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‘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).

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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.

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