Art For Art’s Sake #56 – The Art Of The Lockdown -Anything Goes & One Of The Greatest Alan Moore Tales…

It’s time for another Art For Art’s Sake, where it’s a weekly chance to take us all away from some bloody awful headlines and into a world of quite beautiful looking comics…
Anything Goes was a special series published by Fantagraphics back in 1986. It was a 6-issue benefit book for the publishers to pay legal bills in a two million dollar lawsuit brought by writer Michael Fleisher against The Comics Journal, Gary Groth and Harlan Ellison.
Anyway, at the time I first saw it, I was a naive little 16-year-old, maybe 17-year-old. I’d just started working in Nostalgia & Comics, one of the oldest comic shops in the UK. At some point there, on a whim, seeing Alan Moore’s name on issue 2, and loving Moore from Captain Britain, Marvelman, Watchmen, and V For Vendetta (and almost anything else with his name on it to be truthful), I picked it up and went home to read it.
Frankly, it was a mix of confusing, strange, beautiful, bizarre, and quite amazing. So many different artists and writers, so many different tales. And it was one of those very important series in my comics development, opening me up to a whole set of new comics, a load of new styles, and taking me further and further into a lifelong love of comics of all sorts.
All these years later, having just a little time on my hands thanks to the lockdown, I was sorting a few boxes and happened across the issues of Anything Goes. A quick flick through turned into a complete re-read and something I figured I’d share a little of.
And of course, that includes Pictopia, 13 pages of Alan Moore written brilliance… we’ll get to that at the end of this.
But before that, some of the wonderful, beautiful, amazing, and comic reading, life-changing pages that I first saw back in the mid/late 80s…
Issue 2 – because that’s the first I read (because of the Alan Moore Pictopia)… Frank Miller cover…

Also, my first experience of Jaime Hernandez…

Sam Kieth…

Art Spiegelman…

And then onto the other issues…
Issue 1… Gil Kane…


Gilbert Hernandez

Alex Toth

Michael T Gilbert

Marc Hempel

Issue 3 … cover by Neil Adams…

Dave Sim

Howard Cruse

Captain Jack by Mike Kazaleh (you know, I hadn’t thought about Captain Jack for so many years… but I did so enjoy it)

Daniel Clowes

Issue 4 – cover by George Perez

Trina Robbins

Alec Stevens

Peter Bagge

Issue 5 – cover by Eastman and Laird…

Turtles by Eastman, Laird, and Ryan Brown

Journey by Bill & Nadine Messner-Loebs

Issue 6 – cover by Stan Sakai…

Phil Elliott

Eddie Campbell

And now that Alan Moore and Don Simpson strip… Pictopia
I still maintain that this 13-pager is up there with the absolute best work of Moore’s career. And I know I’m not alone in that. It was originally called ‘In Fictopia’, but was changed before publication. It was also originally an 8-pager from Moore, but the legend is that Don Simpson took the script and expanded it out to a full 13 pages.
It’s a fabulous example of how to do so much in so little space and time. A fully formed world is created and then, as was Moore’s want, deconstructed. In it, Moore tells the tale of Nocturno the Necromancer, living in a world of comic and cartoon characters. There are the old-timers living as best they can, fallen on hard times, making their lives in the b&w slums. And then there’s the new superheroes, bold and bright, grim and gritty, moving in and taking over. It’s brutal and it’s nasty, it’s prophetic, and it’s sentimental… but more than anything else it’s fabulous.
I was tempted to put up all 13 pages, after all it’s been a very long since it was published, very difficult to get hold of… but I just couldn’t, I’d feel bad doing that without express permissions. So instead, here’s the first four pages. Trust me, you really want to read the rest.
(You can possibly find copies of two books where it was reprinted in its entirety – Fantagraphics’ The Best Comics of the Decade (1980-1990) Vol. 1 and The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore by George Khoury – TwoMorrows Publishing)