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This book explores a number of Alan Moore's works in various forms, including comics, performance, short prose and the novel, and presents a scholarly study of these texts. It offers additional readings to argue for a politically charged sense of Moore's position within the Gothic tradition, investigates surreal Englishness in The Bojeffries Saga, and discusses the doppelganger in Swamp Thing and From Hell. Radical environmental activism can be conceived as a Gothic politics invoking the malevolent spectre of a cataclysmic eco-apocalypse. The book presents Christian W. Schneider's treatment of the apocalyptic in Watchmen and a reassessment of the significance of liminality from the Gothic tradition in V for Vendetta. It explores the relationship between Moore's work and broader textual traditions, placing particular emphasis on the political and cultural significance of intertextual relationships and adaptations. A historically sensitive reading of From Hell connects Moore's concern with the urban environment to his engagement with a range of historical discourses. The book elucidates Moore's treatment of the superhero in relation to key Gothic novels such as The Castle of Otranto and presents an analysis of the nexus of group politics and survival in Watchmen. The book also engages in Moore's theories of art, magic, resurrections, and spirits in its discourse A Small Killing, A Disease of Language, and the Voice of the Fire. It also explores the insight that his adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft, which are laced with heterocosms and bricolage, can yield for broader understandings of his forays into the occult.
At 5:32 this evening you will be impaled by a swordfish. There is nothing to be done. It is written. Selena has already decided not to buy the lawn furniture. Alan Moore, Swamp Thing 1 The practices of intertextual
You blight the soil … and poison the rivers. You raze the vegetation till you cannot even feed … your own kind … / A … And then you boast … of man’s triumph … over nature. Alan Moore, Swamp Thing 1 Radical
Where heroes and villains differ crucially in Moore’s works, then, is in their reaction to polyphony; whereas the villains will attempt a definitive synthesis, the heroes will always refrain from this attempt. When Moore took up the reins of DC Comics’ Saga of the Swamp Thing from the previous writer Martin Pasko in 1982, he was faced with the task of revising a character
exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies. The glaciers have their legends. The ocean bed entertains its own romances. Alan Moore, Swamp Thing 2 Alan Moore’s comics, performance and prose works abound with Gothic tropes and beings
Thing , penned while he was still writing V for Vendetta for Warrior ; however, while the Shakespearean intertext in the latter may veer towards melodrama, it steers clear of the sort of pastiche found in the Swamp Thing’s meditation on the death of Arcane. 30 Free from irony, V’s self-conscious literary inheritance does not so much open a gap between narrative and
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
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