Posted in: Comics | Tagged: 1963, Alan Moore, don simpson

Don Simpson Bringing Back 1963 Annual Without Alan Moore

Published Mon, 14 Feb 2022 09:27:10 -0600

1963 was an American six-issue comic book limited series written by Alan Moore in 1993, with art by his then-frequent collaborators Steve Bissette, John Totleben, and Rick Veitch, with Dave Gibbons, Don Simpson, and Jim Valentino working on the series. Image Comics published the series and it was meant to culminate with a 1963 Annual to be drawn by Jim Lee that was never published.

Moore's homage to Marvel clichés included fictionalizing himself and the artists as the "Sixty-Three Sweatshop", describing his collaborators in the same hyperbolic and alliterative mode Stan Lee used for his "Marvel Bullpen"; each was given a Lee-style nickname ("Affable Al," "Sturdy Steve," "Jaunty John," etc. Veitch has since continued to refer to himself as "Roarin' Rick"). The parody is not entirely affectionate, as the text pieces and fictional letter columns contain pointed inside jokes about the business practices of 1960s comics publishers, with "Affable Al" portrayed as a tyrant who claims credit for his employees' creations. Moore also makes reference to Lee's book Origins of Marvel Comics (and its sequels) when Affable Al recommends that readers hurry out and buy his new book How I Created Everything All By Myself and Why I Am Great.

The 1963 Annual was meant to have seen the 1963 characters sent thirty years into "the future", where they would have met then-contemporary 1993 characters published by Image Comics. Moore intended comment on how the air of "realism" brought to Marvel Comics in the early 1960s had paved the way for the "mature" and "grim and gritty" American comics of the 1990s.

Moore was less than halfway through writing the script for the annual when Jim Lee announced that he was taking a year-long sabbatical from comic book art. Moore put the script aside, and after that year had passed, many things had changed. Rob Liefeld had left Image, which meant that some of his characters could not be used. Jim Lee was swamped with work and unlikely to be able to complete the work. The tide had changed, and superhero comics had begun to become less gritty, and Moore stated that his interest in writing superheroes had waned.

In 2007, Erik Larsen was asked about the status of the project and explained, "Alan had a falling out with one of the creators on the 1963 project and he did not want to re-open those wounds. That ship may have sailed, sorry to say." That would have been Steve Bissette, of whom Alan Moore cut ties after a Comics Journal interview with Bissette. Moore also expressed frustration with Jim Lee for selling Wildstorm comics, which owns Moore's America's Best Comics line, to DC Comics with whom Moore had sworn to never work for again.

Bissette later stated that Jim Valentino bringing Alan Moore into Image Comics with 1963, saw Moore targeted by the other Image founders for their own projects, such as Spawn, WildCATS and the ABC line. "My perception of events, then and now, is that we did the 1963 series under the invite and umbrella of Image founding co-partner Jim Valentino… Rick Veitch and I found ourselves caught in the crossfire between the Image partners' pissing contests." These partners "quickly took the initiation of the 1963 project as an open door to working with Alan on their respective projects. Again, we didn't realize at the time this also was tied up with their competitive natures: that is, it was Jim Valentino's coup that he got Alan on board via 1963, and the other Image partners wanted a piece of that action, which would also trump Jim Valentino's initial coup… we didn't realize the Image partners were in competition with one another, and we unfortunately allowed our confusion to undercut Jim Valentino… I believe now had we stuck with Jim Valentino, the Annual would have been completed and seen print. Jim Lee simply never did anything."

Bissette and Veitch had been working throughout 2009 to produce a "bare-bones hardcover reprint" of 1963 at Dynamite Entertainment, but the plan fell through in January 2010. However, he did reveal that there was a "1998 legal agreement signed by Alan Moore, Rick Veitch and myself dividing up our creative properties" that left Bissette with "N-Man, the Fury, the Hypernaut and Commander Solo & Her Screamin' Skydogs" who, he thought, "fit nicely with a bevy of my own characters and concepts I've never had homes for: Curtis Slarch, Lo!, 'The Big Dig,' and much, much more you've never heard of or seen because I could never interest a publisher in those projects." Together they formed "my own invented comics universe — the Naut Comics universe" which became the core of his revival of the 1963 characters he owned, to be published in late 2010 in Tales of the Uncanny – N-Man & Friends: A Naut Comics History, Volume 1.

But now, it is 2022. Next year it will be as far from 1993 as the comic 1963 was from 1963 when it was published by Image Comics in 1993. Did you follow that? In the wake of Don Simpson's struggles with the republication of his earlier collaboration with Alan Moore, In Pictopia, which Moore requested not have his name attached, Don Simpson has decided to publish his own version of the 1963 Annual, written and drawn entirely by him and targeting Alan Moore as "Affabale Al". He has been posting pages in various stages of completion on his Facebook page. He states;

"For the record, from everything I know of the situation, I am convinced the author of the series bears the ultimate responsibility for 1963 never having been completed. Jim Lee is also clearly a villain in the piece, in my view; he intentionally interposed himself as penciller of the Annual, never with the least intention of actually following through. He wanted to sabotage the project from the beginning, and that's been obvious. But at the same time, it was obvious very early that if anyone in the business had the cloud to work around Lee it was the author; the author has had several opportunities besides to see the project through, and has simply bailed. This demonstrates not only an unimaginable disregard for the fans and readers — an overweening ego-trip and sense of entitlement that many of his most ardent fans perversely take as a sign of genius — but it also demonstrably set back the cause of creator-owned comics, because it showed creators could not be responsible proprietors of intellectual properties. The irony is that work-for-hire projects like Watchmen remain in print and 1963 remains in the back-issue bin, fragmentary and uncollected and incomplete. Stupid, stupid indeed. Shame on the author forever."

Here are a few of those pages. Can we expect it to be published in 2023?