Written by Alan Moore
Illustrated by Jacen BurrowsThe cataclysmic final issue of the all-new, all Alan Moore, horror series spoken of only in hushed whispers for years is finally here! NEONOMICON, the sequel to THE COURTYARD Graphic Novel, is slithering its way onto shelves to take its place as a Great Old One of comics terror! Illustrated by Moore’s favorite demented artist, Jacen Burrows, NEONOMICON pulls no punches as every full-colored page is covered in nightmares brought to gruesome life! Agent Brears has, quite literally, been to hell and back. Hell just happens to look like a network of tunnels beneath an esoteric little bookstore in Salem, Mass. But now that Brears has walked out of hell, she can see things that most people can’t. Things that would drive most people mad. But as NEONOMICON draws to a close, Brears has one more thing she wants to show you…
In an interview with Scotland’s The Skinny magazine last September, Alan Moore had this to say about Neonomicon: “I went back and read through the scripts, and I thought, ‘Have I gone too far?’ Looking back, yes, maybe I have gone too far — but it’s still a good story.” No offense, Alan, but we’ll be the judge of that.
(Reader advisory: mature subject matter after the jump!)
Unfortunately for us and the above textual cliffhanger, comics’ mad (you pick whether this means “crazy” or “angry”) old sage was right. Neonomicon goes too far in just about every respect that these things are charted upon. In providing a metatextual counterpoint and companion to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, it smashes headfirst into the most uncomfortable aspects of Lovercraft’s oeuvre: the racism, the sexism, the wilting disgust and coy fascination with sex and copulation. And all this before we even get to Moore’s collaborator on the project. Garth Ennis might be getting all the attention right now (a year or three after the fact) for having written “Horsecock” into Crossed, but Jacen Burrows was the man who brought to life that epoch-defining vision of a man using a severed animal penis as a club. A match made in R’lyeh, no?
Severing Neonomicon #4 from the preceding three chapters is a bit unfair. It’s an ending; if you’ve made it this far, you’re not looking for a jumping-on point. More than that, it’s the ending of a sequel! Eight years ago, Antony Johnston (Wasteland, Daredevil) and Burrows adapted a now-seventeen-year-old prose story Moore contributed to a Lovecraft tribute volume. This was The Courtyard, a jagged little two-issue spike of grimy discomfort told in terse blurts of noir narration and inelegant yet leisurely vertical composition. His entire career, Burrows has excelled the most in his composition; if “widescreen” panel structures play off of our adaptation to Cinemascope and 16:9 TV, then The Courtyard‘s “tallscreen” panels created an edge of discomfort simply by running perpendicular to vernacular. He has, of course, only improved since.
In that previous and comparatively tame episode, a federal agent investigating a strange and seemingly unconnected series of ritualistic murders is given a phantasmagoric introduction to the secret language Aklo, which naturally precipitates his own downfall. No heroic struggle against an anthropomorphized demon that can be overcome like an exceptionally violent geometry exam. As Warren Ellis put it in one of the editorials accompanying his Avatar series with Burrows, Scars: “Horror’s when you realize there is nowhere to run.”
So: Neonomicon, finally. Previewed late 2009, debuted mid-2010, and completed last week, it’s been attended to with less of the gushing and squeeing that one might expect from a new original script from Alan Moore, particularly now that he’s in semi-retirement to tinker with extraordinary gentlemen and publish his magazine. It works in the same vein as his last great meta-opus, Lost Girls: if those hardcovers showcase the richness and depth of the body of Moore’s imagination, then Neonomicon is its surgically-plucked gall stone. This isn’t a Lovecraft adaptation, or a continuation of his fictional world. Instead, Moore positions us just left of center, in an Earth as broadly believable as your favorite cop show, where people read Lovecraft novels but almost entirely miss the point. This is the core concept that’s been driving Moore’s work for years, the notion that ideas and stories are more than just diversions and more than just thought. Neonomicon‘s point, then, is to ask, ‘Well, what if those ideas, those things that are more than simple whims, those secret keys to a universe we only partly perceive: what if those ideas are absolutely evil?’
The ex-fed protagonist of The Courtyard sits in a mental institution, babbling in Aklo, three murders to his name. Two other agents, Brears (she) and Lamper (him), are part of a case investigating what the hell happened. Neonomicon plays all of this totally straight, to the extent that it can; not only is the tone and patter of something like The Wire a fine counterpoint to the portentous stirrings of Lovecraft, but “procedural” is also a great synonym for “exposition.” Brears herself lays out the Lovecraftian connections in the case for the uninitiated (Lamper, that is – but also those amongst the readership who don’t know Cthulhu from Derleth). Brears and Lamper’s case takes them to a small-town Massachusetts sex shop–cum-occult bookstore, and from there to what could aptly and literally be described as a swingers’ party from Hell. As far as content goes, Avatar has never really had any limits, from scatological comedy to outright pornography. That said, Neonomicon is possibly its most extreme series yet, and it’s middle section contains extended rape scenes as gruesome and horrible as the likes of I Spit on Your Grave. The sexual politics of this are a discussion for another blog, but the facts can’t be separated from the story: #2 features Brears’ gang rape by a group of deranged cultists; #3 by a fish-man monster they’ve been keeping from the world. So where the hell can #4 go from there?
Well, it goes the only place it can: to the end. It’s a violent denouement, a wrap-up, and an epilogue. As with even the most throwaway of Alan Moore’s work, the narrative design is impeccable, bringing together the story’s threads, contextualizing the Lovecraftian facts strewn throughout the story, and giving us the twist ending to make the whole ordeal in some way meaningful. The sexual violence of the story’s middle is replaced with a more readily acceptable Kiefer-Sutherland-style FBI shoot-out; the nasty cultists and the hulking behemoth get theirs, as they must. But by the end, the true villain of the story stands revealed. These are the mountains of madness, after all, and we’re following our heroes to it’s peak.
Jacen Burrows, meanwhile, remains one of the unsung heroes of comics. His choice of material and loyalty to a small-press publisher mean that he’ll never move beyond a niche appeal (probably), but I can’t imagine anyone better suited for this story. Remember the talk of “tallscreen” versus “widescreen” a couple paragraphs ago? Here, he goes wide, and his fine line and eye for detail fill those frames as if they were stills from a film. That’s what we want in a story like this, about a vertex where a “real” world might collide with mad, bad and dangerous mysticism. Burrows is the midpoint between the psychedelic tranquility of Frank Quitely and the stiff-yet-understated eyeball-twitch of classic Ditko. Another artist would drape the whole thing in murky shadow and let us tease out terrifying little wiggles of detail. That’s the lazy way, the cliche. Burrows shows us every stain on the tile.
What it comes down to with a series like this is where your comfort zone is. I can’t in good conscience recommend everyone go out and buy Neonomicon and digest it any more than I can recommend everyone run out and get body piercings. It’s a black hole, almost totally separate from the shining suns of superhero stories, but for those who fancy a gaze into the abyss, it’s an arresting and genuinely unsettling one. It goes places everywhere else refuses — places that it maybe shouldn’t. After all, consider the context. The whole thing here is that stories are more than just narratives. They’re primal forces chained by language, given the flesh and bone of paragraphs and sentences. They’re bottled apocalypses who leave their audiences and their worlds changed forever. Taking Neonomicon on its own terms means that the characters in these stories are explorers, but it begs the question: are we safe on the sidelines, or part of the exploration ourselves?
Final Verdict: 8.0 – Buy
