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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
problematic nature of such sovereignty but I will also argue they offer us ways to move beyond it and radically rethink who and what is our kin. Although the list of superheroes and their totems would be very long, with Iron Man representing our dependency on technology, Aquaman our dependency on water and the oceans, or the Flash representing our dependency on time, there are two superheroes that explicitly deal with the theme of connectedness and dependency that totemism assumes. These two heroes are Animal Man and Swamp Thing. In the first issue of Grant Morrison’s run
panel, he descends on her as she screams. Here, then, trauma is not just the effect of war on the men returning from battle, but the effects of the effects, as it were, on the communities to which they return.52 Past violence, the veteran’s experience of PTSD, and the impact of living with someone who has suffered trauma, is, similarly, reflected in the origin of Swamp Thing, who first appeared in DC’s long-running The House of Secrets series (1956–1966, 1969–1978, and then sporadic publication after that as it was incorporated into Neil Gaiman’s Sandman universe
and shape the ‘real world’ in which readers live. While superhero stories clearly reflect the time and culture of their production they also make a direct contribution to that culture. Stories about Superman and Spider-Woman, Swamp Thing and She-Hulk are constitutive of the world in which we live and breathe. To this effect, I hope that executives, editors, writers and artists remember that stories and the world operate in a permanent feedback loop, and that what appears in the pages of superhero comics regularly validates and therefore continues practices that take
Printing Terror places horror comics of the mid-twentieth century in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently and necessarily subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s and 1950s, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The authors examine each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics are centred upon white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history. It is suitably accessible to be used in undergraduate classes.
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