Alan Moore Research Articles

What's Diagnosis Got to Do With it?: Psychiatry, Comics and Batman: The Killing Joke

While comics have found a distinguished position in medicine through the work of graphic medicine, they also have a long, vexed history in other areas of the medical field, namely psychiatry. I explore one way superheroes have previously entered mental health discourse by lingering over the rhetoric of psychiatrists who have attempted to understand the superhero and the supervillain through analysis and diagnosis. The writings of psychiatrists invested in comics and superheroes provide insight into the psychiatric discipline, and the superhero genre supplies new ways to think about mental health practice. After considering a selection of psychiatric readings of the superhero (and villain), I offer my own interpretation of The Killing Joke. By placing The Killing Joke in the context of discussions of mental health, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's text complicates questions of evil as well as empathy through the depiction of the villainous Joker in pain. The reader's identification with and connection to the character facilitates opportunities for both clinicians and laypeople to listen to and to witness the story of a villain, to know what he is, and to contend with the ambivalent feelings that emerge from such a situation of knowing both his sad history and his violent actions.

Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics by Kate Polak

Reviewed by: Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics by Kate Polak Martha Kuhlman (bio) Kate Polak. Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics. Ohio State University Press, 2017. 238 pp, $134.95, $29.95. Comics studies has expanded so rapidly in recent years that scholars are continually seeking new subfields to which they might lay claim, each inventing their own specific terminology to advance the critical discussion. With Ethics in the Gutter, Kate Polak offers her own contribution to this growing list of terms: historio-metagraphics. To situate her specific area of interest, some brief background about the development of comics studies can set the stage. In her introduction, she highlights the division between various forms of non-fiction graphic narrative—autographics (autobiographical comics), graphic memoir, biographical comics, comics journalism, documentary comics, historical comics—and fictional narratives that may engage with many of the same concerns, but do not garner as much attention as the canonical Maus by Art Spiegelman or Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. On the other hand, non-fiction graphic narratives must be conveyed through the subjective mark-making of the artist, and therefore are already necessarily creative constructs. Thus, the category of non-fiction inevitably bleeds into fiction and invention as well without losing credibility. As Hillary Chute points out, "Graphic narrative suggests [End Page 390] that historical accuracy is not the opposite of creative invention; the problematics of what we consider fact and fiction are made apparent by the role of drawing."1 Polak approaches this divide from the other direction by placing her emphasis on the potential of fictional graphic narratives to pose urgent ethical questions, which, in her opinion, have been unfairly overlooked in comparison to "the well-researched genre of autographics" (2). Following Linda Hutcheon's influential term "historiographic metafiction" from her foundational work on postmodernism, Polak invents "historio-metagraphics" to designate graphic narratives that are fictional but nonetheless powerful in the way that they can reveal how history is represented. In foregrounding the mechanisms of narration through temporal shifts, page layout, and the use of the gutter, Polak argues that "[the] reader's awareness of the graphic narrative as something produced is embedded in the form" (11). Unlike autographics, the author and the artist frequently have no personal connection to the historical trauma that is narrated, and it is this level of mediation and distance that Polak finds useful insofar as it prompts self-reflection in the reader. She chooses five narratives as case studies from widely diverse cultural contexts to apply her critical lens: J. P. Stassen's Deogratias (concerning the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide), Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen, Jason Aaron's and R. M. Guera's Scalped (which reflects upon the situation of Native Americans and the shootings at the Pine Ridge Reservation, although it is called the "Prairie Rose Reservation" in the story), Jeremy Love's Bayou (which bears similarity to the Emmett Till murder), and lastly an issue of Hellblazer by Mike Carey and Marcelo Frusin that addresses the massacre of Tasmanian Aborigines. Her intention is not to suggest that these instances of trauma are equivalent, but rather to tease apart the various levels of ethical engagement between the implied author and the reader in each example. Formally speaking, she is interested in the way that each author manipulates focalization and point of view in order to destabilize the ethical position of the reader. It's an ambitious project, and she delivers some surprising and nuanced readings of texts from very different historical and cultural perspectives. Although each reading has its merits, the strongest chapter is probably her opening analysis of Stassen's Deogratias. Polak argues that Stassen frustrates the Western reader's preference for a sympathetic protagonist and a redemptive ending by choosing a Hutu perpetrator as the main character. She further notes that readers objected to the graphic novel first and foremost because it is difficult to relate to Deogratias, a character who ultimately rapes and kills two of his Tutsi classmates. Secondly, the confused chronology and fragmented style of narration posed a problem for many readers, especially since the novel lacked a consistent...

Chronotope in Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen

Following Cyril Camus's argument that the category of "graphic novel" is defined by its particular use of literary chronotopes, the present paper reads Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen as a treasure trove of chronotopic arrangements. As a metafictional exploration of its own medium, Watchmen displays a plurality of chronotopes, which is not simply an effect of its postmodernism (Smethurst), but the inherent possibility of graphic narrative. Therefore, with the help of Watchmen, it is possible to both argue for an easy transfer of Bakhtinian theory to the field of comics studies, and highlight the ways in which the unique potential of the medium as such can help us repurpose the theory of the chronotope.

‘An altered view regarding the relationship between dreams and reality’: Magic, politics and the comics medium in Alan Moore and Jacen Burrow’s Providence

Abstract Alan Moore reports that, through researching Providence, he ‘became more fully acquainted with academic literary criticism’ (Moore and Green 2016) and the extensive evidence of research throughout the series supports this claim. In this article, I argue that Providence uses the comics form to assert the value of humanities research and of the arts more broadly, and to educate its audience in reading and research practices (some of which are more providential than others). My focus is on the relationships between imagination and the historical realities of readers; while the latter are not detailed at length, the discussion does map onto the real world of Brexit, the aftermath of the 2016 US Presidential election and austerity politics because Moore’s underlying premise is that it is possible to trace the origins of our contemporary moment through the societal anxieties encoded in Lovecraft’s fiction. The analysis combines key concepts from adaptation studies with the theoretical model of the comics system proposed by Thierry Groensteen; moreover, it both draws upon and extends Brian McHale’s work on metafiction to suggest ways of extending Groensteen’s model in order to better understand the way in which Providence uses the comics medium to put into practice his hopes concerning the world-altering potential of art and scholarship.

Rorschach tests and Rorschach vigilantes

One of the clearest signs that Psychology has impacted popular culture is the public’s familiarity with the Rorschach ink-blot test. An excellent example of the Rorschach in popular culture can be found in Watchmen, the comic/graphic novel written by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1987). In the mid-20th century Psychology had an especially contentious relationship with comics; some psychologists were very anxious about the impact comics had on young people, whereas others wrote comics to subvert dominant norms about gender and sexuality. Yet historians of Psychology have had almost nothing to say about this popular and critically acclaimed novel. We read Watchmen here for its narratives that most concern the history of Psychology. We focus on such themes as anti-psychiatry, sexual violence, homophobia, lesbian erasure and social psychological research on bystander intervention. We argue it is possible to align Psychology and comics more closely despite their sometimes contentious history. In doing so we demonstrate the active role of the public in the history of the Rorschach, and the public engagement of Psychology via comics, and also reveal what is possible when historians consider comics within their histories.

‘Comics on the Main Street of Culture’: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (1999), Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah (2011) and the politics of gentrification

Abstract Through a comparative discussion of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (serialized 1989−96, collected 1999), which is now widely marketed as a ‘graphic novel’, and Laura Oldfield Ford’s more self-consciously subcultural zine, Savage Messiah (serialized 2005 to 2009, collected 2011), this article explores the correlation between the gentrification of the comics form and the urban gentrification of city space − especially that of East London, which is depicted in both of these sequential art forms. The article emphasizes that both these urban and cultural landscapes are being dramatically reshaped by the commodification and subsequent marketization of their subcultural or marginalized spaces, before exploring the extent to which this process neutralizes their subversive qualities and limits democratic access to them. In conclusion, however, the article demonstrates that comics artists tend to collect their ephemeral comics and publish them as marketable graphic novels not to commodify them, nor to maximize their profits. Rather, they do so in order to reach a wider readership and thereby to mobilize their subversive, anti-gentrification political content more effectively, constituting radical urban subcultures that resist the reshaping of London into a segregated and discriminatory cityscape.

Sex Workers in Comics and Graphic Novels

Prostitutes, or sex workers as they are often referred to nowadays, are usually marginalized and generally depicted in a negative light in comics and graphic novels. Most frequently, a stereotypical image of female sex workers as victims of society from a patriarchal viewpoint is perpetuated. Violence against prostitutes is often the central theme for graphic novels, like in From Hell (1989) by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. Characters that are, or used to be, prostitutes are almost exclusively victimized or vilified. Even powerful, authoritative, and independent women, like most from the Sin City series (1991-2000) of graphic novels by Frank Miller, are, in the grand scheme of things, at the mercy of more powerful male figures. In 2011 the Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown tried to counter this prevalent misogynist depiction of prostitutes in his graphic novel Paying For It. The autobiographical story centers on him as a “John”, a client of sex workers, for several years, and explains his experiences with escorts. My paper will focus on the depiction of prostitutes in Chester Brown’s Paying For It (2011) and will compare various comics and graphic novels also featuring sex workers with the book. I will show that Paying For It (2011), although partly flawed, is an important work for the portrayal of prostitutes in comics, and a valuable contribution in the debate about the decriminalization of sex work.

Political Monologue vs. Political Dialogue in Graphic Novels

Can a comic book communicate support to political status quo and strive to educate a society of obedient citizens who share common conservative values? Can it, in other cases, encourage tough questions and sound rebellious? And why are graphic novels so efficient as means of propaganda and ideological impact? Selected stories from “Commando” and “Battle” war comic series are discussed along with Alan Moore’s and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta in order to look at hierarchical versus anarchistic political communication in British graphic novels. Special attention is paid to uniqueness of comic books as a medium.

Histórias em quadrinhos como fonte de pesquisa: uma análise sócio-histórica acerca do graphic novel “Batman: a piada mortal”

Este trabalho propõe uma discussão acerca da utilização de histórias em quadrinhos (HQs) como fontes de pesquisa sócio-histórica. Tal debate promoverá uma análise sobre alguns aspectos referentes à criação do graphic novel Batman: A Piada Mortal de Alan Moore como ponto de referência. A criação, e sua estética e ainda uma reflexão sobre alguns personagens principais da trama exposta nesta história em quadrinhos permitirão uma observação mais detalhada da relevância existente em sua narrativa, e sua importância como fonte documental. Para este fim, será realizada uma investigação sobre a arte sequencial mediante um estudo nos campos científicos da história, com Chartier e da semiologia, com Barthes, com o objetivo de demonstrar como os aspectos visuais e “não visuais” (escrita) interligam-se na construção de diferentes sentidos.

‘For God’s sake, cover yourself’: sexual violence, disrupted histories, and the gendered politics of patriotism in Watchmen

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the representation of sexual violence in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. The comic book was published between 1986 and 1987 by DC Comics – and later collected into one volume in 1987 – and is set in an alternative reality, conceptually converging with points in history spanning from the 1930s to the 1980s. Watchmen hinges, on a number of levels, on the (alleged) rape of Silk Spectre by the Comedian in the early 1940s, an event shown as a flashback within the narrative. Although forming a short part of the comic book, and taking up a minimal number of frames, the episode of sexual violence is proposed in Watchmen as the conceptual fulcrum on which much of the narrative pivots, as well as the conceptual dynamics between the vigilante characters and their identification with the ‘United States’ as an entity. In my analysis, I connect sexual violence to notions of disrupted memory, collective historical narrative, (un)patriotism, and the ‘nation’ as a gendered entity. Ultimately, this paper uncovers how Watchmen exposes the well-known dichotomous metaphor of ‘women/nation’ as conflicted and warped. The politics of nationalism and patriotism are conflated with the aesthetics of gender representation, and the violated body as a contested social, cultural, and historical space.

The magic of patriarchal oppression in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell

ABSTRACTIn From Hell, Alan Moore establishes systemic patriarchal sexual violence against the backdrop of Victorian London. While rape and other acts of physical repression are easily linked to the notion of sexual violence, Moore’s treatment is concentrated on the society as a whole. His anti-hero, physician Sir William Gull, justifies the serial murders and dissection rituals as a necessary continuation of Victorian inequality and as a symbolic manifestation of patriarchy’s counterattack. Linking ancient religion and mythology to a thousand years of British history, the sexual violence in From Hell is cast in the frame of a successful victory of patriarchy over matriarchy. Alan Moore’s particular emphasis on the erotic as a biological and cultural force creates some ambiguity in the work’s pro-matriarchal ideological values by naturalising much of the tale within a libidinal machine. This is expounded by the anti-hero, Sir William Gull, in a ‘psycho-geography’ of London that privileges the masculine side in this conflict, and Moore and Campbell employ visual cues that implicate the structures of organised religion. The insights of feminist theologian Mary Daly will be presented to complement Moore’s approach to women’s societal battle. The matriarchal focus is presented anecdotally in the short presentation of the victims of sexual violence.

Alan Moore, Donald Davidson, and the Mind of Swampmen

Alan Moore, Donald Davidson, and the Mind of Swampmen

Northampton Calling: A Conversation with Alan Moore

photo : joe brown 28 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 Q&A WORLDLIT.ORG 29 A lan Moore is the most celebrated comics writer living but doesn’t write comics anymore . For the past decade, he’s been working instead on his second novel, Jerusalem, a sprawling epic covering a span of time stretching to the heat death of the universe but contained geographically within half a square mile in Moore’s hometown of Northampton, UK, in an area known as the Boroughs. Using the rapidly eroding map of his own working-class neighborhood as a canvas, Moore spins a tale of life and afterlife, using narrative tools that include stream of consciousness, verse, playwriting, and Joycean glossolalia to boot. It is both the culmination of his life’s work as a writer and a radical departure for an artist known for them. So it was with great excitement that I sat down to talk with Moore about this crowning achievement of his career. Rob Vollmar: Jerusalem builds on themes and techniques that began in your work as early as From Hell but figured heavily in your first novel, Voice of the Fire, and, more recently, in your homage to your friend and mentor Steve Moore, Unearthing . Could you talk about psychogeography and how it came to play such an important role in your work? Alan Moore: Psychogeography would be the understanding that in our experience of any place, it is the associations, the dreams, the imaginings, the history—it is all the information that is relevant to that place which is what we experience when we talk about a place. That is what we’re talking about. We’re not actually talking about the hard bricks and mortar. Yes, that is all that we can measure in the material world, but that is not the essence of what we feel when we talk about a particular place that means something to us. It is always that psychological effect the place has on us that is going to be paramount , and that is psychogeography—a way of considering the landscape around us as more than its physical components, acknowledging that there is much more to all of this than the material world. The bigger part of our experience is spent in this vague, drifting, entirely immaterial world of associations. I suppose that the first time I ever heard that term, it would have been in the context of my first discovering the extraordinary Northampton Calling A Conversation with Alan Moore by Rob Vollmar 30 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 work of Iain Sinclair. During the early stages of From Hell, I had been sent a copy of Lud Heat, which was one of Iain’s early super-dense poems that are on the verge of turning into prose. He was dealing with his time spent maintaining the lawns and gardens of the churches in East London when he was working for the council. A lot of these were Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches. Iain started to notice some alignments between these churches, which were suggestive. He put all this into Lud Heat. I was fascinated because this seemed to me to be a new way of engaging with place. Place has always been immensely important in all my work, even from the earliest days of my career. Even if a thing was a fairly average superhero narrative like Captain Britain or something like that that was set in this country, then I wanted it set in a real London that contemporary people would recognize. I was also very keen to have things like V for Vendetta set in a visibly real and accurate London. It wasn’t really until I discovered Iain’s work that I saw the kind of focus Iain was capable of that I had been missing, and I quickly understood that this wasn’t something Iain had invented. There were all sorts of people who had made “walking with an agenda,” as Iain calls it, into a kind of art form. There was Arthur Machen with his illuminating strolls around London. There were the situationists, the surrealists with their walks that would be like planned experiences. There were the flâneurs. There...

Jerusalem

The river’s name becomes allegory. On it flows, blissfully unaware of its role. Borders , blindness, bridges—Jacobsen nestles them all beside “the peaceful Our, which meandered through the dewy meadows with such heavenly calm, if only life on earth were like that.” Borders is a sweeping masterpiece. Lanie Tankard Austin, Texas Alan Moore. Jerusalem. New York. Liveright. 2016. 1,266 pages. Alan Moore has constructed in Jerusalem a monolithic rendering of his hometown of Northampton, England, steeped in a timeless mythology and haunted by ghosts and devils as well as those left behind by gentrified spaces. This sophomore novel is bookended with sections featuring Alma Warren, a painter and likely alter ego of Moore, whose name even resembles a visual and phonetic scrambling of his, as well as her muse of a brother. In the pages between the planning of a series of paintings and their unveiling, Jerusalem is split across three divisions of eleven chapters, caught in phantasmagoric drift through a millennium in the Boroughs. Its sprawling cast of characters includes sex workers, poets, cowboys, politicians, addicts, spirits, angels, demons, freed slaves, monks, and various historical and contemporary celebrities, all of whom are woven expertly by Moore into the gritty tapestry of Northampton and its shadow dimension, Mansoul. Theirs is a porous existence in which fate is as much determined by a celestial round of billiards as it is by the perceived failings of Thatcherite economics. As with many novels of its breadth, there are moments of interaction between Moore and the attentive reader, such as an instance in which Alma reflects on the gravity of this enormous undertaking, a project she realizes she must commit to fully or risk failure. This is also a book that abounds with whimsical diversions and ontological exploration. In one extended sequence, a young boy chokes to death on a lozenge before embarking on an extradimensional journey through the cosmos. Other sections involve occasionally tedious walk-throughs of the city, pointing out landmarks or buildings as though more intent on cataloging than storytelling. Gradually, as the settings and characters begin shifting throughout the book, so too does Moore’s execution, transitioning between poetry and noir to theater and beyond. It is perhaps a testament to his range that this works very nearly through to the end. If Jerusalem has cousins in literature, theyareambitiousofferingslike2666,Gravity ’s Rainbow, and most certainly Ulysses by James Joyce, whose institutionalized daughter Lucia is actually a character here, experiencing her days through a tangle of rhythmic color that almost derails the flow of an unbalanced novel that’s taken nine hundred pages to acclimate to. In reaching that milestone, however, it’s doubtful the devoted reader who has invested the time will find themselves deterred, and will perhaps even be immensely rewarded for seeing it through. Though challenging and at times lacking restraint, conquering its nearly 1,300 pages is an enjoyable experience . (Editorial note: Turn to page 28 to read Rob Vollmar’s interview with Moore.) Michael Kazepis Portland, Oregon Rabih Alameddine. The Angel of History. New York. Atlantic Monthly Press. 2016. 294 pages. Jacob has issues. He was born a bastard in Beirut, the son of a bourgeois Lebanese teenager and a Yemeni housekeeper. He spends much of his youth in a brothel in Cairo, graduating from there to a Catholic boarding school where he loses his virginity The Book of Khartoum Ed. Raph Cormack & Max Shmookler Comma Press When a city like Khartoum is full of diverse stories, it begins to take on a character of its own. This collection of ten short fiction pieces sketches the Sudanese capital with its cultural complexity, joining various social realities and prose styles to represent dynamic life where the White and Blue Niles meet. Best European Fiction 2017 Ed. Nathaniel Davis Dalkey Archive Press Prefaced by an explanatory essay by Eileen Battersby, Best European Fiction 2017 offers readers a one-stop tour of contemporary European fiction stretching from the UK to Russia. With each piece clocking in at around ten pages, this collection is ideal for taking the temperature of contemporary literature without becoming bogged down in the specificities of any single contributing community. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 69...

Dressing the Tongue: The Spoken-Word Albums of Alan Moore

WORLDLIT.ORG 31 things that have been done to them and the way in which they have been made to live. Now, actually neither of these options are the way that working-class people think about themselves. We are all heroes in our own narrative. Of course we are. This is why the idea of supervillains in comics is innately so ridiculous. Nobody in the world is ever going to call themselves “Dr. Evil,” because we all are the heroes in our own stories. In trying to address that, there weren’t really that many difficulties. If I were trying to talk about a famous person—like, say, the various references throughout the book to Lady Diana Spencer—there, with that, I did my research. I read the books. I looked at Wikipedia entries. I did as much as I could to actually put together a picture of that woman and her family life. It was a lot easier actually to get the often inexact and fictionalized details of my family’s history and the neighborhood, just from conversations. It all doesn’t have to be upon Wikipedia. A lot of it is these days and that’s a good thing, but there is this other, much older method of transferring information from one generation to another, and that is oral tradition. Even in our techno-rich times, there is still an oral tradition. There are still people with a wealth of stories. Other than the various narratives that were told to me as part of family history, family legend, or tales about the neighborhood, there was one specific book that is probably a cornerstone of Jerusalem. This is a book called In Living Memory, and it was published by Northampton Arts Development in the 1980s. It was a series of interviews, just with the people of the neighborhood, asking what they remembered. It was quite an unusual thing to do, and if my friend Richard Foreman and his accomplices hadn’t done that, there would probably not be a Jerusalem, or at least not in its current form. Some of the most extraordinary things were things that I found in there. For example, I had known what my grandmother’s occupation was, my paternal grandmother . I had known that she was one of those mythical women who lived in the next street that if you’d got a pregnancy that was just about to turn into a delivery or you’d had somebody die, then, in a neighborhood without midwives or undertakers, there would be a woman in the next street or down the road who, for a shilling, would come and deliver the baby or would lay out the corpse. I’d known that my nan had worked in that profession. I hadn’t realized until I’d read the book Dressing the Tongue The Spoken-Word Albums of Alan Moore by Rob Vollmar In addition to his better-known work as a writer of comics and novels, Alan Moore has built a considerable body of spoken-word albums, most created in conjunction with a collective known as Moon and Serpent, which features musicians David J (of Bauhaus fame) on the first two albums and Tim Perkins on all but Brought to Light and Unearthing. The Birth Caul (Charrm, 1996) Subtitled“A Shamanism of Childhood,” The Birth Caul was originally performed on Moore’s forty-second birthday. The piece is structured around a meditation on his mother’s birth caul (fetal membrane), found upon the occasion of her death, as juxtaposed against a narrative that unravels a human life from middle age to the mystery from which we emerge into birth. The piece was later adapted for comics by Eddie Campbell (1999). The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels (Cleopatra, 1996) The first piece recorded by the collective but released after The Birth Caul, Moon and Serpent explores ideas of magic in practice as well as some of the psychogeographical material about London also featured in Moore’s graphic novel From Hell. Brought to Light (Codex Books, 1998) With a text adapted from Shadowplay, a comic written by Moore in collaboration with artist Bill Sienkiewicz (Eclipse...

World-Building in Watchmen

World-Building in Watchmen Mark J. P. Wolf (bio) The graphic novel Watchmen (twelve issues, 1986–1987), by writer Alan Moore, illustrator Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins, demonstrates the possibilities that comics offer for world-building while at the same time making full use of the peculiarities of the medium. While the film adaptation of Watchmen required changes to the original, including some losses, the further adaptation of the film to home-video formats was able to restore some of those losses, because of the ways in which home video is better able to emulate the original comics. Watchmen features a world that is an alternate version of the United States in 1985 and that departs from the Primary World (the real world) when superheroes appear in 1938 and a superhero group, the Minutemen, forms in 1939. Superheroes help the United States win the Vietnam War in 1971, release the hostages from Iran in 1980, [End Page 119] and jump ahead of the Soviets in technology thanks to the superhero Dr. Manhattan, whose control of matter on the molecular level gives the United States a great advantage in the Cold War. By 1985, airships are common, as well as electric cars, with spark hydrants for recharging them found along the streets, and Richard Nixon is reelected for a fifth term as president. Although the degree of invention and number of world defaults that are changed is not as great as that of many science fiction and fantasy worlds, there are many subtle changes and details throughout Watchmen’s world that give it its own flavor. Illustrator Dave Gibbons even described how it was the world itself that inspired the way he drew it: I suddenly realized one day, this isn’t a superhero story, this is actually a science fiction story. . . . Once I thought about it like that, I didn’t draw it as if it were a superhero story, I didn’t want to draw it that way, I wanted to draw it as if it was an alternative history, in which case all of the background things, all the buildings, the forms of transport, the fashions, the fads, immediately become what the story’s about.1 So while the initial story inspired the world, world-building began to influence the story at a very early stage, resulting in Watchmen having much more background detail than most comic books. The commercial and critical success of the graphic novel made a movie adaptation inevitable. The attempt to adapt Watchmen has a long history, including Terry Gilliam’s turning down the project twice.2 Part of the reason for that history is that Watchmen was designed to make use of the peculiarities of comics that make it a medium distinct from all others. According to Alan Moore: The relationship between films and comics has been overemphasized to a degree. If you understand cinematic techniques then you’ll be able to write better, more gripping comics than someone who doesn’t, but if cinematic technique is seen as the be all and end all of what comics can aspire to, then at the very best comics are always going to be a poor relation to the cinema. What I’d like to explore is the areas that comics succeed in where no other media is capable of operating. Like in Watchmen, all that subliminal [stuff] we were getting into the backgrounds. You are trapped in the running time of a film—you go in, you sit down, they’ve got two hours and you’re dragged through at their pace. With a comic you can stare at the page for as long as you want and check back to see if this line of dialogue really does echo something four pages earlier, whether this picture is really the same as that one, and wonder if there is some connection there. [End Page 120] Watchmen was designed to be read four or five times; there’s stuff in there Dave had put in that even I only noticed on the sixth or seventh read. And there are things that turned up in there by accident . . . the little plugs on the spark hydrants...

Northampton Calling: A Conversation with Alan Moore

Northampton Calling: A Conversation with Alan Moore

“Watchmen” by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons: A Presentation of Moral Dimension in Popular Culture

“Watchmen” by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons: A Presentation of Moral Dimension in Popular Culture

“Who makes the world?”: Before Watchmen, Nostalgia, and Franchising

“Who makes the world?”: Before Watchmen, Nostalgia, and Franchising Kathryn M. Frank (bio) In the field of comics studies, there are relatively few texts considered canonical, particularly for superhero comics. Perhaps more than any other, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s 1986–1987 series Watchmen stands in for the whole of the medium in classrooms and critics’ lists. Watchmen’s appeal as an object of analysis is clear: as a self-contained story, it is easier to purchase and to read than many other superhero comics, whose story lines can stretch over years and are not always collected into neat volumes; it has also garnered critical acclaim to a degree that few other comics have. On the front cover of the trade paperback reprint of the series, DC touts Watchmen’s status as “one of Time Magazine’s 100 best novels”; the back cover includes a quote from Time calling Watchmen “a landmark in the graphic novel medium.”1 Watchmen stands alone on the list as the only comic worthy of inclusion alongside canonical literature such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Watchmen also holds a special, if not singular, place in the pantheon for comics readers. Thirty years after its conclusion, the collected edition routinely places among DC’s top sellers and is a standard holding for public and academic libraries alike.2 Watchmen has also been credited, along with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, with ushering in an entire “dark era” of comics storytelling by inspiring superhero storytellers to create darker, “grittier” antiheroes and villain protagonists.3 Although these violent antiheroes have not been as popular in comics recently as they were in the 1980s and 1990s, Watchmen is still held in high regard for its critical take on the role of superhero narratives in society and its formal experimentation with intertextuality and parallel structure. [End Page 138] Given this critical and popular admiration, it is not surprising that reactions to proposed adaptations of (or additions to) the Watchmen universe have been largely negative. While Zack Snyder’s 2009 live-action film adaptation was not universally panned, and has in recent years found both a cult audience and a place in academic analysis (particularly in adaptation studies), the Before Watchmen comics series has not yet found a similar niche in Watchmen fandom or scholarship.4 Before Watchmen, a series of prequel comics released from 2012 to 2013 by DC, spanned thirty-seven single issues and is available as four collected volumes in trade paperback and digital format. Each series focuses on a character from Watchmen, detailing the character’s past and in some cases filling in his or her whereabouts or perspectives during the events of the original series. The characters profiled in Before Watchmen include the Minutemen, Silk Spectre and her daughter Silk Spectre II, the Comedian, Dr. Manhattan, Ozymandias, Rorschach, Nite Owl and his protégé Nite Owl II, Dollar Bill (one issue), and Moloch (two issues).5 Despite containing approximately four times as much material as the original Watchmen, and some of the series garnering positive reviews from comics and media critics, the series has failed to generate the cottage industry of academic study that Watchmen boasts. Before Watchmen’s perceived position among fans as largely superfluous to the Watchmen canon can be understood as the result of a number of factors, including “fanboy” ire and inconsistent quality.6 However, it deserves examination both in comparison and on its own merits for what it adds to the textual and industrial analysis of Watchmen. Before Watchmen’s content and the reactions to it reveal uneasy truths about nostalgia, franchising, and authorship in the comics industry. Deconstructing and Reconstructing Watchmen Nostalgia There seems to exist a kind of nostalgia about Watchmen that makes the overt expression of nostalgia in Before Watchmen—both in the content of the series and in its existence more generally—uncomfortable. Before Watchmen reminds the reader that Watchmen was a DC series, produced under contract to a major publisher and subject to the same impulse toward character licensing and franchising as any other DC or Marvel superhero series. The political message and implications of Watchmen and its deconstructive...

Table of Contents, Masthead, and Editor's Note

World LiteratureToday Dystopian Visions 13 Githa Hariharan on women’s bodies that refuse to be silenced SPECIAL SECTION Writing from Montenegro Writers with Doomsday Imaginations Your passport to great reading REVIEWS OF NEW BOOKS BY Amitav Ghosh, Safiya Sinclair, Madeleine Thien & more Poetry 26 After the War by Rachel Tzvia Back 67 Old Reasons by Ghassan Zaqtan special section 28 Contemporary Montenegrin Prose featuring Milovan Radojević Brano Mandić Slađana Kavarić Guest-edited & introduced by Will Firth WorldLiteratureToday Contents In Every Issue | 03 Editor’s Note | 05 Notebook | 33 Editor’s Pick | 68 World Literature in Review | 96 Outpost MARCH – APRIL 2017 26 60 Creative Nonfiction 10 Triptych by Samina Najmi Crime & Mystery 13 Korean Crime Novels: “The Next Big Thing”? by J. Madison Davis Essays 16 When Bodies Speak by Githa Hariharan Part of the Puterbaugh Essay Series 21 “Tough as Ox Tendons”: Korean Literature and Returning Catastrophe by Eun-Gwi Chung cover feature 42 Dystopian Visions featuring Elizabeth Fifer Kiriu Minashita Michelle Pretorius Yuri Herrera Yoss Basma Abdel Aziz Susan Smith Nash Claudia Salazar Jiménez about the cover Marcus Jansen, The Rescue Rings That I Found Close By, 2015, oil enamel and mixed media on canvas. 28 cover illustration : artist rights society , ( ars ) new york vg bild kunst , bonn courtesy : unit a studio and residency oy : dominik meier moore : joe brown back : getty / afp / mahmud hams sullivan : www . flickr . com / people / jp _ math 54 worldliteraturetoday.org Web Exclusive Visit our website for exclusive content including original audio recordings, photo galleries, blog posts, and more. Music video by the Swiss group OY (page 8) Online Extras Look for these icons throughout the issue for information about exclusive content found online. web exclusive photo gallery audio video Heather Sullivan’s essay on dystopian“dark pastorals” Rachel Tzvia Back reads her poem “After the War”(page 26) Web Exclusive Web Exclusive Join the WLT community Join us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, GoodReads, and Flickr to share ideas, view photos, and read book reviews. Facebook facebook.com/ worldlittoday Twitter @worldlittoday Pinterest @worldlit GoodReads goodreads.com/ worldlittoday On the WLT Blog The interior of the human head is infinite”: A Conversation with Alan Moore by Rob Vollmar We’ve got to have a villain in our narrative, or our narrative of us being the heroes doesn’t work. At the moment we are living in this imposed state of terror.” The Matter of Forking Consequences: Translating Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince by Yu-Yun Hsieh The nomenclature of characters in the book is neither Steinian paradox nor Freudian slip.They are lovers at work.” Read more at worldliteraturetoday.org/blog Join the conversation Join our community of readers and writers on Twitter. Use the hashtag #IReadWLT and tell us about your favorite features from this issue. Returning the Gift @RTGLitFest Congrats on the Arts Award @worldlittoday. Looking forward to both the Native Writers edition & 25th anniversary conference this year. Lucina Schell @LucinaSchell David Williams on the financial struggles of literary translators—a hard but true read @worldlittoday. Sandra Davidson @layerperception EJ Koh’s [Krys Lee] review makes the book feel entirely relevant & brilliantly provides context with which many are unfamiliar. Find us on flickr flickr.com/wltonline “ “ “ WORLDLIT.ORG 3 Have a comment, critique, or inspiration you’d like to share? Write to us on Facebook, tweet us @worldlittoday, or email the editor in chief at dsimon@ou.edu. editor’s note photo : alba simon  In László Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel, The Melancholy of Resistance—published the same year Hungarian communism collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell—“crowds rampage, hypnotized by the chirping of a shrunken puppet-man sitting in front of a rotting whale.” In 2016, months before the US presidential election , Cuban writer Yoss imagined “the division of the United States into two dozen small nations, after Donald Trump’s second term.” The autocrat in Egyptian novelist Basma Abdel Aziz’s story “deleted words that society no longer needed, like ‘elect,’ and introduced new terms of great importance, which outlined groundbreaking ways of being patriotic that no one had considered before.” For Japanese poet Kiriu Minashita, “Even while boasting of its rapid strength and speed, the world is being...