Alan Moore

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.

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.

""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.

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

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.

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.

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 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/

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

"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."

The course focuses on the reconstruction of comic books’ role in American culture. Comics as well as graphic novels are often seen as purely American medium and thus it important to discuss its uniqueness and well as its place among other art-forms.

The definition of comic book as a specific form of art will be the starting point. During the first part of the course several schools of American comic books in historical perspective will be analysed from the popular superhero stories to underground ones. Our attention will be directed to the analysis of the evolution of the medium and its main genres.

During the second part of the course selected important comics and graphic novel will be thoroughly analysed. Special attention will be devoted to European, especially British authors who created their main works in US and became the force that revolutionised the medium (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Garth Ennis).

Considero que puede resultar muy revelador un estudio de personajes, puesto que, en esta obra de Alan Moore, hay una ruptura con la visión del cómic popular del superhéroe y la estructuración maniquea del universo ficcional donde éstos se mueven. Sus protagonistas ya no son una representación del Superhombre, en el sentido en el que lo define Umberto Eco; no son modelos estilizados, unidimensionales, defensores de los valores de la sociedad, enfrentados a su alter ego, que deseaba desestabilizar dicho sistema para beneficio propio, en una representación del mundo verdaderamente maniquea.
Por contra, en Watchmen encontramos unos superhéroes sometidos a pulsiones humanas, llenos de contradicciones internas y que actúan en su propio beneficio, sin un interés tan claro por conseguir la permanencia de los valores de nuestra sociedad, ni con una visión dualista del bien y del mal. Una obra ambigua con un final que no consuela, como ocurre en las novelas populares.
El planteamiento es similar al que realizaron los griegos con sus dioses, humanizarlos, despojarles no de sus poderes, pero si de su carácter unidimensional y dotarles de los mismos yerros e hipocresías de los humanos. Su estructuración también corre pareja a la del panteón griego, puesto que en ambos encontramos dos generaciones divinas.
Son personajes redondos, personajes, que rompen los alineamientos del bien y del mal, pues tanto se alían en un momento como rompen las relaciones en otro. Así, encontramos casos como el Dr. Manhattan, que siendo el más poderoso, aparece como un títere movido por los demás personajes, o el Comediante, quien, similar a Zeus, tras su imagen de dirigente justo, llega a violar a una compañera, o Rorschach, un outsider, un marginado que se autoincumbra como justiciero, pero valiéndose de los mismos métodos que sus enemigos. Por lo tanto, este análisis de personajes en uno de las obras señeras de Alan Moore permitirá vislumbrar la complejidad de las obras del guionista.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Two characters in Watchmen appropriate God-like spaces but do so with unsatisfactory consequences. Dr Manhattan is the only conventional superhero in the text in that he possesses scientific/supernatural powers. At the end of the text, he leaves earth to create a ‘human’ population elsewhere, that is, to be a God and start another world from scratch, since this one is past redemption. Adrian Veidt, ‘the smartest man on earth’, comes closest to a ‘god-like’ decision when he kills half the population of New York in order to put an end to fighting and unite the world against a perceived external enemy. This decision, made on
behalf of humanity, alienates him from it.

A "História do Brasil em Quadrinhos" é a primeira experiência em adaptar os quadrinhos às sala de aula e, é também a primeira vez que se utilizaram os quadrinhos para o Ensino de História. Esta obra, pelo menos em sua segunda parte, realiza uma ultrapassagem no modo como a raça negra era enxergada pela historiografia no Brasil, isso antes mesmo de que obras acadêmica pudessem fazê-lo. E, ao mesmo tempo, é um retrato amargo do período da Ditadura Militar.

Paper presentado en el congreso "Posthumanism and Posthumanities: a Dialogue with Rossi Braidotti", celebrado en la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid en diciembre de 2015.

En este paper pretendo explorar la relevancia de algunos cómics norteamericanos de superhéroes como literatura utópica en relación con el concepto de posthumanismo.

The 1980s: The Superhero genre experiments the most significant transformation since the creation of Superman in 1939. A new age of superheroes begins, in which the funny characters for children become darker, violent, brutal, more and more realistic, disenchanted and adult. In Supergods Grant Morrison will call it Dark Age, when the antihero takes the superhero’s place. The Dark Age is considered the biggest revolution in superheroes comics – and yet it is possible to see many warning signs during the Silver Age: a man – The Man – had already started to revolutionize the superheroes world: Stan Lee. Stan created dozens of characters: his superheroes are more complex and human than ever before. They are anticipating the Dark Age, twenty years before it. Thanks to some of the most iconic creations of The Man, this article will show the characteristic of these characters who anticipate the Dark Age’s revolution.

https://revistas.unilasalle.edu.br/index.php/Dialogo/article/view/5788

RESUMEN: El objetivo de este trabajo es presentar un análisis desde el punto de vista de la recepción clásica del cómic de Alan Moore "Promethea". En concreto, nos centraremos en la apropiación que el autor hace de la figura de Hermes-Toth y de los tratados contenidos en el Corpus Hermeticum como reivindicación del medio en el que el autor se expresa: el cómic.
--
ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to offer an analysis from the point of view of classical reception in Alan Moore’s comic book "Promethea". Specifically, we will focus on the appropriation that the author does of the figure  of Hermes- Toth and the treatises contained in the Corpus Hermeticum as a defense for the means in which the author expresses himself: comic books.

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

A critical and contextual study of Ainsworth's neglected historical romance, Guy Fawkes, arguing that it has, in fact, a subversive religious and political subtext in line with contemporary agitation for Catholic emancipation:

Nowadays, the image of Guy Fawkes – the man who tried to blow up Parliament on November 5, 1605, assassinating James I so a popular revolt could install a Catholic monarch – has become synonymous with anti-establishment protest. This modern symbolism began in the British comic strip V for Vendetta, a dystopian revenge tragedy with an anarchist heart by Alan Moore and David Lloyd (1982 – 1988) produced during the darkest decade of Thatcherism (filmed in 2006). In the twenty-first century, the loosely associated and politically unaligned ‘Anonymous’ network of hackers and activists has taken as their emblem the ‘penny-for-the-guy’ mask worn by Moore’s protagonist, along with the ethos of the character. Just as ‘V’ once spoke to the people of an imagined fascist Britain that seems to be getting closer in fact every day, Anonymous broadcasts regularly to the world. History becomes fiction becoming history again; but while the cultural significance of Moore’s subversive hero is huge, the connotative seeds of Guy Fawkes as a revolutionary freedom fighter, rather than a terrorist to be burnt in effigy, were in fact sown in a relatively obscure early-Victorian novel…

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.

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.

The antihero embodies competing values; he is the symptom of a crisis, and he exasperates it. 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. Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, together with Alan Moore’s Watchmen, are the graphic novels that represent this transformation.Today, the western world faces a new crisis. Economic uncertainty, mass migrations, encounters and clashes with different cultures, terrorism, pandemics: 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 is probably the most emblematic example.We are witnessing a new proliferation of antiheroes, and even superheroes are changing. The classic superheroes have begun to kill. Their relationship with the mask, with society, becomes much more problematic and "anti-heroic".I will refer to Nietzschean concepts, such as the mask to distinguish the superhero and the antihero. Comparing Dark Age’s antiheroes with contemporary films and comics I will show how our perception of “heroes” has changed.
Link: https://figshare.arts.ac.uk/articles/presentation/Marco_Favaro_-_What_if_Superheroes_kill_Evolution_of_Superheroes_and_Antiheroes_during_the_Post-heroic_Age/12562214

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.

The article presents an analysis of two neo-Victorian Londons: that of Peter Ackroyd in the novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and that of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell in the graphic novel From Hell. Particular attention has been given to the representation of the city in terms of the most characteristic elements of London and its mode of portrayal in each work. The article also presents how the British capital is personified or at least treated as a driving force behind human actions, as well as the subjectification of the city and its functioning as a text. Finally, the article focuses on the
superposition of the late 19th and late 20th centuries, i.e. the times of action and writing of both works, and how relevant these texts are at the present time.

Este trabalho busca abordar a questão do humanismo no âmbito da obra do roteirista de
quadrinhos e escritor Alan Moore, focando em dois trabalhos: “O Monstro do Pântano” e
“Watchmen”. À leitura dessas obras somam-se os trabalhos filosóficos de Sartre (2014),
Heidegger (2005) e Sloterdijk (2009). Assim, é possível observar nas narrativas de Moore
uma visão do homem enquanto construção pós-humana, através de um processo
antropotécnico.