“I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilised.”
A Comparative Analysis of The Handmaid's Tale and The Ballad of Halo Jones.

'Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen.'
Margaret Atwood

'If you were working-class you had comics. It was like rickets.'
Alan Moore

'The Handmaid's Tale won the very first Arthur C Clarke award in 1987. [Margaret Atwood has] been trying to live this down ever since.'
David Langdon

When I first read The Handmaid's Tale as an undergraduate in 1989 I was struck by the similarity of its epilogue to the prologue to Book 2 of the sci-fi comic books series The Ballad of Halo Jones written by Alan Moore (serialised in the British anthology comic 2000AD). I initially assumed that Moore had imitated Atwood but on checking the publication dates I discovered that the instalment of Halo Jones had been published in February of 1985, the same year as the novel saw print. Had Atwood, in fact, been influenced by Moore?

Given the proximity of publication dates, probably not. But the point is, my assumption that the novel must have influenced the comic came not only from Moore's reputation for 'borrowing' from other writers but also (if not more so) from a perceived 'hierarchy of texts' in which comics – and their creators – have a lowly cultural status relative to novels and their writers, and therefore any influence is likely to ‘trickle down’ from above. In this paper I will discuss the relative cultural status of Atwood's novel as a modern literary classic, and its Hulu TV adaptation as a part of the current ‘Golden Age’ of television, comparing and contrasting both with the status of Halo Jones as a text and of Alan Moore as a writer, and touching too on Atwood's own work in the comics medium, including her forthcoming (at the time of writing) graphic novel adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale. In doing so, I will explore, with reference to Atwood’s assertion that she writes ‘speculative fiction’ rather than sci-fi, notions of genre, taste, authorship and readership, and their relationship to gender and social class.