Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Alan Moore, illuminations, thunderman

Alan Moore's What We Can Know About Thunderman Comic Industry Novella

In the Illumninations collection of short stories by Alan Moore, to be published later this year in the US and in the UK, one particular story, What We Can Know About Thunderman, may be of specific interest to his traditional readers. Described as a "monumental novella", the story "charts the surreal and Kafkaesque history of the comics industry over the last seventy-five years through several sometimes-naive and sometimes-maniacal people rising and falling on its career ladders, Moore reveals the dark, beating heart of the superhero business." It smacks of a comic book industry version of his recent Cinema Purgatorio treatment of the movie industry with Kevin O'Neill. I loved Cinema Purgatorio.

From the unparalleled imagination of New York Times bestseller Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and other modern classics, nine stories full of wonder and strangeness, which take us to the fantastical underside of reality. In his first-ever short story collection, which spans forty years of work and features many never-before-published pieces, Alan Moore presents a series of wildly different and equally unforgettable characters who discover–and in some cases even make and unmake–the various uncharted parts of existence. In "A Hypothetical Lizard," two concubines in a brothel for sorcerers fall in love with tragic ramifications. In "Not Even Legend," a paranormal study group is infiltrated by one of the otherworldly beings they seek to investigate. In "Illuminations," a nostalgic older man decides to visit a seaside resort from his youth and finds the past all too close at hand. And in the monumental novella "What We Can Know About Thunderman," which charts the surreal and Kafkaesque history of the comics industry over the last seventy-five years through several sometimes-naive and sometimes-maniacal people rising and falling on its career ladders, Moore reveals the dark, beating heart of the superhero business. From ghosts and otherworldly creatures to the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and theoretical Boltzmann brains fashioning the universe at the big bang, Illuminations is exactly that–a series of bright, startling tales from a contemporary legend that reveal the full power of imagination and magic.

Hypothetical Lizard was written in 1988 by Alan Moore for Wizard's Row, the third volume of the Liavek shared-world fantasy series, and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award. The story was later reprinted in Words Without Pictures, a 1990 book of prose stories by comics writers edited by Steve Niles. In 2004, Bleeding Cool publisher Avatar Press published the first issue of a comic book adaptation by Antony Johnston, Lorenzo Lorente and Sebastian Fiumara. The story describes the life of Som-Som, a prostitute in the House Without Clocks – a brothel designed to service rare and exotic tastes. Som-Som has undergone a corpus callosotomy, severing the connection between the two hemispheres of her brain; this, in conjunction with the porcelain mask attached to the right half of her face, and the thick glove on her right hand, destroys the connections between her thoughts and actions. Therefore, she can see and hear, but not speak of or act on, any secrets her wizard clientele may inadvertently reveal in the throes of passion.

Not Even Legend was included in Uncertainties volume V published by Swan River Press in March last year, part of an anthology series featuring authors from Canada, America, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, each exploring the concept of increasingly fragmented senses of reality.

Illuminations and What We Can Know About Thunderman appear to be new works. While his planned Long London series of novels have now been revealed to be a quintet.

From the beloved creator of Watchmen and numerous other classics, the Long London series is a tour-de-force that tells the story of the timeless shadow city full of magic and memory somewhere beyond the "real London." Long London is a series about "a sometimes-accessible shadow city that is beyond time." This is a hugely inventive, atmospheric, mythical world of murder, magic and madness. It is a quintet of novels that sweeps across the 20th century, starting in the shell-shocked and unravelled London of 1949, and following the populations of writers, criminals, artists, and magicians through that familiar city and a version of London just beyond our knowledge.

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