alan moore und brecht

Alan Moore spricht in diesem LANGEM (und extrem lesenswerten) Interview über:  Den bald erscheinenden dritten Band von „The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen„; Brechts Rolle in den neuen Abenteuer der Liga; den literarischen Zeitgeist; die verschollene The Black Dossier Vinyl; seine Zusammenarbeit mit dem Zeichner Kevin O’Neil; das Weihnachtsgeschenk seiner Tochter; sein Standtpunkt zur Comicundustrie, sein Verhältniss zu Top Shelf und wie immer über seine Passion für die Magie. Hier schonmal ein Vorgeschmack auf den neuen Band:

Alan Moore: Each of these time periods we’ve got in this new volume, each is a new experience in itself. And one of the things I think you’re going to see very clearly over this third volume is how much we, as a society, changed in a hundred years. Now, I know that the League’s version is a skewed and literary reflection of society. It’s the culture of the times and characters from the fiction of the times, but that does reflect, very closely, the actual times that you’re talking about, the hopes and fears of those times, the times in which these stories are set. I mean, American 1950’s science-fiction films, even the trashiest, most throw-away one, often have eerily appropriate, sort-of accidental subtexts to them that say a lot about the times. Invasion of the Body Snatchers which was partly, in its original incarnation, about the fear of communism, that the person next to you might be a communist and you’d never know, which was fitting with the McCarthyite-era that it emerged from. It’s the product of any given time, I’m going to say a lot about that time, and they’re going to reflect the time in which the work was created in a peculiar way.

Having gone through 1910, we then move on to 1969 and Swinging London and lots of references to the films and fictions of that period. That is quite an interesting narrative, that section is quite good, lots of references to the television series of that time. And the third one, I’m just now writing the opening pages. It’s opening in Qumar, which I believe is the surrogate Iraq from The West Wing, so it’s reflecting the situation in the real world, and it’s quite a brutal shock to the characters, and there is this overarching plot thread that starts with the occultists in the first volume and winds through the remaining two volumes, the remaining two chapters rather, as a kind of occult plan that has had its origins around the turn of the century but that has grown to include things like Rosemary’s Baby and other supernatural films of that vintage and which has come to a head spectacularly and horribly in 2009 which will be the climactic third part, third chapter of volume three.

Das gesamte Interview mit dem Meister findet ihr hier.