Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore
Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2012 4:37 am
Since some people have evinced interest, a brief review.
Sexual Ideology is a collection of seriously academic literary essays about the work of Alan Moore, focusing primarily on his graphic novels and more acclaimed comic runs like Swamp Thing and The Ballad of Halo Jones. There are fifteen essays divvied up into three sections, and each one is authored by a PhD or PhD candidate. If you're thinking that and the $40 price tag dissuades casual readers from this book, you're probably right.
Don't get me wrong, there is some good, solid criticism and analysis in these essays, but as a whole the efforts are disparate and don't build to any kind of singular thesis or picture of Alan Moore. Rather, theses are mostly your typical English or Women's Studies majors essays discussing some specific theme in some specific or very small body of work. I think this restriction is probably the greatest weakness of the book as a whole - there are several references to Moore's essay on pornography 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom, but nowhere have I found a reference to Voice of the Fire, to quote one example. None of the writers ever focuses on an exhaustive look at any particular work in relation to the rest of Moore's stuff - so, for example, Neonomicon is rated a couple pages in one of the essays near the back, but Moore's "The Courtyard" is never mentioned at all as far as I can find.
It's hard to say that any one part of Moore's work has been neglected, though the essays in the book obviously skew toward the big ones: Promethea, Swamp Thing, Ballad of Halo Jones, The Killing Joke, From Hell, Lost Girls, V for Vendetta, and even the chapter on Fanny Hill he made up for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier. Watchmen is somewhat underrepresented, but that's probably only because those essays rated their own book.
The stand-out oddity is "The Poles of Wantonness: Male Asexuality in Alan Moore Film Adaptations" - which is bizarre because not only does Alan Moore have relatively little to do with his adaptations, but he often openly hates them. Honestly, the film adaptation bit is more of a talking-point to address the fact that Alan Moore sometimes chooses to use deliberately asexual characters - characters for whom asexuality is a preference just as other people may be instinctively heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, etc. Sadly, the author - Evan Torner - appears to have trouble really coming to grips with the subject, and falls back and forth between the film adaptations Moore had almost nothing to do with, Moore's own writing, and very stolid references back to Sartre and academic definitions of sex-whatever. Still, even with Torner's fumbling there are a few interesting insights to stumble across in his essay.
Or maybe the weird one is the third essay with its ludicrously long title:
Now, let me be clear that both of these essays are fine for what they want to do - examine the crux of the comics-to-film zeitgeist. I might have suggested they do it somewhere else, since the rest of the book talks about mainly comics, but it's a fair cop. I think both essentially miss the point a bit, however. Also, Joseph Michael Sommers is going to hell for using the phrase "Transmedia Dialogue" - and in a section heading, no less.
I really like Zoe Brigley-Thompson's "Theorizing Sexual Domination in From Hell and Lost Girls" because she starts off with Gail Simone's Women in Refrigerators. If you're going to be talking about sex and women in comics, that's a great start. Better yet, it's a start that your average internet-savvy comics reader can grab a hold of. It is erudite and sometimes political, but never strays too far off topic. In discussing From Hell, she even quotes Anne McClintock:
So there is some good stuff in there - honest looks at what Moore has written, the context of it in the story, the philosophy behind it, some relation to his other work - but it is buried and needs digging out. I might have preferred a longer work on the subject, with wider coverage of everything he's written to give more perspective. As it is, I don't think there is any single essay I can point to as earth-shattering or terribly provocative - but that's par for the course as far as these things go.
Sexual Ideology is a collection of seriously academic literary essays about the work of Alan Moore, focusing primarily on his graphic novels and more acclaimed comic runs like Swamp Thing and The Ballad of Halo Jones. There are fifteen essays divvied up into three sections, and each one is authored by a PhD or PhD candidate. If you're thinking that and the $40 price tag dissuades casual readers from this book, you're probably right.
Don't get me wrong, there is some good, solid criticism and analysis in these essays, but as a whole the efforts are disparate and don't build to any kind of singular thesis or picture of Alan Moore. Rather, theses are mostly your typical English or Women's Studies majors essays discussing some specific theme in some specific or very small body of work. I think this restriction is probably the greatest weakness of the book as a whole - there are several references to Moore's essay on pornography 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom, but nowhere have I found a reference to Voice of the Fire, to quote one example. None of the writers ever focuses on an exhaustive look at any particular work in relation to the rest of Moore's stuff - so, for example, Neonomicon is rated a couple pages in one of the essays near the back, but Moore's "The Courtyard" is never mentioned at all as far as I can find.
It's hard to say that any one part of Moore's work has been neglected, though the essays in the book obviously skew toward the big ones: Promethea, Swamp Thing, Ballad of Halo Jones, The Killing Joke, From Hell, Lost Girls, V for Vendetta, and even the chapter on Fanny Hill he made up for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier. Watchmen is somewhat underrepresented, but that's probably only because those essays rated their own book.
The stand-out oddity is "The Poles of Wantonness: Male Asexuality in Alan Moore Film Adaptations" - which is bizarre because not only does Alan Moore have relatively little to do with his adaptations, but he often openly hates them. Honestly, the film adaptation bit is more of a talking-point to address the fact that Alan Moore sometimes chooses to use deliberately asexual characters - characters for whom asexuality is a preference just as other people may be instinctively heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, etc. Sadly, the author - Evan Torner - appears to have trouble really coming to grips with the subject, and falls back and forth between the film adaptations Moore had almost nothing to do with, Moore's own writing, and very stolid references back to Sartre and academic definitions of sex-whatever. Still, even with Torner's fumbling there are a few interesting insights to stumble across in his essay.
Or maybe the weird one is the third essay with its ludicrously long title:
By Joseph Michael Sommers.When "One Bad Day" Becomes One Dark Knight, Love, Madness, and Obsession in the Adaptation of The Killing Joke into Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight
Now, let me be clear that both of these essays are fine for what they want to do - examine the crux of the comics-to-film zeitgeist. I might have suggested they do it somewhere else, since the rest of the book talks about mainly comics, but it's a fair cop. I think both essentially miss the point a bit, however. Also, Joseph Michael Sommers is going to hell for using the phrase "Transmedia Dialogue" - and in a section heading, no less.
I really like Zoe Brigley-Thompson's "Theorizing Sexual Domination in From Hell and Lost Girls" because she starts off with Gail Simone's Women in Refrigerators. If you're going to be talking about sex and women in comics, that's a great start. Better yet, it's a start that your average internet-savvy comics reader can grab a hold of. It is erudite and sometimes political, but never strays too far off topic. In discussing From Hell, she even quotes Anne McClintock:
Nice.[C]ontrolling women's sexuality, exalting maternity and breeding a virile race of empire-builders were widely perceived as the paramount means fro controlling the health and wealth of the male imperial body politic.
So there is some good stuff in there - honest looks at what Moore has written, the context of it in the story, the philosophy behind it, some relation to his other work - but it is buried and needs digging out. I might have preferred a longer work on the subject, with wider coverage of everything he's written to give more perspective. As it is, I don't think there is any single essay I can point to as earth-shattering or terribly provocative - but that's par for the course as far as these things go.
