04/28/09 – 6:10pm (alan moore meets constantine)

“Another writer who has experienced such encounters with their characters is Alan Moore, author of Watchmen and From Hell, who met his creation, the always delightful John Constantine twice. The first time he met the Hellblazer star was at a bar in London, right out in the open, not long after Moore had written him in to his run on Swamp Thing.

One day, I was in Westminster in London — this was after we had introduced the character — and I was sitting in a sandwich bar. All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine. He was wearing the trenchcoat, a short cut — he looked — no, he didn’t even look exactly like Sting. He looked exactly like John Constantine. He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorially and then just walked off around the corner to the other part of the snack bar.

I sat there and thought, should I go around that corner and see if he is really there, or should I just eat my sandwich and leave? I opted for the latter; I thought it was the safest. I’m not making any claims to anything. I’m just saying that it happened.

The second time Moore met him was during an occult ritual, wherein Constantine appeared from the dark with a light of his cigarrette, and whispered to him the true secret of magic – Anyone can do it.

(You can hear him describing these encounters in detail on the Disinfo Podcast at the one hour, two minute mark.)

Moore’s description of his encounter with another fictional entity, the Roman snake god Glycon:

In fact, the whole alphabet’s there right from the start. So there was this perception of being outside of Time. From that perspective, it was possible to see that all of Time was in fact happening at once.

There were other revelations. There was a lot that seemed to be connected with this Roman snake god, whose name was Glycon. Now, the only references there are to him, which are very disparaging, are in the works of the philosopher Lucien… Lucien explains that the whole Glycon cult was an enormous fraud, and that Glycon was a glove puppet. And I’ve got no reason to disbelieve that whatsoever. It sounds absolutely true, that yeah, the false prophet Alexander, who was the person putting on the Glycon show, had a large tame boa constrictor and he had the head of it tucked under his arm and draped over his shoulder he had a speaking tube that had been designed to look like this inhuman longhaired snake’s head with articulated jaws so that it would seem to speak. Yeah, that sounds about right. [chuckles] Of course, to me, I think that’s perfect. If I’m gonna have a god I prefer it to be a complete hoax and a glove puppet because I’m not likely to start believing that glove puppet created the universe or anything dangerous like that.”

To me, the IDEA of the god IS the god.

–from: Electric Children’s “Superman is Real”

~ by your fellowman on 28/04/2009.