Monday, March 2, 2009

The Dawn of Watchmen

Back in 1985, Neil Gaiman, a young journalist at the time, wrote a profile of Alan Moore a few months before the release of the first issue of Watchmen. Back in last week, Gaiman posted a scan of that article to his blog. Sharing that same spirit of mining the past for fun reading, I've decided to tackle some of my old comic press magazines for content, too. I'm kicking off with a bit about Watchmen.

What I have here is the 1985 Preview issue of Amazing Heroes, a spectacular mag that's been discontinued for some time now. Amazing Heroes was published by Fantagraphics (go now and buy stuff from them) and covered "mainstream" comics as passionately as, say, The Comics Journal (which is also published by Fantagraphics) covers graphic storytelling in all its forms.


dig that Jaime Hernadez cover...sigh...

I could write a whole post on Amazing Heroes alone. A few years ago, I switched collector gears from buying stuff like single issues of random comics to buying stuff like single issues of random comics AND comics magazines. Especially stuff from 1985-1987, the comics era I'm most obsessed with in terms of wondering how BAD ASS it must have been to be a fan at the time. So, in my quest to recreate the feeling of being able to snag issues such as Dark Knight Returns #4, Watchmen #5 or, I dunno, Raw #8 off the new comics rack, I buy comics magazines from the era. And oh, how the treasure flows.

For instance, in this 1985 Preview, we get the following bit on Watchmen. This is the first that Amazing Heroes ever covered the book. Just try to wrap your head around that. Imagine you work at Amazing Heroes - a magazine whose staff included Heidi MacDonald, Mark Waid, Peter Sanderson and many other names you may recognize nowadays - and you speak to people at DC Comics and they say, "Oh, we have this book called Watchmen coming out from Alan Moore, the Swamp Thing writer, and Dave Gibbons. Maybe you should cover that in your Preview issue. We think it may be big" Guh. Here's what writer Frank Plowright had to say

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I thought it'd be nice to also add a scan of another article by Frank Plowright about a mystery project "coming in 1985" from Fantagraphics. Anybody know what this was/became/if it came out?


Click to enlarge

Hope you enjoy! And all due respect to the former writing staff, editors and publishers of Amazing Heroes. I hope I'm not angering anybody by posting these. I'm just posting because I want to share with fans whom I'm sure would like to read this stuff, but may not be able to get their hands on it. I'm not sure the legalities of posting portions of content from magazines that no longer exist, so I apologize in advance if I'm doing anything wrong here. Please contact me if you know otherwise.

7 comments:

KP said...

I totally have a fuzzy memory of an Alan Moore book at Fantagraphics that never fully came to fruition, but right now I can't recall which late night Wikipedia binge set off that alarm initially. Sorry.

Rickey said...

Sounds to me like the book Avatar put out called Alan Moore's Yuggoth Cultures. It was filled with Moore stories either adapted by other writers or from him directly and then drawn by a bunch of artists. But I have no idea if that has ANY connection to this Fanta project...

Jesse T. said...

Could Moore have been teasing "Big Numbers," perhaps? I never read that book ... or the two issues of it that actually came out, anyway. I think the first issue came out in 1990, maybe...

Rickey said...

Could be, Jesse! I totally have no idea.

Anonymous said...

Someone pointed this out to me along with your concerns about copyright. I've no problems about your using these couple of old articles.

All the best,
Frank Plowright

Will Dockery said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Will Dockery said...

I just read the blurb, and realized I don't really have any idea what became of this Alan Moore Fantagraphics project. It definitely isn't Big Numbers, though, I'm pretty sure.