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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.
’, bringing defunct or ailing properties back to life. These characters were haunted by what would be a key element in Moore’s work – a profound sense of alienation, disappointment and loss. With these characters Moore rehearsed the elements that would mark his mature work, texts such as Watchmen , A Small Killing and From Hell , and the spoken performance pieces The Birth Caul
interconnectedness of beings, times and places in A Small Killing , From Hell , The Birth Caul and Snakes and Ladders . But Murray’s discussion also suggests another connection to the abject, noting that Moore introduces fear into the superhero genre by undermining the presumed inviolability of the superheroes. Julia Kristeva describes the ways that
’s replication of Valerie’s suffering and perseverance. Similarly, the idea that Batman and the Joker are mirror images of each other is the premise of The Killing Joke , in which the mirroring of their acts, images and insanity reproduces the symbiosis of law and transgression. Timothy Hole, the protagonist of A Small Killing , meanwhile, is haunted by a small boy who not only