![]() ![]() tutor, Professor Carlo Pagetti at the University of Milan, telling him that something really big was going on in there, and that I wanted to know more about it. I went back to Italy and brought the book to my would-be Ph.D. It was 2000, and From Hell had just been published as a collected edition. thesis about Angela Carter I also seized the occasion to ransack London’s comics shops and take the English-language versions of Moore’s works home with me. I took advantage of my first scholarship to spend some time in the U.K. When I grew older and went to university, I chose contemporary English literature as my major. But thoughts of Watchmen never left me, and together with searching for whatever comics I could find, I began a systematic quest for Alan Moore’s books. I discovered Art Spiegelman, Winsor McCay, Andrea Pazienza, and much else. That was the beginning of a very long journey: I started reading any comic book I could find, from Tezuka Osamu’s mangas to American superheroes. Curiosity changed into irrepressible enthusiasm with every turn of the page. I felt intoxicated I had never seen anything like that before. In particular, I remember lying on my stomach on the floor of my parents’ living room, my back slightly aching because I had been there for hours, unable to stop reading Watchmen, carefully trying not to tear its creased pages. Two very different books, but both extremely challenging reads. Then, one day, Valentina found that there was a comics section at our small public library and came home with two books: Frank Miller’s Ronin and a dogeared, battered copy of the collected edition of Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen. My schoolmates did not seem peculiarly keen on the medium my feeling toward comics remained one of mild curiosity, and my relationship with them a solitary one, albeit sometimes shared with Valentina, one of my older sisters. In my hometown a few miles from Milan there were no specialty stores, so the only comics I got to see were the ones I could find at newsstands-where the international selection was rather poor-or the secondhand Disney comics I occasionally bought at bookstalls when I was on holiday at the seaside with my family. I was not that interested in getting to know more about the strange world of sequential art. I continued liking comics but gave my reading preferences to prose. As an adolescent I turned to reading classics, then fantasy and gothic novels I came across science fiction, and veered toward horror through the popular Italian comic book character Dylan Dog. The ones I loved most were the tales of the good-natured devil Geppo by Pier Luigi Sangalli, and Pinky the Rabbit, a surreal, cynical strip (oddly, published in the Catholic children’s magazine Il Giornalino) by Massimo Mattioli, who I later came to know as a key figure in the Italian underground movement. I read a lot of comics, too, especially Mickey Mouse and many Italian kids’ comics. Anything would do: fairy tales, adventure books, edifying young adults’ novels. Nevertheless, Alan Moore played an important role in this story. I am no exception to this rule, but I was born and bred in a small Italian town, so the story of my approach to the medium is certainly different from the experience of the average English-speaking comics reader. ![]() Preface and Acknowledgments Why a book about Alan Moore? When we talk about comics, it is practically impossible not to recall our childhood and adolescence, for it is there that most of us first came into contact with them. Moore and the Crisis of English Identity 102 Chapter 4.įinding a Way into Lost Girls 134 Conclusion 162 Notes 176 Bibliography 182 Index 203 PN6737.M66D5 2009 741.5’973-dc22 2008038646īritish Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data availableĬontents Preface and Acknowledgments 7 Introduction 13 Chapter 1.įormal Considerations on Alan Moore’s Writing 27 Chapter 2.Ĭhronotopes: Outer Space, the Cityscape, and the Space of Comics 63 Chapter 3. Moore, Alan, 1953–-Criticism and interpretation. (Great comics artists series) Includes bibliographical references and index. First printing 2009 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Di Liddo, Annalisa, 1977– Alan Moore : comics as performance, fiction as scalpel / Annalisa Di Liddo. Copyright © 2009 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Detail from “The Reward of Cruelty.” From Hell, chapter 9, page 16 (excerpt). ALAN MOORE COMICS AS PERFORMANCE, FICTION AS SCALPEL Annalisa Di Liddoĭesigned by Peter Halverson The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. ![]()
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