Product Description

From Alan Moore?s interest in magic he created two performance pieces The Birth Caul and Snakes and Ladders, which Eddie Campbell has adapted as graphic works. This book also contains the acclaimed interview with Alan Moore by Eddie Campbell from Egomania, and features a never-before-seen sketchbook of the working drawings for Snakes and Ladders

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #610053 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

Customer Reviews

Reimagining the Intellect: Alan Moore Meets Moebius
You'll have to decide whether Alan Moore, highly touted as one of the most important of comic book writers today (perhaps ever), is pretense or intellect. But A Disease of Language attempts to offer highly imaginative, intellectually stimulating comics. It includes the previously published one-shots, The Birth Caul (1999) and Snakes and Ladders (2001) and an interview between (writer) Alan Moore and (artist) Eddie Campbell that was published in the magazine, Egomania (2002). The Birth Caul is autobiographical in nature, and in the work Alan Moore does the imaginative re-reading of himself that he has done to William Gull and Jack the Ripper (in From Hell), William Blake (in Angel Passage), and London history and it's people in general (in The Highbury Working). Alan Moore calls what he does magic, branching off from Alesiter Crowley's definition of magic as "a disease of language," a pathologically deconstructive process of reinventing language and the past to understand ourselves and thereby perhaps affect the future. Whether you believe in such things or not doesn't mean you can or can't enjoy this work. Moore's very candid and daunting look at this life in the Birth Caul is both trouble and redeeming in its honesty. The so-called disease of language dovetails into the death of his grandmother (who wasn't told the name of the hospital that she was dying in because the name, that is, the words, would have troubled her as so-called good people didn't visit this hospital in her own time), death of his mother (where the cancer becomes reminiscent of an embryo-shape, the thing of life before language and the definite ending of it -- perhaps), and his own life, damned by words and fulfilled by it. Snakes and Ladders is a verbal and graphic rendering of one of Moore's so-called magical performances. It attempts, in part, to understand the place of art (as magic) in the history of England in general but also the English as they have impacted the world and been touched by it. It is highly centered on the metaphor of the double helix as well as the feminine as the stimulus for life. Eddie Campbells' art is wonderfully intense even in black-and-white. It is detailed and shadowy at the same time, at times blazingly brilliant and at times nicely evocative in its vagueness. If you're a fan of Alan Moore's or a person looking for comics that match any great writer of the highest forms of literature, you'll want this. If you're looking for an easy read, this probably isn't your thing. The interviews proved just how astute Eddie Campbell is himself; he seems a parallel companion for Mr. Moore. This work is daring in its ability to create a comic that is purely intellectual and deserves to be placed along comics like Spiegelman's Maus and the work of Jean Giraud, aka Moebius.

What is "A Disease of Language?"
A while ago, I wrote another review about A Disease of Language. And for the most part, there is not much else I would add to it. Like many of Alan Moore's works, you kind of have to let it encompass you before you begin to closely read it. There are sheer levels of meaning and nuance in these arcane scrawlings. You will probably not get it all in the first reading and viewing, but perhaps more on a subconscious level as most poetry goes.

The first story, called "The Birth Caul" deals with a "birth caul" defining what it is and how it is an apt metaphor for an existential map of human existence, while the second story, "Snakes and Ladders" deals with the layers of English history and imagination in at Conway Hall in Red Lion Square. Both stories speak to that subconscious level. The book ends off with an interview with Alan Moore about his works and even something about his mystical paradigm and then there are some lovely sketches in the back created by Eddie Campbell, who also was the interviewer in the previous part.

The Interview is the most intriguing and it even explains what the title stands for to an extent -- that thing within us that linguistics cannot structure and tends to be changed by -- that essence of us. Call it magic, or inspiration, writing and creativity always seeks it ... something that this work does.

Campbell's drawings are black and white, with fine detail and they bring you further and wildly in the poetic underworld Alan Moore creates, with a few elements of his life woven within to make it almost semi-autobiographical.

This is where my original review and I now diverge. There are elements of the psycho-geographical to look at -- on how humans imprint their experiences onto the land around them and vice-versa. But this is by no means unique. Many other books have done the same and this concept has been explored by writers and occultists alike. I still think that the "text-book" look of this compilation matches both a didactic and very intrinsic question.

What is "a disease of language?" The answer to this is supplied in the interview with Campbell -- a phrase that is attributed to the occultist Aleister Crowley, but at the time I didn't understand what it was, or what it meant. I could only approximate it. So with somewhat more approximation, the answer to this question is that "the disease of language" is imagination. More specifically, it is not so much a "disease" of linguistics as it is a "symptom," or a "result." From the moment humankind began to develop language, with literal and double metaphorical meanings, an attempt was made to define both the outer and the inner worlds of existence as humans perceive it. To understand, create a foundation of knowing, and build on it.

In this sense, language in all its forms builds meaning and reality. In this light, the following stories and interview seem to have a different purpose -- to illustrate this process of how definition moves past the didactic "text-book" world of the cover and into the deeper inner world of magic and imagination. Through pictures, words, and storytelling, this is what Moore tries to communicate to the audience -- because, in the end, storytelling is the most potent "symptom" of language that there is.