Alan Moore and the Gothic tradition

Alan Moore and the Gothic tradition

Alan Moore and the Gothic tradition

Matthew J. A. Green

Manchester University Press

Manchester and New York

distributed in the United States exclusively

by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © Matthew J.A. Green 2013

The right of Matthew J.A. Green to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN 978 0 7190 85994 hardback

First published 2013

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Contents

List of illustrations

A note on references and quotations

Notes on contributors

Preface

Acknowledgements

PART I: MONSTROUS POLITICS

1    Alan Moore and the Gothic tradition

Matthew J.A. Green

2    ‘Soap opera of the paranormal’: surreal Englishness and postimperial Gothic in The Bojeffries Saga

Tony Venezia

3    A Gothic politics: Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and radical ecology

Maggie Gray

PART II: GOTHIC TROPES

4    ‘Is that you, our Jack?’: an anatomy of Alan Moore’s doubling strategies

Jochen Ecke

5    ‘Nothing ever ends’: facing the apocalypse in Watchmen

Christian W. Schneider

6    Gothic liminality in V for Vendetta

Markus Oppolzer

PART III: INHERITANCE AND ADAPTATION

7    ‘The Sleep of Reason’: Swamp Thing and the intertextual reader

Michael Bradshaw

8    Madness and the city: the collapse of reason and sanity in Alan Moore’s From Hell

Monica Germanà

9    ‘I fashioned a prison that you could not leave’: the Gothic imperative in The Castle of Otranto and ‘For the Man Who Has Everything’

Brad Ricca

10  Radical coterie and the idea of sole survival in St Leon, Frankenstein and Watchmen

Claire Sheridan

11  Reincarnating Mina Murray: subverting the Gothic heroine?

Laura Hilton

PART IV: ART, MAGIC, SEX, OTHER

12  ‘These are not our promised resurrections’: unearthing the uncanny in Alan Moore’s A Small Killing, From Hell and A Disease of Language

Christopher Murray

13  Medium, spirits and embodiment in Voice of the Fire

Julia Round

14  A darker magic: heterocosms and bricolage in Moore’s recent reworkings of Lovecraft

Matthew J.A. Green

Bibliography

Index

List of illustrations

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders.

A note on references and quotations

Reference format

References to all works in the comics medium employ the following format: volume or book (V or B followed by the appropriate Arabic numeral; e.g. V1, B5), chapter (upper-case Roman numeral), page number (Arabic numeral) and panel number (lower-case Roman numeral), as in the following examples:

•   reference to V for Vendetta, Book 1, Chapter 4, page 4, panel 7: B1.IV.4.vii.

•   reference to From Hell, Chapter 4, page 35, panel 4: IV.35.iv.

Panel numbering runs from left to right across the page and then down; where panels do not follow a standard grid, the most likely direction of reading the page has been followed. Where any of the above divisions is not present, the relevant digit has been omitted (as in the example of From Hell above, which has chapter divisions but not book or volume divisions).

Chapter and issue numbers

Chapter numbering has replaced original issue numbers where these are the same, as in the case of Watchmen, or where the original publication included the same chapter divisions as the collected edition (e.g. V for Vendetta and From Hell). Where chapter numbers differ from issue numbers, as in the case of Swamp Thing, references cite the original magazine publication with corresponding references to the trade paperback collection provided in the bibliography. Chapters in V for Vendetta do not consistently begin on the page where the chapter number and title are given; readers of the collected editions are advised, however, that chapter breaks are indicated by a small Guy Fawkes mask in the bottom outside corner of each chapter’s final page.

Pagination

Pagination is by issue/chapter, excluding any pages that included advertisements in the original magazine publications. Where no pagination is provided, numbering begins on the page in which the narrative or prologue begins, excluding cover reproductions. Where the trade paperback collection includes continuous pagination across multiple issues/chapters (as with collected editions of Swamp Thing and V for Vendetta), non-continuous pagination is retained in view of the considerable variation in practice across different editions. Interpolated material that is included at the end of a volume/issue/chapter (e.g. ‘Under the Hood’ in Watchmen) is also paginated separately and, where given, follows the pagination as presented in the cited text.

Editions

For the majority of these works, no standard edition exists and reference is, in general, given to the trade paperback or hardback collection most readily available when this book went to press.

Quotations

Ellipses: given the preponderance of ellipses in Moore’s comics, it has been necessary to differentiate their presence in the original texts from editorial omissions made when quoting from these. Across all quotations, ellipses that appear enclosed in square brackets – […] – indicate editorial omissions, while those that appear without brackets – … – are present in the original.

Line breaks in block quotations indicate a full or partial break in a speech balloon, either in the same panel or split across panels. In short quotations, line breaks are indicated by a forward slash: / .

Lettering: in general, the typescript for quotations has been standardised and there has been no attempt to replicate changes in letter-weighting. Practice varies across scholarly publications in the discipline. It was felt that because the gradations possible in comics are not possible in conventional typesetting and because discerning such weightings involves considerable subjectivity whilst yielding little change in the overall sense of the quoted material, this would be the most practical approach to take; however, where emphasis is clearly fundamental to the sense of the passage – as in the case of underlining, a change in font, or changes in capitalisation – these are indicated in the quotations.

For Thomas who gets first dibs on the Swamp Thing collection

Notes on contributors

Michael Bradshaw is the author of Resurrection Songs: the Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (2001), the co-editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes (2007), the editor of Death’s Jest-Book: the 1829 text (2003) and the co-editor of Beddoes’s Selected Poetry (1999). He has published critical articles on a range of Romantic authors and themes, including George Darley, Thomas Hood, John Keats, Mary and Percy Shelley, Walter Savage Landor, The London Magazine and Romantic fragment poems. Currently writing on Hood’s comic poetry, and on Romanticism and disability, he is Professor of English at Edge Hill University, Liverpool.

Jochen Ecke teaches English literature at the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. He has written his Master’s thesis on concepts of time and space in Alan Moore’s works and is currently preparing his doctoral thesis on British comics of the 1980s. In addition to co-editing Comics as a Nexus of Cultures (2010), he has published a number of essays on Alan Moore and Warren Ellis. He has also done extensive work in the German comics industry, serving as German editor and occasional translator on works by Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka and Alan Moore.

Laura Hilton holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, where she also completed her BA and MA degrees. Her doctoral research analyses representations of the Gothic double in the contemporary graphic novel and focuses on the work of Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller and Alan Moore. She is co-founder and co-editor of the first two issues of the Birmingham Journal of Literature and Language (BJLL) and has recently published articles in Gothic Science Fiction: 1980–2010 and Investigating Heroes: Truth, Justice and Quality TV. She also has an article forthcoming in Comment Rêver la Science-fiction à Present? Laura has presented papers at several national and international conferences and her wider research interests include nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, comic book and graphic novel studies, and Gothic studies.

Monica Germanà is a writer and Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Westminster, London. Her research interests and publications concentrate on contemporary British literature, with a specific emphasis on the Gothic, gender and popular culture. Her first monograph, Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2010. She is currently working on a monograph exploring the politics of body and dress in Ian Fleming’s narrative and subsequent cinematic adaptations, provisionally entitled ‘Bond Girls: Body, Style, and Gender’.

Maggie Gray was awarded her Ph.D. in the History of Art at University College London in 2010, with a thesis entitled ‘Love Your Rage, Not Your Cage’ Comics as Cultural Resistance: Alan Moore 1971–1989. Her work has been published in Studies in Comics, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and Kunst und Politik. She has taught comics, aesthetics and the history and theory of art and design at Middlesex University, UCL and Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design, and works part-time at Mega-City Comics, London.

Matthew J.A. Green is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Nottingham. In addition to articles published on William Blake, Alan Moore and Lord Byron, he is author of Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake (2005) and co-editor of Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror (2011). He is currently completing a monograph on William Blake and Alan Moore.

Markus Oppolzer holds a Ph.D. from the University of Salzburg, Austria, where he is Assistant Professor (PostDoc) in the Department of English and American Studies. In his thesis he applied Victor Turner’s theory of liminality to a study of early British Gothic fiction. Since then, his research interests have shifted to the comparative study of narrative strategies in various media, focusing mainly on comics.

Christopher Murray is Head of the English Department at the University of Dundee, Scotland, and lecturer in English, Film and Comics. He runs the UK’s first Comics Studies M.Litt. programme, is editor of the peer-reviewed journal Studies in Comics (Intellect Books) and Anthology, a series publishing the work of comics students. He is the author of a monograph on superhero comics and propaganda, Champions of the Oppressed (Hampton Press, 2011), as well as articles on British comics, and the work of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore. He organises two annual conferences on comics, and chairs the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies.

Brad Ricca received his Ph.D. in English from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA, where he is currently a SAGES Fellow. His work has been published in The Emily Dickinson Journal, Leviathan and Critical Approaches to Comics and Graphic Novels, among others. His book Super Boys: Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and the Creation of Superman is forthcoming in 2013 from St. Martin’s Press.

Julia Round (MA, Ph.D.) is senior lecturer in the Media School at Bournemouth University, UK, and edits the academic journal Studies in Comics (Intellect Books). She has published and presented work internationally on cross-media adaptation, television and discourse analysis, the application of literary terminology to comics, the ‘graphic novel’ redefinition, and the presence of Gothic and fantastic motifs and themes in this medium. She is currently writing a monograph on comics and the literary Gothic (provisionally entitled Ghosts in the Gutter, McFarland 2013) and editing the collection Real Lives Celebrity Stories (Continuum, 2013). For further details please visit www.juliaround.com.

Christian W. Schneider studied English Literature and Political Science at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany, and at the University of Wales Aberystwyth. He then went on to pursue a doctoral degree at Heidelberg. His doctoral dissertation on the Gothic mode in graphic literature will hopefully be finished by the time this reaches print, including an extended version of his arguments about Watchmen. He has written about the Gothic in other comics; his further research interests include contemporary American fiction, the narrativity of digital media and the postmodern transformation of popular literary genres.

Claire Sheridan has completed a Ph.D. at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research looks at representations of solitary survival and sociability, especially in the writings of William Godwin and Mary Shelley. She has published work in the European Romantic Review and written papers on Godwin as ‘last man’, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Tony Venezia is a Ph.D. candidate at Birkbeck, University of London, completing a thesis on Alan Moore and the historical imagination. He is a tutor at Birkbeck and visiting lecturer at London South Bank University. His research interests include genre fiction, critical theory and post-millennial literature and culture. He has published articles and reviews in Radical Philosophy, New Formations and Studies in Comics and will be guest editing a special issue of Studies in Comics on comics and cultural theory (2013). He established the annual Comica Transitions symposium at Birkbeck, and is co-convenor of the Contemporary Fiction Seminar.

Preface

The following collection explores a number of Alan Moore’s works in various forms, including comics, performance, short prose and the novel. It presents a scholarly study of these texts that examines the ways that Moore’s work draws upon, and intervenes in, what can loosely be described as ‘the Gothic tradition’. Though the project was originally conceived through conversations with other scholars who, predominantly though not exclusively, specialise in the Gothic, it has expanded to those working in Comics Studies and other cognate disciplines. Accordingly, the chapters below adopt a range of methodologies and vocabularies, some more readily associated with a specific discipline or school than others, giving rise to a plurality of voices that express the variety of ways in which Moore’s work is being received at the present moment.

Though there are a range of connections across various chapters, for ease of reading the collection has been grouped into four parts. Part I, ‘Monstrous politics’, overtly explores the political dimension of Moore’s works. In the first chapter, I highlight the collection’s overarching themes, drawing on material from each of the subsequent chapters and presenting additional readings to argue for a politically charged sense of Moore’s position within the Gothic tradition. Chapters 2 and 3 flush out this argument, through Tony Venezia’s investigation of the sociohistorical context of The Bojeffries Saga and Maggie Gray’s examination of Swamp Thing’s environmentalism.

The investigation of Moore’s deployment of three specific Gothic devices occupies the chapters in Part II, ‘Gothic tropes’. This part opens with Jochen Ecke’s discussion of the döppelganger in Swamp Thing and From Hell, relating this to a close reading of Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella, Carmilla, followed by Christian W. Schneider’s treatment of the apocalyptic in Watchmen, which analyses the use of atmosphere and fragmentation as well as the intersection of form and intertextuality. Markus Oppolzer’s discussion of V for Vendetta closes the section with a reassessment of the significance of liminality in this text and others from the Gothic tradition.

The penultimate part, ‘Inheritance and adaptation’, explores the relationship between Moore’s work and broader textual traditions, placing particular emphasis on the political and cultural significance of intertextual relationships and adaptations. Michael Bradshaw situates Moore’s work within a larger post-enlightenment tradition, arguing that the work uses intertextuality to enhance the aesthetic and political sensibilities of the readership, while Monica Germanà provides an historically sensitive reading of From Hell that connects Moore’s concern with the urban environment to his engagement with a range of historical discourses. Brad Ricca and Claire Sheridan situate Moore’s treatment of the superhero in relation to key novels from the Gothic genre, with Ricca providing a compelling reading of Superman Annual, 11 in relation to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, while Sheridan combines an informed reading of William Godwin and Mary Shelley in their historical context with a careful analysis of the nexus of group politics and survival in Watchmen. Laura Hilton’s chapter completes this part by directly addressing the adaptation of Mina Harker in Moore and O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Stephen Norrington’s cinematic adaptation of The League.

The final part of the collection – ‘Art, magic, sex, other’ – turns attention to Moore’s recent work in different genres and media, while at the same time engaging with his theories of art and magic and considering the significance, in this respect, of his representations of violence and sexuality. Christopher Murray and Julia Round provide extensive discussions of the intersection of magic and the Gothic in Moore’s comics, performance pieces and the novel Voice of the Fire, while my closing chapter explores the insight that Moore’s adaptations of Lovecraft can yield for broader understandings of his forays into the occult.

By examining Moore’s diverse and longstanding engagements with the Gothic tradition, the chapters in this collection contribute both to Gothic Studies and Comics Studies. The underlying premise of the collection is that Moore, and the artists with whom he works, engage in a process of dialogue with a diverse array of source material. Accordingly, the chapters outlined above address two interrelated topics: how an understanding of the Gothic can enhance our understanding of Moore’s work and, conversely, the ways in which the ideas and reading practices engendered by Moore’s work might impact on a reflexive analysis of one or more of the traditions out of which it emerges.

Matthew J.A. Green

University of Nottingham, 2012

Acknowledgements

This collection truly has been a collaborative endeavour, and I am indebted to the conversations and correspondence with each of the contributors over the course of its creation. Alan Moore has been exceptionally generous with his time and his interest – I am tremendously grateful to him for taking time away from his many projects to discuss ideas about this book and other work in progress, as well as for permission to quote extensively from his texts. Many thanks also to Eddie Campbell, Kevin O’Neill, Steve Parkhouse, Avatar Press, Bryan Talbot and Oscar Zarate for permission to reproduce the visual art for which they hold copyright. Tony Bennett, William Christensen and Chris Staros were each instrumental in fielding correspondence; for their cooperation and support I am also very thankful. Equally, I would like to thank Matthew Frost and Kim Walker, whose enthusiasm for the book has been unwavering, as well as the anonymous readers whose comments have considerably strengthened it. Huge thanks are also due to Stephen L. Holland, Jonathan Rigby and Dominique Kidd of Page 45, whose suggestions and encyclopaedic knowledge have been invaluable – as a man far more knowledgeable than me once said, Page 45 is the best graphic novel shop I’ve ever been to. I am also obliged to my many colleagues in the School of English at the University of Nottingham, who have provided support and guidance at various stages in the project, and to successive years of students whose passion and interest for the Gothic and the comics form are inspirational. Last but not least, I could not have completed this collection without my wife Louise, whose enduring belief and advice mean more than words can say, and my daughter Abigail, who has kept me from disappearing too far into the shadows.

Part I

Monstrous politics

1

Alan Moore and the Gothic tradition

Matthew J.A. Green

It’s about the vital message that the stiff lips of decapitated men still shape; the testament of black and spectral dogs written in piss across our bad dreams. It’s about raising the dead to tell us what they know. It is a bridge, a crossing-point, a worn spot in the curtain between our world and the underworld, between the mortar and the myth, fact and fiction, a threadbare gauze no thicker than a page. It’s about the powerful glossalia of witches and their magical revisions of the texts we live in. None of this is speakable.

Alan Moore, Voice of the Fire¹

Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies.

The glaciers have their legends. The ocean bed entertains its own romances. Alan Moore, Swamp Thing²

Alan Moore’s comics, performance and prose works abound with Gothic tropes and beings. Alongside archetypal vampires, zombies, werewolves and witches lurk creatures extracted from the personal bestiaries of writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft. And while the ancient beasts and pagan gods of British myth who appear in the novel, Voice of the Fire, do not exactly rub shoulders with the swamp monster created by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson, Moore’s syncretic imagination erects bridges and opens byways that facilitate traffic between territories as seemingly distinct as pulp fiction and fading folklore, quantum science and anarchist politics, underground comics and the literary canon. His position within the Gothic tradition stems from the ability of his writing to tap into what Fred Botting identifies as the ‘darker undercurrent to the literary tradition’³ coursing through the culture of modernity. In staging the world-shaping capabilities of writing, his work enhances our understanding of the uncanny and the abject while further illustrating David Punter’s sense that the Gothic ‘serves to demonstrate […] the perverse in the very ground of being’.⁴ Uniting works as diverse as Voice of the Fire, From Hell and Swamp Thing is an unwavering belief in the intercourse between the fictional and the real. And underpinning Moore’s understanding of these exchanges and communications is his longstanding interest in the occult and language, which reached a new stage in 1993 when, on the occasion of his fortieth birthday, he proclaimed himself a magician, giving tangible expression to his reflections on the craft of writing: ‘There is something very magical at the heart of writing, and language, and storytelling. The gods of magic in the ancient cultures, such as Hermes and Thoth, are also the gods of writing.’⁵

Viewing Moore’s work in relation to the Gothic tradition focuses attention on significant similarities across his diverse body of work, highlighting the political import of a variety of spectral or marginal continuities. The relevance of this tradition to Moore’s oeuvre beyond the relatively small number of works that explicitly invoke the Gothic is connected to a shared preoccupation with the intersection of the popular and the literary, as well as with the problems of textuality which unfold into wider cultural anxieties over the heterogeneity and instability inherent to the self and its world(s). These concerns are, in other words, tied to what Moore identifies as the magic at the heart of writing which imbues fiction with its creative and destructive capabilities. This occult dimension of writing, so often disavowed in the narrowly defined economics and instrumentalism of contemporary culture, is expressed overtly in the Gothic’s obsession with the supernatural; that is, with beings or occurrences that disrupt hegemonic structurings of everyday experience.

While the efficacy of storytelling is illustrated – often coercively, in Moore’s view – by religion, the potential of writing to alter human consciousness also provides a link between magic and politics, offering a way of ‘giving something back’.⁶ Punter’s remark that ‘Gothic is the paradigm of all fiction, all textuality’ itself suggests that the rupturing effects of Gothic writing make it particularly well placed to intervene in the wider social discourses that produce our experiences of self and of the world.⁷ While such discussions of Gothic textuality draw overtly on poststructuralist critical theory, they are also commensurate with Voice of the Fire’s self-presentation, in which fiction is constitutive of nonfiction and writing gives a textual form to this interplay between the speakable and the unspeakable. But they also recall Swamp Thing’s evocative proposition that the non-human also has its stories to tell, and that the telling of them can be a magical intervention that recodes the discursive worlds we inhabit.

Representations of the sublime and of the abject – together with the staging of the inability of semiotic and legal systems to accommodate that which exceeds, precedes or otherwise annihilates the codifying capacities of language – motion outward to a ‘relation between writing and the animal’ that incorporates ‘the mess, the shit, the refusal of confinement, the pacing tiger and its face of fury’.⁸ Moore’s work, from Miracleman onwards,⁹ repeatedly depicts encounters with figures that disrupt hegemonic and self-aggrandising claims about what it means to be human. This is not the place to explore parallels between the sorcerer, whose memories are evoked by Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, and the voice of the magus that reverberates throughout Moore’s corpus; however, it is worth noting that the link between writing and the animal discussed by the sorcerer and the use of writing to present a world beyond illusory myths of human mastery that we find in works like Swamp Thing both owe something to the Gothic’s propensity for unsettling boundaries and destabilising hierarchies. Thus, in their account of becoming animal, Deleuze and Guattari quote Lovecraft, whose works provide the jumping-off point for Moore’s most overtly Gothic work in recent years, Neonomicon: ‘Lovecraft recounts the story of Randolph Carter, who feels his self reel and who experiences a fear worse than that of annihilation: Carters of forms both human and nonhuman, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable.’¹⁰ Lovecraft’s passage indicates another way in which the Gothic in general, and Moore’s work in particular, moves beyond the becoming-animal to include all those modes of existence that Deleuze and Guattari associate with the plane of nature: ‘what if one became animal or plant through literature, which certainly does not mean literally?’¹¹

Political ecologies

The transformative capacity of literature as a device for reconnecting the human with the non-human is a central aspect of Moore’s work on Swamp Thing, which communicates an environmental politics that registers across his texts. Compare, for example, the guest story for Eclipse Comics’ Mr. Monster, in which the protagonist, himself part vampire, must save a city being savaged by a monster composed from garbage. Staging a literal, if lightly depicted, return of repressed waste, ‘The Riddle of the Recalcitrant Refuse’ draws explicitly on the Freudian conception of the death drive in its articulation of environmentalism: ‘No greater monster faces man than that which he has inadvertently created himself: Garbage! /[…] [I]n his wanton squanderings, man displays an unconscious tendency towards destruction / Surely, this repressed Thanatic curse is the greatest menace of them all!’¹² Though not widely discussed, this story experiments with ideas that would be further developed 12 months later in Swamp Thing, 53 (Oct. 1986), ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’. Recalling this issue, Moore underscores the way it foregrounds humanity’s disavowed dependence on nature:

we had an entire tropical rainforest […] smothering the city in vegetation. In the resulting chaos and carnage all of the animals escaped from the local zoo so that you have […] escaped tigers padding through the cosmetics department of the local chain store. […] [E]ven though mankind can cover nature, and smother the wilderness with a layer of concrete […] underneath our feet […] the wilderness is still there. And though man might boast of having conquered nature that’s not the case, for if nature were to shrug or to merely raise its eyebrow then we should all be gone.¹³

As Maggie Gray demonstrates in Chapter 3 below, the series as a whole deploys Gothic devices to engender a new environmental sensibility by moving beyond the instrumental attitude towards nature fostered by Enlightenment thought. Moreover, as Gray argues, Moore’s revision of Swamp Thing’s character destabilises distinctions between self and environment, animal and plant, human and non-human.

This sense of ecological interconnectedness is, moreover, subject to a doubling effect whereby Moore’s commitment to environmentalism intersects with his longstanding engagements in the areas of gender and sexuality. The irruption of the wilderness in Gotham City occurs in a story arc that stretches across issues 51–4 (Aug.–Nov. 1986) and represents Swamp Thing’s attempt to force Batman and Gotham City to release his lover, Abigail Cable, who, as a result of their relationship, is facing extradition to Louisiana for ‘crimes against nature’.¹⁴ Batman here becomes an unthinking agent of law, describing the eruption of the wilderness as ‘terrorism’ and insisting that Abby will not be released ‘until she’s been through the judicial process’ (‘Garden’, 13.ii). The issue develops into a conflict between an urban, sci-fi Gothic – displaying the terrifying aspect of law and technocracy embodied in Batman and his monstrous technologies – and a Green Gothic that, as Batman is compelled to acknowledge, is on the side of ‘love and justice’ (‘Garden’, 27.iii). The confrontation between the wilderness and the city thus expresses not only Moore’s own environmental politics but also his opposition to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or practice evident in ‘The Mirror of Love’, included in Moore’s self-published anthology, Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia.¹⁵ This political dimension positioned Swamp Thing at the vanguard of a renewed engagement between comics and society, which developed in part out of the growing visibility of creators associated with the underground press.¹⁶ While the interventionist stances adopted by such projects efface the boundary between the text and its social context, as Michael Bradshaw discusses in Chapter 7, Swamp Thing specifically utilises a series of intertextual connections to