Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel

Introduction

1 iNtROduCtiON This book is an examination of some motifs and concerns in the work of British author Alan Moore (1953– ). It stems from a long-cultivated interest in comics as a medium, which I was lucky to turn into the object of my Ph.D. studies at the University of Milan, Italy. Criticism about Moore’s work has been abundant so far, and it has been lately revived by the appearance of the three volumes of Lost Girls, the result of sixteen years of work with artist and partner Melinda Gebbie. Significant contributions toward an analysis of his wide artistic output have appeared in several publications—from the Comics Journal to the Journal of Popular Culture, from the International Journal of Comic Art to Extrapolation—and on specialized web magazines such as NinthArt, ImageTexT, and Image and Narrative. The web teems with interviews, YouTube videos, specially dedicated websites, and annotations to several works, from V for Vendetta to Top Ten, to the script for the Watchmen film that was never made by Terry Gilliam (even though rumor has it that Zack Snyder has been shooting his own adaptation from it). Independent director Dez Vylenz recently released a double DVD called The Mindscape of Alan Moore, featuring a lengthy documentary interview of the author plus extra conversations with scholar Paul Gravett and with Moore’s co-authors Gebbie, Gibbons, Lloyd, O’Neill and Villarrubia. In short, the amount of commentary on Moore’s work is colossal and scattered over several media, ranging from academic essays and high-quality journalism to hagiographic fan sites. A few books have been entirely dedicated to him: two annotated bibliographies—Lance Parkin’s 2001 Pocket Essentials booklet and Gianluca Aicardi’s 2006 M for Moore—and three companions to single works: Kimota! The Miracleman Companion, published by George Khoury in 2001, and two volumes of annotations to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen compiled by Jess Nevins in 2003 and 2004. Three collections of miscellaneous essays have been published: The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, edited by IntroductIon 14 George Khoury; Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman, edited by Gary Spencer Millidge and smoky man, both released in 2003; and Watchmen. Vent’anni dopo (Watchmen: Twenty Years Later), edited by smoky man and published in 2006. The broad scope of these three collections certainly is their credit, but their all-too-celebratory character sometimes results in deficient critical attitude. Hence, in an age when comics criticism has finally been (almost) fully legitimized by the academia, and comic books and graphic novels often appear in syllabi both at high schools and at universities, the need for a more systematically critical study of Moore’s work is clear. Nevertheless, this book by no means claims to be a comprehensive analysis of Moore’s wide artistic production in the field of comics, prose, and performance . If anything, it can be defined as an attempt to map out one of many routes into the work of a writer and artist whose importance and influence have now been recognized worldwide, but whose complex aesthetics and cultural discourse have not yet been thoroughly examined. As my research and reading proceeded, I realized that trying to encompass all of Moore’s works in a single analysis would bring me either to write a ten-volume treatise or to compile a fifty-page annotated bibliography. Considering that the former possibility was quite far-fetched and beyond the scope of a Ph.D. grant, and that the latter was doomed to superficiality, I opted for a different approach. Therefore, I selected only a few of Moore’s works and tried to build a consistent argument about what I identified as some core aspects of his production. When an author is so prolific and encyclopedic in both style and content, selectivity becomes crucial for the scholar to avoid shallowness or stereotype. The method employed in this study is as hybrid as the medium it is devoted to: a form of expression as mixed and heterogeneous as comics—“a wandering variable,” as Charles Hatfield defined it (Alternative XIV)—cannot but be open to assorted critical approaches. In my work, certainly because of my own taste and academic education, but also—and maybe most of all—because of the inborn characteristics of Moore’s narrative, I mainly use the tools of literary and cultural studies. Therefore, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gérard Genette, and Northrop Frye meet the modern and postmodern perspectives of Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, of cultural...