“When you cycle, you use your own steam to get from A to B, there’s a feeling of achievement that comes of riding,” the 56-year-old Glaswegian says in his rich Scottish accent. “It’s also a healthy thing you do for your body. I like the way the world looks in motion, how it opens up to you. In the countryside, the silence of the bike means you happen upon deer before they know you are there. The trails also open up beautiful places you would never see by car or tram.”
His long, exploratory rides in the countryside are inevitably accompanied by photos of Moore sitting outside a village pub with a tall, foaming mug of beer at his elbow. He recalls one eventful ride to the magnificent Gothic Karlštejn Castle, located about 35 km from Prague.
“My chain snapped on a hill above Karlštejn Castle,” he recalls. “But with no chain, I managed to freewheel all the way down the hills to the Dobřichovice train station, which sounds ridiculous, but I did it.” It sounds ridiculous because the town of Dobřichovice is more than 12 km from the castle, which must represent a personal freewheeling record for Moore.
But riding deep in the countryside was nothing new. “I’ve taken my bike on the train many times so that I can start a ride well away from the city,” he says. “Sometimes I pick a train station deep in the countryside and ride to it and then catch the train back. I try to only do off-road. But there are great areas where new highways have drawn traffic away from the old roads, and you have those old roads pretty much to yourself. I don’t mind riding those. But I’m usually on the trails or in the forest, and I put my own paths together with trial and error.”
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The Mongoose bike Moore rides is also his primary transportation in the city for a practical reason. “In Prague, I’ve found it’s quicker; you can often beat traffic and public transport to your destination by bike. I tend to avoid roads and use parks and designated cycling lanes to stitch my way to where I’m going. Oftentimes, I’ve taken the bike while friends and family take a taxi or a bus, and I usually arrive first or very shortly thereafter.”
He describes himself as an artist wearing two hats (or wielding two brushes). “I make my living as a comic book artist on Judge Dredd and, more recently, Dick Tracy. So that’s the commercial side of my art. Beyond that, I explore landscape painting when I have time. I tend to prefer sequences. This may come from my comics and may be why I like to see landscapes in motion. I also work in more abstract ways, too. I developed a series of sequential paintings based on the Pi ratio.”
Asked if cycling affects his art, he says, “I like to paint landscapes, and the bike helps me find new locations and vantage points. Artistically, cycling also troubles me a bit because it makes the world seem more magical due to the motion of the bike. A view will open up, and I will witness it and decide I need to capture a photo. But the frozen image is never as interesting as the image in motion that I see while moving. There’s a grace that vanishes when I stop moving. I can’t explain it.”
If his name is relatively unknown to the general public, Moore is well-known and highly respected within the Comic-Con universe and among aficionados of graphic novels. He has recently illustrated a story for the Halloween horror anthology devoted to Judge Dredd’s zombie nemesis Judge Death, The Judge Death Mega Special. Judge Dredd is the comic book antihero created by writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra in 1977. He first appeared in the second issue of the British weekly anthology comic 2000 AD and is the magazine’s longest-running character; in 1990, he got his own title, the Judge Dredd Megazine. He also appears in a number of video games and film adaptations, notably the critically trashed 1995 film starring Sylvester Stallone as the judge.
Moore also illustrated Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which was published in 2023, but his most ambitious work is Project MKUltra: Sex, Drugs & the CIA. It was based on a film script by Brandon Beckner and Scott Sampila detailing the real-world efforts of the CIA to weaponise LSD for purposes of mind control during the Cold War. In 2018, Moore launched a crowdfunding campaign on Patreon to finish the final 100 pages. The work was eventually published in 2021 by Ted Adams’ Clover Press.
If cycling inspires his landscapes, Moore says that on occasion he’ll always think about his graphic work while in the saddle. “On one occasion earlier last year, I was riding and thinking about a script I had to work out,” he recalls. “In the script, there was a talking possum. I was trying to imagine how I would illustrate the possum when some people passed and looked at me. It occurred to me that the last thing they would expect me to be thinking about was a talking possum.”
Project MKUltra: Sex, Drugs & the CIA is available from Amazon.
His illustrated Macbeth is available here.
You can purchase The Judge Death Mega Special here.
Header image credit: Grant Podelco
