Avatar Press has announced that it will publish a career-spanning series of comic book horror stories from one of the medium's acknowledged masters with ALAN MOORE'S YUGGOTH CULTURES AND OTHER GROWTHS. The three part, 40 page per issue series begins in September 2003 from Avatar with stories by Moore and artwork from a number of high-profile creators including Bryan Talbot, Val Semieks, Oscar Zarate, Jacen Burrows (ALAN MOORE'S THE COURTYARD, WARREN ELLIS' SCARS), Juan Jose Ryp (ALAN MOORE'S ANOTHER SUBURBAN ROMANCE, FRANK MILLER'S ROBOCOP), and Mike Wolfer (WARREN ELLIS' STRANGE KILLINGS).

The series features classic and little-known comic book stories from throughout Moore's career, some hard-to-find tales that have appeared only in comic books outside the U.S., and some surviving stories from the tragically-lost Lovecraftian Moore epic Yuggoth Cultures, which will be seen here in comic book form for the first time. The YUGGOTH CULTURES AND OTHER GROWTHS series will include such gems as the now-completed first part of Moore and Bryan Talbot's important lost classic NIGHTJAR, a story started 20 years ago which was supposed to appear in UK comic book WARRIOR, the legendary anthology where other Moore classics such as MIRACLEMAN and V FOR VENDETTA appeared.

"Perhaps because it was a symptom of the strangeness of existence or perhaps because it was an unnerving reminder of the cyclic nature of life, but it was really bloody weird returning to and finishing a work that I'd started and abandoned when I was a young underground comic artist trying to break into the mainstream," says NIGHTJAR collaborator Bryan Talbot. "It was definitely weird inking a page drawn on yellowing watercolour board that another me had penciled over twenty years ago. It's not that I'd forgotten drawing it: I could remember penciling those panels, on some, even the music that was playing at the time (a pretty common phenomena), but it did give me a peculiar frisson all of its own.

"I don't know how he had heard about it but William Christensen got in touch, asking if I still had the artwork for the "lost WARRIOR story" NIGHTJAR," Talbot continues. "WARRIOR was the groundbreaking UK comic art periodical published by Dez Skinn (now editor/publisher of COMICS INTERNATIONAL) where Alan Moore made his name before being headhunted by DC Comics, bringing his unique and magisterial talent for writing sequential art universal acclaim. Alan was already contributing MARVELMAN (later MIRACLEMAN) and V FOR VENDETTA and he and I had talked about collaborating on a strip for WARRIOR for a while. We decided upon a horror piece. I started drawing from his script, fitting it in around paying work until, to be mercifully brief, Alan and Dez fell out big time. As a result, Alan stopped contributing to WARRIOR and NIGHTJAR, now with no home, was shelved. NIGHTJAR would have been Alan's first horror work. Many of the ideas he is playing with here emerge later in SWAMP THING, his concept of an urban sorcerer eventually manifesting itself in the form of John Constantine." (more...)
[ posted Wednesday, June 25, 2003 9:21:33 PM  |  permanent link to this item ]