Julia Round

Moderating readers and reading online

Despite the proliferation of online forums for the discussion of literary texts, very little has been written to date on the management of these spaces and how this helps frame the kinds of discussion and interpretative work that take place. This article draws on a series of interviews with moderators of online book-related sites, alongside close analysis of online interactions between moderators and users to consider issues of authority, hierarchy, power and control, asking how these act to structure or facilitate acts of interpretation taking place online. We begin by outlining the moderator’s role before conducting a brief review of existing scholarship on offline reading groups and online communities, to identify how social infrastructures are established and negotiated. The main body of the article draws upon interviews with moderators of two online literary forums – The Republic of Pemberley and The Guardian’s online Reading Group – to explore the ways in which each of the respective moderators frames his or her role. This is accompanied by an in-depth exploration of how the forms of interpretation we find on the two sites are shaped and directed by the moderators. The article concludes by reflecting upon some of the issues raised by this study and its methodology, particularly with regards to digital dualism and the blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private in online spaces.

Reconstructing Alice Cooper: ‘From the Inside’ to The Last Temptation

This article analyzes the representations of rock singer Alice Cooper in comics, focusing on his debut in ‘From the Inside’ (Marvel Premiere #50, 1979) and the three-part miniseries The Last Temptation by Neil Gaiman and Michael Zulli (Marvel Comics, 1994–1995; Dark Horse Comics, 2000), alongside his albums of the same names. After offering a brief background of rock music and comics, the article analyzes Coopers representation in ‘From the Inside’: arguing that, rather than using the medium to offer a thematically consistent depiction, this comic subsumes Alice Coopers persona into its idiosyncratic style. It proceeds to contrast this with Gaiman and Zullis interpretation, arguing that The Last Temptation instead privileges the performative elements of Coopers character, which is created through aesthetic excess (makeup, clothing and exotic stage props) and subversion (of gendering, authority and naturalism). It then analyzes the different strategies Gaiman and Zulli use to convey Alice Cooper, with particular reference to the comics mediums narrative conventions: including iconography, intertextuality and retroactive continuity. It also considers the use made of the mediums essential narratological features: such as its creation of the hyperreal, an ‘aesthetic of excess’ and reliance on reader involvement. It concludes that The Last Temptation demonstrates an ambitious use of its mediums conventions in order to represent Alice Cooper and, more generally, that comics are ideally suited to depict the type of theatricality and subversion essential to such celebrity antiheroes and rock stars.

Corrigendum: Misty, Spellbound and the lost Gothic of British girls’ comics

Correction to: Palgrave Communications (2017) 3 Article number: 17037 doi:10.1057/palcomms.2017.37; Published 16 May 2017; Updated 3 Oct 2017 On page 6 of the PDF, in the second paragraph beginning “I also surveyed Misty’s entire run of stories”, the sentence “However it does give a sense of the weighting given to named Gothic archetypes in Misty content—and reveals that they make up just 22% of its total content” has been corrected to “However it does give a sense of the weighting given to named Gothic archetypes in Misty—and reveals that these make up just 25% of its total comic strip content.