Category Archives: Rummaging Around in Alan Moore’s Shorts

I would like to thank all the contributors to this series considering Alan Moore’s short form works, and thank Ian Hague and Comics Forum for having us. I hope readers have found the articles interesting, enjoyable and thought-provoking. To me, they have certainly demonstrated that many of the acclaimed qualities of Moore’s larger projects are equally present in these more academically disregarded works.

Recurrent themes identified across the contributions include an exploration of the potency of language, as Jose Alaniz puts it, ‘the perception-shaping power of words’. Alan Moore draws attention to the ideological operations of language, the way it serves to demarcate borders of inclusion and exclusion. However, he also insists on the utopian potential of words, and their ability to remake the world. As Daniel Werneck points out in relation to Moore’s treatment of Aklo as a ‘language virus’, this focus on the ‘role of words in modifying a human’s perception of reality’, is closely connected to his interest in the occult, and conception of magic as convergent with the liberatory capacity of creative practice.

This is itself deeply linked to Moore’s anarchist politics, also apparent across the examples discussed, which articulate anti-ableist, anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, and anti-nuclear stances. The political character of Moore’s work has often served to expose the representational hierarchies and marginalising occlusions of both mainstream comics and other cultural forms (as K. A. Laity demonstrates with her discussion of ‘Beyond the Angels and the Apes’, he often attempts to bring obscured female voices and strong women characters into more usually ‘male-centred’ stories.) However, as Alaniz asserts in relation to Moore’s representation of (dis)ability, this is not unproblematic. Not only do ‘Moore and Willingham reproduce some ablist presumptions’, but the explicit unveiling of the racist and misogynist undercurrents of Lovecraft’s work in Neonomicon also opens itself up to allegations of reproducing the very attitudes it purportedly critiques, particularly in the presentation of sexual violence against women.[1]

In terms of form, these shorts demonstrate an experimentation with narrative and playful subversion of the established conventions of their medium, underlining what Werneck calls Moore’s persistent ‘commitment to innovate’, as much as their lengthier counterparts. As Laity contends, they reveal his careful and tight approach to structure, whereby each unit – no matter how small – fits into a fully-conceived whole. This often results in non-linear or elliptical narratives, using flashbacks and framing sequences, as in ‘In Blackest Night’. Such a comprehensive approach is likewise apparent in his script-writing; as Laity suggests, approaching comics in the same manner as his multi-media performances, forming organic wholes out of a mix of words and images. Signature formal devices include a healthy dose of metafictional reflexivity, with Dr Dee’s breaking of the fourth wall or the self-awareness of the Kool-Aid man, who Marc Sobel suggests almost stands in for the writer himself. Intertextuality also abounds, from Ginsberg pastiche to a round of the Lovecraftian intertextual game, alongside play, not only on words, but with visual metaphors like the wave of ‘The Bowing Machine’.

However, alongside these more familiar aspects of Moore’s creative approach, this series of articles has also cast light on some of the more neglected aspects of his work. In particular, attention has been drawn to the use of comedic modes such as parody, farce, and satire that Moore is not widely acknowledged for. Alaniz has pointed out the way in which ‘In Blackest Night’ parodies ‘conventional ‘commiserating’ discourse often aimed at the disabled’ and Sobel has explored both the absurd tragicomedy of ‘The Hasty Smear of My Smile’ and the biting political satire of ‘The Bowing Machine’. As Laity suggests with her reference to BBC period sitcom Blackadder, Moore’s sense of humour not only owes a lot to his underground origins but to traditions of British comedy. It has been proposed that this has potentially contributed to the critical neglect of works such as D.R. & Quinch, Captain Britain, and notably The Bojeffries Saga which owes as much to the anarchic and surreal humour of British comics like The Beano and Wham! as it does The Munsters.[2]

Hopefully, these articles have inaugurated a wider process of fleshing out such overlooked aspects of Moore’s career, which, stemming from both his creative restlessness and fractious relationships with publishers, has been incredibly multifarious.

Parkin’s article focused on an often ignored part of Moore’s career, his earliest work as a comic book writer contributing back-up strips to British anthologies, mapping his creative development and the emergence of ideas in Dr Who Weekly that would come to fruition in Marvelman, Captain Britain and The Ballad of Halo Jones. Sobel’s articles have revealed the plenitude of Moore’s ‘Wilderness Years’, as in his post-DC/pre-ABC phase he combined epic projects like From Hell and Lost Girls with one-off collaborations with a stellar cast of alternative creators like Peter Bagge and Marc Beyer (not to mention Harvey Pekar, Hunt Emerson, Michael Zulli, Jamie Hewlett, Savage Pencil…). Werneck has considered one of his most recent comics contributions, despite semi-retirement from the field, and Laity one of a number of regrettably unfinished projects, notably in the field of music and performance, a continuous aspect of his career that has doubtless shaped his practice as a ‘performing writer’ (Di Liddo, 2009: 22).

Yet particular sections of Moore’s career remain stubbornly untouched in academic discourse. This notably includes almost the entirety of his work for Image and the studios that operated under its banner (like Jim Lee’s Wildstorm and Rob Liefeld’s Extreme), as well as parts of his ABC output, with Promethea and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen generally favoured over Tom Strong, Top Ten and Tomorrow’s Stories. However, as noted, particularly absent is discussion of his early work in British comics, including his work as a strip cartoonist in underground, music and local papers, as well as contributions to UK anthologies like 2000AD, Dr Who Weekly, and Marvel UK publications like The Daredevils (as well as annuals, and fanzines). Importantly this work included prose stories, photo fumetti, illustrations, articles and reviews as well as comic strips.

As stated in the introduction, there are many contributing factors as to why short form works by comics writers like Moore have been critically neglected. However, the profound historical importance of the anthology format to British comics, a key point of difference from US comics publishing traditions, may be of significance.

In general, British mainstream comics periodicals have been anthologies, evolving from illustrated magazines, penny dreadfuls and story papers and initially aimed at a wider working class readership before becoming solely targeted at the juvenile market. (For Moore himself comics were ‘a staple part of working class existence…something like rickets’, Vylenz, 2003). Like many Golden Age US comic books they conventionally comprise short episodes of character-led series in various pulpy genres, alongside activities pages, prose material and pin-ups. However, they tend to have a greater degree of text features and articles and a greater number of shorter strips – originally of one to two pages, but expanding to five to six pages (and greater continuity between episodes) with ground-breaking titles of the 1970s like IPC’s Action and 2000AD.[3] Traditionally, British comics are published on a weekly basis, magazine or tabloid size, and monochrome or duochrome. For many years printed on newsprint, they were cheap, disposable ephemera sold in newsagents, often with the incentive to be taken apart (e.g. to enter competitions or detach pin-ups). Their production was based on a highly rationalised division of labour, for a long time predicated on conservative house styles, restrictive editorial policies, and a dearth of creator rights – it wasn’t until Kevin O’Neill snuck credit cards into 2000AD that artists were openly acknowledged for their work.[4] Although very much a dying breed, reflecting the general decline in the British market since the 1960s, British comics magazines are therefore very different formal, material and social objects from the (Silver Age +) American comic book and the literary ‘graphic novel’.[5]

As Parkin points out, Moore claims he developed his skills as a comics writer working on back up strips for such British anthologies, with the limited page length schooling him in pacing, structure, rhythm and concision of storytelling and world-building. Moore has said of the period spent contributing two- to six page stories to the ‘Future Shocks’ and ‘Time Twister’ segments of 2000AD:

I continue to regard the two years or so that I spent working on stunted little five-page stories destined to be printed in black and white upon Izal two-ply lavatory paper as one of the most educational and creatively rewarding times of my career. (1986: 2)

These strips not only display a sharp learning curve, but also represented a space in which he could play around with different genres, concepts and techniques, mixing parody of overblown science-fiction clichés in the vein of Douglas Adams with experimental formal devices and psychological and metaphysical themes inspired by writers like Philip K. Dick, while also confronting painfully relevant political issues like unemployment.

In the same vein as the articles in this series, it is arguable that strips like ‘The Reversible Man’ (a life told in reverse revealing the pathos of the ordinary) or ‘Chronocops’ (featuring hardboiled paradox police and numerous overlapping timelines) are as formally complex, thematically unified and developed, and structurally integrated and well-crafted, as his critically acclaimed longer works, economical in their storytelling yet profound in their effect. Being less significant to the publication as a whole and its commercial imperatives, and less tied to the formulaic demands of ongoing series, these shorts potentially offered more freedom to experiment without great editorial interference, financial risk or career impact. It is also perhaps arguable that this schooling in the structural and narrative demands of creating effective short form works, gave the writers of the 1980s British invasion as a whole an advantage in exploiting the potential of mainstream serialisation, to create self-contained episodes that formed part of overarching, fully-conceived and cohesive narratives.

The wider question, however, is whether sections of comics studies and criticism continue to evade (and even disdain) the medium’s mass cultural ‘populist, industrial and frankly mercenary’ origins (Hatfield, 2005: ix) and heteronomous contexts of production as epitomised in British mainstream anthologies. Is there a process of gentrification occurring in concurrence with the legitimising efforts of some comics theorists and practitioners, despite the supposed post-modern erasure of high/low-brow distinctions? (Hatfield 2005: xi-xiii and 2012: 34) Are certain works that appear in more durable formats, appeal to a middle class audience, and align with bourgeois romantic models of authorship being canonised, elevated to the status of timeless auratic masterpieces, in contradistinction a mainstream Other elided as tawdry commercial kitsch?[6]

Answers on a postcard.

Works Cited

Barker, Martin. Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989.

Beaty, Bart. Unpopular Culture, Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

comicbookgrrrl. ‘Comic Review: Neonomicon by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’, 13/12/2011. http://www.comicbookgrrrl.com/2011/12/13/comic-review-neonomicon-by-alan-moore-and-jacen-burrows/ [Accessed 24/09/2012].

Di Liddo, Annalisa. Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.

Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics, An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

- Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.

Heer, Jeet. ‘Comics and Class: Labor Day Notes’ Comics Comics, 01/09/2010. http://comicscomicsmag.com/2010/09/class-and-comics-labour-day-notes.html [Accessed 24/09/2012]

Moore, Alan. ‘Introduction’. Alan Moore’s Shocking Futures. London: Titan Books, 1986.

Venezia, Tony. “Soap Opera of the Paranormal”: Surreal Englishness and Postimperial Gothic in The Bojeffries Saga’. Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition. Ed. Matthew J. A. Green. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. In Print.

DeZ Vylenz. The Mindscape of Alan Moore. London: Shadowsnake Films, 2003.

Maggie Gray completed a PhD in the History of Art at University College London in 2010, with a thesis entitled ‘Love Your Rage, Not Your Cage’ Comics as Cultural Resistance: Alan Moore 1971-1989. Her work has been published in the journals Studies in Comics, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and Kunst und Politik, as well as Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition, edited by Matt Green (Manchester University Press, 2012. In Print). She has also contributed to 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die (Cassell, 2011) and Icons of the American Comic Book: From Captain America to Wonder Woman (forthcoming, Greenwood, 2013).

Notes

[1] – There has been ongoing criticism of the representation of rape and violence against women in Moore’s oeuvre in both academic and fan contexts. For a thoughtful consideration of the portrayal of rape in Neonomicon see comicbookgrrrl, 2011.

[2] – Identification and analysis of Moore’s use of comedy, and its oversight in existing scholarship, is one of the key insights of Lance Parkin’s forthcoming literary biography. See also Venezia, 2012.

[3] – Action was the subject of a censorship campaign led by the tabloid press, the National Association of Newsagents, and Christian moral pressure groups such as Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners Association with a class dimension similar to the anti-comics crusade of the 1950s as discussed by Jeet Heer (2010). See Martin Barker, 1989.

[4] – Eagle was actually the first British comic to run credits, but these were removed when Odhams took over publishing the title in 1959. DC Thomson was particularly stringent about retaining creator anonymity, and also forbade trade union membership.

[5] – This is at least true of the commercial mainstream – The Dandy for instance has announced its final print edition in December of this year. However, the anthology remains an important format for small press publishing, as it was for both UK and US underground and alternative comics scenes.

[6] – While this gentrification appears to be most prevalent in correlation of comics to literary models, it is equally apparent via association with certain practices in the visual arts. I draw here strongly from Bart Beaty’s identification of an autonomising trend of ‘postmodern modernism’ prevalent in the European comics avant-garde of the 1990s (2007).

This article is part of a series on Alan Moore’s short comics, guest edited by Maggie Gray. To read the other articles in this series click here.

For fans of the esoteric the news was wonderful: Alan Moore writing an opera on mystical adviser to Queen Elizabeth, John Dee, with Gorillaz. It sounded like a match made somewhere in an alchemical lab with every potential of turning into gold. There was just one problem: Gorillaz couldn’t be bothered to come up with some artwork for Moore’s magazine Dodgem Logic, despite having the issue held for them several times. As Moore told it:

And then we just got through to the point where I just met them, I said, yeah, I can get the other two-thirds of the opera written by the end of February, middle of March at the latest. It will mean working flat out, but I can do it. You still alright for that deadline for issue three? And they said yep, and it turned out they wouldn’t be able to make that issue three deadline even though we extended it for them for a little bit because they had too many commitments, so at that point I decided I had too many commitments as well.

(Johnston, 2011)

While Moore’s relationships with other former collaborators have also been fractious at times, there seems little reason to doubt this. Further interviews with Albarn have tended to use neutral language along the lines of ‘Moore moved on from the project’ despite the latter’s clear enthusiasm and expertise on the topic. (Fitzpatrick, 2012)

In keeping with his usual habits, Moore simply got on with the various other projects he had going and published the incomplete libretto for the opera in Strange Attractor (2011). Damon Albarn made his own opera anyway, Dr Dee (2012). It received mixed notices; Pritchard in The Guardian called it more of a masque than an opera, while Christiansen in The Telegraph praised its dazzling staging and design. Albarn’s CD, however, comes across as less successful, offering rather tepid meanderings into psychedelia – what The Quietus called, ‘less philosopher’s stone, and more curate’s egg: a handful of fine songs where Albarn plays to his existing strengths, but mired in a sea of over-reaching folly’ (Graham, 2012). As Kitty Empire writes in The Observer, ‘this record isn’t anywhere near as dense with magick as you might have expected. Rather, Albarn remains nostalgic for a strange, lost England, one not a million miles from PJ Harvey’s on elegant, moving songs such as “Cathedrals”‘. (Empire, 2012)

Moore’s notes offer a much richer—if nonetheless tantalisingly incomplete—glimpse of what might have been. The lovely thing about ‘Between the Angels and the Apes’ is how the notes reveal (once again) Moore’s structural approach to composition; as Richardson observes, ‘Rarely does a comic by Moore seem like it just “goes”; every page, every issue, every arc seems to be following an almost mathematical formula’ (2012). Consider the opening section of the outline:

If we’re to create an approximately ninety-minute piece on the subject of Greatest Dead Englishman John Dee, then a solid and conventional place to start structurally would be a classic three-act construction with sections of a half-hour each. This also seems to fit nicely with the triangular Greek delta symbol (which is how Dee identifies himself in the facsimile notes presented in A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers between Dr John Dee and Some Spirits [Meric Casaubon, 1659] and is also the elemental symbol for fire, which is in turn the element that represents the highest spiritual component of the magician or, indeed, the ordinary human being).

(Moore, 2011:242)

Moore further breaks down each section into subsections with flashbacks, framed by opening and closing scenes of the dying Dee in Mortlake with his daughter. Doing so brings a female voice and perspective to what tends to be a male-centered story in most retellings which center on Dee and his later partner in endeavours, Edward Kelly.

The elements of Dee’s life and world that catch Moore’s interest show his magpie attraction to the wondrous and grotesque. He wants the first section to focus on Dee’s imprisonment ‘for treason after casting an inauspicious horoscope for Queen Mary’, when his cellmate happened to be the leper Bartlett Green (Moore, 243). Moore suggests doubling the role with that of Kelly ‘to make a subtle connection between these two mysterious figures (both of whom had bits of their bodies missing)’ (245).

It almost seems as if Moore comes up with the idea of breaking the fourth wall in the opera while he writes his outline, suggesting that the magician can sense the audience as ‘spirits of futurity’ watching him from the time to come. Like the final chapter of Voice of the Fire, breaking that wall breaks down the sense of certainty about the barrier between reality and fiction. His approach to Queen Elizabeth is that she’s a kind of Faerie Queen, and he suspects ‘that Dee’s devotion to Elizabeth was at least partly erotically inspired’ so imagines her as more ‘otherworldly and erotic’ than traditionally envisioned. This recasting of the much-reproduced image of the queen has the practical aspect of making her ‘distinctive and unusual enough to make the character seem fresh again’ (244).

To capitalise on the fluid aspects of live performance, Moore suggests, ‘we will need at least two or ideally three performers to take the part of Dee himself. The main one will be the elderly and dying Dee who both opens and closes the opera, but we might need two other performers to depict Dee at the three stages of his life’ in the flashbacks (245). Moore begins to sketch out not just the narrative of the opera but many of the staging and costuming plans. A fully realised conception begins to emerge from what had been planned only as a libretto, leaping into life like his own magical performances, bringing an organic whole out of a mix of words, image and sound.

For example, his conception of Queen Elizabeth, in which he name-checks Miranda Richardson’s wonderfully demented embodiment of the monarch in Blackadder, suggests she must be ‘strange and fey’ and should ‘accentuate the fact that English royalty of this period (and, arguably, any other period) were incredibly strange and exotic creatures who were literally as different from the human beings around them as if they had actually been the faerie race of Spenser’s poem’ (248). She has to be a highly sexualised figure to demonstrate her powerful appeal (and for Moore, a powerful woman is always appealing), but also to give an opportunity to employ ‘fantastical and psychedelic’ interpretations of period costumes, a theme he carries over into musical suggestions as well. Readers of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen would find this Elizabeth right at home in the 1969 iteration of the League. Moore muses on ‘intensely mathematical and Hendrix-fast harpsichord pieces’ that might be inspired by letting the mind race over the re-imagined Elizabeth.

‘Between the Angels and the Apes’ is a fascinating look at a show that will doubtless never be, that includes some of the text as well as the notes for the piece. Taken in that same spirit of imaginative psychedelia, it can create an amazing opera in your own head.

Works Cited

Albarn, D. 2012, Dr Dee, Virgin Records [Music CD]

Christiansen, R. 2012, ‘Damon Albarn’s Dr Dee, ENO, London Coliseum, review’, The Telegraph, 27 July 2012. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/opera/9359720/Damon-Albarns-Dr-Dee-ENO-London-Coliseum-review.html [Accessed 7 September 2012]

Empire, K. 2012, ‘Damon Albarn: Dr Dee – Review’, The Observer, 5 May 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/may/06/damon-albarn-dr-dee-review [Accessed 7 September 2012]

Graham, B. 2012, ‘Damon Albarn: Dr Dee’, The Quietus, 5 May 2012. http://thequietus.com/articles/08720-damon-albarn-dr-dee-review [Accessed 3 July 2012]

Johnston, R. 2011, ‘Damon Albarn, Alan Moore, Jamie Hewlett And The Two Doctor Dee Operas’, Bleeding Cool, 5 July 2011. http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/07/05/damon-albarn-alan-moore-jamie-hewlett-and-the-two-john-dee-operas/ [Accessed 3 July 2012]

Moore, A. 2011, ‘Between the Angels and the Apes’, Strange Attractor Journal, no. 4, pp. 241-265.

Richardson, W. 2012, ‘Friday Recommendation: Promethea‘, Multiversity Comics, 1 June 2012. http://multiversitycomics.com/columns/friday-recommendation-promethea/ [Accessed 7 September 2012]

K. A. Laity has written several essays on Moore’s work as well as on various aspects of magic and comics. Her works include Owl Stretching, Chastity Flame, Unquiet Dreams, Rook Chant, Pelzmantel,  Unikirja and many stories, plays and essays. Laity has been described variously as an all-purpose writer, Fulbrighter, uberskiver, medievalist, humourist, flâneuse, techno-shamanka, Jane Quiet scripter, Broad Universe social media wrangler, and Pirate Pub Captain, currently anchored in Dundee, Scotland. Website http://www.kalaity.com

This article is part of a series on Alan Moore’s short comics, guest edited by Maggie Gray. To read the other articles in this series click here.

‘The Courtyard’ is a short story, written by Alan Moore and first published in 1994, as part of an anthology named The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute To H. P. Lovecraft. The prose was later adapted into comics form by Anthony Johnston, with artwork by Jacen Burrows, and published by Avatar Press in early 2003. The same publisher re-released this title in four different editions between 2003 and 2009. This success led Avatar to offer Moore the opportunity to continue the story, and Neonomicon was published in four issues from July 2010 to February 2011. It is a direct continuation of ‘The Courtyard’, to the extent of making the two stories indissociable.

One of the most typical aspects of the “Lovecraft mythos” is how the author designed his fictional world to be an open literary game that could be played by other writers. Lovecraft was joined in this game by some of his contemporaries, and even replied to them by reusing their characters or fake myths in his own stories, thus creating a rhizome of citations that grew without control, like memes, incorporating elements conceived by various authors into a masterful puzzle of fake occultism and make-believe mythology.

This continued even after Lovecraft died, in a peculiar phenomenon. Dozens of writers and artists kept his legacy alive, through various levels of reference, from adding the Necronomicon as a usable item in a video-game, to writing entire role-playing game systems or whole novels set in his fictional universe. This doesn’t happen very often, and some of the few authors who went through the same process were actually correspondents of Lovecraft himself, such as Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian.

When a writer of the stature of Alan Moore joins such a game, he can’t afford to lose. Even though neither Neonomicon or ‘The Courtyard’ are considered among his most important works, Moore faces Lovecraftian horror with both respect for the original author, and commitment to innovate, mixing his expertise as a fiction writer with a vast knowledge of the history of occultism.

In addition to exploring Lovecraft’s occult lore, Moore also brings his open inter-textual game to a new level by successfully updating the setting of his story to our own time, not only chronologically, but also in terms of the sensibilities of contemporary audiences, probably more accustomed to graphic depictions of sexual intercourse and gruesome scenes than most Lovecraft readers back in the 1930s.

Lovecraft (…) would only talk of “certain nameless rituals.” Or he’d use some euphemism: “blasphemous rites.” It was pretty obvious, given that a lot of his stories detailed the inhuman offspring of these “blasphemous rituals” that sex was probably involved somewhere along the line. But that never used to feature in Lovecraft’s stories (…) So I thought: let’s put all of the unpleasant racial stuff back in, let’s put sex back in. Let’s come up with some genuinely ‘nameless rituals’- let’s give them a name. So those were the precepts that it started out from, and I decided to follow wherever the story lead.

(Moore, in Gieben, 2010)

Surprisingly, this chronological update is made possible by drawing on elements already present in Lovecraft’s stories. Racism and anti-Semitism, for instance, have not ceased to exist, and therefore it sounds perfectly plausible when a deranged FBI agent refers to African-Americans as ‘spear-chuckers’ and describes his boss as ‘a know-nothing kike’. It also sounds current and naturalistic when fanatical Dagon cultists call Agent Lamper a ‘nigger’ and accuse a SWAT team of being Zionists. Instead of sanitizing the fictional universe and the writing style of Lovecraft stories, Moore kept these controversial subjects and perverted their use, not creating racist stories, but making some of the characters as racist as Lovecraft’s narrators, maybe more. He even goes so far as to take the mysterious rituals Lovecraft always mentioned but never described, giving them a very graphic portrayal thanks to the advantage of using images in comics, thus showing the actual fornication that takes place among cultists themselves, and between them and the object of their cult, a supernatural fish-like creature similar to those described in the short story ‘Dagon’. He goes even further to show Special Agent Brears of the FBI being raped by the cultists and the creature, and later reveals this rape to be the most important event in the entire storyline, turning the victim into a demigoddess of the new emerging Cthulhu cult, a Holy Mary of the Lovecraft mythos.

Moore also furthers the Lovecraftian practice of disseminating story elements created by other writers, making them all seem to be part of a believable larger scheme. The more obvious form of this practice is explained by one of the characters in Neonomicon: the name of the singer, Randolph Carter, is the same name of a character of many Lovecraft stories; Johnny Carcosa is named after a fictional city in Ambrose Bierce’s ‘An Inhabitant of Carcosa’ (the name was later reused by Robert W. Chambers in his ‘The King in Yellow’); the church in Red Hook, being the same of the original story, is renamed Club Zothique, after the futuristic setting imagined by Clark Ashton Smith, a close friend of Lovecraft. Moore is also smart enough to allow newcomers to understand the story: besides keeping all of these cryptic details around for Lovecraft buffs to find, he also makes his protagonist in Neonomicon conveniently schooled in Lovecraft’s fiction, allowing her to explain everything to her co-workers, as an excuse to allow the average reader to understand the general rules of this meta-fictional game.

The most intricate re-purposing of a literary element in these stories is Moore’s use of Aklo, a fictional secret language first mentioned by Arthur Machen in 1899, in a story named ‘The White People’, and later re-used by Lovecraft in some of his stories. Moore takes it one step further: instead of merely describing it as an ancient language used by cultists of obscure religions, he shows Aklo as a virtual drug that modifies the very thinking patterns of its speaker. Moore’s Aklo is a ‘language virus’, similar to the concept described famously by William S. Burroughs, but also tightly connected to Moore’s general view on actual magic and the role of words in modifying a human’s perception of reality. His Aklo connects the ancient sacred words of shamans and priests to more current trends of neuro-linguistic programming.

Finally, the main aspect of Lovecraftian horror summoned by the wizard from Northampton is the idea of ‘cosmic horror’, a feeling of dread as large as the universe itself that brought existentialism to popular culture. Lovecraft’s mythos had an underlying pessimism, and more often than not the reader is led to a feeling that when the Great Old Ones finally rise from the depths of the ocean, the demise of human race will actually be a good thing for the rest of nature and the cosmos. In consonance with that general feeling, Moore ends this dark tale by showing Agent Brears’ personal views on the inexorable end of the human race:

I mean, look at this species. We’re pretty much vermin. Never mind. He’ll sort all that out, once he arrives. (…) The strange aeons start from between my thighs. And for everything else, all this other bullshit… it’s the end.

(Neonomicon #4: 24)

With this pessimistic and exploitative ending, Moore’s closes (at least for now) his exploration of the Lovecraftian writing game, keeping alive not only the fictional characters and places invented by that writer, but also his meta-fictional literary game. Reality and fiction merge into a network of places, names, book titles and legends in an intellectual kind of entertainment that seduces the mind with mysteries both real and unreal, confusing the memory and stimulating the reader to research more, read more, and further their own investigations.

Moore is a great player of this inter-textual literary game, and examples can be seen in heavily researched works such as From Hell, and obviously in his most elaborate reference piece so far, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Thanks to this, he has managed to make a Cthulhu myth that successfully maintains the spirit of the previous original stories, but at the same offers a contemporary view on the themes so dear to Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Works Cited

Interviews

Gieben, Gram. “Choose Your Reality: Alan Moore Unearthed.” The Skinny. Radge Media Limited, 01 sep 2010. Web. 7 Sep 2012. http://www.theskinny.co.uk/books/features/100258-choose_your_reality_alan_moore_unearthed

Comics

Moore, Alan and Jacen Burrows. Neonomicon. Issue #1. Rantoul, IL: Avatar Press, 2010. Print.

Moore, Alan and Jacen Burrows. Neonomicon. Issue #2. Rantoul, Il: Avatar Press, 2010. Print.

Moore, Alan and Jacen Burrows. Neonomicon. Issue #3. Rantoul, Il: Avatar Press, 2010. Print.

Moore, Alan and Jacen Burrows. Neonomicon. Issue #4. Rantoul, Il: Avatar Press, 2011. Print.

Moore, Alan, Anthony Johnson, and Jacen Burrows. The Courtyard. Issue #1. Rantoul, Il: Avatar Press, 2003. Print.

Moore, Alan, Anthony Johnson, and Jacen Burrows. The Courtyard. Issue #2. Rantoul, IL: Avatar Press, 2003. Print.

Prose

Moore, Alan. ‘The Courtyard’. The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft. London, UK: Creation Books, 1996. 147-154. Print.

Daniel L. Werneck is a Doctor of Arts and professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, where he currently coordinates the recently-founded Graphic Narratives Research Group. He also makes his own comics, trying to complicate the scholarship of comics studies by mixing the analysis of comics with the actual production of them. He always dreamed of using the word “transmogrification” in a real-life situation.

This article is part of a series on Alan Moore’s short comics, guest edited by Maggie Gray. To read the other articles in this series click here.

‘The Hasty Smear of My Smile,’ a four-page story which ran as a backup feature in the final issue of Peter Bagge’s Hate (#30), is a miniature masterpiece. It’s a capsule version of Moore’s considerable skill and the epitome of everything that makes him fascinating as a writer. The story essentially brings personality, perspective, voice and history to the Kool-Aid man character, a ubiquitous corporate mascot used to sell swill to unsuspecting children.

The Kool-Aid Man, originally named the ‘Pitcher Man,’ was created in 1954 by Marvin Plotts, an otherwise anonymous art director for a New York City advertising agency hired by General Foods, the powdered drink’s corporate manufacturer. Plotts, who claimed that the inspiration for the character – a glass pitcher full of cherry red Kool-Aid with arms, legs, and his signature broad smile – came from watching his son draw smiley faces on a frosted window. Fairly simple in concept, Plotts could not have imagined how successful his character design would become. Within just a few years, his beaming ‘Pitcher Man’ was at the heart of a massive advertising campaign aimed at America’s schoolchildren.

The Kool-Aid Man’s ascension into American popular culture began in the mid-1970s when the character was re-imagined and began appearing in live-action television commercials aired during children’s cartoons. In a typical advertisement, the ‘Kool-Aid Man was introduced as a walking/talking 6-foot-tall pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid. Children, parched from playing and/or other various activities, would typically exchange a few words referring to their thirst, then put a hand to the side of their mouths and call forth their ‘friend’ by shouting ‘Hey, Kool-Aid!’, whereupon, the Kool-Aid Man would make his grand entrance, breaking through walls, fences, ceilings and/or other furnishings, uttering the infamous words ‘Oh yeah!’ then pour the dehydrated youngsters a thirst-quenching glass of Kool-Aid’ (Wikipedia, ‘Kool-Aid Man’).

Despite being referred to as one of the “Top 10 Creepiest Product Mascots” by Time magazine (‘Our biggest gripe with Kool-Aid Man: Why did he have to cause such a mess every time he entered the scene?’), by the mid-‘80s, the Kool-Aid Man was one of the most widely-recognized corporate-owned advertising characters in the United States. Marketing executives, recognizing the signs of a cresting fad, understood that Americans were both enamored with and amused by the absurd character. As a result, in addition to the ongoing General Foods advertising campaign, the Kool-Aid man enjoyed a brief moment of pop culture notoriety, in which his familiar rotund likeness was featured on everything from toys and television shows to clothing and video games (one noteworthy success was a game developed for the Atari 2600 and Intellivision platforms).

At its height of popularity, the Kool-Aid Man even earned his own comic book title, perhaps the greatest sign of the wider culture’s obsession with the glass-pitcher turned human. From 1983 through 1989, seven issues of the The Adventures of Kool-Aid Man were published by Marvel Comics (#1-3) and Archie Comics (#4-7). Clearly aimed at children, this ridiculous series saw the ‘beloved giant wall-bashing red pitcher… battl(ing) the evil thirsties who are the enemies of children everywhere…’ (Comicvine) The final four Archie-published issues were even illustrated by legendary Betty and Veronica artist Dan DeCarlo and featured the Kool-Aid Man interacting with (and quenching the thirst of) the familiar cast of Riverdale characters.

However, while children clearly responded to the farcical character on a certain level, the absurdity of the Kool-Aid Man’s cultural ascension was also the subject of many adult-focused satires. Even today, the character remains the subject of an ongoing series of gags on the animated sitcom, Family Guy. However, perhaps the most famous satire of the Kool-Aid Man was perpetrated by the artist, David Hammons, during an exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2003. Hammons’ controversial ‘Kool-Aid’ painting, which, although hung in the museum, was covered by a white silk cloth and could only be viewed by making a private appointment with the artist, was ‘an absolute stunner’ (Russeth). The painting, which featured a small abstract representation of the Kool-Aid Man in a corner of the canvass, was created using Kool-Aid in lieu of paint. However, by restricting access to the painting by appointment only, Hammons was making a social comment about consumer culture’s addiction to instant gratification (represented in this case by the Kool-Aid Man perpetually bursting onto the scene to immediately satiate the merest thirst).

It is this category of conscientious cultural satire in which Alan Moore’s short collaboration with Peter Bagge undeniably belongs. In ‘The Hasty Smear of My Smile…’ the Kool-Aid man is not only a real person living in the real world, he is acutely aware of the absurdity of his existence. He knows he’s just a pitcher of Kool-Aid with a face ‘hastily smeared’ on it, yet he has the same human desires to be loved and accepted as anyone else.

As usual, Moore’s prose is more than just functional, it’s poetic. The Kool-Aid man’s distinctive voice as narrator is a note-perfect evocation of the somberness of his paradoxical nature, a recalcitrant reflection on a life comprised mostly of torment and ridicule, only occasionally rising from the depths to experience a few brief moments of fleeting joy. Even the title is strangely beautiful, foreshadowing the melancholy meditation that follows and implying hidden depths of depression behind that gleaming, yet unsustainable smile.

On the opening page, Moore immediately sets the scene, establishing the Kool-Aid man as a highly sensitive writer and poet, uniquely talented at translating the horror and ridicule he’s endured into haunting and painful lyrics. ‘Sometimes I am purple in angry negro thunder over night tenements,’ he writes, ‘sometimes I am rock-a-dile red, queer commie blood leaked from America’s television asshole.’ In just these few panels, Moore has revealed the soul of a tormented genius.

Or has he?

Former Comics Journal editor, Robert Boyd, has argued that Moore’s unusual protagonist was rather intended as a satire of the ‘50s Beat poets. Boyd described the Kool-Aid man as ‘a lame fellow traveller who had a little cache because of his fame,’ which was a result of his bizarre appearance rather than his literary talents. Boyd further noted that ‘his hilarious poem is an obvious rip-off of Allen Ginsberg…’ which Moore all but acknowledged in the text when the Kool-Aid man himself recalls how critics compared his work to ‘a young Allen Ginsberg.’ Indeed Moore’s carefully chosen use of the phrase ‘negro thunder’ in the Kool-Aid man’s absurd poem echoes Ginsberg’s similar line, ‘the negro streets at dawn’ from his most famous work, ‘Howl’ (9).

‘Hasty Smear’ also demonstrates that not only is Moore an immensely talented storyteller, but his sense of humor, an underrated quality in his work in general, is also razor-sharp. In the story, Moore takes a swipe at several of Ginsberg’s counter-culture contemporaries, including, most appropriately, Tom Wolfe, whose classic novel, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, was an obvious yet perfect target for satire. But rather than play it straight, Moore twists the book’s concept to imply that the Kool-Aid man himself was addicted to psychedelic drugs. After a hilarious fight in which he called Wolfe ‘a hack journalist,’ the Kool-Aid Man painfully recounts how ‘Hunter S. Thompson held me down while Wolfe pissed into my head.’

Of course, Peter Bagge (with inks by Eric Reynolds) deserves much of the credit for his skillful handling of the physical comedy in this story. His looping, rubbery drawings, which hyper-exaggerate emotions to their cartoon extremes, are perfectly suited for the psycho-mascot lead character. And the red monotone coloring added a tenor of sadness to the proceedings, while also staining the panels the all-too-familiar color of its subject. As Boyd notes, in reality, the Kool-Aid man’s brief moment of notoriety was derived not from his talents as a poet, as he desperately tried to convince himself, but rather from his hideously grotesque appearance and the overall absurdity of his life, a fact which, deep down, he understands though tries to deny. According to Boyd, ‘He (tries) to define himself by the famous people he knew. But unlike most of the people mentioned in the (story), his fame is built purely on his physical appearance, not on any talent he may have, and that is what torments him.’

Perhaps this short piece, written in 1998, a period in which the author had just completed From Hell and was preparing to launch his ambitious quartet of superhero series for America’s Best Comics (including Top 10, Promethea, Tom Strong and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), was also a bit self-reflexive. By this point a veteran writer, Moore may have paused momentarily to scrutinize some of his more frivolous tendencies in earlier works, such as Swamp Thing and Miracleman, poking fun at his own similar use of overblown flowery language.

In the hands of a gifted writer, anything can become a character, and Alan Moore, possesses the perfect combination of imagination, talent, skill, and vision to not only bring this bizarre figure to life, but to use his story to mock and ridicule the society which created and worships such an absurd character. In addition to a clever cultural satire, ‘Hasty Smear’ is, in the end, a tragedy, an elegiac memoir of a difficult life, and while it can hardly be expected to garner the same degree of praise or critical attention as Moore’s longer works, it’s every bit as satisfying.

Works Cited

Bagge, Peter and Moore, Alan. ‘The Hasty Smear of My Smile…’ Hate #30. Fantagraphics Books, Inc. June 1998.

Boyd, Robert. ‘Alan Moore’s Lost Treasures.’ In Comic Book Galaxy. Published November 3rd, 2009. http://www.comicbookgalaxy.com/troublewithcomics/2009/11/alan-moores-lost-treasures-1-in-6-part.html

Carbone, Nick. ‘Top 10 Creepiest Product Mascots.’ In Time Magazine. Published August 24th, 2011. http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2090074_2090076_2090101,00.html

Comicvine. ‘Adventures of Kool-Aid Man’ http://www.comicvine.com/adventures-of-kool-aid-man/49-18580/

Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956.

Russeth, Andrew. ‘The Man Behind the Curtain: At MoMA, a David Hammons Hidden Behind Silk.’ Gallerist NY. February 28th, 2012. http://galleristny.com/2012/02/the-man-behind-the-curtain/

Wikipedia, s.v. ‘Kool-Aid Man,’ Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, last modified July 25th, 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kool-Aid_Man.

Marc Sobel is the author of the forthcoming books The Love & Rockets Reader: From Hoppers to Palomar and The Love & Rockets Companion: 30 Years (and Counting) from Fantagraphics Books. His article, “The Decade in Comics” was recently featured in The Comics Journal #301. In addition, Sobel’s reviews, interviews and essays have appeared in a variety of publications and websites, including The Comics Journal, Sequart Research and Literacy Organization, Hooded Utilitarian, Comic Book Galaxy, and elsewhere. He lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two sons.

This article is part of a series on Alan Moore’s short comics, guest edited by Maggie Gray. To read the other articles in this series click here.

The third issue of RAW (volume two), the digest-sized final collection of Art Spiegelman’s art comix series, is possibly the best single volume of a comics anthology ever published. Included among the book’s extraordinary contents are Spiegelman’s own penultimate chapter of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, a classic 32 page excerpt of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (the famous ‘Tiger Tea’ sequence), an exquisite Gary Panter sketchbook, ‘Thrilling Adventure Stories,’ the first glimpse of the genius that was to come from Chris Ware, ‘Proxy,’ a highly under-appreciated collaboration between novelist Tom DeHaven and Richard Sala, and a long portion of Kim Deitch’s masterpiece, ‘The Boulevard of Broken Dreams.’ The anthology also includes strong standalone pieces from Lynda Barry, Muñoz and Sampayo, Drew Friedman, Marti, Justin Green, Kaz, and several lesser-known but equally talented European artists, not to mention a brilliantly sarcastic R. Crumb cover. With such an impressive line-up, it’s easy to see how a little story by Alan Moore got lost in the mix.

Yet ‘The Bowing Machine,’ Moore’s unlikely collaboration with Amy and Jordan creator, Mark Beyer, is among the highlights of this impressive book. Written in 1991 on the heels of the highly publicized collapse of the Big Numbers series with Bill Sienkiewicz after only two issues, and just before he began exploring alternatives to the Big Two superhero publishers, including, most notably, his 1963 limited series for Image Comics in which he re-imagined the origins of the Marvel universe, this nine-page short story appeared during a period which the author himself described as his ‘wilderness years.’ (Rose)

Like Big Numbers, which, though incomplete, touched on themes regarding the United States’ corrupting influence on the rest of the world, ‘The Bowing Machine’ is a subtle exploration of the socio-political tensions that arose between the US and Japan in the early ‘90s as Japan’s economy returned to international prominence. In the very first panel, Moore’s nameless Japanese protagonist describes, in scathing fashion, the toxic influence that years of foreign investment has had on Japanese culture: ‘Ah, there is so much money, rolling west in giant waves of dollar green topped with a silver froth of dimes, to break amongst the broken crab-claws down in Tokyo Bay.’ Once again we are immediately confronted with evidence of Moore’s unparalleled command of the English language.

The story quickly narrows its focus onto a single rivalry between the narrator and a co-worker, both employees of an unnamed Japanese company, as each struggles to curry the favor of their superiors that they may ascend the corporate ladder. The personal competition between these two workers is a metaphor for the larger competitive tensions that existed between the US and Japan, and Moore plays a note-perfect riff on international politics in the way he depicts these two rivals, each going to ritualistic extremes of politeness in their professional behavior, while secretly harboring a seething mutual hatred for one another.

Eventually the story takes a Steven Millhauser-esque dive into obsession as the protagonist becomes a self-trained master at bowing to his superiors. The importance of the bow as a professional and cultural ritual is keenly understood by the Japanese narrator, but as one of the story’s many newspaper articles describes, ‘It is not enough to just bow in Japan. The exact angle of the bow must be determined by the nuances and subtle shades of a complex system of social intercourse. But today, as the country continues to absorb the ways of the West, older Japanese are worried that the new generation is losing the gentle art of bowing.’ In the narrator’s hands, this simple social grace is once again elevated to a high art, and becomes the foundation upon which he briefly stakes his professional reputation.

But of course, the American has only a rudimentary concept of the bow’s importance in traditional Japanese culture, and instead seeks to best his rival by use of technology. He purchases the ‘bowing machine’ in an effort to learn to bow in the same impressive manner as his Japanese rival, never understanding that bowing is a revered cultural tradition, not some mundane skill one can learn on the weekends with a simple machine.

The story ends with a bitter irony when, despite his ignorance, the rival becomes entangled in the bowing machine for several days, and suffers a crippling back injury in which he is permanently bent forward, like some hideous monstrosity. When he returns to work, hunched in his grotesque posture and relegated to a wheelchair, the Japanese narrator realizes he has been bested in their silent competition. His superiors, whether out of pity or admiration, are unable to ignore the immense sacrifice they perceive he made in pursuit of cultural sensitivity, and are moved to promote and favor the tragic figure over his upright, majestically bowing rival. Thus, a grave miscarriage of justice prevails as the accident victim is shown favor and privilege within the corporate culture.

Mark Beyer’s art is an acquired taste. Unlike Dave Gibbons, David Lloyd, John Totleben and the dozens of other mainstream artists Moore has collaborated with throughout his career, whose styles tend to be more dramatic and photo-realistic, Beyer’s drawings are overtly and intentionally “arty”. Well-suited for the experimental context of RAW, Moore’s decision to partner with Beyer was part of the author’s general move away from mainstream comics at the time. During the same period, Moore also collaborated with Bill Sienkiewicz (Brought to Light and Big Numbers), Oscar Zarate (A Small Killing) and Eddie Campbell (From Hell), all artists whose visual approaches are vastly different from the traditional house art styles of Marvel and DC. Beyer’s style is over-simplified and, to the untrained eye, may seem childlike and unattractive. But upon closer examination, his panels are deceptively complex. First of all, Beyer makes great use of colors and patterns, using meticulous hatching and shading, as well as bright swaths of primary colors to add tone and texture to his panels. In addition, Beyer rises to the considerable demands of Moore’s script, which calls for several recurring images that inform the story’s underlying themes. In particular, the arcing posture of the bow itself, noted not only in the physical act depicted throughout the story, but also in the breaking arc of the ‘waves of dollar green,’ operates as a visual motif for the cynicism and defeatism of the main character.[1]

Beyer also incorporates newspaper articles, both in Japanese and English, to convey a large quantity of story context (including a brief history of the bowing machine’s invention) in a relatively small amount of space. Finally, each page features a shifting series of symmetrical wallpaper patterns, set against stark black backgrounds, adding a distinctively Japanese aesthetic to the story.

In the end, this is one of Alan Moore’s most cynical tales. Its focus on the unspoken bitterness inherent in international politics is a brutal indictment of American arrogance. What lingers most is the final image of the rival, pathetically mangled in his wheelchair. Though victorious, his bastardization of a sacred cultural ritual, not to mention the self-destructive nature of his behavior, makes him a loathsome and disgusting figure. His victory is pathetic and hollow, and, in the story’s larger metaphor, it portrays America as an unscrupulous giant, blindly destroying the world in search of the all-important profit. Moore’s final words are scathing in their indictment of America’s globalization and the impact it’s had on the world.

‘Now he has laid himself so low that I can never rise above him.’

Works Cited

Rose, Steve. ‘Moore’s Murderer.’ In The Guardian. Published February 1st, 2002. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2002/feb/02/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.books

Marc Sobel is the author of the forthcoming books The Love & Rockets Reader: From Hoppers to Palomar and The Love & Rockets Companion: 30 Years (and Counting) from Fantagraphics Books. His article, “The Decade in Comics” was recently featured in The Comics Journal #301. In addition, Sobel’s reviews, interviews and essays have appeared in a variety of publications and websites, including The Comics Journal, Sequart Research and Literacy Organization, Hooded Utilitarian, Comic Book Galaxy, and elsewhere. He lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two sons.

[1] Indeed, with Japan’s island geography and history of tsunamis, the wave is an important cultural symbol, perhaps best reflected in the famous woodblock print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, by Katsushika Hokusai.

This article is part of a series on Alan Moore’s short comics, guest edited by Maggie Gray. To read the other articles in this series click here.

‘In Blackest Night’, a perversely clever short story by Alan Moore and Bill Willingham, featuring Katma Tui of the Green Lantern Corps, allegorizes two pillars of disability theory: the social model and accommodation.[1] Seeking to recruit a new Green Lantern in a lightless void called the Obsidian Deeps, Tui befriends the native silicone life form Rot Lap Fan and offers him membership of the Corps. But there is one big problem.

To her shock Tui discovers that, living in an abyss, Fan has no eyes – therefore the concepts of light and color hold no meaning for his species. Consequently, the translator function of Tui’s power ring utterly fails to convey the phrase ‘the Green Lantern Corps’ into Fan’s language, rendering it ‘the (untranslatable) Corps’ (3). Similarly, it turns the Green Lantern oath, with lines such as ‘brightest day’ and ‘escape my sight,’ into an incomprehensible mass of ‘(untranslatable).’ ‘Mmm,’ responds a bemused Fan to Tui’s futile efforts, ‘Perhaps it loses something’ (4, emphasis in original).

Tui solves the dilemma through an inspired act of cultural translation: she tells Fan to imagine himself not as a Green Lantern but as an ‘F-Sharp Bell,’ part of a galactic peace-keeping corps that uses ‘power bells’ to manipulate sound waves into energy patterns for defense. To periodically recharge the bell, Tui explains that Fan must use a sort of ‘tuning fork’ (actually a GL power battery) and recite the modified oath: ‘In loudest din or hush profound/my ears catch evil’s slightest sound/Let those who toll out evil’s knell/Beware my power: the F-Sharp Bell!’ (6).[2]

Moore and Willingham’s story elegantly and brilliantly illustrates how environments construct what we call “disability,” which, as Tobin Siebers puts it, ‘is technically invisible until it becomes visible under the pressure of social convention’ (2010: 129). Or, as he writes elsewhere, ‘Constructions are built with social bodies in mind, and when a different body appears, the lack of fit reveals the ideology of ability controlling the space. The presence of a wheelchair at the Polk County courthouse exposes a set of social facts about the building’ (2008: 124).

‘In Blackest Night’ also points the way to a social/environmental solution to the “problem” of disability: adjustment and accommodation (an approach codified in the Americans with Disabilities Act,[3] however imperfectly implemented).[4] More boldly, Moore’s script challenges the ablist presumptions in Tui’s language – and the reader’s, which as Brueggemann, et al, argue ‘is laden with metaphors of ability’ (they offer such examples as ‘sight equaling insight’; ‘turning deaf ears’ and ‘coming up with “lame ideas”‘ (2001: 369).[5] An important part of disability activism and scholarship, they add, echoing Mitchell and Snyder, involves ‘making the invisible visible and … examining how language both reflects and supports notions of Other’ (371).

That is precisely what ‘In Blackest Night’ does, through its fantastic science-fiction setting and by (humorously) drawing attention to the perception-shaping power of words. Filled with puns and sly linguistic turns, the story pivots on Tui’s realization that ‘ring’ (noun), source of a Green Lantern’s power, can also be interpreted as ‘ring’ (verb) – something which dawns on her when Fan uses the phrase ‘ring of truth’ (4).[6] Other language games abound: the tale opens with Tui – in a willfully mysterious mood – announcing to her overseers, the Guardians, a kind of riddle: that she succeeded in recruiting a protector for the Obsidian Deeps, but he is not a Green Lantern. The recounting of her adventure serves as explanation of that odd utterance.

Moreover, Fan’s aural-centric speech is filled with reworkings of familiar ocularcentric clichés, e.g., ‘By the Primal Chime! Will you listen to that!’ (5, emphasis in original). Moore even parodies and inverts the conventional ‘commiserating’ discourse often aimed at the disabled: after touching her face, Lap says to Tui, ‘Such a terrible pity that you should bear this tactile deformity. Your voice sounds so kind …’ (3, ellipsis and emphasis in the original). Tui, after all, is the alien life form on Fan’s lightless planet, with an “inadequate” body: ‘I cannot say what it was like,’ she tells the Guardians, ‘… I saw no more than a searchlight’s width of it at any given time’ (2, ellipsis in original).

Thus, the story prompts a rethinking of assumptions critical to disability theory: about spaces and bodies (what they are, what they do); about what kind of life is worth living; about the “invisible,” ideologized nature of discourse. All the same, Moore and Willingham reproduce some ablist presumptions themselves: Fan has vestigial eyes (disability as lack or defect); he seems oddly unable to perceive others unless they speak (the disabled as helpless); while Tui’s “solution” carries a whiff of colonialism: her inspired act of translation is also a trick at Fan’s expense – she even chooses not to tell him of the power ring/bell’s vulnerability to the color yellow, which would seem some crucial information to omit, even in a dark cosmos (6).

Nonetheless, we have clearly come a long way since such mainstream superhero stories touching on disability as ‘The Case of the Disabled Justice League’, in which medical and charity models predominate.[7] In Moore and Willingham’s tale, corporeal/cognitive difference functions not as something to be pitied or overcome; rather, the critical reorganization of environments (social, physical, mental) unlocks the hidden potential always already there.

Works Cited and Consulted

Brueggemann, Brenda J., Linda F. White, Patricia A. Dunn, Barbara A. Heifferon, and Johnson Cheu. “Becoming Visible: Lessons in Disability.” College Composition and Communication. 52.3 (2001): 368-398.

Fox, Gardner and Mike Sekowsky. “The Case of the Disabled Justice League”. Justice League of America Vol. I, #36, June 1965.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Hebl, Michelle R. and Robert E. Kleck “The Social Consequences of Physical Disability.” Heatherton, Todd F. The Social Psychology of Stigma. New York: Guilford Press, 2000: 419-438.

Longmore, Paul K. Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.

Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Moore, Alan, and Bill Willingham, “In Blackest Night”. Green Lantern Annual Vol. 1, #3, May 1987. p. 1-6).

Siebers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.

____________. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.

José Alaniz, associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature (adjunct) at the University of Washington – Seattle, published his first book, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (University Press of Mississippi), in 2010. He currently chairs the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF), the leading comics studies conference in the US. His current projects include Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond and a history of Czech comics.

[1] – Excerpted from Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (forthcoming). The author would like to express his gratitude to the Smithsonian American Art Museum for its support in preparing this draft.

[2] – The original Green Lantern oath is, of course: “In brightest day, in blackest night,/No evil shall escape my sight/Let those who worship evil’s might,/Beware my power – Green Lantern’s light!” Other members of the Green Lantern Corps have used modified oaths, but only Fan’s ignores the concepts of light and color.

[3] – Passed by the United States Congress in 1990.

[4] – For an account of accommodation traced back to section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, see Garland-Thomson 2009: 197fn. On environmental modification as a concept in Disability Studies, see Hebl and Kleck: 434-35. On the failure post-ADA to create accommodating environments and integrate the disabled into education and work life as quickly and thoroughly as some would wish, see Longmore: 2003, chapter 1.

[5] – They go on: “[D]isability studies does invite us all to at least consider the able-bodied agenda lurking in the way we make meaning through so many crippling metaphors, in the way we compose and communicate that disables even as it might be attempting to ‘enable’” (2001: 369).

[6] – Moore, of course, also puns on “ring” (an object worn on the finger, e.g. power ring) with “ring” (a resonating sound, and its figurative derivations, e.g., “ring of truth”).

[7] – That story has various JLA members stricken with various disabilities by a supervillain, so that they may inspire a group of disabled kids to “overcome” their impairments.

This article is part of a series on Alan Moore’s short comics, guest edited by Maggie Gray. To read the other articles in this series click here.

Doctor Who fans encountered Alan Moore at the beginning of his career. In June 1980, when his first strip for Doctor Who Weekly, ‘Black Legacy’, appeared, Moore’s body of published professional work consisted of a handful of magazine illustrations, and regular strips in the music magazine Sounds and local newspaper the Northants Post. His Doctor Who work predates his 2000 AD debut by a month, and represents his very first published comics work – amateur or professional – solely as a writer.

Marvel UK had launched Doctor Who Weekly in October 1979 as a virtual carbon copy of their popular Star Wars Weekly. Both comics were black-and-white, aimed at a young readership, their 28 pages filled with three comic strips and a variety of text articles, interviews, a letters page, pin ups and puzzles. The key difference was that Star Wars Weekly ran mostly reprinted American material, whereas the Doctor Who strips were new, and created in Britain. There were two: one featuring new adventures for the Doctor, and a back-up strip featuring monsters from the show [1].

Alan Moore never wrote for the main strip. ‘Black Legacy’ was a four-part story featuring the Cybermen. This was followed by a four-part Autons story, ‘Business as Usual’ and three linked stories set in the distant past of the Doctor’s home planet of Gallifrey, ‘Star Death’, ‘4-D War’ and ‘Black Sun Rising’ – Moore has called these the ‘4D War cycle’ (Cerebro, 1982). With the exception of ‘Star Death’, drawn by John Stokes, his artist was David Lloyd. Around May 1981, while working together on Doctor Who, Moore and Lloyd began work on their only other collaboration, V for Vendetta.

Moore says that this early professional work, was ‘the best way to learn… you have to create all of your characters, you have to create their entire world, you have to set the story up and bring it to a conclusion, all in six pages’ (Khoury: 67). He certainly had to learn to be concise: ‘Black Legacy’ and ‘Business as Usual’ may have been published over four issues, but each chapter was only two pages long. As well as the world building and story, each two page instalment had to work if read in isolation, recap previous instalments, and end on a strong cliffhanger.

Alan Moore’s friend and mentor Steve Moore had written all the previous back up stories before being promoted to write the main strip. He’d established a formula very reminiscent of 2000 AD’s Future Shocks [2]. They tended to be variations on the theme of someone arrogantly venturing somewhere they were clearly warned not to go, where they meddle with forces they don’t understand, with a nasty twist at the end when the protagonist thinks they are finally safe.

One aim Alan Moore would have had with his first story was to show editor, Paul Neary, that he could replicate the existing formula. ‘Black Legacy’ does that almost to a fault – it’s set on Goth, ‘a haunted planet shunned by all’, except the story’s protagonist, Cyberleader Maxel. Goth was the home of the long-dead Deathsmiths, builders of terrible weapons. The plan, as expressed by Maxel, is simple: ‘With devices like these, the Cybermen will be truly invincible!’ As they explore the ruins, the Cybermen are picked off one-by-one by the Apocalypse Device, finally revealed to be a demonic construct who seeks to leave the planet and devastate the galaxy. Maxel gets back to his ship, but realises he must blow it up to prevent the Apocalypse Device from leaving Goth … and months later, a Sontaran ship arrives to repeat the process.

It’s a near re-run of Steve Moore’s ‘The Final Quest’ from Doctor Who Weekly #8, where a Sontaran is tricked into self-destruction by exposing himself to another ‘ultimate weapon’, a lethal plague. Even the twist of telling a story where our sympathies lie with the Cybermen had been employed by Steve Moore, in earlier back up strip ‘Throwback: Soul of a Cybermen’ and its sequel ‘Ship of Fools’.

Being a Doctor Who strip added another mandate: it had to capture at least some of the spirit and letter of what had been previously established in the television series. Moore has admitted that he’d watched Doctor Who but wasn’t a fan (Khoury: 71) [3]. The Cybermen in ‘Black Legacy’ are not the logical, emotionless beings of the TV series. Moore’s Cybermen – helped by Lloyd’s posing of the figures – seem at times almost operatic.

The flaws of the strip, however, are not limited to ones of Doctor Who lore. After three instalments where the Cybermen are being stalked by a spooky, unseen presence, all the reveals and explanations are stacked in the final chapter. The Device describes itself as ‘a synthetic creature carrying every conceivable disease and virus. A creature that broadcasts telepathic nightmares that paralyzed its enemies with fear!’ – two things that don’t seem to have much of a common theme (not to mention the problem that the Cybermen ought to be immune to both). We learn the Device wants to leave the planet and has allowed Maxel to escape so it can hitch a lift in his spaceship, but both the dialogue and art have the Device outside the ship when Maxel gets back to it. [4] The last line – ‘It will not wait forever, that is the problem with ultimate weapons’ – is almost certainly Moore attempting to yoke the story to the nuclear weapons issue, but it’s too little, too late. It has all the hallmarks of a writer assembling a story as he goes and realising he’s written himself into a corner.

His second story, ‘Business as Usual’ has a writer who is learning lessons and growing in confidence. The first part charts the rapid rise of a mysterious new plastics company that uses revolutionary and highly secretive new techniques. As the title implies, it’s a very similar set up to the second TV Autons story, ‘Terror of the Autons’, and there could be few Doctor Who Weekly readers who hadn’t guessed the identity of the monsters by the time they are named in the last caption of the first chapter.

Moore and Lloyd make good use of the medium. When talking about learning his craft with these early stories, Moore said one choice is to ‘pace it so that a lot happens in a very few pages, in which case, tell it mostly with captions’ (Khoury: 67). The first part is a fast-moving – while very word heavy – montage sequence with a snuck in cameo by Tom Baker’s Doctor.

The last three chapters comprise a more straightforward runaround. Max Fischer, an industrial spy, is chased through a plastics factory by toy soldiers and confronts the sinister Mr Dolman, who patiently explains the aliens’ plan. Then Fischer flees, starts a fire, jumps in his car and thinks he’s escaped, but one of the toy soldiers is in the car with him and it crashes [5].

On one level ‘Business as Usual’ is little more than exposition describing the aliens’ plans in the form of captions and Dolman’s dialogue. The strip moves fast, though, it’s exciting and benefits from Lloyd’s exaggerated shadows and facial expressions. The story keeps revealing striking images, the most memorable being Dolman himself. Four years before James Cameron’s The Terminator, ‘Business as Usual’ features an indestructible artificial human who relentlessly pursues the protagonist even when its head has been damaged so extensively the mechanical skull beneath has been exposed. [6]

Moore has said that his attitude to writing licenced comics was that ‘if it isn’t something that’s interesting to you, then try to so something clever with it that will make it interesting to you’ (Khoury: 71). It was with the 4D War cycle that he got to spread his wings a little.

While Doctor Who had been on television for seventeen years by the end of 1980, the history of the Doctor’s people, the Time Lords, had barely been touched on [7]. With a relatively blank slate, Moore took the opportunity to cast the events as golden age space opera. The 4D War cycle is hung around a relatively straightforward time paradox – the Time Lords are under attack from the Order of the Black Sun, a mysterious organisation from the future, who are retaliating for some offence the Time Lords we see are yet to commit [8]. ‘4D War’ takes place twenty years after ‘Star Death’ and ‘Black Sun Rising’ takes place ten years after ‘4D War’, and so Moore manages to create something of a generational saga in only 12 pages.

Moore has mentioned that when he decided to make a go of being a comics creator,

I was starting all of these gigantic space operas that I was going to sell to 2000 AD I was going to write them and draw them. I think about six months later I’d got one page half penciled, some inks. I just thought, “why am I doing this?”. I realised it was because I was never going to finish it.

(Chain Reaction).

He would go on to write a number of space operas early in his career – this, The Stars My Degradation, Warpsmith, The Ballad of Halo Jones and Green Lantern Corps – and it’s tempting to imagine that ideas were salvaged from this abandoned project. Both the Time Lord strips and Warpsmith deal with a small, close-knit team with space/time manipulation abilities, who live on the fringes of cosmic cold war that seems poised to break out into open hostilities at any moment, and the team leaders in both ‘Black Sun Rising’ and the first Warpsmith strip, ‘Cold War, Cold Warrior’ are forced to kill a colleague.

It’s also notable that in ‘4D War’ Moore introduced the Special Executive, a group of ‘parahumans’ each with their own abilities; a superhero team, in other words, complete with superhero codenames like Wardog, Cobweb and Zeitgeist. We see little of the Order of the Black Sun, but what we do see also resembles a team of superheroes or supervillains.

In a 1982 interview Moore said that when he came up with the Special Executive,

it’s fair to say that I did receive a certain amount of inspiration from those early Byrne X-Men … (Incidentally, did anyone notice that the Order of the Black Sun in those 4D War stories were an Earth-5 version of the Green Lantern Corps? No? just wondered.) And while I’m on the subject of supergroups its perhaps worth mentioning that us people at Warrior have a supergroup in the works. For gentle hints check out the ‘Marvelman’ story in this year’s soon-come Warrior Summer Special.

(Cerebro) [9]

Moore intended to write more instalments of the 4D War cycle, but quit Doctor Who Monthly as a gesture of support to his friend Steve Moore [10]. He would reuse the Special Executive in his Captain Britain series, but would never return to, or explain the story behind, the Order of the Black Sun.

Moore had already written the first few chapters of Marvelman and V for Vendetta by the time he left Doctor Who Monthly and in that time had gone from a novice comics scriptwriter to being one of ‘the most respected and reputable strip writers in British comics’ (SSI Newsletter). Alan Moore’s Doctor Who strips come to a sum total of 28 pages over little more than a single year, and he was working to a restrictive brief and writing for a very young audience. Within that, though, we can definitely see progress in a very short time from the fairly slavish imitation of a template of ‘Black Legacy’ to a work closer to his own heart, a more creative use of the format and a more assured use of the medium.

Works Cited

Khoury, George (ed.). The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. Raleigh NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2003.

Moore, Alan.

and David Lloyd. ‘Black Legacy’. Doctor Who Weekly #35 – #38 (June-July 1980). London: Marvel UK

and David Lloyd, ‘Business as Usual’, Doctor Who Weekly #40 – #43 (July-August 1980). London: Marvel UK

and John Stokes, ‘Star Death’, Doctor Who Monthly #47 (December 1980)

and David Lloyd, ‘4-D War’, Doctor Who Weekly #51 (April 1981). London: Marvel UK

and David Lloyd, ‘Black Sun Rising’, Doctor Who Weekly #57 (October 1981). London: Marvel UK

and Walter Howarth, ‘Southern Comfort’, 2000 AD Sci Fi Special (July 1981). London: IPC

and Steve Dillon, ‘Marvelman: The Yesterday Gambit’, Warrior #4 (Summer 1982). London: Quality

and Garry Leach, ‘Warpsmith: Cold War, Cold Warrior’, Warrior #9 – #10 (January, May 1983). London: Quality

as Curt Vile, ‘The Stars My Degradation’, Sounds (12th July 1980 – 26th December 1981)

with Pedro Henry (Steve Moore), Sounds (6th February 1982 – 19th March 1983)

Steve Moore

and Blasquez, ‘King of the World!’, 2000 AD #25 (August 1977). London: IPC

and Paul Neary & David Lloyd, ‘Throwback: The Soul of a Cybermen’, Doctor Who Weekly #5-7 (November/December 1979). London: Marvel UK

and Paul Neary & David Lloyd, ‘The Final Quest’, Doctor Who Weekly #8 (December 1979). London: Marvel UK

and David Lloyd, ‘Deathworld’, Doctor Who Weekly #15-16 (January 1980). London: Marvel UK

and Steve Dillon, ‘Ship of Fools’, Doctor Who Weekly #23-24 (March 1980). London: Marvel UK

Interviews

Alan Moore, author roundtable, ‘From the Writers Viewpoint’, (ed) David Lloyd, SSI [Society of Strip Illustration] Newsletter No 40, May 1981.

Alan Moore (as Curt Vile), interview ‘Curt Vile Interview’, by E Stachelski, Cerebro v.3 n.15, 1982.

Alan Moore, interview ‘Chain Reaction’, interview by Stewart Lee, BBC Radio Four, 2005.

Lance Parkin is the author of a number of Doctor Who novels such as Just War, The Infinity Doctors and The Eyeless, and non fiction work about the series including Ahistory, a timeline of the Doctor Who fictional universe, the Third Edition of which will be published this autumn. He is also the author of The Pocket Essential Alan Moore, and a literary biography of Alan Moore which will be published in November 2013 by Aurum Press.

[1] – Doctor Who Weekly was originally padded out with reprints of Marvel adaptations of classic science fiction-tinged novels, such as The War of the Worlds and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but these were soon dropped in favour of more text features.

[2] - Not a surprise, given that the original idea, and name, for the Future Shocks is usually credited to him, and he certainly wrote the first story to appear under that banner (‘King of the World’ in 2000 AD #25, August 1977).

[3] – At the time he was writing, perhaps the best source of information about the Cybermen, Autons and Time Lords would have been the articles and photo features in Doctor Who Weekly itself. Moore would not have found it hard to track down a copy of The Making of Doctor Who, a popular and oft-reprinted paperback that gave plot summaries and a potted history of the show. Every branch of Smiths and Moore’s local library could have supplied him with a shelf of novelisations of individual TV stories.

[4] - Killing Maxel’s crew is not much of a plan to start with – it would have been smarter, surely, for the Device just to hide itself in the ship at the earliest opportunity and keep its head down until it had escaped Goth.

[5] – The following year, Moore would write a story for the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special, ‘Southern Comfort’ and was very unhappy with the end result. It’s almost beat-for-beat the same plot as ‘Business as Usual’, except it uses zombie-like creatures instead of Autons.

[6] - Even intact, Dolman was creepy and represents the first time Moore used the motif of a grin that remains fixed whatever horrors go on around it, one that recurs in his best known eighties work – V for Vendetta, The Killing Joke and Watchmen.

[7] – The sum total of information came from two stories: ‘The Three Doctors’ (1972) established that the engineer Omega had blown up a star and provided the Time Lords with the energy needed to master time travel; ‘The Deadly Assassin’ (1976) didn’t mention Omega but named the founder of Time Lord society as Rassilon, who gave the Time Lords a black hole that’s the source of all their power.

[8] - Omega is mentioned in ‘Star Death’ and Rassilon appears at the end (we see only his eyes and hands). After that, all the Time Lord characters and settings are new (‘Castellan’, a title used in the TV stories is used).

[9] - The Marvelman episode in the Warrior Summer Special mentioned by Moore introduced the Warpsmiths.

[10] - Steve Moore’s account of this at www.alteredvistas.co.uk/html/steve_moore_abslom_daak_interv.html

This article is part of a series on Alan Moore’s short comics, guest edited by Maggie Gray. To read the other articles in this series click here.

The growth of academic work concerned with prolific and iconic British comics writer, Alan Moore, has been indicative of the wider growth and consolidation of comics studies as a field. Scholarship has moved from a near-exclusive focus on deconstructive superhero title Watchmen in the context of the mid-1980s adult revolution (Sabin), to encompass a broader range of Moore’s works. Alongside the ubiquitous Watchmen, comics such as From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and V for Vendetta have been the subject of numerous journal articles (in ImageText, the International Journal of Comic Art, Image & Narrative, Studies in Comics and the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics to name only a few), as well as featuring on both undergraduate and postgraduate reading lists. Moore’s importance within UK comics studies was signalled by the one-day conference ‘Magus: Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Alan Moore’ that took place at the University of Northampton in May 2010. [1]

There have equally been a growing number of publications that confront Moore’s career as a whole, ranging from George Khoury’s extended interview collections to the annotated bibliographies of Lance Parkin and Gianluca Aircardi, alongside Gary Spencer Millidge’s richly illustrated survey Alan Moore Storyteller and charity tribute volume (with smokyman) Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman. To date the most significant of these monographs has been Annalisa di Liddo’s Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel, which critically analysed not only those of Moore’s works that have become canonised, but also more academically disregarded series such as The Ballad of Halo Jones, unfinished works like Big Numbers, and production in other disciplines including multimedia performances and prose novel Voice of the Fire.

Di Liddo acknowledged the impossibility of offering an exhaustive overview of Moore’s extensive output, insisting that ‘selectivity becomes crucial…to avoid shallowness or stereotype’ (14). However, as with other scholarly approaches to comics creators (notably writers), this ostensibly led to a general favouring of works that more closely approximate the highly contested and often vague definition of the ‘graphic novel’. For Di Liddo this meant comics that represent ‘a self-standing narrative entity’, defined by ‘thematic unity…one or more adequately developed motifs… a composite, well organized structure’, correlative to the ‘weight of literary tradition’ (20-22). While this does not necessarily mandate a specific length, these formal qualities are more frequently ascribed in comics scholarship to what Charles Hatfield has denoted ‘comics in the long form’, as opposed to ‘short form’ comics such as newspaper strips, ‘panels and strips in magazines’ and ‘short features within comic books’ (4-5).

Thus academic approaches to Alan Moore’s oeuvre remain exclusive and selective in focus, and particularly overlooked have been the wealth of Moore’s short form works, which range from newspaper strips and underground cartoons, to back-up features in UK titles, single-issue DC stories and image mini-series, as well as fanzine and benefit anthology contributions, one-off alternative and small press collaborations, abandoned projects, and forays into other media and their adaptation (including site-specific performance, illustration, theatre, song writing and journalism).

This oversight can be attributed to several factors, most notably perhaps the question of accessibility. Much of the more obscure material is out of print or limited in print run, some of it published anonymously or pseudonymously, and some mired in copyright controversy. Moore’s short form comics that have received most critical attention have been those that remain widely available in print, such as those collected in DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore or featured in George Khoury’s The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore (notably the elegiac ‘In Pictopia!’) Gary Spencer Millidge’s Alan Moore Storyteller includes reproductions of a wealth of less commonly available material, but many of Moore’s short form works only remain accessible thanks to invaluable online resources, such as Pádraig Ó Méalóid’s glycon livejournal archive of out-of-print work and ephemera, and the 4colorheroes ‘Alan Moore for Free’ webpage.

However, as David Simmons asserts, such exclusions may also speak to ideologically-inflected representational hierarchies underlying the processes of canon formation taking place within comics scholarship, with works that correspond more fully to accepted critical hegemonies, and embody more closely forms of academic capital, prioritised over those that don’t. Are comics in the short form, in their episodic, compressed or aphoristic nature, ‘by and large, severely hobbled in terms of graphic and thematic potential’ (Hatfield: 5)? Or is it that they resist assimilation into certain institutionalised critical paradigms (in terms of commodified and partial constructions of formal quality, material format, and modes of production and consumption)?

This series of articles, to be published throughout the month of September, hopes to highlight some of the treasures that can be found with a good rummage around in Alan Moore’s shorts, in order to throw light not only on his more well-known works and familiar thematic concerns and formal approaches, but also to explore neglected aspects of his creative practice and development. The articles included cover both a broad section of his career (from early British back-up strips to his latest comic mini-series) and a range of different materials (from superhero Annual features to unrealised collaborations). In keeping with the subject, contributions are short; suggestive rather than authoritative, laconic rather than expansive, many of them glimpses of larger projects both old and new. You’re certain not to find your favourite covered, but as part of an open-ended, transitory and hopefully generative project, that should only provide the impetus to do it yourself.

Articles to feature:

‘Doctor Who and the Genesis of Alan Moore’ – Lance Parkin

“Will You Listen to That!”: (Dis)Ability in Moore/Willingham’s ‘In Blackest Night’ – José Alaniz

‘Alan Moore’s Lost Treasures: ‘The Bowing Machine’ & ‘The Hasty Smear of My Smile’’ – Marc Sobel

‘The shadow over Northampton: the transmogrification of the Lovecraft mythos by Alan Moore’ – Daniel Leal Werneck

‘Moore vs. Albarn: Between the Angels and the Apes’ – K. A. Laity

Works Cited

4colorheroes, Alan Moore for Free. Accessed 28th August 2012. http://fourcolorheroes.home.insightbb.com/free.html

Aircardi, Gianluca. M for Moore. Il genio di Alan Moore da V for Vendetta e Watchmen a Promethea. Napoli: Tunué, 2006.

Di Liddo, Annalisa. Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.

Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics, An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005.

Khoury, George. The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. Indispensable Edition. Raleigh NC: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2008.

Millidge, Gary Spencer. Alan Moore Storyteller. Lewes: ILEX, 2011.

Millidge, Gary Spencer and smokyman (ed.s) Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman. Leigh-on-Sea: Abiogensis Press, 2003.

Moore, Alan & various. DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore. New York: DC Comics, 2006.

Ó Méalóid, Pádraig. ‘Why I love the master’. Accessed 28th August 2012 http://glycon.livejournal.com/

Parkin, Lance. The Pocket Essential Alan Moore. Harpenden Herts.: Pocket Essentials, 2001.

Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Simmons, David. “Nothing too heavy or too light”: Negotiating Moore’s Tom Strong and the academic establishment.’ In Studies in Comics. 2:1 (May 2011) pp. 57-67.

Maggie Gray completed a PhD in the History of Art at University College London in 2010, with a thesis entitled ‘Love Your Rage, Not Your Cage’ Comics as Cultural Resistance: Alan Moore 1971-1989. Her work has been published in the journals Studies in Comics, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and Kunst und Politik, as well as Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition, edited by Matt Green (Manchester University Press, 2012. In Print). She has also contributed to 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die (Cassell, 2011) and Icons of the American Comic Book: From Captain America to Wonder Woman (forthcoming, Greenwood, 2013).

[1] – Several of the conference papers were published in a special issue of Studies in Comics, 2:1 (May 2011).

This article is part of a series on Alan Moore’s short comics, guest edited by Maggie Gray. To read the other articles in this series click here.