Dave Gibbons, the prolific artist who co-created Watchmen alongside writer Alan Moore, is releasing an autobiography called Confabulation: An Anecdotal Autobiography in October. While Gibbons has created and drawn many stories over the course of his long career, in this book he’ll be turning the focus onto himself. Given the length and breadth of his career, this promises to be no less fascinating than the fictional stories he has produced in the past.
Dave Gibbons first broke into the underground British comics industry in the 1970s. This eventually led to him becoming the lead artist for Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly. His work in Britain attracted the attention of Len Wein at DC Comics, which led to him working for the company soon thereafter. It was here he began to collaborate with Alan Moore and the two went on to create some of the most iconic comics of all time, including the groundbreaking series Watchmen. Gibbons would continue to work with iconic creators like Frank Miller and Mark Waid over the course of his career and he would also go on to write and illustrate his own graphic novels like The Originals. His expansive body of work eventually led to him becoming the UK’s first Comics Laureate in 2014 and to him getting inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame in 2018.
Gibbons is illustrating some of the details of this long and illustrious life in his upcoming autobiography Confabulation: An Anecdotal Autobiography, which is to be published by Dark Horse Books. This is far from Gibbons' first collaboration with Dark Horse as he co-created the comic The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century with Frank Miller for the publisher in the 1990s. According to AIPT, the new book will be made up of many anecdotes, presented in alphabetical order by topic. This makes it possible to either read the book straight through or focus on the anecdotes that the reader is most interested in. These anecdotes also promise to reveal key behind the scenes details that fans have been wondering about for many years, such as the exact reasons behind the dissolution of Gibbons’ partnership with Alan Moore.
In addition to these anecdotes, Confabulation will feature more than 300 unpublished art pieces and photographs. Based on the cover of the book, these may even include childhood drawings of superheroes, and thus will be a fascinating peek into Gibbons’ artistic evolution over the course of his career. The drawings also promise to be worth owning in their own right, as Gibbons is one of the best comic book artists of the past 50 years and any works of his are likely to be gorgeous.
The 325-page hardcover book will be released on October 25, 2022. The combination of interesting anecdotes on topics such as Watchmen and a cache of unpublished drawings in Confabulation: An Anecdotal Autobiography promise to make this autobiography a worthwhile purchase for both those interested in Dave Gibbons himself and those who are interested in the history of the comics industry.
Sources: AIPT