This book explores Alan Moore's career as a cartoonist, as shaped by his transdisciplinary practice as a poet, illustrator, musician and playwright as well as his involvement in the Northampton Arts Lab and the hippie counterculture in which it took place. It traces Moore's trajectory out from the underground comix scene of the 1970s and into a commercial music press rocked by the arrival of punk. In doing so it uncovers how performance has shaped Moore's approach to comics and their political potential. Drawing on the work of Bertolt Brecht, who similarly fused political dissent with experimental popular art, this book considers what looking strangely at Alan Moore as cartoonist tells us about comics, their visual and material form, and the performance and politics of their reading and making.

Researches an academically disregarded body of work, both in terms of Moore's early work and the history of British comics Offers a distinctive approach to the study of Alan Moore's oeuvre Challenges dominant trends in comics studies by attending to the aesthetics of the visual, the politics of form, and the location of graphic style in specific social and historical contexts of production. Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext

Maggie Gray is Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London, UK.

Klappentext

This book explores Alan Moore s career as a cartoonist, as shaped by his transdisciplinary practice as a poet, illustrator, musician and playwright as well as his involvement in the Northampton Arts Lab and the hippie counterculture in which it took place. It traces Moore s trajectory out from the underground comix scene of the 1970s and into a commercial music press rocked by the arrival of punk. In doing so it uncovers how performance has shaped Moore s approach to comics and their political potential. Drawing on the work of Bertolt Brecht, who similarly fused political dissent with experimental popular art, this book considers what looking strangely at Alan Moore as cartoonist tells us about comics, their visual and material form, and the performance and politics of their reading and making.

Inhalt

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. the Marks of the Arts Lab: Comics, Performance, and the Counterculture.- Chapter 3. the Play of the Press: Cartooning, Materiality, and the Underground in Print.- Chapter 4. the Sound of the Underground: Comics, Music and the Politics of Punk.