Pirate multiplicities: Aion, chronos and magical inscription in the graphic novels of Alan Moore

This article will seek to address questions of creativity, sense and expression in the fiction of Alan Moore and a few of the artists with whom he has worked through an examination of their manipulation of time and space and magical inscription in the graphic novel. It will do this across and alongside the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, on the one hand, and the often antipathetic thought of Alain Badiou, on the other, on virtuality, the event and multiplicity. Taking as its points of triangulation, therefore, first, Moore's Watchmen and Promethea series, second, Deleuze's appropriation of the Stoic notions of aion and chronos in Logic of Sense and with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, and third, Badiou's notion of 'pirate multiplicities' from his essay on Fernando Pessoa in The Century, this article will consider the hieroglyphic density of magical inscription in Moore as a fabricated codex of fundamental creativity in art, literature and philosophy, and by implication, in the terms that Moore favours and advocates, in magic itself. Moreover, such magical inscription (which it will be assumed encompasses, in Moore's case, straightforward narrative and image as much as anything specifically occultic) will be considered here as a fabricated codex, whose ontological implications emerge both mimetically and diegetically from its enactment as a narrative device so as to question the very notion of a distinction of ontological levels between fiction and reality.