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2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

5. Written by Alan Moore?

Authors : Bart Beaty, Benjamin Woo

Published in: The Greatest Comic Book of All Time

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US

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Abstract

This chapter addresses the turn toward “ground-level” comics in the 1980s and 1990s, or comics works that were self-consciously “literary” while working in popular and generic traditions. The case of Alan Moore, the most visible of the writers working in this tradition, is assessed to demonstrate the disproportionate attention that has been to writers within this tradition, and also to demonstrate the way that British forms of writing were imported to the American comic book industry as a marker of sophistication.

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Chris Murray, “Signals from Airstrip One: The British Invasion of Mainstream American Comics,” in The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts, ed. Paul Williams and James Lyons (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 44.

Julia Round, “‘Is This a Book?’ DC Vertigo and the Redefinition of Comics in the 1990s,” in The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts, ed. Paul Williams and James Lyons (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 14–30.

The end date here partially marks the departure of Vertigo’s most prominent writers, followed by Karen Berger’s own exit in 2013, but more importantly the sense that other publishers—notably, Image Comics’ creator-owned titles and the comics imprints of major trade presses—have caught up.

Marc Singer, Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 24–25.

Virginia Woolf, “Middlebrow,” in The Death of the Moth (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), 113–119.

Round, “Vertigo and the Redefinition of Comics,” 18.

Benjamin Woo, “Understanding Understandings of Comics: Reading and Collecting as Media-Oriented Practices,” Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 9, no. 2 (2012): 180–199.

Douglas Wolk, “Please, Sir, I Want Some Moore,” Slate, December 17, 2003, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2003/12/please_sir_i_want_some_moore.html

Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

For example, Jess Nevins, Heroes & Monsters: The Unofficial Companion to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Austin, TX: Monkeybrain Books, 2003).

Douglas Wolk, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007), 230.

Ndalianis, “Comic Book Superheroes,” 8.

See Grant Morrison, Supergods (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2012).

Greg Carpenter, “On Canons, Critics, Consensus, and Comics,” Sequart Organization, January 2014, http://sequart.org/magazine/38323/on-canons-critics-consensus-and-comics-part-1/

Stephen Weiner, The 101 Best Graphic Novels (New York: NBM, 2005); Gene Kannenberg, Jr., 500 Essential Graphic Novels: The Ultimate Guide (New York: Collins Design, 2008); Paul Gravett, 1001 Comic Books You Must Read before You Die (New York, NY: Universe, 2011).

Alison Flood, “Alan Moore finishes million-word novel Jerusalem,” The Guardian September 10, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/10/alan-moore-finishes-million-word-novel-watchmen-v-for-vendetta

John Williams, “Alan Moore’s Novel ‘Jerusalem’ Coming in 2016,” ArtsBeat (blog), The New York Times, March 17 2015, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/17/alan-moores-graphic-novel-jerusalem-coming-in-2016/

Despite the sound and fury surrounding the “feud” between the two writers, this is as much a matter of perception as chronology; Laura Sneddon, “The Strange Case of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, As Told By Grant Morrison,” The Beat (blog), November 24, 2012, http://www.comicsbeat.com/the-strange-case-of-grant-morrison-and-alan-moore-as-told-by-grant-morrison/

Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2012), 182.

Morrison, Supergods, 229.

Morrison, Supergods, 229–230.

Morrison, Supergods, 203.

Murray, “British Invasion,” 44, our emphasis.

See, for example, Artyclopedia.com’s “not-to-be-taken-too-seriously measurement of which famous artists have the greatest ‘mindshare’ in our collective culture,” http://www.artcyclopedia.com/mostpopular.html

Murray, “British Invasion,” 44.

Philip Sandifer and Tof Eklund, “Editor’s Introduction,” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 4, no. 1 (2008), http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v4_1/introduction.shtml, para. 4.

Russell Lynes, The Tastemakers (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1954), 311.

Title: Written by Alan Moore?
Authors: Bart Beaty
Benjamin Woo
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Book: The Greatest Comic Book of All Time
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-56196-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-53162-9

Copyright Year: 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53162-9_5