Alan Moore’s early work in the 1980s, such as Captain Britain , Marvelman and Swamp Thing , earned him a reputation as a clever innovator, producing reinventions of old characters, subverting their histories, remoulding them as ‘realistic’ or adding shades of characterisation uncommon in comics. In this sense he was a ‘resurrection man
Moore and Rick Veitch (1987) in Swamp Thing volume 2 #61 when Swamp Thing accidentally incorporates the population of the planet J586 into himself. Swamp Thing, by now an Earth Elemental with God-like powers and the ability to move through and inhabit any form of plant life in the universe, has been separated from his physical form after an attempt on his life. Without knowing that the vegetation on J586 is sentient, he attempts to form a new body from the planet’s plant life nearly killing a large number of the planet’s inhabitants in the process. The terrible
1985, midway through his run on Swamp Thing . Though Walpole’s work does not appear by name, ‘For the Man’ employs narrative devices that clearly parallel – in both form and function – those found in Otranto , elements which Frederick S. Frank has identified as the ‘imperative features’ of the Gothic revival inaugurated by Walpole: unrewarded virtue, claustrophobic containment
impressively by the chapters in this collection, Watchmen does not feature evidently Gothic settings or characters. Obviously, it is not a horror comic like Swamp Thing or From Hell , but works within the ‘diametric opposite’ conventions of superhero comics. 5 Still, this volume demonstrates that there is a myriad of approaches to the Gothic and just as many potential Gothic readings
-archeological investigation of English spaces that has frequently appeared in Moore’s work, especially from the nineties onwards’, 2 and location also dominates some of Moore’s notable earlier works, such as Swamp Thing , From Hell and V for Vendetta . 3 Psychogeography is at the core of Voice , as its series of historical narratives are shown to make up Northampton’s identity as their
subaqueous town is reminiscent of the vampire city depicted in issue 39 of Swamp Thing , whose Gothic environmentalism is discussed in detail by Gray and Bradshaw above; however, in the context of Gothic adaptations more broadly, the application of Lovecraft to the Welsh countryside represents a homecoming of sorts. Indeed, anchored as Lovecraft’s fiction is within specific locales
that Ginger’s close and complex relationship to her sister Brigitte (who becomes a werewolf herself in the sequel) keeps Ginger as a member of a social unit throughout the film. See also, Alan Moore’s graphic story ‘The Curse’ ( Swamp Thing 40 (September 1985)), in which Phoebe, though a predatory and lonely lycanthrope, is constructed through her role as
). 39 See Martin Millar, Lonely Werewolf Girl (London: Piatkus, 2010); Thomas Emson, Maneater (London: Snowbooks, 2008). 40 See Alan Moore, ‘The Curse’, Swamp Thing 40 (September 1985). 41 Frederick Marryat, ‘The
power, but, as we have seen, it also takes the more specific forms of Swamp Thing’s ‘verdant grace’ and Animal Man’s immersion in the Template. For Bataille, to touch limitlessness invariably involves a brush with death because death alone, he writes, can reveal the ‘invisible brilliance of life that is not a thing’ (47; italics in original). The caveat, of course, is that this needs to be an encounter with death in which death is not the victor. What we desire, then, is not to die but through an encounter with death, to ‘bring into a world founded on discontinuity
devil, but abandoned the idea.74 In the same year, DC launched Swamp Thing and the GOODRUM 9781526135926 PRINT.indd 19 04/12/2020 09:24 20 Printing terror 2 Carmine Infantino’s cover for Spider-Woman #6 anthology, Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion. By 1974, horror rivalled the superhero genre in terms of output – Benton counts forty-five superhero titles and forty horror titles published that year.75 Charlton Comics produced several horror titles in 1975 such as Beyond the Grave and Monster Hunters. By 1978, the superhero genre, once again, fed from the success
