Alan Moore in the Guardian again .....

I know, it happens so often nowadays that it's almost getting boring seeing another comics story in the Guardian, especially if it's about Alan Moore. It's almost weekly now. But Jonathan Jones' art blog in yesterday's online version does find a slightly different way to play up the great man's credentials - a comparison to Damien Hirst:

I've found a British artist who is serious, complex, and shocking - whose work is utterly sensational yet repays looking at again and again. There are just two problems. One is that you won't find Alan Moore's work in an art gallery. The other is that he doesn't create his images himself but works, like a film director and screenwriter, with visual artists who realise his extraordinary visions. But wait a minute... if Damien Hirst doesn't need to make his own artworks to be their author I suppose Moore doesn't either.

But I wouldn't want to make him sound respectable. Moore's comics are utterly mad. He believes in the occult and is a practising Magus. In Black Dossier his characters end up in a mystic alternate reality which he seems to be claiming is a real place, not a fiction. In fact he appears to believe that fictional personae have their own existence in some spiritual realm he can access through magic. Now you're disturbed. Well, we're always being told art should disturb. Moore makes artists like the Chapmans look like the middle-class entertainers they are. He's a real force of imagination in a world that is full of fakes. If there was any justice this man would get the Turner Prize.

That last paragraph is a bit off though. Alan Moore's comics described as utterly mad? That's just lazy journalism. But Alan Moore for the Turner Prize? Now that is an idea.......