Performing Form and Playing in Print: Comics in Oxford’s Other Paper

5 february

Speaker: Maggie Gray (Kingston University)

One of Alan Moore’s earliest comics, ‘St Pancras Panda’ (1978-9), appeared in Oxford community paper the Backstreet Bugle. Renowned as a scriptwriter, Moore started off as a cartoonist, and with this strip consolidated not only the acute social satire and genre iconoclasm that would characterise his writing, but a ludic and performative graphic style, refracting a countercultural aesthetics that bridged the underground and alternative press. This paper will explore the politics of Moore’s playful, self-reflexive cartooning by attending to the relationship between the strip and the paper it was printed in, in terms of outlook, visual design and material production.


Oxford Comics Network, TORCH Networks