Year 2: Alan Moore and the Green

ST203 American Gothic

Moore's longest story: the creature dissolved and regrown, sent by a stranger called Constantine across an America where every town has a horror, from radioactive waste to vampires, werewolves, the legacy of slavery and a house built for guns, toward a darkness older than the world. What the storyline says about a nation, and what "American Gothic" means as a mode.

6 lessons 6 units 2 assignments

Introduction

After "Rite of Spring", the comic changes shape. "The Nukeface Papers" (#35 to #36) dissolves the creature in radioactive waste; "Growth Patterns" (#37, June 1985) grows him back and introduces a blond man in a trench coat who knows more than he says. John Constantine sends Swamp Thing on a journey across the United States, and each stop is a horror: a lake town with something in the water, a werewolf, a plantation where the past will not stay buried, a house built by a gun fortune, and at the end a cult in South America and a darkness that predates creation. The storyline is called American Gothic, it runs to #50 (July 1986), and it is the run's largest structure.

This module reads it as two things at once. As a Gothic road story: the wandering monster of ST101, now with a purpose and a guide, meeting the sub-genres of Year One one by one. And as a political anatomy of a country, written by an Englishman in the middle of the Reagan years, using each horror to open a different wound. Botting's American Gothic, Poe's house and Whitted's argument about horror and race from Year One all return.

The module ends where the storyline does: #47's Parliament of Trees, which ST204 takes up in full, and #50's battle with the Darkness, which ST205 reads for its magic. Here the question is the country.

Learning objectives

  • Narrate the American Gothic storyline accurately across sixteen issues.
  • Analyse the road-story structure and each horror as a sub-genre with a political charge.
  • Explain American Gothic as a mode and test the storyline against it.
  • Read horror as social commentary with precision, especially on race and history.
  • Analyse John Constantine as a narrative device and as a character.
  • Write a research essay on a multi-issue storyline using historical and critical sources.

Lessons

Unit 1: Week 1: Dissolved and regrown

Nukeface, the seedling, and the stranger.

  1. Nukeface and Growth Patterns: #35 to #37The creature destroyed by waste and grown back from a seed, and the arrival of John Constantine.150 min

Unit 2: Week 2: Still waters and the curse

The vampire town and the werewolf: old monsters, American reasons.

  1. Vampires and werewolves in America: #38 to #40Rosewood under the lake and the company-town werewolf: how Moore re-roots the classic monsters in American soil.150 min

Unit 3: Week 3: Strange fruit

Race, history and horror on the plantation.

  1. Southern Change and Strange Fruit: #41 to #42A television production on a plantation wakes the dead of slavery. The storyline's most direct political horror, read with Whitted.150 min

Unit 4: Week 4: Windfall, bogeymen and the ghost dance

Three American fears: drugs, serial killers, guns.

  1. Windfall, Bogeymen and Ghost Dance: #43 to #45The tuber as drug, the serial killer, and a house built by a gun fortune and haunted by its dead.150 min

Unit 5: Week 5: Revelations

From America to the world: #46 to #49.

  1. Revelations, the Parliament and the Brujeria: #46 to #49The storyline widens: the Crisis, the ancient plant elementals in Brazil, the cult of male witches, and Constantine's summoning.180 min

Unit 6: Week 6: The end

#50, and the whole storyline as an argument.

  1. The End: #50 and the storyline as argumentThe battle outside creation, its theology, and what sixteen issues have said about a country.150 min Sample

Core texts

Secondary reading

Assessment

Two assessed pieces. The first is a close reading of one two-issue horror from the storyline as a sub-genre with a political charge. The second is a research essay on what American Gothic says about America, requiring at least four secondary sources.

ST203-A1: Close reading: one American horror

Choose one two-issue story from American Gothic (#38 to #39, #41 to #42, or any other pair you can justify). How does it use a horror sub-genre to make a political argument about a specific American place, and how do the pages carry that argument?

Length
2000 words (1800 to 2200)
Sources
Primary source plus optional secondary research. Primary source plus optional secondary reading. Two issues, analysed on the page.

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ST203-A2: Essay: what does American Gothic say about America?

Across #35 to #50, what does Alan Moore's American Gothic say about the United States? Is it a single argument, a catalogue of horrors, or an outsider's map? Argue a position using Botting's account of the American Gothic mode and at least three further secondary sources.

Length
2500 words (2250 to 2750)
Sources
Research assignment, minimum 4 secondary sources. Research assignment. Botting required; at least three further credible secondary sources; MHRA with page numbers.

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Source requirements

Assignment 1 is primary source plus optional secondary reading. Assignment 2 is a research assignment: at least four credible secondary sources, including at least one on the Gothic as a mode and at least one on the run.