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The didactic doppelgänger The double is everywhere in Alan Moore’s work. In V for Vendetta , the elusive V is intent on turning working-class girl Evey into his doppelgänger by subjecting her to a simulation of the traumatic experiences of a woman known simply as ‘Valerie’, an early victim of the Larkhill
Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta is not a Gothic novel – at least, if one were to rely on the ubiquitous ‘narrative props’ or ‘stock features’ that characterise the genre’s early wave (1764–1820). 1 On the contrary, this graphic novel can best be described as a rich intertextual web that combines features of several different
‘the morbid imagination of unbalanced minds’. Significantly, the address ends on a pessimistic note reflecting on the state of ‘our civilisation’, suggesting that, rather than the crimes themselves, it is the uncontrollable responses to them that question its rational foundations. This chapter proposes a reading of Alan Moore’s retelling of the 1888 Whitechapel murders in relation
’s Mina by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill in Volumes I and II of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 2 and the reinterpretation of League ’s Mina in Stephen Norrington’s film adaptation, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen . The field of Adaptation Studies will be an important context for this study, and issues surrounding the translation of Mina from textual
Dave Gibbons : I don’t consider Watchmen to be a pessimistic book – on the contrary, it’s very positive about the human condition. Alan Moore : I believe that with Watchmen , if we’ve achieved anything in terms of the moral aspect of it, I don’t believe that
vicissitudes that are but to us. 2 As in Suicide Bridge , time here has a cosmological dimension, and echoes the emphases on cosmic time and limited human time, attempting to paint on both canvases simultaneously through psychogeography and myth. This explains the time-jumping structure of White Chappell : to explore the continuities of consciousness and ‘force’, the novel grafts the 1970s and 1980s onto the 1880s. Both White Chappell , and Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic narrative From Hell (1999), which is clearly indebted to Sinclair
. Of all the Batman stories that address the thin line between law and violence, it is perhaps The Killing Joke (Moore and Booland, 2006) that most succinctly and starkly dissolves the line between Batman and The Joker, between good and evil, order and chaos, sanity and madness. Aside from this, Alan Moore’s story takes place in continuity and is also notable for the shooting and disabling of the daughter of the Police Commissioner and original Batgirl, Barbara Gordon.5 The book uses numerous formal techniques to problematise any simple opposition between the Batman
to achieve a ‘superior finality’, or sovereign completion in the face of apocalypse is precisely what threatens to bring the apocalypse about. Although superhero comics regularly partake in this projection of the bad infinite there are plenty of stories that explicitly treat the threat of apocalypse and the ‘necessary’ violence it supposedly demands as an explicit theme. This can be seen in Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come, discussed in the introduction, but Alan Moore’s Watchmen is perhaps exemplary in this regard.9 This subject is primarily addressed through the male
Eco, ‘ The myth of Superman ’, trans. Nathalie Chilton, Diacritics , 2:1 (Spring 1972), 14–22 (15). See also Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality , trans. Willard R. Trask (Long Grove: Waveland, 1963). 5 Steve Brie, ‘Spandex parables: justice, criminality and the ethics of vigilantism in Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke ’, in William T. Rossiter and Steve Brie (eds), Literature and Ethics: From the Green Knight to the Dark Knight (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), pp. 203–15 (203). 6 Dennis O
and Hannibal , which have, in turn, inspired Hannibal , an American television series. Or take graphic novels, such as Todd McFarlane's Spawn (1992–present), Mike Mignola's Hellboy (1993–present), and most notably British comic artist Alan Moore's V for Vendetta (1982–89), Watchmen (1986–87), From Hell (1991–96), and even his recently published second novel, titled Jerusalem , which is a crippling