2. The Marks of the Arts Lab: Comics, Performance, and the Counterculture

Alan Moore’s cartooning, politics, and ideas about art were forged in the hippie counterculture. This chapter looks in depth at the history of the UK underground and its growing confrontation with the political establishment in the 1970s, including how countercultural values, debates, and conflicts were expressed in the form of comics. Part of a network of hippie anti-institutions, it was the experimental Arts Lab movement that most shaped Moore’s approach to cultural production. Tracing this movement in detail, with a focus on the Birmingham and Northampton Labs, this chapter analyses Moore’s transdisciplinary output in relation to visual poetry, psychedelic posters, science fiction, and radical theatre. In doing so it unpacks the relationship between comics and performance, and identifies the reflexive performativity at the heart of Moore’s aesthetics.