ABSTRACT
Halo Jones, protagonist of a 2000AD strip produced by Alan Moore and Ian Gibson from 1984 to 1986, has been described as ‘possibly the first feminist heroine in comics.’ Moore intended the strip to challenge the sexist representation of women in anglophone comics of the time, and The Ballad of Halo Jones has since gained a cult following in the UK and beyond, and holds a particular resonance for female readers. However, when it first appeared its reception was lukewarm, particularly because nothing much happened—as Kate Flynn has argued, the comic owes more to soap opera than action-packed adventure. It therefore stood apart from the other strips in the ground-breaking British anthology, not just because it attempted to contest the way restrictive gender norms were inscribed in both visual and narrative forms, but also because it lacked action, or at least action that was synonymous with spectacular violence.
Yet The Ballad of Halo Jones can be read as an exploration of the forms of violence less visible in both mainstream comics and mainstream political discourse, and, as such, engaged with the manifold debates about violence taking place within the UK feminist movement of that time. This chapter examines how Moore and Gibson’s strip, across its three story arcs or ‘books,’ interrogated the violence of poverty, the violence enacted on bodies (in domestic, workplace, institutional and representational contexts) and the violence of occupation and war. As a result, it analyses how The Ballad of Halo Jones not only tried to break loose of sexist conventions of representation in comics (by drawing from British girls’ comics, women’s comix and alternative comics) but also attempted to make visible these non-spectacular forms of violence that disproportionately affected women, girls and trans* people, and are intertwined with oppressions of class, sexuality and race.
