Posted in: Comics, IDW | Tagged: Alan Moore, Ben Wickey, Ian Sinclair, london

Alan Moore On Ben Wickey's More Weight, Providence And Fiction (Video)

Alan Moore on Ben Wickey's More Weight, Providence and Fiction, with Ian Sinclair in the Swedenborg House earlier this month

At the beginning of December, Ben Wickey ran a launch event for his new graphic novel, More Weight, about the Salem Witch Trials. He did so in London with Ian Sinclair and Victor Rees, with the presence of Alan Moore over their heads, zooming in from his home in Northampton. And it was Northampton that joined the two together.

The book is about Giles Corey, an eighty-year-old farmer from the Boroughs of Northampton, where Moore has lived his life, who emigrated to Salem in the 1640s. He testified against his wife when she was accused of witchcraft, only to find himself accused and then imprisoned for this crime. Corey was then pressed to death for refusing to stand trial, one of the first American protests documented in American history. A focus of More Weight, Moore was able to provide Wickey with details about Corey's Northampton that he might not have found elsewhere, wrote an introduction to the graphic novel, and then delayed it by a year by offering Wickey work on the Moon And Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.

The launch event was held at Swedenborg House in Russell Square, London, where one of Wickey's other inspirations, Ian Sinclair, is on the board, and was joined by Alan Moore and Ben Wickey to discuss their intersection of Venn diagrams of interest. Here are a few videos taken that evening; it's not the entirety of the night by far, but maybe it's a little more thorough than I initially intended.

Swedenborg House is the headquarters of the Swedenborg Society, which holds a bookshop, reading rooms, a historical archive and library, and Swedenborg Hall: a neoclassical lecture theatre. Built around 1760, Swedenborg House was acquired by the Swedenborg Society in 1924, which aims to translate and publish the works of the Swedish scientist, philosopher, and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg. And, yes, that includes comic books. It's a gorgeous place, and I want to return and explore it in the New Year. You should, too. Here's a bunch of videos followed by a preview of More Weight by Wickey.

More Weight: A Salem Story by Ben Wickey
"Every word is an accusation…and every whisper kills." This staggering graphic novel explores the infamous Salem witch trials and the long shadows they cast more than 300 years later.
In Salem, Massachusetts, 1692 is a year of terror. When accusations of witchcraft plunge the community into paranoia and death, curmudgeonly farmer Giles Corey and his great-souled wife Martha are forced to confront their troubled pasts, fighting to hold onto their principles even at the cost of their lives. In the 1860s, famed writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow stroll the streets of Salem together, reflecting on their own dark connections to those wicked days. Today, graphic novelist Ben Wickey wrestles with the complex legacy of "the Witch City" and what it shows us about the best and worst of humanity.
Based on true events, set in three centuries, and hand-drawn over a decade, More Weight is a stunning visual symphony — a unique and profound inquiry into the infamous Salem witch trials and the long shadows they still cast on us all.

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