Give me some Moore

One of the things that I've been reading quite fervently is the comics of Alan Moore. While my attention was first drawn to The Watchmen, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen several years ago, a chance conversation with a real comics freak (yooo hooo Andrew, how's Nottingham?) keyed me on to explore some of his other stuff.

Thus far, I've managed to read From Hell, which I definitely need to re-visit because I rushed through it while I was in back home. It's extremely learned and well-researched, and because it's filled with an amazingly arcane references to Free Masonry, it's almost like a comic book version of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.

I also managed to read the Swamp Thing run that was the first major thing that Alan Moore did for DC and which sort of introduced him to America. His meditations on Nature, metaphysics and the fragility of human relations through, a comic about a glorified plant, is pretty amazing. I managed to get my hands on a collected DC Universe stories of Alan Moore, which features some amazing Superman and Batman tales as well. In that, he has short quirky stories, just two to three pages long, which are really original pieces of story telling.

I'vce just finished several issues of his Tom Strong series and Promethea. With these comics, Moore toys with comics conventions and more generally, the boundaries between fiction, the imagination and the Real.

There is a series of six videos from a BBC programme on YouTube which profiles Alan Moore and they're quite interesting. The best moment in the videos happens when he actually shows his extremely detailed (and indulgent) "script" for the illustrators (this is in the 4th video) and when he explains why he wants to dissociate himself from the film adaptations of his work (video 5). And here they are:

Part 1	Part 2
Part 3	Part 4
Part 5	Part 6