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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
THE END IS NIGH Life goes on. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen 1 The intention was to try and make people feel a little bit uneasy about it. Alan Moore 2 Maybe it is all about transgression. According to Fred Botting
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.
respecting their transgressing the line of their duty on the side of undue rigour.57 The law was not balanced evenly, but towards the interests of state agents, especially when they dealt with the poor and marginal. Watchmen The streets of eighteenth century Britain were patrolled by watchmen, who had far more of the characteristics of waged labourers than did constables. The legal ideal was for householders to take a regular turn of duty on watch: this had not fallen entirely into desuetude by the late eighteenth century: for example, householders 022-042 PoliceControl
’, 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
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
reprieve, asking Gilliam to direct the graphic novel Watchmen , Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic comic book series about conflicted superheroes who exist in an alternative version of America’s history. 1 Gilliam was drawn to Watchmen , with its dark overtones and caustic take on American dreams, as well as its ambitious scope, making it for him ‘the War and Peace of comic books’. 2
admission to workhouses in this period.4 This chapter builds on this work by showing that people were not the only guardians of space in the Georgian metropolis. In doing so, it asserts that watchdogs demonstrated agency in three different ways. First, these animals foiled criminal plans, influenced human behaviour and enabled human actors, including their masters, watchmen and other officers. Second, they exhibited a degree 188 189 Watchdogs of intentionality and self-directed action; and third, they shaped, albeit unconsciously, the urban experience of thousands of
who made it, and beneath its surface lie the tales of those whose labour goes unrecognised: 130 men were killed, 165 permanently injured and 997 slightly injured. Those who still had some capacity for lighter toil were redeployed as watchmen or such like, joining the ranks of ‘Walkers’ fragments’.4 Today, like its brethren canals – the Manchester, Bolton & Bury, the Rochdale, the Ashton and the Bridgewater – the ally-ally-oh (the colloquial name for the Manchester Ship Canal) occupies a strange position in the psyche of Manchester. Canals flow ‘betwixt and between
the manner of watchmen, at the bottom of a hierarchy which was itself disciplined. In broader terms, this linked with other processes of evolving labour discipline related to the industrial revolution. Its antecedents will be observed here, notably through the proposals around 1800 by the moral entrepreneur Patrick Colquhoun for better-disciplined police forces, and the recommendations of the 1822 inquiry into the policing of London, which also arrived at many of the new police’s key organisational features. The chapter will end with an analysis of how this shift