Back in the eighties, after Swamp Thing and Watchmen had made a superstar of Alan Moore he cashed in on this not by getting some prestige assignment at the Big Two, but by self publishing his most ambitious project to date: Big Numbers. Originally it was going to be called The Mandelbrot Set, as Moore’s big idea for the series was to be fractals and fractal storytelling. Bill Sienkiewicz was tapped to do the artwork, two issues were released in 1990 to general applause and then Sienkiewicz and Moore had a falling out, Sienkiewicz’s assistant Al Columbia was slated to take over, drew one issue which however was never published as Columbia destroyed the pages. Big Numbers became one of the big lost classics of comix, some excerpts of the third isssue were published here and there, taken from high quality photocopies, but there were no photocopies of the entire issue in circulation; that is, until now:
In any case, everything I know leads me to believe that this is a copy of the unpublished third issue of Big Numbers, and I genuinely didn’t believe it existed, and certainly never expected to actually see a copy, led alone own one. Even Alan Moore doesn’t have a copy, to the very best of my knowledge, which in this case is considerable, as I decided to specifically ask his permission before I posted this here. He is happy for it to be made available to the world, so here it is.