Studies in Comics - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2011

This article addresses Alan Moore's earliest work for zines and underground papers from 1971 to 1980. It argues that the hippie counterculture was a formative influence not only on his anarchist politics but his approach to cultural production, and an awareness of its significance is therefore crucial to the critical understanding of his oeuvre as a whole. Equally Moore's experience of the underground augments historical understanding of the UK counterculture itself and the role of comics within it, and challenges dominant chronological narratives that insist on a definitive split between its political and cultural wings during this period. This article considers Moore's output in illustration, poetry and prose, but particularly focuses on his earliest comics, featured in Embryo, anon. and The Backstreet Bugle. It looks in detail at the Northampton Arts Lab and the underground press as counter-institutions, and spaces in which Moore developed highly politicized aesthetic and creative strategies that he would carry into his later professional work. These included a commitment to the realization of non-alienated and collaborative artistic production, a partisan engagement with key political issues, an insistence on formal experimentation and an emphasis on a demystified and enabling relationship with the reader.

Alan Moore's graphic novels have marked essential standpoints in the history of narrative iconical genres. Works like Watchmen or V for Vendetta helped reorient the 1980s Anglo-American comic book into the graphic novels of the 1990s by pushing the boundaries of the comic-book genre into the realm of postmodernity. Moore's graphic novels depict characters that are suffocated by the grand narratives of capitalist societies, Orwellian dystopias and totalizing ideologies. In this vein, his works may be placed in the context of postmodernist thinking postulated by Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard or Fredric Jameson. However, the rebellious attitude shown in his narratives against those globalizing definitions of the self and homogenizing social orders strongly recalls the efforts of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes to provoke their bourgeois audiences into action by fostering their radical distaste. The aim of this article is to consider certain examples of Alan Moore's graphic novels as direct inheritors of the committed ideology and technical experimentalism proposed by avant-garde movements at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Brecht famously argued, 'art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it'. This article will thus centre on Moore's works that best reflect the same experimental spirit of revolutionary art forms fostered by Cubism, Modernism, Futurism and other European avant-garde movements. These movements, by using the power of artistic creation, called audiences to social action against the rising fascist discourses of the first decades of the twentieth century. It is my contention that graphic novels like Lost Girls, Watchmen, From Hell and V for Vendetta connect with the recovery of avant-garde ethics and aesthetics, and seem to renew their attacks against the moral double standard of bourgeois, accommodated social classes. Then, Moore's graphic novels raise public awareness and serve as social denunciation, becoming, at certain moments, examples of intellectual terrorism against the status quo.

The article examines Alan Moore's America's Best Comics' Tom Strong series. In particular, the article will utilize Pierre Bourdieu's theories concerning cultural capital, and will suggest reasons why the aforementioned series has still largely been ignored by a scholarly community increasingly interested in introducing the comic book and graphic novel forms into the academic establishment. While Alan Moore's works have often been at the forefront of this nascent appreciation, with older texts such as V for Vendetta (1982–1989), Watchmen (1986–1987) and From Hell (1991–1996) and newer ventures such as Lost Girls (1991–2006) increasingly discussed in academic circles, at conferences and in the emergent field of comic books studies, as yet Tom Strong seems to lie outside of this groundswell. This article will argue that this can be perceived as a result of a conscious attempt to subjectively elide those works by Moore that are difficult to fit into accepted critical hegemonies. It is significant that Tom Strong draws on a range of pulp sources (most notably early twentieth-century American pulp fiction of the sort printed in Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction) that are themselves yet to be accepted in the manner that many of the more 'establishment-friendly' Victorian texts referenced in the original League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999–) have been. The absence of any recognizable academic cultural capital means that to date Tom Strong has fallen outside of academic interest in a move that has interesting connotations for how scholars examine and begin to canonize the comic book form.

This article aims at proposing a reading of the function of madness in Alan Moore's The Killing Joke and establishing a link between the graphic novel and philosophical thought on madness and rationality. The article focuses on the character of the Joker and on the intricacies of his relationship to madness as the element that inspires and informs the epistemological mode through which he perceives and organizes his knowledge of reality. Instead of addressing the question of whether the Joker is mad, the article seeks to answer the following questions: In what sense can madness be read as a force that epistemologically regulates the Joker's discourse? and Can the presence of madness be read as disrupting philosophical thought on madness? In order to address these questions, the philosophical debate on madness between Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida is laid out both in the attempt to establish a link between the two thinkers and The Killing Joke and to set the grounds for an investigation of madness and rationality in the graphic novel. It is argued that the presence of madness in the Joker's discourse elevates madness to the same status as reason, and hence creates the space for the denunciation of the complicity of the subject of thought.

Popular comics, in the particular case of the 'superhero' genre here considered through the lens of Alan Moore's Watchmen comics novel, are mainly based on conservative ideological systems. This article focuses especially on some British and American comic books, which, by emphasizing the bourgeois ideological basis of superhero comics, have highlighted the limits of such comics and have made them possible to overcome. The article finds similarities and differences between the so-called 'supermen' of serial narratives and the Übermensch.

While Alan Moore's recent work has emphasized the power and primacy of language, this article examines one early story that focuses on its limitations. 'Pog', published during Moore's tenure on Swamp Thing, returns its characters to their generic, cultural and linguistic origins to argue that comics and other forms of pictorial narrative can convey meaning more clearly than words. Moore effectively strips the Swamp Thing of language in 'Pog', restoring him to his original role as a speechless, unintelligible monster and forcing him to devise nonverbal, pictorial methods of communication. Moore's story also recalls a number of intertexts, from Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo to the Biblical fall of man. These allusions speak directly to the issue's linguistic preoccupations, suggesting that humanity has fallen from a perfect and universal language of direct correspondence between sign and object into a chaotic profusion of tongues and a welter of arbitrary, floating signifiers. Like later works such as Promethea, 'Pog' proposes that comics have the potential to counteract this linguistic fall through their recourse to visual as well as verbal narratives. Unlike Moore's later comics, however, 'Pog' does not argue that our world is constituted by language and does not express much confidence that any language, even a visual one, is capable of resolving its shortcomings.

This article starts from the neo-formalist assumption that any fictional narrative comic book is governed by three systems: a system of narrative logic, a system of time and a system of space. In conventional comic books, both the system of time and the system of space are subordinated to the system of narrative logic, which demands clear causality and easily comprehensible linearity. For comics creators, achieving this dominance represents a particularly difficult feat, since the overwhelmingly spatial disposition of the medium has to be overwritten by narrative cues in order to prevent the reader from becoming aware of his or her highly abstract constructive activity; if not done properly, there is a considerable risk that mise-en-page, artistic style and/or material and diegetic space will take centre stage in the reader's attention instead of the action. The work of Moore and his collaborators, however, often turns this classical predisposition for action on its head; in comic books such as Watchmen or A Small Killing, the system of comics space (both material and diegetic) comes to dominate the systems of narrative logic and diegetic time by various metafictional means. In Moore, these self-reflexive operations often tend to have a have a didactic dimension. In constantly alerting the reader to another layer of meaning generated by the quasi-diagrammatic spatial features of the comics medium, an ontological rift is opened between the respective comic book's diegetic world and the reader's perspective. Moore will thus always draw our attention to the fact that many of his narratives cue two different fabulas: one, usually severely limited in scope, assembled by the diegetic characters, and another, much more far-reaching, fabula that is constructed by the reader. To provide an example for the many potential uses of this narrative strategy, sample pages from Moore and Oscar Zarate's A Small Killing (1991) are analysed.

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.

This article examines how the fictional world complex of Neopolis and its co-worlds are constructed in the America's Best Comics Top 10 (1991–2005) written by Alan Moore and drawn by Gene Ha and Zander Cannon. Using Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope to open up the narrative, the analysis is interested in the interdependency between time and space and how reality and fiction are intertwined in Top 10. The chronotope is the time–space construction that is measured out by the actions, speech and movement of the characters in the individual storylines, and this article will show how the combination of police series and superhero narrative allows for a multiplicity of chonotopes that, put together, help construct a very complicated structure of lived time and space. Combining a formal analysis of page layout and panel composition with an overall view of the series' myriad of characters and stories, this article maps out the many ways in which linear time and consistent space are circumvented. The concept of fiction as understood by Paul Ricoeur is employed to explain the way fiction, fictional world and reality are linked together and how they influence each other in this comic-book series.

Taking into account the fact that Alan Moore was the person who actually taught Neil Gaiman how to format a comics-script, and that reading Moore's Swamp Thing (1983–1987) notoriously rekindled Gaiman's interest in comics in his adulthood, this article studies and surveys the connections between Moore's fiction and Gaiman's. At first, it particularly focuses on their shared interest in the kind of integrative fiction pioneered in the 1970s by Philip Jose Farmer through his 'Wold Newton Universe' (initiated in the novel Tarzan Alive in 1972), and which is a narrative practice at the core of Gaiman's Sandman (1988–1996), 'A Study in Emerald' (2003) and others, and of Moore's Lost Girls (1991– 2006) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (started in 1999). It also tries to appraise the place of Gaiman's work on Miracleman (1990–1992) following up Moore's seminal run (1982–1989), in the rich history of Gaiman's love affair with mythology. And it ends up exploring the direct intertextual links between Gaiman's Black Orchid (1988–1989) and Moore's Swamp Thing, and between Gaiman's Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? (2009) and Moore's Whatever Happened to the Man ofTomorrow? (1986).

Having grown up entirely within the Franco-Belgian comics tradition, I confess that I read Watchmen for the first time in 2009. On page 2, I realized that I would need to look up several historical facts and names in order to make sense – more than twenty years after publication – of the complex background of gloomy Cold War tensions against which the action takes place. (Vainly) desiring to get the full picture and bridge the cross-cultural gap(s), I Googled terms like 'Vice-President Ford', 'KT-28' and 'Keene Act', which made me realize that Watchmen, to my surprise, has its own 'Wiki', and more important, that it displays a uchronia, or alternate history. Different scholars have fruitfully studied Moore's playing with the narratological levels of story and discourse. While they have focused on the manipulations at the discourse-level, this article divides the story in separate levels to probe the mechanisms of reading 'uchronical' comic stories. Partially inspired by Wolf Schmid's narratological model (2008), I hypothesize the level of 'uchronical Geschehen'. Comparing Watchmen to some other uchronical works, I try to explain why Alan Moore's gradual disclosure of the alternate-historical information generates two particular 'uchronical reading pleasures'.

The grotesque, a staple of the comic book vernacular is a defining characteristic of Alan Moore's graphic literature. Moore's work often transcends the traditional grotesque and blends this aesthetic with erotic elements, evoking the subversive spirit of the carnival, foregrounding bodily transformation, deformation and the connection between interior bodily functions and the external world. Bakhtin describes this 'festival of the body' as essential to an understanding of the literary and artistic carnivalesque. Moore's literary take on the erotic-grotesque adds resonance to some of his central themes such as invisible connections between class, gender, social groups and moral opposites. His artistic collaborators have expressed this effectively throughout Moore's literary oeuvre. Unfortunately, the film adaptations of Moore's work tend to de-emphasize this critical aspect. I assert that the artistic success or failure of the Moore film adaptations rest to a large extent on the degree to which they grapple with the erotic-grotesque. From Hell (2001), which I argue is the most successful cinematic adaptation of Moore's literature in these terms, retains the essence of Moore's erotic-grotesque sensibilities even while altering much of the principal narrative and themes. By contrast, the film adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) also alters the narrative and characterization to a great extent, but also removes much of the novel's sense of the erotic-grotesque. This omission, I argue, is the key element that leads to the film's relative artistic failure. A truly satisfying cinematic adaptation of a Moore novel, therefore, must embrace this key element of his literature.

Given that textual narrative can be infinite and the filmic framework finite, a space is created between the source material and its possible reappropriation, where a choice is made. Do the film executives decide to be true to the original (where the auteur's true meaning possibly rests) or do they bow to fiscal policy and sociopolitically risk-free cinema? The adaptation of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta from the original source and how this process evolves through film as a cultural, political and diasporic text is examined, with particular focus on the differing geographic and cultural ideologies that underpin the graphic novel and the filmic representation. This article posits a celebration of the beauty, visceral power and freedom of the graphic novel set against the power and homogeneity of the Hollywood film industry. It is possible to say that graphic novels do not exist as Hollywood's occasional goldmine, but in fact exist as a site of narrative and visual freedom, in and of themselves. The audience or subject position of experiencing the 'altered' version of literature, from all its various forms and sources, can be seen to create a spoon-fed pre-existent narrative usage via Hollywoodized culture that somehow manages, in this instance, to defuse political vibrancy and vitality and potentially reformat the narrative as mainstream popular culture … or does it?

Alan Moore and the Hughes brothers shared a common goal to depict nineteenth-century English slum life in a credible manner in their versions of From Hell. The documentary style created by Moore and Eddie Campbell in their graphic novel is not replicated in the film with correspondent solutions specific to cinema. Instead, the Hughes brothers veered away from the source text thematically and aesthetically, creating something quite different. These choices, although inventive, ultimately alienated fans and were a factor in the film's moderate critical reception. Pascal Lefevre posits in his essay 'Incompatible Visual Ontologies?' that the unique conflicts facing a film-making team that choose to adapt a comic book can be broken down into four main divisions: 'first, to what extent the screenwriter has to rewrite the story, second, how to go from page layout to a single, unchangeable screen frame, third, how to translate the static drawings into moving and photographic images, and fourth, how to give the "silent world" an audible sound?'. These distinctions will frame my theoretical, thematic and aesthetic analysis of Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell to the resultant film of the same name.