Introduction

Abstract

Most scholarship on Alan Moore casts him as a writer, reflecting the dominance of literary studies. This introduction contends that existing approaches often overlook the aesthetics and materiality of comics and the significance of visual style and facture. They elide the way that graphiation is embedded in specific contexts of production and presents particular ways of seeing, and therefore neglect the politics of form. This book instead looks at Moore as cartoonist, in relation to his wider transdisciplinary practice within the hippie counterculture. Exploring the correspondences of comics with other arts, it argues the formal performativity of Moore’s work is key to its radical politics. Bertolt Brecht’s ideas of epic theatre are introduced as a framework for understanding this political aesthetics and the intersections of cartooning, performance, and dissent.