By Annalisa Di Liddo
Great Comics Artists Series
192 pages (approx.), 6 x 9 inches, 40 b&w illustrations, bibliography, index
978-1-60473-212-2 Unjacketed cloth $50.00S
978-1-60473-213-9 Paper $22.00T
Eclectic British author Alan Moore (b. 1953) is one of the most acclaimed and controversial comics writers to emerge since the late 1970s. He has produced a large number of well-regarded comic books and graphic novels while also making occasional forays into music, poetry, performance, and prose.
In Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel, Annalisa Di Liddo argues that Moore employs the comics form to dissect the literary canon, the tradition of comics, contemporary society, and our understanding of history. The book considers Moore's narrative strategies and pinpoints the main thematic threads in his works: the subversion of genre and pulp fiction, the interrogation of superhero tropes, the manipulation of space and time, the uses of magic and mythology, the instability of gender and ethnic identity, and the accumulation of imagery to create satire that comments on politics and art history.
Examining Moore's use of comics to scrutinize contemporary culture, Di Liddo analyzes his best-known works--Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, From Hell, Promethea, and Lost Girls. The study also highlights Moore's lesser-known output, such as Halo Jones, Skizz, and Big Numbers, and his prose novel Voice of the Fire. Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel reveals Moore to be one of the most significant and distinctly postmodern comics creators of the last quarter-century.
Annalisa Di Liddo is an independent scholar and translator based in Milan, Italy. She has been a contributor to Cityscapes: Islands of the Self, Londra tra memoria letteraria e modernità, and Cross-Cultural Encounters: Identity, Gender, Representation, and her work has appeared in the International Journal of Comic Art.
Image--Cover of Watchmen (1987) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
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