Posted in: Comics | Tagged:

Magic, Politics and Providence – Discussing Alan Moore and HP Lovecraft at the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studios

The Guardian newspaper just named Providence one of their best comic books of the decade, which is handily timed for one event happening this week. Oh, before I go any further, yes, Providence by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows is published by Avatar Press, the same publishers of Bleeding Cool. Needs to be said, The Guardian states,

The capstone to Moore's remarkable career in comics, Providence is a horror narrative of staggering depth and detail. The book works as a complex meditation on identity and morality, but it's also a huge addition to the body of narrative gamesmanship surrounding HP Lovecraft, who lived and worked in the city that gives the story its name. Providence (the comic) at first appears to be a collection of oblique, linked short stories and then resolves into a gigantic vision of inevitable – providential – destruction, wrought by countless tiny, familiar failures. Burrows' magnificent, period-perfect art fills each panel with so much earthbound detail that the supernatural intrusions are not merely jarring but genuinely shocking, subverting the reader's senses of time and place in ways that only comics can manage.

This Thursday sees The London branch of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studios is hosting an evening dubbed Magic and politics in Alan Moore and Jacen Burrow's adaptations of Lovecraft. Held in the Swedenborg Hall from 7-10pm, tickets £12,

Alan Moore reports that, through researching his latest adaptation of HP Lovecraft's life and work, Providence, he 'became more fully acquainted with academic literary criticism'. The extensive evidence of research throughout the series supports this claim. In this talk, I argue that Providence uses the comics form to assert the value of humanities research, and of the arts more broadly. The comics series educates its audience in reading and research practices (some of which are more providential than others). My focus– like Moore's and, arguably, like Lovecraft's — is on the relationships between imagination and the historical realities of readers; the discussion maps Moore's reworking of Lovecraft onto current political turmoil in Britain and the US via Moore's underlying premise that we can trace the origins of our contemporary moment through the societal anxieties encoded in Lovecraft's fiction. The analysis combines key concepts from adaptation studies, comics studies and postmodern theory to help us understand the way in which Providence uses the comics medium to put into practice Moore's hopes concerning the world altering potential of art and scholarship. Put differently, I will be discussing some of the less obvious ways in which Lovecraft has been deployed by one of Britain's most prolific contemporary magicians – Matthew Green, Associate Professor in English Literature, Faculty of Arts at The University of Nottingham.

I fear I am otherwise engaged that night at something called Troopers, so in my stead, here's a small gift. Call it a statistical datapoint to add to the many… take this scene.

And compare it to this front page of Young Men of America, May 1886.

The man on the right is James Gordon Bennett Jr, a wealthy newspaper publisher and also a madman. He had a brief dalliance with Jennie Spencer, mother of Winston Churchill, and nearly got her killed one time – long before she became a Churchill. On such small moments, history can spin…

Anyway, hope that adds to your excitement for Thursday.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!