Alan Moore talked to
ComicsBeat about his upcoming Lovecraftian comic
Providence, which Moore called "my attempt to write what I would consider to be a piece of ultimate Lovecraft fiction, in that it will be fiction, it will be a continuation of Neonomicon, it will in a sense be a prequel to that book, but it will also – slightly – be a sequel as well. It will be dealing with the world of Lovecraft’s American-based fiction, which tends to sort of rule out stories like The Mountains of Madness which, although, yes, it does have a strong Miskatonic element in it, is largely based in Antarctica."
Moore explained that "with
Providence, what I am doing is, I’m looking as much at American society in 1919 as I am looking at Lovecraft, in terms of my research, and I am connecting up Lovecraft’s themes, and Lovecraft’s personality, to a certain degree, with the tensions that were then incredibly evident in American society. So, there’s that element of it, but the amount of research that I’m doing into America 1919, into the gay culture of America 1919, into the way that American society was just beginning to cohere around that point, and the research upon the actual places, because this is set in a real America – there’s no Arkham in it, there’s no Innsmouth, but there are real locations which I believe are coherent sites for the Lovecraft stories that I’ve connected them to."
And then there is the whole connection to Moore's seminal work,
Watchmen. "It’s actually a little bit like
Watchmen in that it – the basic premise of
Watchmen was, if these ridiculous characters, superheroes, actually existed in a real world, then what kind of characters would they be, and what kind of real world would it be to accommodate them. And it was also commenting upon superhero fiction and various other things while it was doing that. Very similar things are happening with
Providence. It’s obviously a completely different animal to anything like
Watchmen, but there is that point of similarity."
Okay, I was going to buy this already because it's about H.P. Lovecraft and I was also going to buy it because it's by Alan Moore, but now I'm like going to buy it 10 times more enthusiastically because it's Alan Moore doing H.P. Lovecraft like
Watchmen. There's loads more info in the interview so go check it out!
is finally available for pre-order. It features stories by Neil Gaiman, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Joe R. Lansdale, Elizabeth Bear, Gemma Files, Kim Newman, Laird Barron, Howard Waldrop, Nick Mamatas, Karl Edward Wagner and more. And better yet, it's edited by one of the most renowned horror editors in the world, the incomparable Ellen Datlow.
