Alan Moore

RESUMO Utilizando como base os estudos de intermidialidade defendidos pelo Prof. Claus Cluver, da Universidade da Indiana (EUA), estudamos os conceitos introdutórios necessários para realizar a análise da adaptação da obra de Alan Moore e Brian Bolland, entitulada Batman: The Killing Joke (1988). Originalmente, o título foi publicado em formato comics (no Brasil, História em Quadrinhos, ou HQ), e algum tempo depois (2016), transformado em um filme de animação pela DC universe. Aqui, pretende-se observar as diferenças apresentadas na transcrição de um meio impresso para outro tipo de mídia. A princípio, detectou-se que muitos diálogos foram mantidos inalterados na animação. Por outro lado, esta última apresenta o acréscimo de um relacionamento entre personagens (Barbara e Batman) inexistente na versão original. Tal alteração da trama poderia implicar em diversas consequências com potencial para afetar o famoso dénouement que empresta o nome à história. Adicionalmente, a linguagem de comics sugere que seja possível explorar um nível de complexidade maior quando são associadas imagens que contam uma história própria no subtexto visual, em paralelo com o texto dos diálogos, que eventualmente podem seguir outra direção, criando um efeito de contraste. Assim, conclui-se que existem decisões mais complexas à disposição do leitor de comics, e estes elementos afetam sua da recepção da narrativa, e.g., a interpretação da linguagem multimodal na qual a cena é exibida, em comparação com a linguagem direta dos elementos que o diretor optou por manter na animação.

Richards Reynolds (1992) has described the superhero genre as a modern mythology. He discusses how the genre often reflects the socio-political ideologies of society, and offers Alan Moore’s comic series Watchmen (1986-1987) as a key text which subverts the superhero identity. In Moore’s own words, his work on Watchmen is an application of the Solve of the alchemists’ Solve et Coagula to the superhero genre; the act of taking it apart and examining it (Graydon, 2009). Moore brings superheroes into a “completely new realm” (Kavanagh, 2000) by placing them into the real world and giving them “sexual neuroses, bad breath and anxiety disorders” (Leith, 2010). This creates grounds for rich reflection on the intersection between superheroes and real-world issues of identity and ideological power. The following will be a discussion and evaluation of the relevant literature around identity and ideology in Watchmen.

Previously unpublished paper originally presented at the American Image/Text Conference, University of East Anglia, Norwich, June, 2011. A narratological and semiotic study in context and intertext. This paper argues that, in addition to the familiar gothic archetype of the ‘divided self’ implicit within the continuing, multimedia mythology of the Batman (seen, for example, in Alan Moore’s exploration of ‘Rorschach’ in Watchmen, 1986), the concept and character can be read visually/textually as much more multi-layered gothic intertexts. The paper focuses on three key texts and areas by way of illustration, the first being the Theosophical origins of Batman, most recently re-told in Christopher Nolan’s movie Batman Begins (2005), with Bruce Wayne, like Madame Blavatsky, studying in Tibet under the immortal master Ra’s Al Ghul, in an esoteric occult frame the origins of which can be traced to Bulwer-Lytton’s gothic romances Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1862). I also look at the Jungian Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean (1989) as a deconstruction of the American gothic from Poe to Vincent Price, and conclude by considering Pat Mills’ 50th anniversary parody of Batman in Marshall Law: Kingdom of the Blind (1989) in which a middle-aged millionaire vigilante, ‘The Private Eye,’ uses the rhetoric of the superhero to protect his own wealth and to prey, vampire-like, upon the urban underclass that he despises. The framing quotation is taken from Arkham Asylum. The design layout of the visual presentation is again by Gracie Carver. This and the EC paper (above) were very short presentations – about 20 minutes I think – so please excuse the brevity. I will try to edit and post the longer versions later if anyone’s interested.

"El amnios natal abarca numerosos aspectos de la obra de Moore, incluyendo su obsesión con las pautas históricas y geográficas. Se trata, esencialmente, de una autobiografía, profunda e introspectiva pero, a la vez, universal, que extrapola las experiencias personales de Moore al más amplio nosotros. El amnios representa un mapa de la humanidad que Moore procede a descifrar en un texto que, en esencia, constituye un examen de las conexiones entre nuestro lenguaje, nuestra identidad y la forma en que percibimos el mundo. El dibujo de Eddie Campbell enfatiza la naturaleza esotérica de la obra, añadiendo a menudo significado a la prosa del guionista, a la vez que embarca al lector en el viaje propuesto por Alan Moore. "

Article published in the collective book "Alan Moore, tisser l'invisible" (edited by Julien Bétan), published in 2010 by Les Moutons électriques (collection "La Bibliothèque des miroirs"). I present the main elements developed by Alan Moore in his book "Alan Moore's Writing for Comics". 
Article publié dans l'ouvrage collectif "Alan Moore, tisser l'invisible" (sous la direction de Julien Bétan), publié en 2010 par Les Moutons électriques (collection "La Bibliothèque des miroirs"). J'y présente les principaux éléments développés par Alan Moore dans son ouvrage "Alan Moore's Writing for Comics".

The Guy Fawkes mask has become a symbol of the internet group Anonymous. This paper seeks to understand why this happened. The Guy Fawkes Mask takes us back to a 17th Century Catholic renegade, a 1980s graphic novel, a millennial movie based on the graphic novel, social media visual communication practicing internet memes on 4chan and YouTube, and physical demonstrations in public space. It will show how the Guy Fawkes Mask changed meaning during this process, and how this symbol works as a meaningful signifier in a digital age.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/279418299/The-Guy-Fawkes-Mask-as-Visual-Communication-of-the-Internet-Group-Anonymous

http://research.crocels.com/research/1564/the-guy-fawkes-mask-as-visual-communication-of-the-internet-group-anonymous-lars-konzack/

Schematische Skizze einer Musteranalyse von Comics am Beispiel von Alan Moores und David Lloyds »V for Vendetta« für Teilnehmer meiner Comic-Seminare. Der stichpunktartige Überblick soll in die Lage versetzen, selbstständig Ansatzpunkte für die Analyse anderer Comics, insbesondere für Hausarbeiten, zu finden.

In Alan Moore’s _Promethea,_ love is more than right relationship between two or more human beings—it is the universe reaching out compassionately and erotically to every living being within it. Drawing upon the monist threads of the Western esoteric tradition that affirm the feminine divine (particularly the writings of influential twentieth-century magician Aleister Crowley), Moore constructs an apocalyptic narrative where the end of the world involves not its physical destruction, but spiritual dissolution and transformation. Here, divine love is both unconditional and erotic—though not necessarily sexual in the physical sense. Yet sexuality is an important vehicle for the characters’ experience of love, and sexuality also operates as a metaphor for the quality of God/dess’ love for the universe
Although Moore’s intellectual and spiritual influences may appear obscure, the fact that erotic love has arisen as a central way to understand the love of God in some recent Christian and post-Christian theology suggests that Moore’s work is part of a wider cultural movement to position the body and eroticism as central issues in Western religiosity. In this theology, erotic love is explored as a moral force for justice, as well as a metaphor for humanity’s embodied relationship with the divine. “Grace,” the traditional term for divine love that is offered without condition and despite the brokenness or sinfulness of humanity, blurs with this new conception of eros. This essay will contextualize Promethea within current theological trends, articulate Promethea’s notion of love using textual examples from both the comic and from theological and occult writings, and examine how the comics form is used to educate Moore’s audience about how one might reframe sexuality spiritually or religiously.

[Download is EXCERPT ONLY.]

The spring 2021 issue of the journal "Miranda", contains, in the section "Reviews" (edited by Candice Lemaire and Isabelle Keller-Privat), my review of two fascinating Alan Moore-focused books by Pádraig Ó Méalóid: "Poisoned Chalice: The Extremely Long and Incredibly Complex Story of Marvelman (and Miracleman)" (devoted to the inextricable legal battles that have prevented the continuation of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman et al.'s comic book series "Miracleman" for almost three decades, and "Mud and Starlight. The Alan Moore Interviews, 2008-2016", which is, as its subtitle suggests, a collection of the many interviews with Alan Moore carried out by Ó Méalóid over the years.

The article is, like the rest of the issue, available online at the following address: https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/38271

Here is one of the addresses where you can get Poisoned Chalice: https://www.lulu.com/shop/padraig-o-mealoid/poisoned-chalice-the-extremely-long-and-incredibly-complex-story-of-marvelman-and-miracleman/paperback/product-23858084.html?page=1&pageSize=4


Here is one of the addresses where you can get Mud and Starlight: https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/p%C3%A1draig-%C3%B3-m%C3%A9al%C3%B3id-and-alan-moore/mud-and-starlight-interviews-with-alan-moore-2008-2016/paperback/product-6744gq.html?page=1&pageSize=4

As dystopian novels, both V for Vendetta and 1984 remain situated within the frame of a post-apocalyptic world in which people are usually exploited by a self-proclaimed supremacist political party governing and controlling the masses in the form of a totalitarian police state helmed and shaped by a single leader. To achieve this monopoly over political power and radically influence, change, and constantly oversee every aspect of public life, such regimes use a plethora of devices moulded especially for the subdual of masses, namely all forms of political repression, mass surveillance of speech and thought, regulation of rations, control over the state's economy, personality cultism used to enliven the image of the aforementioned single leader as the harbinger of better tomorrow, and all the institutions used to mechanize and fully utilize physical terror. Therefore, what this BA thesis aims to do is to shed light on such toxic constructs by gradually delineating their mechanisms of control, primarily through sourcing their origins and illustrating how they were established and used in the titular novels, while also contextualising these fictional accounts by juxtaposing them to their historical counterparts.

What makes an anti-hero a true anti-hero? Why is a mask so important for the superhero? Do heroines still wear high heels? These are some of the questions I try to answer in this interview published on A2 kulturní čtrnáctideník.
https://www.advojka.cz/archiv/2021/2

Although Alan Moore has criticized the occult appropriation of H.P. Lovecraft in interviews, this article contends that this is precisely what Moore has done in his graphic novel Providence (illustrated by Jacen Burrows). This article analyses the role of dreams in the occult appropriations of Kenneth Grant and other ceremonial magicians and compares them to the occult treatment of dreams in Providence. Where Grant maintained that Lovecraft made contact with real occult entities in his dreams and wrote about them in his fiction, in Providence Moore represents Lovecraft’s dreamworld as a real occult realm that has been repressed by human reality. And while Providence is a fiction, it illustrates Moore’s thesis that writing is magic and that there is no difference between fiction and reality, in that it presents Lovecraft’s fiction as being inexorably accepted as real and this catalyzes an occult apocalypse.

Watchmen is a comic book series that contains a vast number of cultural references from a plethora of sources. This essay explores how these references and epigraphs affect the
reader’s interpretation of the text, besides merely enriching their literary experience. Narrowing down on the poem ‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Shelley (referenced in the novel) and
its lesser known counterpart by Horace Smith, also named ‘Ozymandias’, I will study mutual aspects of both the poems and the novel and explore their relations. Shelley’s work does not
connect well to the novel due to its relative clarity in structure. Horace Smith has stronger
similarities to The Watchmen due to its enmeshed structure, the relation between the characters and their diegesis, the treatment of time and space and the style.

Through the analysis of the two poems’ (Smith’s and Shelley’s Ozymandias) relation to the novel, this essay elucidates the deconstructive nature of Watchmen and of Smith’s poem: they alienate the reader from the world of the novel and defy the reader’s attempt to engage with their characters. Therefore, Shelley’s poem comes off to the reader as misplaced
and discordant. This suggests that the epigraphs that Moore chooses are unreliable as essentialisations or even as crutches for interpretation of the novel. However, their very unreliability and discordance reinstates the fact that whatever meaning is distilled from the novel, needs to be personal.

This colloquium paper is an attempt to reflect my thoughts on stories, and telling thereof using visual sequential art as the media. It also briefly discusses my understanding of the art form and its parallel evolution over time, in dispersed locations on the face of Earth, sometimes citing a few examples to illustrate the point, and at other times quoting the exemplars of the field to suggest the influence they had on ideas and perceptions of the followers, here mostly being the comic book readers and artists. The paper also towards the end opines on the current surge of graphic novels in the popular yet not so mainstream readership, India being the context.
Following is the sequenced outline of this colloquium, yet the subsections can be read on their own, irrespective of the order; coherence being subject to the familiarity of the readers with the media of sequential art.

1. The Inception
1.0 The Need To Tell Stories
1.1 In Early History
1.2 Medieval Make-believe

2. In The Modern Sense
2.0 Sequential Art, the Term
2.1 Modern Comics, an Introduction
2.1.1 Manga
2.1.2 Franco-Belgian Comics
2.1.3 American Comics

3. The Graphic Novels
3.0 Graphic Novels
3.1 Criticism of the Neologism

4. End Note.

This chapter analyses the specific way in which Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill in their graphic novel series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen appropriate Victorian Gothic fiction into a highly elaborate metafictional crossover. Special focus is put on the role of hybridity and otherness, both in the Victorian source material and in the neo-Victorian rewriting , and on the critique of discourses of power.

Graphic novels have sparked indignation and controversy among scholars and literary theorists. Various experts have stated that the medium lacks the intricacies and sophistication of the novel. These assumptions are the consequence of years of misconceptions that have contributed to the devaluation of the graphic novel. This study seeks to dispel this myth and to challenge the stigma attached to graphic novels. The objective of this research work is to investigate the literary value of the graphic novel V for Vendetta. The methodology used to address the research question is a comparative approach between the novel and the graphic novel, followed by a literary analysis of V for Vendetta that includes aspects of the novel, elements of the postmodern novel, and critical approaches to literature. It attempts to demonstrate that, while the graphic novel is postmodern, it is still literary. It possesses features that distinguish it as a literary work. The aggregate findings show that the graphic novel is equivalent to traditional novels. It has intriguing storylines, experiments with various narrative techniques, character development, and presents serious topics deserving of praise and critical consideration.

Deconstructing the superhero genre, exposing its roots in proto-apocalypticism, eutopianism, travel narratives, detective noir, science fiction, and other traditions and genres, Moore revolutionized the comic book industry, creating a new paradigm within the medium.  Moreover, Moore and Gibbons rely on Nietzschean criticisms of Plato to launch an attack on Western eutopianism and American interventionism.

Dystopian literature is considered a branch of science fiction which writers use to portray a futuristic dark vision of the world, generally dominated by technology and a totalitarian ruling government that makes use of whatever means it finds necessary to exert a complete control over its citizens. George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) is considered a landmark of the dystopian genre: it portrays a futuristic where a totalitarian, fascist party rules London aiming to keep its citizens under their complete control. This paper will take two examples of contemporary dystopian literature, Philip K. Dick’s “Faith of Our Fathers” (1967) and Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta (1982-1985), in order to closely analyze the influence that Orwell’s dystopia played in their construction. It will focus on how these two works took Orwellian vision of a totalitarian state, the different methods of control it employs to keep citizens under complete control and submission, and how they introduce them into their stories.

KEYWORDS: Orwell, V for Vendetta, Faith of Our Fathers, social control, manipulation, submission.



La ciencia ficción es uno de los géneros cuye auge se encuentra al alza hoy en día. De entre sus diversas ramificaciones, la literatura distópica es una de las más usadas por los escritores para proyectar una visión del mundo oscura y futurista, dominado por la tecnología y caracterizada por un gobierno totalitario que hace uso de todos los medios que encuentra necesarios para ejercer un control total sobre sus ciudadanos. La novela de George Orwell 1984 (1949) es considerada un hito del género distópico: en ella, Orwell retrata un Londres futurista, gobernado por un partido fascista y totalitario, cuyo mero objetivo es el control total sobre sus ciudadanos. El objetivo de este ensayo es analizar dos ejemplos de la literatura distópica contemporánea, por un lado "La Fe de Nuestros Padres" (1967) de Philip K. Dick, así como la novela gráfica de Alan Moore  V de Vendetta (1982-1985), con el objetivo de estudiar la influencia que el modelo distópico de Orwell desempeñó en la construcción de las distopías anteriormente mencionadas. De igual modo, este ensayo se centrará en cómo estas dos obras tomaron las representaciones de Orwell de un estado totalitario, los diferentes métodos de control que éste emplea para mantener a sus ciudadanos bajo un estado de absoluta sumisión y control, y cómo plasmaron éstas representaciones en sus respectivas obras.

PALABRAS CLAVE: Orwell, V de Vendetta, La Fe de Nuestros Padres, control social, manipulación, sometimiento.

The end of the twentieth century and the turn of the new millennium witnessed an unprecedented flood of traumatic narratives and testimonies of suffering in literature and the arts. Graphic novels, free at last from long decades of stern censorship, helped explore these topics by developing a new subgenre: the trauma graphic novel. This book seeks to analyze this trend through the consideration of five influential graphic novels in English. Works by Paul Hornschemeier, Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons will be considered as illustrative examples of the representation of individual, collective, and political traumas. This book provides a link between the contemporary criticism of Trauma Studies and the increasingly important world of comic books and graphic novels.

Hardback: ISBN 9781138238886
Published: January 9, 2017

eBook: ISBN 9781315296616
Published: January 6, 2017

Paperback: ISBN 9780367886035
Published: December 10, 2019

Pre-publication pages for a chapter in _Teaching the Graphic Novel_ (MLA). Carter reflects on teaching Alan Moore's _Watchmen_ directly after the attacks on September 11, 2001, and how that event informed his pedagogy, the class's reading of the text, and helped Carter see that graphic novel as residing in the "Prophesy Literature" genre.

Two of the most influential graphic novels of the twentieth century, Frank Miller’s _The Dark Knight Returns_ and Alan Moore’s _Watchmen_ (both published in 1986) played key roles in altering the public’s perception of “comic book” superheroes while simultaneously winning over the respect of critics who hitherto may have had little, if any, interest in the medium. In contrast, one work that has garnered very little critical attention is Moore’s _Marvelman_ (later __Miracleman_), which ran from 1982-1989. _Miracleman_’s relative obscurity stems from the legal limbo of the Miracleman canon since its original publication. Readers and critics alike have had few opportunities to read what is arguably one of the most significant series from the early years of the Modern Age of Comic Books (alternately referred to as the Dark Age). This essay explores the ways in which the "real world logic" of Moore's _Marvelman/Miracleman_ comics likely influenced Miller’s reconstruction of the superhero genre in _DKR_ as well as the more obvious influences on Moore’s own work in _Watchmen_. In examining the _Miracleman_ series in this way, I will argue that _Miracleman_ is a true forerunner of comic’s Modern Age.

A década de 1980: O gênero Superhero experimenta a transformação mais significativa desde a criação do Superman em 1939. Começa uma nova era de super-heróis, na qual os personagens engraçados ficam mais escuros, violentos, brutais, mais e mais realistas, desencantados e adultos. Em Supergods, Grant Morrison vai chamar de Dark Age, quando o anti-herói toma o lugar do super-herói. A Idade das Trevas é considerada a maior revolução nos quadrinhos dos super-heróis - e ainda é possível ver muitos sinais de alerta durante a Era de Prata: um homem - O Homem - já havia começado a revolucionar o mundo dos super-heróis: Stan Lee. Stan criou dezenas de personagens: seus super-heróis são mais complexos e humanos do que nunca. Eles estão antecipando a Idade das Trevas, vinte anos antes. Graças a algumas das criações mais icônicas do The Man, este artigo mostrará a característica desses personagens que antecipam a revolução da Idade das Trevas.

In most comics, the art and the text – the visual and the verbal channels – seem to be telling the same story. But, to be technical narratologically, it is actually the same fabula, not the same story which requires uniform perspective. That is, both art and text present events from the same general plot but not necessarily at the same time, in the same order, or from the same viewpoint. The captions may be disclosing a character’s inner monologue, for instance, while the panels show that character leaping to safety. Or, as a reverse example, word balloons could be vocalizing a fight between two off-panel parents while the panel focalizes on a tearful child trying to sleep. It is the dreadfully boring and narrow comic that has the visual and verbal reflect exactly the same thing in each and every panel. There would be no point and, ultimately, no reason for doing this narrative in comic form. Since the visual and the verbal narratives may be telling different parts of the same fabula simultaneously, it stands to reason that there may also be two different narrators for a given panel as well. This distinction becomes particularly important when it is taken advantage of by a savvy creator (e.g., Art Spiegelman in MAUS, Alan Moore in Watchmen, Chris Ware in ACME Novelty Library) to create an intentional schism between the two narratives; that is, the visual and verbal narratives may actually be spinning different yarns. This narrative polyphony, though not unique to comics, affects the hermeneutic model for the medium to such a degree that a revised tetrahedral hybrid of Wolfgang Iser, J. Espen Aarseth, and Scott McCloud’s theories bears implementation

Prova finale di tesi triennale in Scienze per la Comunicazione Internazionale dell'Università di Catania.
Il testo propone una prima parte incentrata sugli studi di traduzione a partire dagli anni '70, anni in cui i Translation Studies fanno da apripista alla nascita della traduttologia.
La seconda parte ripercorrerà velocemente la storia e le fasi che danno vita ad un fumetto, soffermandomi principalmente su come questo particolare genere letterario venga tradotto.
Nell'ultimo capitolo l'analisi della versione originale di Watchmen di Alan Moore e due delle versioni italiane, cercheranno di analizzare come la traduzione possa cambiare a seconda di stili ed approcci diversi

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 typo-logical 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.

In order to shed light on the current worldwide success of Marvel's comic-book inspired Endgame and the overall rise of “heroes in tights” in cinematic as well as televised form for the last decade or so, one must consider a phenomenon that revolutionized the US comics' mainstream industry, the British Invasion, which started in the early 1980's and lasted for about thirty years. It also seems to have played a key role in the recent transmedial success of comics, and its influence seems to grow even more as the quality of those productions improves.

""UEA Thesis (2011)

In this thesis I draw upon recent formulations of fantasy theory, from Rosemary Jackson’s psychoanalytic analysis to the socio-historical approaches of José Monleon and Mark Bould, and the poetics of fantasy literature of Farah Mendlesohn, to illuminate the interlocking political debates about fantasy fiction which are important to literary theory: whether fantasy is a minor sub-set of literature or the basis of all fiction; whether fantasy functions primarily as a satirical or utopian idiom, or as sheer escapism; and whether fantasy is a liberating expression of the imagination or a limiting and commodified form. ""

The full thesis can be downloaded via the UEA Digital Repository: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/19302.

Unhappy is the land that needs an anti-hero: a land in crisis, without a clear moral, without truths. The anti-hero embodies competing values; on the one hand, he is born of a crisis, on the other exasperates it, leads it to the extreme consequences.
During the 1980s these characters have their greatest success in superhero comics. The so-called Dark Age follows a profound crisis in American society, marked by the Vietnam War, the fear of nuclear conflict, but also by alternative cultural and social movements. A profound social transformation that inevitably brings with it a crisis of certainties, morals and values. Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, together with Alan Moore’s Watchmen and V for Vendetta, are the graphic novels that more than any other represent this transformation.
Today, the western world faces a new crisis. Economic uncertainty, mass migrations, encounters and clashes with different cultures, terrorism: our worldview and our truths are wavering. Superhero universe mirrors all of these. Antiheroes become more and more numerous, and superheroes lose a clear definition. Marvel’s Civil War, saga directly linked to the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent PATRIOT Act, is probably the most emblematic example, an ideal beginning of this new Age.
The historical moment is comparable to the Dark Age. We are not just witnessing a new proliferation of anti-heroes: even superheroes and the way we perceive them are changing. The line between superhero and anti-hero becomes confused. The classic superheroes have begun to kill – the latest Batman and Superman films are emblematic. Superheroes’ relationship with the mask, with society, becomes much more problematic and "anti-heroic".
I will refer to Nietzschean concepts, such as the mask, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the Übermensch, to distinguish the superhero and the anti-hero, in his relationship with the mask and the society, in his morality. Comparing Dark Age’s anti-heroes (Miller’s Batman, Rorschach, V) with contemporary films and comics like The Authority, Civil War, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight, I will show how our perception of anti-heroes and superheroes has changed.
https://www.uni-due.de/balc/superhero.php

While the apocalyptic elements of the graphic novel Watchmen have previously been explored, the theodic elements of that text remain to be studied. This article does so by focusing on the figure of Dr. Manhattan, the almost all-powerful super “hero” who is the equivalent of God in the Watchmen universe. When the world is threatened by a nuclear holocaust, it is Dr. Manhattan who can diffuse the threat. For much of the comic, appeals to him to intercede come up against his inhuman ethic and aesthetic, attitudes that are presented as an outgrowth of his capacity to experience the universe at a subatomic level. This theodicy challenges and is challenged by other perspectives in the book, such as anthropocentric perspectives voiced by the Silk Spectre and Rorschach, namely that life ought to be “fair,” or that, in the moral vacuum left by the absent God, humans must impose their own meaning and morality. Rorschach also offers the alternative theodicy that evil arises from human acts, and the demigod Ozymandias suggests that all human suffering is part of a secret, but just, “higher plan.”

Keywords: Watchmen; theodicy; Dr. Manhattan; Ozymandias; Silk Spectre; Rorschach

In his essay The Myth of Superman, Umberto Eco claims that in superhero comics nothing really changes: this is one of the most characteristic aspects of the superhero who is a status quo defender. By the end of each story, everything is back to normal. It’s 1964 when Eco wrote it, 20 years before one of the biggest revolutions in the superhero comic books history, the beginning of the Dark Age.
Graphic novels like Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Dark Knight Returns revolutionize the concept of "superhero". But we are not talking about superheroes anymore, we are in front of antiheroes. Something else is different too: in these stories, something really happens, there is not a return to the status quo, but a transformation, sometime a revolution.
The difference between superhero and antihero means also a difference between the kind of story, between comic and graphic novel. I argue that the antihero narrative is linked to the graphic novel format, while superheroes go on with their infinite battle to defend the status quo on the pages of comic books.

https://internationalgraphicnovelandcomicsconference.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Conference-Booklet-june-17-updated.pdf

"Keywords:
Polyphony, Film, Chronotope, Adaptation, Comics.

Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009) has a tortuous multi-studio production history, but finally arrived on cinema screens in 2009. Adapting Moore and Gibbons‘ 1986-7 comic series, which became undisputably the most critically acclaimed superhero tale ever when republished in trade paperback‘ format (Moore and Gibbons, 1987), and is renowned for its 'realist‘ take on the implications of a world in which powered heroes actually exist, the film imagines an out-of-control American dystopia defined by nuclear brinkmanship and the persistence of far-right politics.

Distinctively, a diegetic counterfactual history is formed after the intervention of one of the heroes, the godlike Dr. Manhattan, decisively settles the war in Vietnam in favour of the U.S. Thus, it is implied, popular support is secured for second and third terms for Richard Nixon, who is shown as maintaining Cold War hostilities at a high pitch.

Watchmen, then, presents the counterfactual scenario familiar in science-fiction, culminating in a diegetic apocalypse that is linked to a plan for world renewal masterminded by sinister, possibly amoral forces (like another time-travel text, Chris Marker‘s La Jetée/The Pier [1962]). Form relates to content: individual chapters of the comic shuttle between times, and represent different historical incarnations of the 'Minutemen‘ team of heroes from their 1940s 'GoldenAge‘ to the cynical 1970s. Characters like Dr. Manhattan are endowed with a certain novelistic subjectivity by this structure (which is emulated in sequences of Snyder‘s version).

Bakhtinian readings of the science-fiction film as exploring carnivalesque alternatives to the temporal controls of life under capitalist mass culture have been presented by Dimitrakaki and Tsiantis (2002), who discuss time paradox films like Twelve Monkeys (a 1995 near-remake of La Jetée, directed by Terry Gilliam), as do Fry and Craig (2002), with ideas around carnival and chronotope well-represented. Chronotopic values are certainly pertinent to Watchmen, but its counterfactuality and interest in themes like quantum physics and the perception of time also bring it into the orbit of Bakhtinian polyphony.The latter, with its removal of predetermination from the field of character consciousness and ethical behaviour, calls to mind 'a pluralistic, restless universe in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene‘ (William James, cited in Morson, 1996: 87). As a literally 'de-authored‘ text, following the well-publicised removal of Alan Moore‘s name from the production (Anon., 2008), the regime of time in Watchmen seems to demand a reading that not only notes its chronotopes and many temporal thresholds, but explores its register of 'crisis time‘ in more detail.

As one example of the concern with notions of authoring, its ethical problematic concerns how the citizens of earth maintain the interest of a virtual god in a world whose reality and future he can see far beyond.Yet, a further twist about the film version of this tale is that, in its commercial life, the ambiguous representation of temporality does not end here; if anything, it is expanded by its commodification and manner of release. Aimed at a cult audience already tantalised by years of counterfactual production scenarios that 'might have been‘ (including announced deals with directors like Paul Greengrass, and others like Gilliam who were associated with the project), Warner Brothers‘ eventual multi-platform release of Watchmen can be seen to spiral out into a poly-diegetic form that exceeds the fragmentary status even of the typical contemporary event film. Some of the textual forms comprise: the animated 'motion comic‘ DVD version; the 'massively multiplayer‘ online iPhone game; the separate animated Tales of the Black Freighter  (DanielDelPurgatorio/Mike Smith, 2009), an intratext of the original Moore and Gibbons series, excised from the 'main‘ film; and, post-theatrical release, a slew of DVD recuts of varying running times – 'Director‘s Cut‘, 'Ultimate Cut‘- that follow the recent Hollywood trend of equating aesthetic impact with extra duration.

Exploring these temporal complications and contradictions, this paper will draw together the Bakhtinian themes of open time and polyphony while also questioning why the film provoked ambiguous critical responses that identified a certain hollow,
aesthetic monologism in the exactitude of Snyder‘s adaptation, with A.O. Scott calling the film 'an artifact of a faded world
brought to zombie half-life by the cinematic technology of the present‘ (2009). Notably, even this criticism is expressed in terms of a breakdown or confusion of time."

This project identifies narrative intersections between first-generation Romantic literature and twentieth and twenty-first century graphic novels. Specifically, I comparatively read the nineteenth-century imaginative poesis with twentieth-century experimental narratology to reveal new understandings of graphic narratives as part of larger, historically distinctive discourses in our contemporary moment.

Applied rigorously, philosophical conceptions of subversion call the very possibility of politically subversive Blockbuster cinema into question. For political theorist Johannes Agnoli, for example, subversion entails a critical reflection about oppressive social orders as much as an emancipatory political practice directed towards their transformation. While the commercial orientation and mass address of mainstream Hollywood film render the existence of politically subversive blockbusters in this narrow sense highly unlikely (as subversive films would not only need to tell stories about political subversion, but also actively participate in social conflicts), 2006’s V for Vendetta , which adapts Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s 1980s graphic novel of the same name, represents an interesting counterexample. Operating within the commercial framework of blockbuster cinema, the film relates the protagonist’s fight against the fascist government of a near-future Britain and, by doing so, promotes an (problematic) idea of theatrical performance as a model of subversive political activity. Beyond these thematic concerns, however, the film produced a lasting impact on the iconography of anti-authoritarian protest movements worldwide by disseminating and popularizing the image of the ‘Guy Fawkes mask’ as a symbol of political activism, which, in the years after the film’s release, came to be used by the ‘hacktivist’ collective Anonymous, activists of the Occupy movement, and street protesters at Istanbul’s Gezi Park (to name only a few). This paper explores  V for Vendetta’s function for the spread of the Guy Fawkes image and argues that the film’s depiction of subversive activity, along with the iconic staging of its masked protagonist, made the image available to activists and started a process of ‘viral’ serialization in which it was spread across different media over an extended period of time. This serialization followed and continued a series of earlier incarnations of the same image, and derived its power from the mask’s stylized and immediately recognizable character, i.e. from an iconicity that lends itself both to commercial logics of branding and to a use within the context of political activism.

The term graphic novel has increasingly functioned as a catalyst for understanding comic books as an emergent literary genre. This article focuses on one specific element within this historical process: the claim, made by artists such as Alan Moore, that graphic novels are characterized by greater formal complexity , or density, than serial comics. These claims are evaluated by combining computational text and image recognition of a corpus of 131 graphic narratives with sociological metadata on production and circulation. The results show that Moore's own book-length comics, in particular Watchmen and V for Vendetta, rank among the densest graphic narratives in the sample in both their visual and textual content. Graphic memoirs, in contrast, only show an increase in textual complexity. With Pierre Bourdieu, the article understands complexity as a social and aesthetic strategy that aims at increasing the cultural capital of comics creators. At the same time, the article contextualizes computational results against the background of a changing marketplace for comics, in particular the decline of serial comics, the shift towards digital printing, and increased access to book distribution. This analysis shows that graphic narratives pursue both literary and popular aesthetic strategies, challenging Bourdieu's account of a clear opposition between profit and prestige in cultural production.