Depictions of musical activity with little or no definition of musical content

The most straightforward of the three categories of sounded music is the case in which the musical content is left primarily undefined. In V for Vendetta, during a scene set in a church service, following the conclusion of a prayer, a single panel shows an organ manual with a chord being depressed by the organist.Footnote ²⁷ The reader is given no information as to the detail of this musical event, beyond the fact that the organ (presumably) sounds in the church. A degree of ambiguity thus arises: is a single chord played in isolation at this moment (such as is often heard at the conclusion of a prayer during a church service), or is this a snapshot of the organist playing a longer piece such as a voluntary? In the case of a minor musical inclusion such as this, the sonic specifics are moot. The reader is free to understand the organ performance however they wish.

A more extensive presentation of music that leaves sonic detail undefined is found in the second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics bring together famous figures from nineteenth-century fantasy literature (such as Captain Nemo, Jekyll and Hyde, Mina Harker and Allan Quatermain) into one storyline and universe. These hypertextual comics provide opportunities for clever postmodern textual interplay. We will discuss intertextuality in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen below, but for now it is sufficient to examine a localized musical example. At several moments in the last two chapters of the second volume, Mr Hyde begins to sing and whistle.Footnote ²⁸

Hyde's whistling is often indicated by musical notes (though not notated score) inside speech bubbles.Footnote ²⁹ This use of musical notes as a symbol of music is similar to the way in which film subtitles sometimes display three crotchets enclosed in square brackets when musical underscore begins.Footnote ³⁰ The jaunty arrangement of the unstaffed, sometimes reversed, quavers and crotchets implies lively whistling, but, as in the inclusion of the organ chord in V for Vendetta, the specific musical content is not significant, and is left to the reader to imagine. Hyde's nonchalant attitude is sometimes given more specific vocalization, with ‘Tum tum tum tum te-tum …’ included in a speech bubble.Footnote ³¹ More significantly, however, in the first pages of the last chapter,Footnote ³² Hyde's monologue about death is followed by his return to whistling, again indicated by musical notes in a speech bubble.Footnote ³³ The visual presentation of these notes creates a sonic layering effect (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.Hyde whistles while London burns in the final chapter of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, ii. Moore and O'Neill, 2003: Chapter 6, p. 1. © Titan Books. Reproduced by kind permission of Titan Books.

Figure 1 shows the juxtaposition of Hyde's jolly whistling and the apocalyptic chaos of a London under attack by Martians from H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. By ‘zooming in’ on Hyde's whistling over two panels, a virtual point of hearing is created for the listener, as this whistling forms an auditory foreground to the burning city under siege in the background. This scene could even be understood to use anempathetic music,Footnote ³⁴ despite the largely undefined musical content.

In this ‘silent’ medium, Hyde's whistling and the organ in V for Vendetta call to mind the depiction of performed music and sound in another ‘silent’ form. Dominique Nasta and Melinda Szaloky have examined ‘visualized sound’ in silent film. The visual representation of a sonic event, such as bells or whistling, prompts viewers to imagine an audio incarnation of the visually depicted sound.Footnote ³⁵ The same processes of inferred or mental hearing occur in the comic. Szaloky describes how ‘visible sounds (i.e., sounds that are unmistakably implied by their source objects) are often explicitly visualized in order to make them more conspicuous and to suggest other meanings beside the obvious, that a certain sound has been produced by a certain object’.Footnote ³⁶ Nasta concludes that such sound elements can be used to ‘increas[e] the degree of audience participation’ as films ‘complicate their legible diegeses with hyperbolic aural figures that would attract the viewer's attention’.Footnote ³⁷ Again, the same can be true of the instances of ‘visualized sound’ in comics. These sounds, as distinct from sound sources that are shown but not narratively highlighted, are ‘visualized and accentuated by the distinctive use of a pictorial cinematic device’ (such as the close-up of Hyde's whistling) and ‘supply a “surplus” of meaning to the aesthetic experience of the film’.Footnote ³⁸ Comics similarly foreground certain instances of sonic, and particularly musical, visualized sound for the same Ricoeurian ‘surplus’:Footnote ³⁹ to create texts that prompt and invite interpretation. Furthermore, and as betrayed by the distinction of two types of ‘diegetic’ audio (the accentuated and the non-emphasized), the notion of ‘diegetic’ music in comics is complex. This issue is often foregrounded when comics use music that does not exist in the real world.

Newly created music in comics

Music in comics does not need to remain unspecific in the manner of Hyde's whistling, and can be musically defined to a greater or lesser extent, even within the same comic. V for Vendetta includes several instances of performed music, with musical detail that ranges from invoking a particular musical genre, to lyric allusion, to the inclusion of notated score in the comic. V for Vendetta follows the activities of V, a revenge-seeking masked terrorist rebelling against a totalitarian regime that controls a dystopian London of the near future. The comic begins with V destroying the Houses of Parliament as an act of protest. A police detective, Inspector Finch, is assigned to investigate V and, in doing so, unravels the mystery surrounding the origins of the vigilante. Finch is a protagonist who finds himself torn between his law-enforcement duties and his growing sympathy with V's cause. A young woman, Evey Hammond, becomes involved with V's activities, and ultimately becomes his successor, adopting V's Guy Fawkes mask as her own.

Lyric pastiche is significant for music in comics, since this is the primary way in which musical genre is communicated. In the church scene from V for Vendetta discussed earlier, the congregation sing a fascist hymn:

This hymn, clearly a parody of the Blake/Parry ‘Jerusalem’, is presented in a way that leaves less musical detail defined than in other musical performances in V for Vendetta, even if the musical genre is obviously established.

The hymn's text, an original verse by Moore, may be found approvingly cited on the website of the notorious neo-Nazi White Supremacist organization Stormfront. Moore's personal political beliefs, it should be clearly noted, are diametrically opposed to the values of Stormfront, and while its satirical intent was not lost on the Stormfront member who typed out and posted the entirety of its lyrics to the site, the hymn was nevertheless sufficiently striking for the reader to seek to disseminate the lyrics.Footnote ⁴¹ Both the strange afterlife of this hymn and a number of audio recordings of performances of other songs from V from Vendetta (discussed below) demonstrate that instances of musical performance and inclusion in comics are perceived by readers as distinct entities, are the focus of active interpretation, are understood as meaningful and can achieve an extra-comic life. It seems that Nasta's hypothesis of ‘visualized music’ as a prompt to active interpretation is as evident, if not more so, in comics as it is in silent film.

A more extensive performance occurs in a cabaret club in V for Vendetta, and is presented in such a manner that the reader is given the architecture of a musical entity. In this situation, readers can elaborate imaginatively as much or as little as they wish upon the scaffold provided. The cabaret song is carefully paced throughout the sequence in the comic so as to imply certain verse and phrase structures. In the Kitty Kat Keller club, a chanteuse performs a cabaret song.Footnote ⁴² The song performance is distributed through a sequence of panels in such a way as to imply the musical-lyrical structure of the song (see Table 1). The rhyming wit of the Kitty Kat Keller song is part of the way in which the genre of the cabaret song is securely invoked,Footnote ⁴³ just as the lyrical parody of ‘Jerusalem’ implied the musical genre of the hymn, but the layout of the lyrics further defines the musical performance. The Kitty Kat Keller song does not maintain a strict syllabic structure, but the line variation and rhyme scheme create a distinct sense of musical and lyrical phrasing, which is assisted by the spacing and presentation of the text in the panels. What are initially presented as two distinct phrases (p. 125, panel 2, bubble 1; and p. 125, panel 3, bubble 1) are later combined in one bubble, though for the reader the two-period construction of the phrase is retained in the combined instance. Moore uses ‘Dada dada dada da’ to demarcate the chorus and represent a melodic hook (possibly an antiphonal instrumental response to the sung lines), even though, of course, any such melody is only implied and constructed by the reader. Along with the spacing of the ‘da's, hyphens are used to communicate the singer's vocal articulation (‘at-ti-tude’), while ellipses are used to imply first a non-tonic melodic resolution, and second, during the final chorus, a ritardando into the body of the final chorus, in the time-honoured singalong fashion.

From the visual and verbal architecture that Moore presents to the reader, the musical entity seems to appear almost in contrasting relief, with only the outline of the song in evidence in the text. The reader may create a virtual melody that conforms to the frame provided by the text, but it will probably remain inexplicitly defined and unsounded. For all of the parameters set by Moore in the comic, he encourages the reader to perform an exercise in mental composition – the reader may create any melody that they ‘imagine’ the singer performs. Whereas a novel without images invites a reader to imagine their own visual incarnation of the action, in this visual (but silent) literary medium, the reader imagines their own musical realization of the song.

The Kitty Kat Keller song supplies a musical outline, but another sequence in the comic provides very explicit musical detail. One chapter in V for Vendetta features notated musical score. The chapter, ‘This Vicious Cabaret’, appears a third of the way through the complete comic, and is presented as a song sung by V.Footnote ⁴⁴ The pages of the chapter include a monophonic vocal line in musical notation that quite literally underscores a montage of scenes in comic panels showing developments in the lives of the book's main characters after the events of the last ‘act’ (Figure 2). For the reader, this five-page chapter approximates a film montage, with a score that simultaneously smooths over disjunctive ‘cuts’ between disparate subjects/locations/points of view and provides a certain perceptual distance from the characters and plotlines. This middle-distance perspective is appropriate for a review of the principal characters and their respective statuses before the next ‘act’ of the narrative commences. Perhaps the most striking component of this ‘underscored’ chapter is the way in which the music serves to apply a temporal and sonic frame to a medium that usually leaves these properties only loosely defined. Particularly for a musician (and to a lesser extent for a reader who is not literate in, or only vaguely familiar with, musical notation),Footnote ⁴⁵ reading the music and lyrics alongside the images creates a sense of pace, if not strictly rhythm per se, as the panels gain a temporal quality.

Figure 2.‘This Vicious Cabaret’ (excerpt). From V for Vendetta. Moore and Lloyd, 2005: p. 89. © DC Comics. Used with Permission.

Kurt Weill has been an influence on Moore throughout his career, and Weill's spectre can often be detected in the musical inclusions that Moore uses in his comics. ‘This Vicious Cabaret’ takes the form of a Weill-like cabaret song. The song lyrics use theatre (‘cabaret’ and ‘grand opera’) as a metaphor for the lives performed by citizens under the dictatorship of the book's villain, Adam Susan. V's lyrical narration betrays his omniscience as he describes the other characters in the comic and hints at events yet to occur with a degree of insight usually reserved for authorial voices. In articulating V's power through his knowledge and MC-like presentation, the metaphor of the theatrical cabaret is emphasized. V is able to see through the parade of inauthenticity and view the totalitarian dystopia as a macabre musical-theatrical production. V's role as MC is an appropriate allegory of his role as a freedom fighter: he operates as a liminal entity, at once outside the regimented order of musical productions (understood to stand metaphorically for autocratic control) and able to influence the ‘performance’.Footnote ⁴⁶ V is thus in a position to disrupt the regime's control, just as an MC both is involved in a musical-theatrical production as an actor/performer and mediates between the audience and the fictional narrative, implicitly aware of the inauthentic nature of the performance.

When readers encounter the pages of this chapter, the way in which they engage with the text changes; even the landscape printing of this section's pages in a volume usually viewed in portrait orientation requires a different physical perspective on the text. For many readers, the music printed on the page will sound in their imagination, creating a virtual sonic event.Footnote ⁴⁷ Even if the reader is not able to understand musical notation, or is unwilling to follow the contours and spaces of the score, the lyrics invoke the genre of cabaret songs, and real-world knowledge of such songs is recalled by the reader. By including a song in the comic text, a rather blunt metaphor is made more compelling as the parallel between musical theatre and totalitarian control is enacted, rather than simply being described; in creating a virtually sounding song in the minds of the readers, V for Vendetta itself is momentarily turned into a musical-theatrical construct, with all of the ironic and self-aware implications this entails for a text that uses cabaret as a metaphor.

Beyond the specific ways in which it can be ‘read’ as narration, and the strong intertextual links to the musical Cabaret (which deals with fascism and cabaret in a different formulation) and perhaps also the song ‘On Broadway’ (The Drifters, 1963), this song serves a more general purpose for the reader. The reader is explicitly prompted to seek meaning from the combination of words, music and images in the text, just as Nasta claims that visualized sound in silent film provokes significant audience engagement with the text and offers a proliferation of possible meanings. ‘This Vicious Cabaret’ is similarly open for interpretation. As with many instances of music in Moore's comics, the reader is not directed to understand the musical inclusion in one specific way. This ambiguity suggests that the reader's act of interpretation is more significant than the particular conclusions they draw. In opening up a text for interpretation in a non-prescriptive way, Moore encourages his audience to engage with the comic in a personal and actively investigative way. He thus emphasizes the hermeneutic possibilities of the text, and of texts more generally, by using music. Perhaps this is part of the reason why Moore's work has been received by readers as more ‘meaningful’ than other, more prosaic, comics.

‘This Vicious Cabaret’ also foregrounds issues connected to the notion of ‘diegetic’ music in comics. The terms ‘diegetic’ and ‘non-diegetic’ music have been used extensively in film criticism as a binary opposition distinguishing between music that is understood to sound in the story world (diegetic) and that which does not (non-diegetic).Footnote ⁴⁸ Recent scholarship has criticized these terms for being simplistic,Footnote ⁴⁹ and the nature of the comic medium further complicates notions of such a division. Much of the difference between music in comics and music in film derives from the lack of an actualized soundtrack.Footnote ⁵⁰ For example, there is much that the reader simply does not know about the performance of ‘This Vicious Cabaret’. Because of the absence of audio, there is no indication of the acoustic space or context in which the song is performed. There is no defined audience for the song, except for the reader, and when the song is later shown in the comic as sounding on a gramophone in a room,Footnote ⁵¹ this complicates matters further: who recorded this song? When did V make this recording (if he is singing it on the record)? The song problematizes the non-diegetic/diegetic division and seems to enact Ben Winters's suggestion that even what has been termed ‘non-diegetic music’ should be thought of as ‘belonging to the same narrative space as the characters and their world’.Footnote ⁵² The moment of music in ‘This Vicious Cabaret’ may be understood as similarly ‘connected’, rather than non-diegetically ‘disconnected’, as narrator and narrated subjects collapse into one another. Unlike in film, where viewers share hearing a ‘diegetic’ song with the characters, the comic reader is not privy to the audio that the characters perform and hear, and the only world in which this character-performed song is heard actually to sound is the reader's world – in their own performance or when listening to a recorded version of the song. To whose diegesis does it now belong? The song problematizes notions of diegetic space and its relationship with narrating music by capitalizing upon one of the differences between film and comics: the lack of audio. The ambiguity, however, is not restrictive, but rather liberatory, as meanings and interpretations are opened for the reader's own imaginative play.

The music for ‘This Vicious Cabaret’ was composed to Moore's lyrics by musician David J (real name David John Haskins). J and Moore have collaborated on a variety of musical and performance art projects, both before and after V for Vendetta. J composed music to Moore's lyrics for ‘This Vicious Cabaret’ under instructions from Moore that dictated the musical style of the song and tempo/pacing during certain sections.Footnote ⁵³ Moore was keen to work in a collaborative way with J: he sought a musically satisfying song, even if his original lyrics had to be changed. In Moore's initial letter of instruction to J, he wrote:

J recorded the song, which was released on a 12-inch EP entitled V for Vendetta, with two compositions that were more generally inspired by the comic (‘V's Theme’ and ‘Incidental’). This record was produced in 1984,Footnote ⁵⁵ roughly contemporary with the publication of the issue of V for Vendetta that contained the chapter ‘This Vicious Cabaret’.

In 2005, J returned to the comic V for Vendetta. This time, however, rather than being involved with the creation of the comic text, he composed a song based on the Kitty Kat Keller song. In this case, a musical performance in a comic is used as the basis for a musical composition. J, however, takes artistic liberty with the source – while the lyrics from the comic are retained, the gender of the singer is switched from female to male. As an analogue to the setting of pre-existing poems in the art-music tradition, J's ‘Song from the Kitty Kat Keller’ is a musical setting of the comic text.

For those readers of V for Vendetta who listen to J's recordings, the music is provided for an otherwise virtual performance. This epitext (to borrow Gérard Genette's term) may impact upon, and possibly enrich, the reader's/listener's understanding of the comic.Footnote ⁵⁶ For the reader that hears J's interpretation of the songs, his versions may replace the reader's own creation (in the case of the Kitty Kat Keller song) or their own interpretation of the music (in the case of ‘This Vicious Cabaret’), but this effect probably varies on a case-by-case basis. The recordings could be understood as forming a soundtrack to the comic, as they give a voice to the silent characters and turn the virtual into the sonically real.

The examples of newly created music in V for Vendetta show a range of musical definition, and although the hymn and the Kitty Kat Keller song do not challenge the notions of music in this fictional diegesis in the way that ‘This Vicious Cabaret’ does, each instance nevertheless seeks to prompt the reader to be heavily engaged with the text. This involvement with the performed music foregrounds (and cultivates) the active role of the reader in interpreting and understanding the text. This ‘prompt to interpretation’ is central to Moore's use of music, and he often uses pre-existing music to serve the same purpose.

Pre-existing music in comics

Unlike the cases described in the preceding two sections, if a piece of music exists in the real world, and especially if it is well known, the reader may accurately ‘fill in’ the sound of music in the virtual world by applying their existing knowledge to the world with which they are presented. This approach avoids the ambiguity inherent in the inclusion of new or unspecified music.

In V for Vendetta, V plays to Evey recorded music that has been banned by the government, and explains that the song is ‘Dancing in the Street’ by Martha and the Vandellas. Given this reference, the reader can recall the music and interpret Evey's reaction to the song in relation to this audio stimulus, even though the lyrics of the song are not printed.Footnote ⁵⁷ Just as when pre-existing music is used in film, pre-existing music in comics engages with the song's extant musical associations and content; in the case of ‘Dancing in the Street’, the song is contextualized so as to emphasize the revolutionary agenda in its lyrics. To dance on the streets of V for Vendetta's London would indeed be an act of defiance – in this situation, the song reads as a call to arms for a coming rebellion that V, in the comic story, will engineer. The totalitarian government in V for Vendetta is characterized as racist and homophobic. The Motown track's status as (primarily) African American music means that, aside from the revolutionary overtones of the song, it is doubly illicit, alluded to when V responds to Evey's comment that Martha's voice ‘doesn't even sound English’ by saying that the government ‘eradicated some cultures more thoroughly than they did others. No Tamla and no Trojan. No Billie Holiday or Black Uhuru’.Footnote ⁵⁸ ‘Dancing in the Street’, as a song sung by an African American group and released on an African American label, represents that which has been eradicated in V for Vendetta both from the contemporary present and from the historical past. The discussion about ‘Dancing in the Street’ serves as a way of articulating the main themes of V for Vendetta – those of power, censorship and the media.

The ‘virtual soundtrack’ created through using pre-existing music is not always as straightforwardly deployed as in the instance of ‘Dancing in the Street’. In a chapter later in the same book, a brawl breaks out in the Kitty Kat Keller while a singer performs ‘Roll Out the Barrel’.Footnote ⁵⁹ If Hyde's whistling was implicitly anempathetic, this is explicitly so. ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ is staged in ironic counterpoint alongside a violent fight precipitated by a vocal outburst by Robert (a minor character in the book). Robert succumbs to desperate frustration when a police chief informs him of his intention to send Robert's mother to be executed at a concentration camp. Robert's anger is vented in the form of a tirade at the club patrons: ‘We shouldn't have to live like this! […] I wish the bastard bomb had 'it bastard London! […] I wish we were all dead! It'd be better!’Footnote ⁶⁰ Such defiance cannot be tolerated, and as off-duty policemen leap to attack Robert, the singer continues ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ undeterred.

The lyrics of the song's performance, and the action of Robert's outburst and the brawl, are synchronized for maximum ironic effect, as shown in Table 2. ‘Let's have a song of good cheer’, for example, is juxtaposed with Robert's cry of ‘I wish we were all dead!’; and the ‘gang’ who are ‘all here’ are seen to refer to the police officers who violently attack Robert.

‘Roll Out the Barrel’ utilizes careful deployment of lyrics (as in the Kitty Kat Keller song) and pre-known musical sonics (as in ‘Dancing in the Street’). The specificity of the comic's description of the diegetic musical event runs to the definition of the particular piece of music in question and the temporal correspondence of action and music. A sense of dramatic pacing is given to the sequence, most obvious in the final panels of the comic page, where the rate of one word per panel depicts the club's quick descent into chaos. Like ‘This Vicious Cabaret’, temporal specificity is applied to a medium in which time is usually only vaguely defined.

Pre-existing music is a feature of many media, and this moment recalls the use of songs as ironic commentary in films. Jeff Smith assesses such instances in film using three criteria: ‘the pun's perceptual saliency, its narrative function, and its bisociative qualities’.Footnote ⁶¹ Regarding ‘perceptual saliency’, Smith comments that in film:

In a comic, however, where there is no ‘mix’ at all, and musical inclusions do not compete for sonic space, readers may be more inclined to pay ‘specific attention to the music’. Rather than requiring a ‘subsequent viewing’, the reader is given time to appreciate the interrelations between strands of narration and audio material, and to interrogate such complex presentations for possible meanings, on first encounter. Even if a degree of temporal definition of the diegetic action is provided by the comic text (as in the case of ‘Roll Out the Barrel’), the reader is not confined to perceiving the action in the time that it takes for the performance to occur. Nor, as is the case with film (manual intervention on viewing technology aside), is the reader limited to perceiving the narrative in the single temporal definition that the text presents – as in, for example, a slow-motion shot. The temporally unlocked comic reader can move about the page, reading forwards and backwards, and stopping to interrogate any one moment of music/action synchronization.Footnote ⁶³ Thus, while Smith clarifies that he does not ‘mean to suggest here that audiences actively listen and comprehend song lyrics during the course of a film’,Footnote ⁶⁴ the reader of the comic, with the benefit of the medium's audio and chronological properties, does exactly that. The silent medium of the comic removes the compulsory temporality of sounded music when it is cited on the page, while paradoxically using the associated temporal properties of the musical reference to depict a chronology of events.Footnote ⁶⁵

‘Roll Out the Barrel’ is well known enough for most readers to be able to conjure the sonic object from their memories and apply it to the sequence (with the temporal qualities this reference brings). ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ is firmly associated with nostalgia, and particularly connected with wartime entertainment. The song is chosen by Moore for the darkly humorous effect that is created when this cheery celebration of comradeship is ironically recontextualized in V for Vendetta's dystopian London during a moment when safety, fun and friendliness are furthest from one citizen's experience of society. It is, to use Smith's vocabulary, heavily narrativized: no ‘throwaway gag’, it serves as a significant moment in the plot and ‘suggest[s] a particular sociocultural milieu’ through its musical generic and historical associations.Footnote ⁶⁶

This scene is an example of Moore's use of pre-existing songs to create a dramatic moment that portrays, through cold irony, an understanding of a fictional world. Smith's third criterion, ‘bisociative qualities’, relates to such instances of the ‘juxtaposition of lyrics or title of a particular song and the situation depicted in the narrative’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Bisociation, a term coined by Arthur Koestler, refers to ‘the perceiving of a situation or idea […] in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Koestler and Smith discuss bisociation in puns, where two frames of interpretation are juxtaposed to create humorous incongruity. While such incongruity is evident in the apposition of the jolly lyrics and affect of ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ to the brutal action it accompanies, this idea is also valuable for considering a wider aspect of Moore's work. The presentation of multiple concurrent interpretative frames is a recurring feature of Moore's comic writing. It is often a significant component of his use of music and can even lead the reader to consider the comics themselves as musical-performative.

Comics as virtual musical theatre

In the third volume of Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, subtitled Century, Moore explicitly and obviously constructs his comics as musical-performative, particularly musical-theatrical, entities. Recalling the use of unstaffed notes to indicate Hyde's whistling in earlier issues of the comic, Moore uses quavers and crotchets surrounding speech bubbles to indicate sung texts (see Figures 4–5). The colour of the notes is particular to each singing character. Some of these songs emanate from the unspecific ether, but most are shown to be sung by characters in the comic. Each of the three chapters of Century includes songs that lyrically map onto numbers from Brecht/Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper, though it is the first chapter that is explicitly a reworking of The Threepenny Opera.

Figure 4.Suky Tawdry sings the final words of the first verse of ‘Pirate Jenny’ in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, [iii]: Century, Chapter 1: ‘1910’. Moore and O'Neill, 2009: p. 26. © Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. Reproduced by kind permission of Knockabout Comics.

Figure 5.Jack Macheath sings his ‘Grave Inscription’ in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, [iii]: Century, Chapter 1: ‘1910’. Moore and O'Neill, 2009: p. 58. © Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. Reproduced by kind permission of Knockabout Comics.

In the first chapter of Century, entitled ‘1910’, Moore creates virtual musical theatre through the staging of a reworked version of The Threepenny Opera.Footnote ⁸⁸ A significant proportion of the dialogue in ‘1910’ is sung; the songs from the opera act as plot nodes that anchor the comic's action. Moore borrows elements of the narrative from The Threepenny Opera, which are intertwined with new plot material featuring the regular League of Extraordinary Gentlemen protagonists. One of Moore's embellishments to The Threepenny Opera, for example, is supplied through the premiss that Jack the Ripper and Macheath are one and the same person. The singular identity of Jack/Mack is explicitly revealed midway through the comic, when Jack walks into Act 3, scene ii of Berg's Lulu singing ‘Mack the Knife’ and kills Countess Geschwitz and Lulu (who screams her Todesschrei, just as she does in the opera).Footnote ⁸⁹

Moore securely references the Threepenny Opera songs throughout Century by creating lyrics that invoke the Brecht/Weill material. His new sung texts do not replicate the Threepenny Opera lyrics directly, but are similar to the opera's libretto and match the melodic rhythm and repetition schemes of the Weill songs. Just as in the Kitty Kat Keller song, Moore uses the presentation of the sung text in Century not only to suggest the rhythm and phrasing of a song, but also to establish the sung material as mapping directly onto a song from The Threepenny Opera, despite the altered lyrics. It is straightforward to identify the four songs that are used in the first chapter of Century, and the repeated songs use different lyrics upon each reprise (see Tables 3–4). Readers of the comic have easily recognized the songs that Moore used as his models, and their investigation has been assisted by the credit to Weill and Brecht printed inside the front cover of the comic.Footnote ⁹⁰

‘1910’ is a gloss on the Weill/Brecht Threepenny Opera and John Gay's Beggar's Opera before it. It takes the form of a revenge narrative for Jenny Diver, who works at the Cuttlefish Hotel. Jenny's centrality to the text is emphasized by the refrain-like repetition of the ‘Pirate Jenny’ song throughout the comic. Moore's lyrics for the songs are sometimes closer to the German text, and at others more similar to Marc Blitzstein's English-language version. Even when Moore departs significantly from the sentiment of either established version, the strategic use of particular words or phrases links the Century lyrics with those of The Threepenny Opera. Unlike Blitzstein's translation, which moderates the more acerbic parts of the text, Moore accentuates the gritty and vulgar tone of Brecht's lyrics (see Table 4).

Moore's version of The Threepenny Opera seeks to be a substantial reworking and rendering of the source materials, rather than a simple quotation of the songs. He thus places himself alongside Gay and Weill/Brecht/Blitzstein in elaborating upon a central story shared by all three versions of The Threepenny/Beggar's Opera. For instance, Moore creates new histories for characters – Jenny Diver (a character from The Beggar's Opera) is an assumed name in Century: Jenny is Janni Dakkar, daughter of Captain Nemo. The ‘black ship’ in the lyrics of ‘Pirate Jenny’ comes to refer to the Nautilus, which destroys the dockside town in an act of revenge for the mistreatment of Jenny/Janni by the local population. Suky Tawdry is given a greater role in Moore's version of the story: she acts as an omniscient musical narrator, singing of the revenge that will soon be exacted.Footnote ⁹¹ Moore elaborates upon the original sources through new lyrics, a refocusing of the plot, providing new backstories to characters and intertextual connections that enrich the characters and situations.

Century is an unusually performative comic. Apart from references to staged works like Lulu and The Threepenny/Beggar's Opera, the comic's sense of performance, of staging the musical, is accentuated by several features of the presentation of the songs. Perhaps most obviously, the characters are distinctly represented as singing, with mouths wide open in expressions of bel canto fortitude (see Figures 4–5). This is no internalized singing monologue – the characters sing out loud, and they are also heard by other characters to be singing. The musical theatre conventions are doubly embodied when Macheath's ‘Grave Inscription’ is introduced by the following text:

Not only is this moment a typical (and heavy-handed) ‘cue for a song’, but saying and singing are treated by the principal characters as interchangeable. Both of these theatrical clichés enhance the sense of a staged piece of musical theatre.

The singing characters are carefully drawn to suggest a melodramatic performance. Figure 4, for example, shows the last lyrics of Suky's first rendition of ‘Pirate Jenny’. Her bodily gestures, exaggerated facial expressions and direct gaze towards the reader/audience all suggest a sense of a staged performance, one that has been directorially ‘blocked’. The structure of the comic even seems to approach a musical-dramatic formal arrangement: the last few pages of the comic, which stages ‘What Keeps Mankind Alive’, appears like a traditional operatic finale, featuring solo passages and a duet, and even shows a chorus line of prostitutes singing and dancing to the song.

Century's performative staging of the musical/operatic action of The Threepenny/Beggar's Opera acts as a microcosm of the whole League of Extraordinary Gentlemen project, which is founded upon the concept of an intertextual combination of pre-existing texts. Genette refers to ‘any text derived from a previous text’ as a ‘hypertext’, and distinguishes two types of hypertextual relationship: transformation and imitation.Footnote ⁹³ Century includes both types of relationship, since it both transforms aspects of The Threepenny Opera and includes substantial new material in imitation of the Brecht/Weill style. This variety allows Century to encompass ‘moods’ (as Genette calls them) as diverse as ‘parody’, ‘pastiche’ and straightforward ‘transposition’ of the songs to comic form. For those who have read Century, the comic seems like a supplemental text to the opera, enriching the characters and plots through intertextual elaboration and the variety of hypertextual processes.

The Threepenny Opera songs serve as a recurring theme throughout all three chapters of Century, binding the volume together. The remaining two chapters of Century (‘1969’ and ‘2009’) do not rely on The Threepenny Opera as much as the first, but Weill's songs are in evidence (see Table 5), alongside other musical performances, such as a song modelled on ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ performed by the comic's analogue for the Rolling Stones at a free concert in Hyde Park.Footnote ⁹⁴ The Threepenny Opera songs are performed in different styles, depending on the chronology of the story: in 1977, the punk group Zuki and the Tawdries sing ‘Immoral Earnings (in the UK)’,Footnote ⁹⁵ while in 2009, Spooky Tawdry raps a version of the ‘Cannon Song’.Footnote ⁹⁶ That no music is audible in the comic avoids the potentially awkward, aesthetically risky or complex rearrangement of Threepenny Opera songs into new musical styles. In a similar fashion to Tawdry's performance of ‘Pirate Jenny’ in ‘1910’, in ‘2009’ the three verses of the ‘Cannon Song’ are spread throughout the chapter, as a musical refrain. The rap's lyrics are a direct commentary on the main characters in the comic – Tawdry is once again an omniscient musical narrator. Tawdry's ‘Cannon Song’ demonstrates the privileged status of musical expression in Century, something that is borne out in the final song of Century: when Quatermain and Harker reunite after a 40-year separation, their emotionally charged reconciliation takes the form of the ‘Instead-Of Song’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Singing is still a significant component of the comic and of the expressive mode of the characters, even if the plot of The Threepenny Opera is left behind in Chapter 1.

Century draws upon The Threepenny/Beggar's Opera as sources to create a virtual musical-theatrical text. This musical-theatrical performance is played out in the reader's imagination, deployed through Moore's understanding of the ‘musical’ properties of the comic medium. The musical performances interact with the concurrent action of the comic in Moore's well-rehearsed ‘narrative counterpoint’, while the Threepenny/Beggar's Opera source(s) are invoked in order to generate ‘sparks of meaning’ as intertextual reference piles upon intertextual reference and palimpsestic texts are placed in dialogue with each other, to their mutual enrichment. The citation of the Threepenny Opera songs in an ostentatious way (just like the other forms of ‘visualized sound’ discussed earlier) prompts readers to begin active investigative interpretation of the comic: they are encouraged to find associations and resonances between the two bisociative frames of the songs and plots of The Threepenny/Beggar's Opera and the action/songs in Century – the sparks of meaning are created through the dialogue between the sources that feed into the comic.

Moore's version of The Threepenny Opera might be seen to be a fulfilment of Brecht's ‘epic opera’ concept. As Stephen Hinton writes, quoting Brecht, ‘[Brecht's] central idea behind epic opera, which he saw principally in terms of an antithesis to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, was the “separation of the elements”.’Footnote ⁹⁸ What could be a greater process of separation in a piece of musical theatre than to silence the music completely? Hinton continues:

The nature of the comic medium directly matches these demands for epic opera: it is essentially non-linear, jumpy and montage-like, and involves fixation on individual isolated ‘moments’ or ‘scenes’, as each panel is a discrete entity. Comics may be considered as predisposed to accentuating Brechtian values: as Annalisa Di Liddo puts it, comics are ‘an intrinsically performative medium […] where the illusion of mimesis is incessantly broken by the blatant antirealism of the lines that intertwine on the page’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Furthermore, the projected ‘inscriptions’ that replace dialogue in Brecht/Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny seem similar to comic speech bubbles. If, as Hinton has suggested, ‘the very idea of opera is at loggerheads with the central notion behind epic Verfremdung [distancing]’, because of the ‘modes of delivery: speech on the one hand and song on the other’,Footnote ¹⁰¹ Moore has succeeded in creating an epic opera through minimizing this distinction in a format that contains no sonic content. Dramatic illusion is thwarted because of the entirely virtual (and silent) nature of this performance.

The musical-performative dimension of Century is deployed in such a way that it becomes a major component of the text, and a significant part of its narrative arsenal. Through the musical performance, Century ‘thickens’ the text through intertextual association, while making explicit the theatrical nature of the comic. Moore's aspirations for the text are also revealed by the choice of The Threepenny Opera: that most highbrow of low art, and lowbrow of high art (to paraphrase Hans Keller).Footnote ¹⁰² The Threepenny Opera, itself a distinctly hypertextual work, is the perfect musical source to use and rework in a comic book series that emphasizes the joy of intertextual synthesis and fantastic performance.