1 Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (London, 2003; originally published in part 1980–91 in Raw); Frank Miller with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (London, 2002; originally published 1986 as Batman: The Dark Knight Returns #1–4); Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (London, 2007; originally published 1986–7 as Watchmen #1–12).

2 See, for example, the International Journal of Comic Art. Sara J. Van Ness, Watchmen as Literature: A Critical Study of the Graphic Novel (Jefferson, NC, 2010). For other comics criticism, see for example Douglas Wolk, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (Boston, MA, 2007); History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels, ed. Mark McKinney (Jackson, MS, 2008); and Matthew J. Costello, Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America (New York, 2009).

3 See, for example, Literature and Music: Essays on Form, ed. Nancy Anne Cluck (Provo, UT, 1981); Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts (Hanover, NH, 1987); Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge, 1992); Erik Alder and Dietmar Hauck, Music and Literature: Music in the Works of Anthony Burgess and E. M. Forster (Tübingen, 2005); and Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa (London, 2006).

4 See, for example, The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, ed. Tim Shephard and Anne Leonard (Abingdon, 2013) and the Répertoire International d'Iconographie Musicale project. The representation of music in visual art has been discussed particularly extensively with respect to early music and non-Western cultures: see, on early music, Elizabeth C. Teviotdale, ‘Music and Pictures in the Middle Ages’, Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music, ed. Tess Knighton and David Fallows (Berkeley, CA, 1992), 179–88, and Iain Fenlon, ‘Music in Italian Renaissance Paintings’, ibid., 189–209; and, on non-Western music, Bonnie C. Wade, Imagining Sound: An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art, and Culture in Mughal India (Chicago, IL, and London, 1998).

5 Alan Moore, ‘O Superman: Music and Comics’, The Daredevils, 5 (1983), 21–3 (pp. 21–2).

6 Ibid., 22.

7 Michael Daugherty, liner notes to Michael Daugherty: Metropolis Symphony/Deus ex machina, Naxos 8.559635 (T. Wilson, Nashville Symphony, G. Guerrero, 2009).

8 See Jeff Smith, ‘Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema’, Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight (Durham, NC, 2001), 407–30 (pp. 411–14).

9 See also the film documentary Unauthorized and Proud of It! The Story of Rock 'n’ Roll Comics (dir. Ilko Davidov, 2005).

10 The most notable scholarship on the subject is Ian Shirley's monograph Can Rock & Roll Save the World? An Illustrated History of Music and Comics (London, 2005).

11 Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta (New York, 2005; originally published 1982–9 as V for Vendetta #1–10), ‘which completed and reprinted the monochrome series from Warrior #1–18 & 20–21’ (Gary Spencer Millidge, Alan Moore: Storyteller (Lewes, 2011), 313).

12 First volume collected as Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, i (La Jolla, CA, 2001; originally published 1999–2000 as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen #1–6).

13 Millidge, Alan Moore, 128.

14 From Hell (dir. Hughes and Hughes, 2001), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (dir. Norrington, 2003), V for Vendetta (dir. McTeigue, 2005) and Watchmen (dir. Snyder, 2009).

15 A comics-themed episode of the American animated series The Simpsons (1989–), ‘Husbands and Knives’ (2007), specifically poked fun at Moore's dislike of the film adaptations of his works. Moore (voicing the animated version of himself) is enraged at being requested to autograph a DVD of a fictional humorously derivative version of his Watchmen comic, ‘Watchmen Babies in V for Vacation’. The episode also makes reference to Moore's musical activity, as he is shown singing in the episode.

16 My analytical method takes its cue from music and image studies, in particular the work of Emanuel Winterlitz. Winterlitz (like other historical musicologists) uses visual art to research musical practice from the past or other cultures, and I use a similar method here to understand musical depictions in modern popular art. In this way, my work is similar to studies of music in film and literature. Winterlitz instructs analysts to consider six dimensions of the depiction of music in images: (a) performance and performers, (b) the listener, (c) the site of performance and the acoustical environment, (d) stage settings, (e) social status and environment, and (f) symbolism and allegory. Emanuel Winterlitz, Musical Instruments and their Symbolism in Western Art: Studies in Musical Iconology (2nd edn, New Haven, CT, 1979), 36–7. My discussion engages with the same aspects of music in image, but further considers medium-specific issues.

17 Moore and Gibbons, Watchmen, Chapter 1, 26. Moore's quotation of Dylan differs slightly from the song's original lyrics (available at <http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/desolation-row>, accessed 23 October 2014).

18 Ibid., Chapter 2, 28.

19 Smith, ‘Popular Songs and Comic Allusion’, 410.

20 Mary Borsellino, ‘How the Ghost of You Clings: Watchmen and Music’, Minutes to Midnight: Twelve Essays on Watchmen, ed. Richard Bensam (Moro, IL, 2010), 24–38 (p. 32).

21 Moore and Gibbons, Watchmen, Chapter 5, 31.

22 Borsellino, ‘How the Ghost of You Clings’, 32.

23 Ibid.

24 Moore and Gibbons, Watchmen, Chapter 11, 32.

25 Ibid.

26 Shirley's Can Rock & Roll Save the World? contains many examples of such references, including the X-Men meeting Kiss (p. 154), Batman and Robin investigating a band who are the Beatles in all but name (p. 84), and a moment in a Justice League comic when the superheroes briefly dance to ‘Love Shack’ by the B52s (p. 217).

27 Moore and Lloyd, V for Vendetta, 45, panel 4.

28 Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, ii (London, 2003; originally published 2002–3 as individual issues #1–6), Chapter 5, 12–13; Chapter 6, 1 and 15–17.

29 Ibid., Chapter 5, 12, panel 1.

30 The Region 2 DVD of Quantum of Solace (dir. Mark Forster, 2008), for example, uses this device throughout the film. Not every instance of musical underscore is indicated, only those that the subtitle authors consider as having dramatic import.

31 Moore and O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, ii, Chapter 5, 13, panel 1.

32 Ibid., Chapter 6, 1, panels 8–9.

33 Hyde's whistling and vocalization is placed in interesting counterpoint with the depiction of Hyde in Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 film Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. As Neil Lerner writes: ‘That Hyde does not create music himself may be read as [one] way, together with make-up, that the film positions him as a kind of alien apart from or not yet fully human.’ Lerner, ‘The Strange Case of Rouben Mamoulian's Sound Stew: The Uncanny Soundtrack in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)’, Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, ed. Lerner (New York and London, 2010), 55–79 (p. 59). In the rather more morally ambiguous depiction of Hyde in Moore's comic, Hyde (the only principal character who is shown to make music) engages in a very human musical activity (whistling), and yet does so at a moment that shows his lack of empathy with the human suffering that surrounds him. Thus Hyde's whistling, and the demonstration of his ‘own musical impulse’ (ibid.) that the 1931 film Hyde lacks, is part of the (re)articulation of the character in the hypertextual comic.

34 Michel Chion's term ‘anempathetic music’ has gained common currency. It is defined as music that ‘exhibit[s] conspicuous indifference to the [filmic] situation, by progressing in a steady, undaunted, and ineluctable manner: the scene takes place against this very backdrop of “indifference”’. Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York, 1994), 8.

35 Dominique Nasta, ‘Setting the Pace of a Heartbeat: The Use of Sound Elements in European Melodramas before 1915’, The Sounds of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel and Rick Altman (Bloomington, IN, 2001), 95–108; Melinda Szaloky, ‘Sounding Images in Silent Film: Visual Acoustics in Murnau's “Sunrise”’, Cinema Journal, 41/2 (2002), 109–31.

36 Szaloky, ‘Sounding Images in Silent Film’, 125.

37 Nasta, ‘Setting the Pace of a Heartbeat’, 104, 97.

38 Szaloky, ‘Sounding Images in Silent Film’, 127.

39 As Szaloky explains, Paul Ricoeur held the view that ‘the very greatest works carry a “surplus” besides their ordinary message and invite us, through their “surplus”, to engage in repeated encounters with them’. Ibid., 117.

40 Moore and Lloyd, V for Vendetta, 44. Bullet punctuation original.

41 The forum member wrote: ‘This is a quote from the Comic “V for Vendetta”; It was intended to criticise the beliefes [sic] it encompasses, but it's [sic] eloquence made it strike me as more in favour of those beliefes [sic] than not.’ ‘Drop-Kick Murray’, ‘V’, post on Stormfront forum, <http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t280920/> (accessed 25 June 2013). In a rather spectacular and shocking example of satire misfiring, Moore's emulation of the linguistic style of what might be termed poetic nationalism in order to invoke a musical performance in a comic has been pressed into service as an expression of those beliefs; it has been appropriated and disseminated as an artistic celebration of, and used to promote, the very values the author initially intended it to oppose.

42 Moore and Lloyd, V for Vendetta, 125–7.

43 It is not unimaginable that readers might experiment in their own form of what Stephen Banfield has called ‘melopoetic wit’, the musical-verbal witty interplay common in vernacular (particularly musical-theatrical) songs. Banfield, ‘Sondheim and the Art That Has No Name’, Approaches to the American Musical, ed. Robert Lawson-Peebles (Exeter, 1996), 137–60.

44 Moore and Lloyd, V for Vendetta, 89–93.

45 Using musical notation in this way may alienate readers who are not notation-literate, but it nevertheless serves to assert the book's aspiration to be understood as art. In implying that at least some members of the book's readership would understand this notation, the comic defines its readers (and, by extension, comic readers as a whole) as educated in musical notation. The cultural reception of Western notated musical education as associated with general education seems to be used to challenge unflattering stereotypes of comics as ‘low culture’ and comic readers as immature and divorced from more mainstream art culture (‘nerdy’). This implicit flattery may go some way towards compensating any alienation the reader who does not understand musical notation might feel.

46 V's personal lair is known as ‘The Shadow Gallery’. This space is often shown to resemble the backstage of a theatre (see Moore and Lloyd, V for Vendetta, 9), and V uses his home as a space to create elaborate deceptions with the aim of torturing and psychologically affecting other characters. Thus ‘This Vicious Cabaret’ matches the depictions of V's activity as theatrical in other sections of the book. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this observation.

47 Here and elsewhere in this article, I use the term ‘virtual’, following Rob Shields's definitions, as referring to ‘that which is so in essence but not actually so’, and that which is ‘real, but not concrete’; and in the Deleuzian/Proustian sense as referring to something that is ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’. Rob Shields, The Virtual (New York, 2002), 2; Marcel Proust, quoted in Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberiam (New York, 1988), 96.

48 The use of these terms stems primarily from their inclusion in founding works of film-music criticism such as Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (London, 1987), and Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley, CA, 1994), as well as their obligatory inclusion in university film-music classes.

49 The main scholarship that has addressed this issue includes Robynn J. Stilwell, ‘The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic’, Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and Richard Leppert (Berkeley, CA, 2007), 184–202; Jeff Smith, ‘Bridging the Gap: Reconsidering the Border between Diegetic and Nondiegetic Music’, Music and the Moving Image, 2/1 (spring 2009), 1–25; David Neumeyer, ‘Diegetic/Nondiegetic: A Theoretical Model’, ibid., 26–39; and Ben Winters, ‘The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space’, Music and Letters, 91 (2010), 224–44. Video-game music studies have also expressed similar dissatisfaction with the terminology: see Isabella van Elferen, ‘¡Un Forastero! Issues of Virtuality and Diegesis in Videogame Music’, Music and the Moving Image, 4/2 (summer, 2011), 30–9.

50 Much of the theorizing concerning the terms diegetic and non-diegetic in relation to music in film is problematic when applied to comics, particularly when such theories often place emphasis on notions of audio fidelity (Smith) and time (Stilwell and Neumeyer), both of which are formulated differently in comics and in film. In a visual medium (and outside the elaborate imagination of a reader), there are no ‘offscreen diegetic sounds’ (Neumeyer, ‘Diegetic/Nondiegetic’, 35), and if Neumeyer, for example, seeks ‘spatial anchoring’ and ‘sorting at the stage of diegesis’ to discuss diegetic sound (p. 30), in the case of comics, this results in less, rather than greater, clarity. For this reason, I prefer to follow Winters's radical treatment of the issue, since it relies on narrative agency, rather than narrative space.

51 Moore and Lloyd, V for Vendetta, 179.

52 Winters, ‘The Non-Diegetic Fallacy’, 228.

53 David John Haskins (David J), liner notes to V for Vendetta, Plain Recordings plain123 (2006).

54 Letter from Alan Moore to David J, 5 January 1983, repr. in Haskins's liner notes.

55 12-inch EP V for Vendetta, Glass Records, GLASS 12032, 1984.

56 I use Gérard Genette's term ‘epitext’ to refer to a textual accompaniment to a work that is not attached to a main text, but influences the understanding of the central text by a reader. See Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge, 1997), 4–5.

57 Moore and Lloyd, V for Vendetta, 18.

58 Moore and Lloyd, V for Vendetta, 18–19.

59 Ibid., 129.

60 Ibid.

61 Smith, ‘Popular Songs and Comic Allusion’, 414.

62 Ibid., 414–15.

63 The DVD viewer can, of course, read a film text in a similar way, but this is not the normal or primary mode of reader consumption of film media. A film director would probably not expect the viewer to understand the film primarily through this kind of non-linear investigation, whereas it is the anticipated mode of consumption of a comic.

64 Smith, ‘Popular Songs and Comic Allusion’, 418.

65 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer famously criticized film as ‘leav[ing] no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience’. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London, 1997), 126. They attribute this ‘stunting of the mass media consumer's power of imagination’ (p. 126) to the nature of film, most particularly the pace of film, ‘the relentless rush of facts’ that does not allow the viewer to ‘dwell on particular points of its mechanics during a screening’ (p. 127). Even without subscribing to the entirety of Adorno and Horkheimer's perspective, it is straightforward to appreciate how the temporal qualities of the comic might allow for greater critical reflection and ‘dwelling’ than film. It is in this space for reflection and investigative critical interpretation that music can encourage such active engagement with the text.

66 Smith, ‘Popular Songs and Comic Allusion’, 415.

67 Ibid., 415–16.

68 Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London, 1964), 35.

69 Moore, quoted in Barry Kavanagh, ‘The Alan Moore Interview: Watchmen, Microcosms and Details’, blather.net (2000), <http://blather.net/articles/amoore/watchmen3.html> (accessed 25 June 2013).

70 Ibid.

71 Moore and Lloyd, V for Vendetta, 173 and 182. The discussion of Koestler in V for Vendetta focuses mainly on The Roots of Coincidence (London, 1974), which Finch is shown as reading, and his involvement with the voluntary euthanasia movement.

72 Smith, ‘Popular Songs and Comic Allusion’, 416.

73 Ibid., 417.

74 Borsellino, ‘How the Ghost of You Clings’, 28.

75 Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows, Neonomicon (Rantoul, IL, 2011).

76 Alan Moore and Ian Gibson, The Complete Ballad of Halo Jones (London, 1991); Alan Moore, Gene Ha and Zander Cannon, Top 10: Collected Edition Book 1 (La Jolla, CA, 2000).

77 Moore and Lloyd, V for Vendetta, 182–6.

78 Moore and Lloyd, V for Vendetta, 14.

79 Ibid., 183.

80 In the 2005 film adaptation of V for Vendetta, the 1812 emanates from a tannoy system over London, and explosive climaxes occur simultaneously with moments of musical eruptions.

81 Winters, ‘The Non-Diegetic Fallacy’, 229.

82 Ibid., 230.

83 Ibid., 232.

84 Alan Moore, Alan Moore's Songbook (Plymouth, MI, 1998; originally published 1994–6 in Negative Burn #10–35).

85 Lev Grossman, ‘Watchmen’, Time, 11 January 2010, <http://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/#watchmen-1986-by-alan-moore-dave-gibbons> (accessed 4 June 2013).

86 George Khoury, The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore: Indispensable Edition (Raleigh, NC, 2008), 41.

87 Moore, quoted ibid.

88 Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, [iii]: Century (London, 2009–12), Chapter 1: ‘1910’.

89 Moore and O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, [iii]: Century, Chapter 1, ‘1910’, 24.

90 See Jess Nevins, ‘Annotations to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume III Chapter One, a.k.a. Century: 1910’, <http://jessnevins.com/annotations/1910annotations.html> (accessed 6 May 2013). Includes contributions by Nevins and additional observations by other comic readers.

91 The reallocation of songs from The Threepenny Opera to different characters in Century is entirely in keeping with Brechtian performance practice: ‘Because the performer is “reporting” rather than experiencing first-hand, many of Brecht's songs may be sung interchangeably by various characters within a given play or even in different plays. Thus, at different times in the run of the original production of Die Dreigroschenoper, Polly and Lucy both sang the “Barbarasong”, and in later years Lenya appropriated “Seeräuber-Jenny” for Jenny's role.’ Kim H. Kowalke, ‘Singing Brecht Versus Brecht Singing: Performance in Theory and Practice’, Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Cambridge, 1994), 74–93 and 186–95 (p. 195, n. 61). Perhaps the whole project of Moore's reworking of Gay/Brecht/Weill might be seen to be an extreme manifestation of this same tradition.

92 Moore and O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, [iii]: Century, Chapter 1: ‘1910’, 57.

93 Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1997), 7, 24–5.

94 Moore and O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, [iii]: Century, Chapter 2: ‘1969’ (2011), 53–6.

95 Moore and O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, [iii]: Century, Chapter 2: ‘1969’, 70.

96 Moore and O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, [iii]: Century, Chapter 3: ‘2009’, 11.

97 Ibid., 31.

98 Stephen Hinton, ‘The Concept of Epic Opera: Theoretical Anomalies in the Brecht–Weill Partnership’, Das musikalische Kunstwerk: Geschichte, Ästhetik, Theorie: Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Hermann Danuser et al. (Laaber, 1988), 285–94 (p. 287).

99 Ibid., 290.

100 Annalisa Di Liddo, Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel (Jackson, MS, 2009), 168.

101 Hinton, ‘The Concept of Epic Opera’, 292.

102 Hans Keller famously described The Threepenny Opera as ‘the weightiest possible lowbrow opera for highbrows and the most full-blooded highbrow musical for lowbrows’. Keller, ‘The New in Review: The Threepenny Opera’, Music Review, 17 (1956), 153–4 (p. 153).

103 See, for example, Guy Lawley, ‘I Like Hate and I Hate Everything Else: The Influence of Punk on Comics’, Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk, ed. Roger Sabin (London, 1999), 100–19.

104 Allan F. Moore, Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song (Farnham, 2012), 163.

105 These ‘analysis questions’ owe a debt to Allan F. Moore's chapter of ‘questions’ used to analyse recorded popular song. Moore, Song Means, 331–6.

106 Di Liddo, Alan Moore, 24, 167–8.

107 Khoury, The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, 48–9; Millidge, Alan Moore, 242–3.

108 A seven-inch vinyl record containing two songs by Moore and Tim Perkins was available with certain UK reprints of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier (La Jolla, CA, 2007).

109 Matthew Pritchard, ‘A Heap of Broken Images? Reviving Austro-German Debates over Musical Meaning, 1900–36’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 138 (2013), 129–74 (p. 173).

110 Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley, CA, 1993), xix–xxii.