Post 1: Magus - Transdisciplinary Approaches to Alan Moore

(kate laity and Mac singer)

On the 28th and 29th May I headed to Nottingham for an academic conference on Alan Moore. It's a strange thing to someone without a Phd to spend two days listening to papers providing deep analysis of particular aspects of Moore's work. Strange, but fascinating and i'm pleased to say that in addition to learning some fantastic new words (chronotopes is a fave) I did manage to follow most of it. About 40 people attended over the weekend and everyone seemed to be having a good time. The team did a good job pulling the event together and everything appeared to run smoothly (appearance is everything). I'm not going to go into detail on every panel I went to or we'll be here days, I took copious notes though.

Friday
Once everyone was gathered and registered Nathan did a short and entertaining introduction to the weekend followed by a keynote paper by Paul Gravett who focused on the idea of "something from nothing" and focused on some of Moore's less commercially popular works like "big numbers" and "small killings", outside of the fantasy work he is so well known for. After a q&a with Paul (who is lovely) and several more titles added to my wishlist, we moved on to the first panels.

The first panel was "The Magic of Place".
Starting off was Rikke Cortsen from The University Copenhagen on "Building Fictional Worlds: On the Construction of Place in Alan Moore's 'Top Ten'.
Rikke has explored the 'construction of chronotope' through this particular series of comics and it's spin offs identifying many of the specific event spaces, in describing chronotopes she quoted Bakhtin naming them as 'the place where the knots of the narrative are tied and untied'. I'd never heard the term before but it was a good presentation and I was mostly able to keep up.

The next paper on the panel was Kate Laity's presentation "Rite here: Ritual, performance and the magick of place". Kate came from The College of Saint Rose USA.
This was an entertaining and informative panel looking at Moore's performance works and indeed Kate began by casting her circle and her watchtowers to cast a spell on us all, which she definitely did. Physical place is important in Moore's work and Kate examined the speculative city and the personal geography that people create. Walking around her own London, listening to Moore in his London exploring Blake's London. There is a physical city of London and none of us experience it the same way.

Later I had to choose between two streams.
"I attended Chaotic Criminality: The Villains of Alan Moore"
Starting with a video conference presentation by Geoff Klock (Borough of Manhatten Community College) on V for Villain. Geoff covered the issue of V being a villain, certainly not everyone would see him that way and the character is kept in every way ambiguous, not even revealing the face or enough of the body to determine gender (keep in mind the focus is on the novel not the film). He compared V to Macbeth and considers that perhaps V is set up as a hero in part because the people and structure that he is fighting are so much more abhorrent. It was an engaging presentation although the thoughts at times seemed a little scattered.

Mervie Miettinen (University of Tempere) was up next considering "The past as multiple choice? - Textual Anarchy in the Killing Joke".
Mervie's focus is on Joker's loss of memory and alternate origin stories (for movie fans, not dissimilar in concept to the Joker's alternate stories in Dark Knight). She considers that different writers have reimagined the Jokers origins over time and none is more true than the others, however familiar tropes of the Batman/Joker relationship always appear in some form to maitain the relationship with the reader or viewer.

Finishing the panel Laura Hilton (University of Birmingham UK) presented her paper on "Reincarnating Mina Murray: Subverting the Gothic Heroine" where she looked at the figure of Mina in the original Bram Stoker and considered her varying roles as Gothic Heroine and New Woman in the books of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the movie by the same name. It was interesting to see how elements of her original character had been used or ignored.

The last panel of the day was "No More Heroes Anymore?
First up was Antonio Venezia (Birkbec College) on "A Sense of History's Patterns" Mapping Northamption in The Voice of Fire and Big Numbers. The paper centred around psychogeography, the coreography or place and the cronology. The paper was interesting but the delivery a little dry makin git less memorable.

The final paper of the day came from Deneb Kozikowski Valereto )Leiden University) on "Philosophy in the Fairground The Killing Joke and Thoughts of Madness".
Couched in academic terms and referring to an ongoing disagreement about the nature of madness between two contemporary philosophers Deneb was essentially contemplating the same thing many batman fans have over the years, really who's the crazy one, The Joker or The Batman. Batman who really believes in what he is dong and lives with his psyche might well be crazier in some ways than the Joker who indulges in crazy as an "emergancy exit".

So it was a long and fascinating day and I was thoroughly worn out with thinking by the end of it. I took off with Kate Laity for a drink at a nearby dive and finished off Friday by unterviewing her but we will get to that in a few days.

I will write up Saturday tomorrow, but clearly it's a lot for one post, even dramatically compressed.