The Integrity of the Work: Alan Moore, Modernism, and the Corporate Author

Abstract

Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s series of graphic novels, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen , interrogates its own status as intellectual property in ways that resonate with the engagements with literary copyright of Ezra Pound and other modernists. League thus serves as a contemporary participant in what Paul Saint-Amour calls modernism’s copyright meta-discourse. The commentary on copyright that emerges in League clarifies Moore’s public denunciations of the comic book industry: League operates as a graphic narrative allegory for the detrimental effects of corporate authorship and maximalist copyright protections that Moore not only sees as responsible for the comic book industry’s decline, but also as threats to the flourishing of the culture at large. Grounded in notions of integrity — artistic, professional, and cultural — League ultimately functions as confirmation of fears over modern copyright’s potentially detrimental consequences found in the work of early twentieth-century modernists.