Alan Moore’s early work as a cartoonist comes under the spotlight in new academic work

Alan Moore, Out from the UndergroundAlan Moore‘s early work as a cartoonist comes under the spotlight in the recently-released academic text, Alan Moore, Out from the Underground – Cartooning, Performance, and Dissent, by Dr Maggie Gray.

Published by Palgrave Macmillan, the 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.

Dr Maggie Gray is Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London, who has written numerous articles about Alan’s work. She’s a teacher and researcher in the history and theory of illustration animation with a specialism in comics, cartooning, and visual narrative.

Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals and academic anthologies originating in the UK, US, and Germany, as well as general-audience publications, and she’s active in the comics studies community, regularly contributing to conferences and symposia and sit on the editorial board of Studies in Comics.

Price wise it’s a bit on the steep side, but may we’ll be a valuable addition to university libraries and other learning centres.

Buy the book from Amazon.co.uk (using this link helps support downthetubes)



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