Alan Moore's Neonomicon

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DIALOGUE: This could be the one place the volume felt lackluster when compared to the masterful writing of Watchmen and excellent dialogue in Swamp Thing, but it is my belief, that Moore’s writing and thus, his more restrained character dialogue is intentionally understated here. On top of the fact that I'm mad at Alan Moore about this misogynist nonsense is the fact that the ending, and what it adds to the Chthulu mythos, *is* kind of cool. There was something good here, until Moore decided he was more interested in rape scenes and monster sex than in following through with the story's far more compelling setup.

Unfortunately, there's a kind of uncanny valley with men writing women, where instead of a badass woman, you get what a man thinks a badass woman would be, if women could be badass. We watch as they become enmeshed in a world of mysterious cults, black magic and unimaginable sexual nightmares. By that measure, this deceptively straightforward story is certainly a work of genius, as long as you're familiar with the source material. It wouldn't be an issue if the sex were portrayed as healthy and positive -- I could get behind that -- but here the sex is entirely non-consensual.Moore presents the language as a multidimensional construct just as the Old ones themselves are, and uses it to guess what effect this would have upon a human and those around them. The plot is much less straightforward than it seems at first and as usual it is impressive how it all ties together.

P. Lovecraft, who, love him or hate him, is one of the most influential Horror story authors of the twentieth century. NEONOMICON collects Alan Moore's 2010 comic book series for the first time in its entirety - including his original story, THE COURTYARD, which chronicled Aldo Sax's tragic encounter with the (somewhat) mortal agents of the Old Ones! His artwork has brought to life the visions of such comics luminaries as Garth Ennis ( Chronicles of Wormwood , Crossed ), Warren Ellis ( Scars ), and Alan Moore ( The Courtyard , Neonomicon ). I read this because I am making it through the Alan Moore corpus, slowly, dabbling in it, at least, and wanted to see what he does with Real Scary and Graphic Horror, and for what it sets out to do, to shock and offend and scare, it works, that's what horror is supposed to do, okay.He does this a lot in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics but in Neonomicon the references are exclusively horror-based, most of them on HP Lovecraft’s work. I have posted a heads up at the appropriate moment, so it is possible to skip the section I’ve marked.

Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The agent digs deeper, finds that a similar string of killings and mutilations occurred in the same place in the 1920s.

Probably one of the first graphic novels I've ever read that made me stop in the middle of it and ask myself whether I wanted, for my sanity and tastes sake, to carry on, I'm so very glad I did. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. STORY: FBI Agents Sax, Lamper, and Brears are enveloped by a mystery connected to a serial killer who turns his victims into grotesque flowers sculptures.

From their interrogation of Sax (where he spoke exclusively in inhuman tongues) to a related drug raid on a seedy rock club rife with arcane symbols and otherworldly lyrics, they suspect that they are on the trail of something awful. Monster rape takes up pretty much the latter half of this graphic novel, replacing everything else that was interesting about the story, to the point where entire plot lines and characters are all but forgotten. Because the dialogue in this book is horrendous - far too many “yeah”s punctuate the conversations as well as info dumps on Lovecraft and other pieces of horror esoterica make for very unrealistic-sounding speech. He has also written a novel, Voice of the Fire, and performs "workings" (one-off performance art/spoken word pieces) with The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, some of which have been released on CD. Once The Courtyard story concludes we jump forward a couple of years and on to Neonomicon, where we meet Agents Brears and Lamper who are in the process of interrogating the now insane Sax.

Two FBI agents, Gordon Lamper and Merril Brears, are assigned to a case of copycat killings in the style Sax committed who, in turn, was mimicking someone else. I love Lovecraft, and most of Alan Moore's work, but this is mediocre at best, childish and revolting at its worst. But as this popular enigma, don’t answer it so soon, since the beauty of this mystery is that both answers have problems to defend it.