You cannot deconstruct unless you know how to construct. - Alexander McQueen

Fashion Beast Launches in September permalink

Fashion Beast is to be released, fittingly, in September. Avatar Press has the details. You can preorder the first of ten issues and variant covers through the site. Better yet, you can get them at your local comic book shop when it comes out.

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Fashion Beast wraparound cover by Facundo Percio

Fashion Beast permalink

This should be interesting. In 1985, Malcolm McLaren commissioned a screenplay from Alan Moore for a film he was trying to get made called, Fashion Beast. The story is supposed to be loosely based on the life of Christian Dior and is, “…an updating of the Beauty and the Beast fable set in the fashion world”. Fashion Beast was never made into a movie, but next year Avatar Press is planning on releasing Moore’s screenplay as a 250-page graphic novel adapted by Antony Johnston (who adapted Moore’s Light of Thy Countenance - well worth the read) and drawn by Facundo Percio. The script can be downloaded here.

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A page from Fashion Beast without colors or lettering.

Hipster Priest: A Quietus Interview With Alan Moore permalink

Bumped into a great interview with writer Alan Moore (but aren’t they all, though?) on The Quietus, which is coincidental because I am currently swimming upstream through Moore’s Dodgem Logic #3. It arrived by slow boat two days ago:

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Wraparound cover art for Dodgem Logic #3 (April/May 2010), drawn by Moore himself.

My reaction to The Quietus article’s title - referring to Moore as a hipster - was knee-jerkishly negative until I read through the interview and now understand the connotation: Moore as autodidact and not Fauxhemian (I prefer “Doucheoisie”):

[Hipsterism] used to be a fashion statement, but it was information as a fashion statement which is probably going to do you more good than the clothing you wear. I got an incredible education starting from the point at which I was thrown out of school. Now, I could probably hold my own intellectually with most people who have had university or college educations. And indeed some of them will have done courses on my books. So, despite the fact my ‘education’ ended at 16, I had hipsterism, which was wanting to be hip, and that led me to read this incredibly diverse array of books on science, mysticism, science fiction, literature, art… I would find out about these movements that I had heard about, and it’s given me a pretty comprehensive education. Now I am an autodidact, which is a great word… I learned it myself.

“Information as a fashion statement”? Can self-education be fashionable if it can’t be commodified; if it can’t be worn, drunk or tattooed on? (Interestingly, Moore is listed as a “Notable Autodidact” in the Wikipedia entry for “Autodidacticism”.)

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Look at THIS fucking hipster. Photo of Alan Moore from “Hipster Priest: A Quietus Interview With Alan Moore”.