Alan Moore's London. part 5

Firstly, if you're reading my blog because I mentioned it at a party last night, you should scroll downstairs and find something that doesn't begin with 'Part 5'.
Continuing: the making of FROM HELL (the book) chapter 4.
The most fun with From hell chapter 4 was to be had not with the majestic churches but with the odd little details that are not remarked upon by Gull as he sweeps through the metropolis. I'm speaking of all the little incidental details along the way. Alan had a great eye for the striking visual notes that would make excellent backdrops to the running dialogue that linked the principal sites. As he toured London himself, he'd snap this or that view, knowing that when the time came I would not be able to thank him enough for making my part of the job so much easier. Like the corner of this building, which is memorable without our being able to say exactly why:




Those leafy out-of-the-way squares that are very typical of the city:




Another enjoyable fact about chapter 4 is the passing of the light of day from early morning to night, giving an added variety to the proceedings. That and the mid afternoon downpour of rain. I thoroughly enjoyed myself with the inky distortions it allowed me:






The final shot wasn't one of Alan's. I got this corner form an old book. Between this and the reflection of the horse above, I was pitching into near abstraction.



Now, has there ever been writer that supplied his artist with so much visual reference? When we'd finished chapter 4, I counted it all up and we had 64 individual photgraphs that had been used, most of them from Alan, subsidized by books of architecture (some supplied By Alan) and period detail.

ps. But this, from a later chapter, is perhaps my favorite street view in the whole book. It's actually a pasted-on photo which I scribbled over, but somehow it's come out looking quite demented.



pps. (strictly Ins-and-outs-of-a-chook's-bum department.) Some have asked about the details of my working relationship with assistants. The bottom line was always that either publishers were likely to go out of business or could fail to pay you for some other reason. For instance, just before starting to work with me in '93 ('94? get me to check if you're going to quote this anywhwere), Pete Mullins' publisher was murdered and Pete never got paid. (See my Comics Journal interview for that and other tales.) And I could get a better page rate and on-time payment from one publisher (eg Dark Horse) and always have to be pestering and getting mad at another (eg. Kitchen Sink Press). The solution was to avoid being totally dependent on one project. If I had a lot of things going on at the same time, then if one went bad it wouldn't be the whole fortress razed to the ground, maybe just a breach in the north wall, or one of the turrets collapsed, but the whole outpost would still be defendable. To keep several projects going simultaneously it was necessary to have an assistant. It would begin with doing backgrounds (and could develop from there to handling more than that), and b/gs is what Steve Stamatiadis did for me in From hell Chapter 4. In the above panels I would have lettered first. If Gull and the carriage took up a lot of space I'd do them in pencil and ink too, then hand it to Steve, otherwise I'd hand it to Steve lettered with a photo lightly taped at the side. The lettering tended to define the composition, which might otherwise be suggested by a few crosses and circles from me. Since there would be different permutations on the same page, the art boards would go back and forth until done. We'd usually have half a dozen circulating the room at the same time. Steve would have pencilled the scene from the photo, got a nod from me and then inked it with a fine rapidograph (.18 probably). I'd then add in the carriage and other traffic, go in strengthening lines, sometimes removing some ( it was easier to white them out later, if I didn't want them, than to look over Steve's shoulder through a whole drawing) and adding all the atmospheric stuff. Large areas of black would be marked with a red cross. Anne was invoved in the process too. She would do the filling in of blacks, the clean up and then wrapping for mailing with the invoicing and necessary fedex export paperwork etc. Anne would also rule up the pages in ink before starting, using my numerical markings on the script which I'd put on there as I read it for the first time ( ie '9 grid' or ' 1-3-3' etc.), and the templates one of my assistants had cut years earlier. The trick was to make sure everybody had a page in front of them all the time. Since I was paying hourly rates and getting fixed page rates from the various publishers, which varied, It was essential to produce a minimum number of pages per week, which isn't a consideration when i'm just working by myself. When I found that I was burning through the material at a hectic rate it then became useful to buy in story ideas from other people too.
I've survived a lot of changes in the game, so maybe I had the right idea. But for now I'm working with a publisher from the 'book trade', getting a decent advance and painting art pages solo. You do what you need to do, and try to keep an eye on the road ahead. It could all change again tomorrow.