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Alan Moore, Out from the Underground: Cartooning, Performance, and Dissent by Maggie Gray

2019; Comics Studies Society; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ink.2019.0009

2473-5205

Jeremy M. Carnes,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Reviewed by: Alan Moore, Out from the Underground: Cartooning, Performance, and Dissent by Maggie Gray Jeremy M. Carnes (bio) Maggie Gray. Alan Moore, Out from the Underground: Cartooning, Performance, and Dissent. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 298 pp. $119.99. It's easy to think mainly of Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or Batman: The Killing Joke when you hear the name Alan Moore. In fact, such a narrow view of Moore as a comics creator has plagued the field of comics studies, which has notably focused on his career after his rise to prominence in the 1980s with The Saga of the Swamp Thing and Watchmen. Yet, as we well know and as scholars like Andrew Hoberek and Greg Carpenter have alluded to, Moore did not in fact begin his work in comics and in the public eye with V for Vendetta (serialized in Warrior beginning in 1982). The lack of sustained attention to Moore's early career in comics, performance, and music is precisely the gap that Maggie Gray addresses in her book Alan Moore, Out from the Underground. Gray's book examines Moore as a cartoonist, as opposed to Moore as auteur, specifically focusing on Moore's use of the comics form and materiality as well as his adoption of "a particular countercultural aesthetic, a dissident way of seeing, that articulated contrary forms of value and was therefore highly political" (8). Central to Gray's study is how Moore approached his cartoons through the lens of comics as performance, which, she argues, Moore developed through his experiences in countercultural theater, underground publishing, and the punk music scene. Gray notes, throughout, that Moore's focus on performance and the form and materiality of comics' self-reflexively draws attention to his work as an artificial construction, which then encourages "acts of critical inquiry and appropriation" on the part of the reader (11). Gray further relates Moore's approach to [End Page 124] his interest in Bertolt Brecht, whose theatrical form relied on the concept Verfremdung, which theoretically produces a space wherein the reader or viewer can, "in the words of Brecht's contemporary and friend the Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin . . . 'take up an attitude towards the events on stage'" (12). The biggest strength of Gray's writing and research lies in her ability to not only analyze Moore's early cartooning work, but to first provide in-depth and insightful contextual sketches of the individuals, publications, and bands that affected Moore's work. As much as this book is about Alan Moore, it is also about British counterculture movements, including Arts Labs rising in London, Birmingham, and Northampton; underground presses producing papers like Oz and ANON as well as comix anthologies like Cyclops; and the British music press, specifically centered on the punk music scene, with publications like NME, Melody Maker, and Sounds. Within these contextual frames, Gray explores Moore's early cartooning work, much of which was printed in these papers and anthologies. She outlines the ways in which performance and dissent disseminating from these countercultural movements and products affected both Moore's contemporary work as well as the later work that Moore, auteur, would produce with various partners to international notoriety. First, Gray examines hippie countercultures throughout Britain and notes how the "flower children" aided in manifesting the Arts Lab movement. Central to the Arts Lab movement was a radical politics, which Moore adopted, that was "determinedly collectivist, anti-disciplinary, experimental and process-driven" (35). While the Birmingham Arts Lab, with its own printing press and headquarters, "had an impact on the development of British comics that has yet to be adequately assessed" (41), it was the Northampton Arts Lab that pointedly "deepen[ed] the countercultural aesthetic of Moore's work across poetry, illustration, and comics, particularly in terms of an emphasis on collaborative and transdisciplinary performance" (48). Under the influence of the beat poets, Moore, along with many of his Arts Lab companions, began experimenting in poetic performance culture. Throughout his work—both verbal and visual—in publications like Embryo, with his unfinished strip "Once There Were Daemons," Moore transformed his orientation to the reader, expecting a more collaborative relationship from them...