Alan Moore Research Articles

Who translates the translation? (Re)traduire les héros marginaux d'Alan Moore

The retranslation phenomenon is essential to the translation process. It is considered as the logical progression of this process which allows the translated literary work to regenerate in a restless cultural and language space. To a lesser extent, we can observe the same phenomenon in the translation of comics. However, this specific translation requires other competencies and a translating approach somehow different from the ones required to translate fiction literature, especially because of the presence of the visual system of drawings which is strongly bound to its own culture and the endless mutations it goes through.
 The comic book Watchmen (Les Gardiens, in the first French translation) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, is known in the whole world as the comic which had not only remodeled the vision we had of super-heroes, but had also given the comic books another voice. Watchmen was published between 1986 and 1987 in the United States and translated in French from 1987 to 1988. Fifteen years after this first translation by Jean-Patrick Manchette, Panini publishing decided to retranslate this famous comic in 2007. However, if the reviews of the first translation were laudatory, the retranslation did not enjoy a great reception from the readers or from the reviewers. This paper proposes a comparative analysis of both these translations and of their original version as well as an experiment on the readers, comic books readers or not, in order to establish why the first translation was a success and the retranslation a failure. Thus, we could withdraw the elements which allow us to understand the reception of comic translation.

‘Footnotes to Miller and Moore’: Monomyth and Transnationality in the 1986 Superhero Comics

New developments in comics studies have begun to consider the superhero comic as a transnational, rather than American, phenomenon. This approach offers a new way of thinking about the typical story that Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen jointly upended the comics world in 1986. While there is robust criticism to challenge the idea that 1986 was a miraculous year for comics, the continuing attention drawn by the two works requires us to think further about their apparent similarity. This article proposes the importance of a narrative of American exceptionalism within comics culture as a defining feature of the contemporary context for the production of the works. It then examines their responses to this context, arguing that they undermine the American monomyth of the superhero in different ways that originate in the different national positions of the two writers.

Text and Image in Translation

Abstract The primary objective of the following paper is the analysis of selected issues related to the translation of comic books. The paper aims at investigating the relationships between the text and the image and their implications in the process of translation. It reflects on the status of the translation of comics/graphic novels - a still largely unexploited area within Translation Studies and briefly presents a definition and specificity of the genre. Moreover, it discusses Jakobson’s (1971) tripartite distinction into interlinguistic, intralinguistic and intersemiotic translation. The paper concludes with the analysis of certain issues associated with the Polish translation of V like Vendetta by Alan Moore, a text that is copious with intertextual and cultural references.

Alan Moore’s Promethea: Countercultural Gnosis and the End of the World

Alan Moore’s Promethea (1999 to 2005) is among the most explicitly “gnostic,” “esoteric,” and “occultist” comics strips ever published. Hailed as a virtuoso performance in the art of comics writing, its intellectual content and the nature of its spiritual message have been neglected by scholars. While the attainment of gnosis is clearly central to Moore’s message, the underlying metaphysics is more congenial to the panentheist perspective of ancient Hermetism than to Gnosticism in its classic typological sense defined by dualism and anti-cosmic pessimism. Most importantly, Promethea is among the most explicit and intellectually sophisticated manifestoes of a significant new religious trend in contemporary popular culture. Its basic assumption is that there is ultimately no difference between imagination and reality, so that the question of whether gods, demons, or other spiritual entities are “real” or just “imaginary” becomes pointless. As a result, the factor of religious belief becomes largely irrelevant, and its place is taken by the factors of personal experience and meaningful practice.

Material

Material

Norman Winfrid Moore (1923–2015)

Norman Winfrid Moore (1923–2015)

Strolling through Hell – the birth of the aggressive flâneur

Among numerous starting points for a potential analysis of the complex Victorian narrative tapestry that is Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, one segment in particular stands apart. It is the representation of the notorious Jack the Ripper, here elevated as a key figure for both Victorian London and the violently approaching twentieth century. However, the complexly portrayed image of Dr William Gull as the serial killer cannot be contained or understood within the ‘simplifying’ frame of a criminal. What this analysis proposes is a reading of this prototypical serial killer through the prism of his interaction with the urban spaces surrounding him. Drawing on the spatial theoretical framework of authors such as Yi Fu Tuan, Henri Lefebvre, as well as the concept of the flâneur, presented and developed by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, the paper constructs its analysis on the premise of the serial killer as a conceptually new, aggressive type of the flâneur, positioned within a supratemporal context. This direct challenge to the canonical understanding of the flâneur allows for a simultaneous coexistence of the Victorian gentleman scrutinous of the vibrant streets of London, and the obsessed killer whose actions foreshadow the looming twentieth century.

In-between Performance and Mediatization: Authentication and (Re)-Live(d) Concert Experience

As a moment of emotional and physical closeness between performers and audiences, the live concert experience represents a crucial element in the construction of authenticity in popular music. Allan Moore argues that the emphasis of research should shift from sources of authenticity to modes of authentication, a process triggered by specific textual or performative features. This article aims to unpack the complexity of authentication, especially with regard to mediatization. An analytical framework based on the temporal relationship between real action and its aural or audiovisual experience through recording is then applied to case studies of Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and Korn.

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

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.

The Monstrous Alchemy of Alan Moore: Promethea as Literacy Narrative

I argue that Alan Moore’s Promethea is nothing short of compositional alchemy: a radically instructive guide to the graphic medium that takes us on a revelatory exploration of the comic/graphic novel qua magical, imaged-narrative. Read as a whole, the comic series forms a primer that teaches the reader not only how to decipher a culturally-abjectified text, the comic, but by bringing traditional epistemologies into question suggests how readers consciously enact the monstrous, mystical causal dance that Scott McCloud explains is “at work in the spaces between panels.” In this essay I further propose that Promethea may be especially compelling for academic readers, since it performs as literacy narrative by telling the story of a scholar who transforms herself into story. Promethea thus forces the scholarly reader especially to become aware, often uncomfortably so, of that continual process of collaborative narrative construction, and of our own complicity, creative power, and responsibility as empowered.

The Graphic Novel: An Introduction by Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey (review)

Reviewed by: The Graphic Novel: An Introduction by Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey Andrew J. Kunka (bio) The Graphic Novel: An Introduction, by Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey. Cambridge University Press, 2015, ISBN: 978-1-107-02523-3, ix + 286 pp., $75.00. As the title suggests, Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey’s The Graphic Novel: An Introduction offers readers an entry point into the history and study of graphic novels. The term has been with us in popular use since the late 70s (with earliest uses dating back to the early 1960s), and, for better or for worse, it has stuck in the popular lexicon. The term came about as a means of distinguishing “comic books,” and their attendant stigma of sub-literate juvenility, from more sophisticated, literary, and adult-oriented works in the same medium. By the early 2000s, “graphic novels” had become an official category in bookstores, at which point it seemed to be permanently, culturally entrenched. Today, the perusal of a graphic novel section in most bookstores will reveal that pretty much any square-bound, long comic book, whether it is a collection of periodical superhero comics or the original publication of a book-length autobiographical comic, will be shelved in that section. However, the term remains problematic for many. For one, it is misleading: “graphic” has connotations of explicit sex and violence, and “novel” refers to a book-length work of fiction. Many of the most significant and famous graphic novels fall within the nonfiction genres of autobiography, memoir, and history, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, making “novel” technically inappropriate. For another, the term originally came about due to a sense of cultural shame that comic books were for kids. Whereas, today, “Comics Studies” is a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry, and comics are regularly taught alongside traditional literary texts. Therefore, is the stigma that engendered the term “graphic novel” still relevant? Even in comics scholarship, some disagreement exists over whether to use “comics,” “graphic novels,” or the compromise term, “graphic narratives.” For the most part, however, with the advent of Comics Studies, the common academic parlance usually uses “comics” to refer to the overall medium of word-picture combinations in sequence, while the “graphic novel” is a particular format within the medium. In addition, the “comic book” is yet another format within the medium of comics, usually reserved for the periodical or serially published “pamphlet” style that readers traditionally think of when they hear the term. This brief history and taxonomy help to situate the historical and definitional arguments that Baetens and Frey make in this study. They argue that the “graphic novel” is itself a medium distinct from comics, and one that emerged from the historical context where more sophisticated, literary comics appeared following the watershed year of 1986, when Maus, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns all became [End Page 143] popular cultural phenomena that seemed to break many of the stereotypes associated with comics. However, this distinction between “comics” and “graphic novels” goes against the parlance common to Comics Studies and the publishing industry today. What, then, according to Baetens and Frey, distinguishes the graphic novel from the comic book? Both types, they argue, sit on a spectrum, with each as opposing poles. The authors identify four levels of “key features” that include “form,” “content,” “publication format,” and “production and distribution aspects” (8) which clarify the distinction. The identification of a spectrum here between comics and graphic novels makes such distinctions murky at best, however, because the authors do not always make clear at what point on the spectrum a work should be considered a comic and when it should be a graphic novel. The distinction made with works like The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen seems clear enough: these works began as serially published comic books and then became graphic novels once the individual issues were collected and published in a square-bound format. In fact, “publication format” functions as the primary distinction most commonly used in Comics Studies and publishing. In such a case, the content of the works...

Embracing Dionysius in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing

In the second issue of Alan Moore’s mid-1980s run on DC comics’ Swamp Thing , Alec Holland learns that he is not simply a mild-mannered botanist who has been miraculously transformed into a super-powered “moss man.” The Swamp Thing is a plant, a plant who borrowed Holland’s identity, a plant who only thought it was a man, all along. This essay examines how Moore’s run on Swamp Thing embraces the challenges of depiction that come with making a plant—not just a “plant-man”—the hero of a comic book. How, the text asks, might the forms of plant-thought differ from a man’s? How does it think, and what might those thoughts “look like” on a comic page? Through the run, the writing and art overcomes the confining linearity of the comic’s paneled structure and conventional points-of-view, as well as the commercial demands of writing for a presumptively adolescent audience.

“There Were No Longer Any Laws”: Voices of Authority, Complicity, and Resistance in Totalitarian Dystopias and Holocaust Imaginings

Abstract This article analyses five landmarks in totalitarian and dystopian fiction from a law-and-literature perspective, thus comparing works published between the 1920s and the first decade of the twenty-first century that fictionalize diametrically opposed ideologies of countries such as Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and the United States of America: Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning work Maus; Philip Roth’s “dark, humane masterpiece” (The Times) of “faction,” The Plot Against America; Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, without which George Orwell’s modern classic Nineteen Eighty-Four would be unthinkable; and V for Vendetta by Alan Moore, one of the most acclaimed writers working in the graphic medium today.

Masked men: hacktivism, celebrity and anonymity

In her 1991 article ‘Signs of Melodrama’ Christine Gledhill provocatively claimed that the Hollywood star system descended from the stage melodrama’s ‘drive to realise in personal terms social and ethical forces’. The disguise is a melodramatic convention, concealing the true personality revealed in the narrative, as the melodrama reveals hidden moral truths. Approaching contemporary celebrity through this dramatic mode, this article considers the unmasking of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden in three recent films, We Steal Secrets, The Fifth Estate and Citizenfour. In true melodramatic style, the films’ presentation of state violence and surveillance is rapidly displaced by moral studies of these three ‘hacktivists’. Drawing on melodrama and genre studies as a methodological approach to studying these films, I trace the mask back to Alan Moore’s anti-melodrama V for Vendetta. This article proposes celebrity studies would be well served by paying closer attention to the political efficacy of celebrity’s opposite: anonymity.

Dennis, Alan and Arthur x 3: Literary Legacies of the ‘Blazing Car Murder’ of 1930

The ‘blazing car murder’ committed by Alfred Arthur Rouse in 1930 was a sensational cause célèbre due to a number of factors, including Rouse's reference, on his arrest, to his ‘harem'; his career as a travelling salesman; and the failure to identify the corpse found burned to death in his car. The case has inspired famous authors, such as the playwright and television writer Dennis Potter, the graphic comic novelist Alan Moore, and the detective fiction writers Dorothy L. Sayers and P.D. James, to write imaginative literary works linked to the case. This article analyses the more significant of those works – those by Potter and Moore – and addresses the link between true crime and literary imagination.

From Penny Dreadful to Graphic Novel: Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s Genealogy of Comics in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen1

In 1890, British media mogul Alfred Harmsworth launched the halfpenny comic magazine. By reducing the page size and opting for the cheapest paper and ink, Harmsworth was able to undersell his competitors’ penny-priced output and created a publishing success that was widely imitated and ushered in the age of comics as a mass medium (Sabin, Adult 21). In 2002, DC Comics started its series of Absolute Editions, which reprint popular titles that originally appeared as pamphlets in oversized hardc...

To read what was never written: the licentiousness of history in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls

Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie (2006. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions) incorporates a variety of both historical and fictional sources into its sexually explicit narrative of three women recounting their troubled pasts. Many of these sources are represented through adaptation and pastiche. This article examines Moore and Gebbie’s strategy of mimicking rather than merely alluding to the intertexts that shape the narrative of Lost Girls. Further, since many of their sources are showcased through the metafictional technique of mise en abyme, I argue that the mimicry of the comic draws attention to the dangers involved in processes of interpretation. The reader of Lost Girls is self-reflexively interpellated by the comic as a reader of history, adaptation and pornography, and as such is prompted to address a series of related distinctions that often shape processes of value-assessment: between the factual and the fictional, the authentic and the forged, and the literary and the obscene.

‘Whose side are you on?’: negotiations between individual liberty and collective responsibility in Millar and McNiven’s Marvel Civil War

The Civil War series by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven, published between July 2006 and January 2007, involves superheroes in a battle among themselves as an allegory for political conflicts of the United States, post-Patriot Act. Akin to Alan Moore’s Watchmen and the Uncanny X-Men series, Civil War centers on a political solution to regulate and control superhero vigilante justice. The rhetoric represented by the conflicting factions orbits the concerns of individual liberty vs. collective responsibility, with Captain America (a World War Two and Cold War warrior) siding most adamantly against government supervision and Iron Man fighting in favor of government control. The civil war played out among the superheroes echoes contemporary social and political concerns seen in the Occupy movement, gun control, and the resistant politics of the ‘Tea Party’. The visual representations in the series invoke visual cues from news, reality shows, as well as the flamboyant conflicts one would expect when the superhero pantheon engages in a fratricidal conflict. While the series has the forces of government control triumphing in the end, Captain America’s eventual martyrdom casts the work as a conservative ideological project, characteristic for comics in general, of endorsing the status quo.

“A Parade of Curiosities”: Alan Moore'sThe League of Extraordinary GentlemenandLost Girlsas Neo-Victorian Pastiches

“A Parade of Curiosities”: Alan Moore's<i>The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen</i>and<i>Lost Girls</i>as Neo-Victorian Pastiches

Comics unmasked: art and anarchy in the UK

It may come as a surprise that comics offer much more than meets the eye. Of course we all have happy memories of favourite childhood reading (Beano, Dandy, Eagle, Mad, Viz - the list is endless). But how aware are we that there is something inherently anarchic about comics? A huge variety have been produced over the centuries by British creators. It is a strong tradition that continues today. Some of the biggest names in comics - Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta), Neil Gaiman (Sandman), Mark Millar (Kick-Ass) and Grant Morrison (Batman: Arkham Asylum) - are featured in this visually stimulating book (which accompanies a major exhibition at the British Library). But there are many, many more. And it is the diversity of content and form, as well as comics' ongoing relevance, which is a main focus. The seditious aspects of the comics tradition - adult, underground and 'alternative' material - is highlighted, alongside the superheroes who still dominate the scene. There is anarchy everywhere that you look!