LIDDO, Annalisa Di. Alan Moore: comics as performance, fiction as scalpel.

University Press of
Mississipi: Jackson, 2009.

CHAPTER 1 – Formal considerations on Alan Moore's writing

27, “Most of Moore’s comics start from an intertextual assumption: a quotation, or an allusion to an
existing character, a distinctive genre, or a particular work. They are built on a proper web of references
that are not only mentioned or suggested but challenged and recontextualized in order to convey new
meanings. Thus transcended, intertextuality is stripped of the status of mere formal device to become a
proper narrative motif.”

The language of comics and the aesthetics of the graphic novel

27-28, Moore didn't like the term “graphic novel”, thinking it only convinient for the market to sell the
“same old crap to a big new audience”. Recently, however, he accepted the term, admitting that a
change was happening in the industry.

28, “Moore draws inspiration from the tradition of the novel, in order to revisit it and to convert its
most interesting peculiarities into visual communication. Despite his admiration for some of his
predecessors in comics, Moore asserts that most of his artistic and cultural points of reference come
from the tradition of English and American prose.”

29, Quoting Moore on the relevance of themes: ““It becomes more of a problem to create work with
any relevance in the rapidly altering world in which the industry and the readers that support it actually
exist. By ‘relevance’ . . . I mean stories that actually have some sort of meaning in relation to the world
about us, stories that reflect the nature and the texture of life in the closing years of the twentieth
century” To do that, it is necessary to be aware of traditional culture.

30, “Moore’s interest in the practice of writing arose in his early childhood reading and gradually
evolved into a consistent aesthetical project. It is significant that, right after his first experiences as a
comic book artist, Moore decided to stop drawing in order fully to devote himself to scripting; the
crucial significance of the written word was thus made clear at the very start of his career. Fascination
with the power of words became a stronger influence on Moore’s work as the years passed, culminating
in his decision to dedicate a substantial part of his time to studying occultism and magic.”

30-31, “Yet, if words are the starting point of creation, our author does not deny the irrepressibly visual
nature of comics. On the contrary, he states that what interests him most is exactly the specificity of the
medium, whose unique characteristic is that of using an “underlanguage” (Sharrett 13), that is, an
alternative idiom to common language, which results from the interaction between two codes: the
iconic and the verbal. His production certainly owes much of its appeal and effectiveness to this
awareness, and to his consequent careful balancing of the constituents of the medium.”

31-32, About Moore's scripts and his interaction with the artists: “preliminary phase of the work
consists in dialogue and exchange of ideas between Moore and the artist, who define the characters’
essential traits, together with the general structure and style of the text. (…) The preliminary outline of
the work is sketched, followed by proper elaboration of the script, which Moore usually writes in
detail, including a wide range of precise indications for the artist. Such instructions are sent out as the
scripting proceeds (implying a rapid working process, considering the pressing timetables of
serialization), often with Moore directly addressing his collaborator.”

32-33, “Moore’s scripts do not provide artists only with the words they should set into the balloons and
with the necessary technical suggestions about perspective and angles, or about the positions of objects
and characters in each panel. The author also enters historical notes, commentaries, and descriptions of
the possible sounds and smells one might have found on the scene. He voices his characters’ thoughts
even when they are not meant to appear in writing on the page. He describes what nuances colors might
have, even if the work is to be printed in black and white. In short, he fills the script with all the details
that, though unwritten and undrawn in the final version, are necessary for the artist to fully understand
the atmosphere that is to characterize the comic book.”

33-34, “Moore himself has always insisted on the collaborative nature of the creation of comics, a
process based on a “meeting of minds and meeting of sensibilities” (Wiater and Bissette 165), which he
considers one of the features that made him focus his attention on the comics medium instead of
traditional prose. (…) The aim of his scripts is less to impose his narrative vision by force than to give
those who provide the illustrations a series of possible hints, which they are free not to follow if they do
not deem them proper.”

The rewriting of literary sources

35-36, “The presence of intertextuality in Moore’s work—be it in the form of quotation, allusion,
parody, or, as happens most often, the revisiting of well-known works or patterns—is pervasive and
results in an incessant, vigorous re-elaboration of textual practices. Intertextuality permeates Moore’s
oeuvre in all its facets and covers not only the domain of literature but cinema, music, popular culture,
and, at last but not least, comics.”

36-37-38-39-40-41, About intertextual examples in V for Vendetta, predominantly Shakespeare.

41, “In the [The League of Extraordinary] Gentlemen stories the intertextual process becomes even
more overt and pervasive than in V for Vendetta. The difference between the two consists not only of a
larger amount of quotations in The League, but most of all in their more markedly ludic quality. This
feature is also mirrored by the lighthearted, sometimes parodistic tone of the narration and, in visual
terms, by the deliberately caricatural nature of the characters’ looks”
> “Intertextual practice here is so enveloping that Moore himself has defined the adventures of the
Gentlemen as a “literary connect-the-dots puzzle” (Khoury, Extraordinary 182)”

42-43, “The two novels unleash a barrage of direct and indirect quotations, both verbal and visual,
touching both “highbrow” literature and popular genres and crossing over the borders of the English
tradition. In these works Moore mixes and parodies adventure novels, scientific romances, steampunk
fiction, erotic narrative, and much else, and he does not fail to pay tribute to cinema by hinting at James
Bond movies.”
> “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a significant piece of work that confirms Moore’s
use of literature as an inexhaustible repository of stories.”

43-44, About references in From Hell.

Revisiting the superhero tradition

46, “As noted above, Moore’s intertextual practice involves not only the field of literature but also the
tradition of comics, which is revisited and rewritten in several ways. In Moore’s vast bibliography, the
genre he has most frequently reworked is the superhero narrative, which for cultural and historical
reasons has occupied a privileged position in comics all over the world from a very early moment in
the development of the medium.”

47, “Moore’s superhero comics are usually included in the category of “revisionary superhero
narrative,” a rich current that came into being thanks to Frank Miller and to Moore himself, and that
was later joined by several other authors.”
> The shift of Moore and Miller's revisions – of fragile and weak characters are not their original
creation → Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko already introduced that in Fantastic Four and The
Amazing Spider-man, separating their comics from those of the Golden Age (like Superman).

47-48, “But the narrative potential of the cracks surfacing on the mask of the superhero is brought to its
extreme consequences in Moore’s production. He creates fresh characters and revisits existing ones,
retaining some of the features of the original models but at the same time further developing their
personalities, bringing out their dark side and sometimes pushing them to the verge of psychosis. The
latter aspect allows for critical reflection on the figure of the superhero, on the ideologies conveyed
through the filter of fiction, and most of all on the legitimization of the ethics of vigilantism that
surfaced between the 1970s and 1980s, especially in big metropolitan contexts in the United States.”

50-51-52-53-54, Analysis on Moore's creation on Swamp Thing.

55, “Watchmen, then, was born out of the will to revise the very presuppositions of superhero
fiction and to use them to organize a renovated narrative that would offer fresh considerations on the
contemporary context; in Moore’s words, “We produced a moral and political fable that used the icons
of superhero adventure fiction to make its point”.”

55-56-57-58-59-60-61, Watchmen and its intertextuality with other comic books.

62, Dialogism in Moore.

CHAPTER 3 – Moore and the crisis of English Identity

102, “Many of the works examined in previous chapters clearly show the way in which Moore reworks
specifically American comic narrative patterns. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that his
graphic novels also retain a very tight bond with distinctively English cultural, social, and aesthetic
contexts, which are often exposed through parody or subtle criticism; this bond has become stronger
in a few recent developments of his work.”

103, “ “ ‘Englishness’ . . . will be defined as a sense of cultural (rather than political) identity.
‘Britishness’, by contrast, will refer to the legal status, the rights and duties, of persons holding British
passports. ‘England’, then, will be treated as a cultural, ‘Britain’ as a political entity” (Mergenthal 17).
It is Englishness that Moore deals with, a set of cultural values connected with social class, gender,
ethnicity—identity—and the way these values are embodied in the lived experience of the English.”
Facing imperial legacy

103, “The critical vision of English imperial culture emerges significantly in the parodistic narratives of
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen I and II. Moore himself presented such books as essentially
ludic works (see Kavanagh), and yet the League panels transpire the author’s serious critical intention
toward Victorian culture as the fullest representative of the imperial mind, its ideals of dominance and
oppression, and its systematic repression of otherness.”

104, “From the visual point of view, the nature of the pages of the League highlights parody as the core
mode of the narration. (…) O’Neill’s most distinguishing feature is the grotesque, hyperbolic trait,
which is characterized by “an exaggerated and cartoony quality”

105-106, The parody working from the first page: the editor's note about the edition, depicting “the
Victorians’ willing blindness to the paradoxes of their own society.”

106-107, The characters used have a significant critical function towards Victorian culture – some
aspects Moore develops were alredy present in those characters (Invisible Man's malevolent nature).
“Allan Quatermain, “the empire’s favorite son” (Moore and O’Neill, League I, 20), is actually an old
man and an addict weakened by laudanum and opiates. Captain Nemo is equipped with a particularly
clear eye when it comes to singling out the inconsistencies of the British imperial system, but often
behaves like a lunatic; and he looks inhuman in his total lack of pity toward the English population,
who in his eyes is just an emanation of the much-loathed empire.”

> “A positively emblematic character is Dr. Jekyll, who as the novel progresses takes on the personality
of Mr. Hyde more and more often, just like in R. L. Stevenson’s original work. According to Moore,
Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde aptly represents the quintessence of the
Victorian Age: “The plight of Henry Jekyll is resonant as a metaphor for the whole of a Victorian
society where virtue was never lauded so loudly in public nor vice practised so excessively in private.
You can almost see in that novel the exact point where the mass Victorian mind became uneasily aware
of its own shadow: Hyde as Jekyll’s shadow” (Sim, “Correspondence Part I” 315–16). (USAR NO
POWER POINT DO SIC)

> “The Victorian will to preserve public steadiness and decency clashed with the fears brought about by
a complex historical and cultural moment where new scientific discoveries and industrial progress were
developing, and where the old system was starting to show its incapability of restraining phenomena
such as social change or the expression of female sexuality.”

108, The protagonists are “Heroes and monsters at the same time, engaged in fighting wars at the side
of the empire against any kind of otherness that may threaten it from the outside (…).”

108-109, “The character who probably emerges as the most significant in both novels is that of Mina
Murray. (…) Mina is less manifestly “monstrous” than her fellows but, as a woman, embodies
otherness all the same.” (…) In Moore’s version, Mina married Jonathan but divorced him shortly after
the wedding to become a suffragette. Her choice is despised by most of her fellow characters, who do
not refrain in labeling her irritatingly “waspish tongue” as “but one of the many unattractive features of
the modern suffragette”.”
109, In Dracula “Mina’s main features are her practical sense and strong temperament, which make her
a precursor of the New Woman of the twentieth century (see Tropp 133–69). Similarly, Moore and
O’Neill outline Mina as the bravest and most clever character in the ranks of the Gentlemen. Mina
—“the heart of our book” in O’Neill’s words (Moore, League I: Scripts II)—is the main tool Moore
uses to expose the insubstantiality of the Victorian ideals of strength and respectability, of imperial rule
and especially of male authority. She is usually in charge of coordinating expeditions and of organizing
her colleagues, whom she reprimands without a moment’s hesitation (…).”

110, “Mina is the only person capable of respecting Mr. Hyde and of obtaining his respect in return.
Moreover, when she establishes her affair with Allan Quatermain, she demonstrates she has overcome
the typical Victorian prudery to become a modern, independent woman, for their relationship begins
and ends because of her decision, and the legendary explorer can only come into line with it.”

> “These features make Mina the exact opposite of the traitor Griffin, a.k.a. the Invisible Man, who
immediately reveals his hostility toward her and who always appears as a racist and a male chauvinist,
thus embodying the meanest aspects of the mindset of the late nineteenth century.”

111, “The attention Moore dedicates to the Victorian Age in significant works such as From Hell and
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen confirms his vision of that time as a pivotal moment in the
development of English identity. For it is in the marginalization of otherness caused by the
Anglocentric, patriarchal vision of the Victorians that the contemporary author ironically locates the
proliferation of the most fruitful, vibrant aspects of Victorian culture itself. Marginal figures and
outsiders, then—monsters, lunatics, and especially women—become Moore’s favorite instrument to
examine the past and its effects on the present time.”

“The plight of Henry Jekyll is resonant as a metaphor for the whole of a Victorian society where virtue
was never lauded so loudly in public nor vice practised so excessively in private. You can almost see in
that novel the exact point where the mass Victorian mind became uneasily aware of its own shadow:
Hyde as Jekyll’s shadow”

“A condição de Henry Jekyll ressoa como uma metáfora para o todo de uma sociedade Vitoriana em
que a virtude nunca era louvada tão ruidosamente em público, nem o vício praticado tão
excessivamente em particular. Você pode quase ver no romance o ponto exato em que o conjunto do
pensamento Vitoriano se tornou inqueitamente consciente de sua própria sombra: Hyde como uma
sombra de Jekyll.”