This is the sixteenth of sixteen (it grew) parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.
The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.
Previously in The Last War in Albion: As Grant Morrison began turning back towards comics in 1984, he started with an unsolicited Kid Marvelman story for
Warrior, entitled “October Incident: 1966.”
“They were friends once, these creatures of near unimaginable power. Now, horns locked, they fight to the death in the pounding rain. There is passion here, but not human passion. There is fierce and desperate emotion, but not an emotion that we would recognize. They are titans, and we will never understand the alien inferno that blazes in the furnace of their souls. We will never grasp their hopes, their despair. Never comprehend the blistering rage that informs each devastating blow. We will never know the destiny that howls in their hearts, never know their pain, their love, their almost sexual hatred. We are only human, and perhaps we will be the less for that.” – Alan Moore, Marvelman
Morrison is blunt about what happened: “Alan Moore had it spiked. He said it was never to be published,” an event Morrison credits for the “slight antagonism” that exists between the two creators. Morrison goes on to claim that Skinn, following his falling out with Moore, “asked me to continue Marvelman,” an opportunity he was tremendously excited by, but that Morrison, when he wrote to Moore asking for his blessing, received back “this really weird letter” beginning “I don’t want this to sound like the softly hissed tones of a Mafia hitman, but back off” and threatening Morrison’s future career if he carried on.
This account of events was flatly denied by Moore three years later in an interview with Lance Parkin for his biography of Moore, saying that it “has no bearing upon reality at all” and defying anyone to produce such a letter. Moore recalled Morrison’s script, saying that “Dez had rather sprung it on me out of the blue, and it didn’t fit in with the rather elaborate storyline that I was creating,” and explaining that he was “almost 100 per cent certain that I never wrote any kind of letter to Grant Morrison, let alone a threatening one,” with Skinn separately clarifying to Parkin that for his part, “I never saw or asked to see the letter Grant got,” but that he “enthusiastically sent Grant’s wonderful little cameo story up to Alan Moore, ill-aware of his growing possessive paranoia.” It is worth noting, however, that Moore and Skinn are, in these interviews, conflating what Morrison depicts as two separate events – Moore’s spiking of Morrison’s spec script, and the separate instance of Morrison being offered the opportunity to take over the main Marvelman strip.
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