Neonomicon #2 (of 4) (Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows; Avatar, $3.99)

In the interests of promoting inter-website dialogue and peace throughout all free lands, what follows is a response of sorts to the recent, very fine writing-on-comics zine The Prism #1 (PDF download here), specifically its “annocommentations” — a considered set of page-by-page reactions — composed by Mindless Ones site contributors amypoodle, Zom and bobsy, in regards to the recent Alan Moore-scripted bookshelf-type comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century #1: 1910.

Three passages in particular seemed relevant to a more recent Alan Moore comic, this week’s Necronomicon #2. In fact, I found the three passages to coincide directly with three extremes active in the work. My duties as a comics critic and obsessive compulsive demand I detail each of them below, in order of growing expanse, as additionally informed by the trio of word-drugs prominent in The Courtyard, this present serial’s overture. To wit:

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(1) (wza-y’ei – a word for the negative conceptual space left surrounding a positive concept, the class of things larger than thought, being what thought excludes)

“The real reason we decided to put together these meandering thoughts is precisely because the urge to respond to the League [of Extraordinary Gentlemen] as a game of spot the reference is so strong. I’m not denying there’s pleasure to be had from this and that it can enrich one’s reading, but I’m concerned that sometimes, perhaps often, discussion of the League amounts to little more than inter-textual trainspotting and that other conversations are being drowned out…. All the textual hyperlinking goes beyond knowing literary backslapping. It possesses formally experimental, political and philosophical dimensions, and that’s where the real action is. By choosing this sort of updating over that one, by painting Mina as a proto-feminist and the Golliwog as a liberated force, Moore is making choices that are worth thinking about and commenting on, but somehow much of the discourse around the League ignores that obvious fact. If the League is simply an exercise in referencing then it is a dead exercise.”

Neonomicon sees writer Alan Moore in an especially aggressive mood. It has nothing to do with the sex & violence to follow, however – the script instead takes aim at the character of Moore’s construction of comics, building self-reference as if to climax. Looking at the image just above, you’ll see series protagonist Agent Brears, FBI, conveying an unusual level of self-awareness among the crucifixes and dildos. You see, she’s caught on to Alan Moore: clearly this story is all just a mélange of literary and pop cultural references! And once you’ve puzzled out all the cites, you’ve cracked the case and solved the comic. Investigation-as-annotation-as-criticism, essentially.

This is hardly a fresh notion for Moore, mind you: the finale of Promethea was nothing if not a revelation of post-apocalyptic living as accessing time in a distanced manner, gifting everyone with the ability to ‘read’ moments in time either sequentially or out-of-order like panels in a comic, the art form most closely allied with Moore’s concept of extra-materiality. Freed from plain waking life, the characters in Moore’s comic are impliedly brought straight up to the reader’s observational level; do feel free to contrast this flourish with rival Grant Morrison’s tendency to dive down into fictions to join his characters, like a hamstrung god parting the clouds. Oh, but remember: Promethea is copyright and trademark America’s Best Comics, an imprint of WildStorm, itself an imminently former imprint of DC Comics, subsidiary of Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. Don’t be surprised to see these favorites back in action, should their multimedia viability hop up at some future date. You can understand why the ultra-connected Morrison is so often a fragile deity.

To Moore — and I presume he would rightly admit to not inventing it himself — this is all the stuff of Magic, the means of accessing the shared Immaterial plane from the individual’s Material experience. “All stories are true,” Dave Sim wrote Viktor Davis saying Alan Moore had said, convincingly, in one of the less-remembered parts of Reads. This is because ideas, per Moore, occupy a reality that’s differently real from what’s in front of you. In building his mighty towers of notions, from the basic utilization of the superhero ‘shared universe’ concept in Swamp Thing to the modified Charlton cast of Watchmen to the archly symbolic Iain Sinclair-informed London of From Hell to the many mash-ups of ABC and all the fucking in Lost Girls, Moore endeavors to navigate formed geographies of ideas. The results certainly vary qualitatively on the page, but there’s always, ideally, an understanding that meaning is to be divined from the process.

In an essay in Dodgem Logic #3, Moore characterized magic as potentially “running in the gutters like lightning.” To stretch a metaphor, this is at least what magic does in his panel gutters, where the material of art is hydrated with imagining.

Poor Agent Brears is caught halfway. If it might seem corny to have a character suddenly ‘catch on’ to all the references in a reference-heavy book, it’s nonetheless tragically so in the context of Moore’s work; she can see the information, but not the meaning. That still puts her a ways ahead of Agent Sax in The Courtyard, who managed to connect the in-story dots without figuring out the Lovecraft connection. Brears, in contrast, is freer in thinking — and is duly rewarded by the confining all-vertical panel layouts of that prior work getting toppled over into an all-horizontal widescreen bonanza, at least giving her room to pace — but behaves like a rather stereotypical fan-addict, only able to enumerate what Name X relates to in the Lovecraft oeuvre, only just following the plot.

This leads to some pretty funny moments in the issue’s early pages, from Brears trying to figure out how Lovecraftian happenings in the in-story 1920s could possibly stem from a man’s then-obscure writings — she briefly considers that Lovecraft was actually writing personal observations, a theory quickly dismissed — to her lobbing H.P. soundbites at a sinister Salem merch dealer (“Whispers In Darkness”) to gain both his trust and access to his Lovecraft-themed porno room (remember: dildos). But Brears doesn’t look any deeper into the evidence. She dismisses the notion of serious nasty rituals because Lovecraft wouldn’t depict sex on the page. She elides his racism to her black partner, Agent Lamper, noting that Lovecraft regretted it later in life. She rationalizes, but doesn’t read into what infernal rites might involve. It’s blunt, but Moore thereby draws a parallel between his heroine failing to consider the deeper potentials of literary literality and readers playing at works (perhaps his!) as only accumulations of borrowed items, or even just plot points.

And so, Brears ends up bumbling with Lamper after an all-devotee orgy in an underground orgone accumulator, wherein Lamper is unceremoniously shot in the head and Brears is raped at gunpoint until an unspeakable creature shows up to rape her again after the issue is over.

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(2) (dho-hna – a force which defines; lends significance to its receptacle as with the hand in the glove; wind in mill-vanes; the guest or the trespasser crossing a threshold and giving it meaning)

“I have no evidence of his intent, but by refusing to exclude rape from his depictions of violence and power in action in my view Moore is fulfilling an important function. While ninety nine percent of popular fictions are happy to present us with a picture of violence that excludes most of the troubling bits, a violence that is fundamentally fun and entertaining, Moore is prepared to go to much more uncomfortable places and thank God for that because, lest we forget, rape is very much part of our violent world, and I think that our consistent attempts to edit it out of our experience are nothing short of dangerously immoral. If it were the case that Moore’s rapes were simplistically titillating or gratuitous without purpose I would be concerned, but taken on a case by case basis I think they are defensible within their respective contexts.”

The most startling aspect of Neonomicon #2 isn’t that Moore presents another rape scene, it’s that (intentionally or not) he appears to be doubling down on criticisms of his presentations of rape. And it’s not just that Brears is set in the uneasy position of misreading the nature of her reference-heavy world as prelude to tragedy – it’s that the comic instills its six concluding pages of violence with a dispassion that teeters toward comedy.

Consider this: all of the orgy participants are huge Lovecraft admirers, or rather admirers of the true nature of what Lovecraft wrote about, the real unspeakable horrors lurking beyond the veil. All of them are demonstratively fucked out of their minds on orgone (“An hour down here, I don’t even know who I am,” muses a portly Whispers in Darkness clerk, nude and splashing in the chamber’s river water sex pool), to the point where they arguably don’t entirely realize that murder and rape are particularly wrong. They happily chatter in porn talk about how good they’re feeling and how fucking awesome everything is, occasionally resorting to further, jokey referencing in the midst of the action. “Pete,” a participant asks, with the rape occurring to the left of the same wide panel, “can you get the strap-a-thoggua from Mai’s satchel? She wants to give me a three-lobed burning eye…”

The effect is magnified by artist Jacen Burrows, who has expressed admiration in the past for All Star Superman penciller Frank Quitely, he of many precise wide vistas, often depicting action at the very edges of horizontal panels to indicate impossible speed. Burrows uses his wide panels to emphasize proximity; that is, his panels essentially mimic the shape of the orgone accumulator — helpfully introduced in a rare three-quarter splash with its doorway serving as three-quarters the panel borders — stalking around the space to capture the sexual action in the same space as the violence. This is an example of David Smart’s so-called diegetic panelization active in the work. I commend Smart’s video(s) to your attention as a fascinating analysis of issue #1 from a visual standpoint, emphasizing on his own the understanding Neonomicon‘s amoral characters have of the base ‘comics’ state of their reality. I emphasize the ‘Alan Moore’ state here, though it is foolish to exclude Burrows from consideration.

Amorality is important. Critical, even. Burrows can be a visceral artist, but in this issue’s finale his characters only bob and hump, lumpy and non-idealized as genuine participants in real sex parties tend to be. It’s funny seeing a woman hanging out with a tiny, precisely detailed double-headed strap-on in position, even without Moore’s deliberately banal dialogue. In this space, trapped as Agent Brears is, nothing really matters, except to her. The horror isn’t that something looks awful, it’s that an awful act is sharing space with such relaxation, so that the reader is trusted to understand that it’s awful, because Moore are Burrows, good as they are to allow horrible dripping mascara and occasional bursts of awkwardly panicked dialogue to appear, don’t really push the issue.

But why? Really: why the fuck should rape be presented in such a manner, so potentially trivializing, almost as a big joke? To a character previously established as a sex addict, whose rape (and the murder of her partner) sends the orgone levels off the charts, summoning a really big-cocked monster to give everyone in the viscinity the fuck of their lives? Toying with the odious vintage porn device of rape unlocking a woman’s theretofore repressed desires? Why? It seems some extra horror is present in the metatextual realm, the horror of the reader in witnessing where exactly this comic is planning to go.

There are answers to this, and forgive my choosing the most roundabout. In his video, Smart makes reference to the artificial skies covering all of the series’ action as an ominous, maximal “panel” refusing escape to any characters not wise to the fundamentals of comics. To my mind, this artificial device represents the constraints of Moore’s concept, the World Where Lovecraft is Real. Metaphorically, Brears is trapped inside the values Moore has divined from Lovecraft. It’s a rigged game, really – we could find “meaning” in Moore’s arrays of odds ‘n ends, but Brears would have to specifically discover Alan Moore’s meaning, since this is his magic, his access to Immateria.

At the most important moment of the series thus far, shortly after the characters enter the orgone accumulator, the chit-chat of Brears and Lamper on the topic of sex and relationships and small things is noticeably replaced with the chit-chat of the devotees on the more immediate variants of sex and relationships and small things, despite the big and atrocious thing happening usually off to the panel’s side, within walls. Their story has superseded the Brears/Lamper narrative, and it is all about delight, about using understanding, power, to simple enjoy pleasure at all costs, to the point where the concept of cost is obscure, and there’s nothing more wonderful that fucking a huge monster. It’s magic misused.

You might have noticed the issue’s title above: The Shadow Out Of America, which promises some unsubtle political commentary. It’s helpful to think of it as the promise of something monstrous slithering from a larger mass. Something indistinct. At points, the issue grows too cute: Brears’ POV is sometimes adopted in the final pages, her hazy sight covered via an ugly digital blurring effect, conveniently obscuring any direct shots of the monster’s full body and suggesting a truly dreadful play on the indescribable nature of Lovecraft’s creatures. One might yearn for the excellent handling of similar material in Taiyo Matsumoto’s GoGo Monster, where enormous creature shapes are detailed in thousands of tiny hatchings and cross-hatchings, forcing the reader to actually lean in and try and discern their contours.

On the other hand, it’s fitting that Burrows takes a less delicate approach. It’s not Brears’ story anymore, so naturally her POV is ruined by an excruciating imposition of ill-fitting technology, instead of being built up from the lines that make up a panel’s world. Curiously, no sexual penetration is shown at any point in the comic – only the monster is allowed the prominence of an on-panel money shot, and I use the porno term because Burrows often positions his characters mouth ajar like the smut participants Moore writes them as, obsessed only with pleasure. Maybe porn close-ups would make it too immediate.

The panel gutters, then, are awash with indistinct, consumptive amorality, as the status of the world, the comic, understood by characters in the know. This is the second extreme, the “dho-hna,” the “force which defines” per The Courtyard, that which is “running in the gutters like lightning” per Moore. The first extreme was to allow a character to acknowledge the conceptual space of the comic on her own, without enlightenment. Moore is a cruel god to Brears, and there’s no superhero Grant Morrison to whoosh down and save her; the confinement she writhes under is a pressure cooker of Bad Magic.

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(3) (yr nhhngr – beneath me, a vortex of marvelous coinage is opened)

“For me, the highlight of our interview with Kevin O’Neill was the big reveal that he and Alan Moore could conceivably continue producing the League forever…”

Considering the future, particularly in regards to comic book-type comics, particularly such comics from small publishing operations, particularly in light of Moore’s oft-stated weariness with “comics,” it’s this work, Neonomicon, that might well stand as his final word in the format. Oh, “comics” won’t die, of course. After all, if Alan Moore has taught us anything, it’s that the end of world (in macro) and personal death (in micro) are but shifts in perception. Likewise, comics aren’t likely to disappear – they’ll join the ranks of poetry and theater, visible in a few prominent examples and otherwise left to the passions of devotees.

But comic books? LoEG is already pretty much out of that, with Black Dossier having suffered a difficult birth into graphic novel form and Century enjoying what used to be called a Prestige Format release and is now a halfway state between the New Releases rack and the Other corner of the manga/superheroes shelves as Borders. Every issue is keenly limited to a discreet time period, a full and complete story in a more formalized manner than the satisfying chapters of the comic book Watchmen, or the serialized From Hell. Or the chapter-attuned rise and fall of events in this series, whatever they represent.

“I will probably love the comic book medium forever,” Moore recently stated in a very controversial interview, seeking to dislodge his much-repeated distaste for comics-the-industry from comics-the-art. This is connected to Neonomicon. “It certainly wasn’t intended as my farewell to comics,” Moore was reported as saying, a bit over one week earlier, “but that is perhaps how it has ended up. It is one of the blackest, most misanthropic pieces that I’ve ever done. I was in a very, very bad mood.” Specifically involving “the horrific stuff that went on around the Watchmen film.”

It would be inaccurate, however, to view this series, even in its present half-complete form, as a simple wish for annihilation. No, the last extreme of Neonomicon is realizing that annihilation is readily present. Imminent. This is Moore’s most crucial citation to Lovecraft. Agent Brears is trapped in several enclosed spaces, from the artificial roof of the sky down to the orgone accumulator, all of it now very self-evidently a constructed fiction space. Of course she will be raped. Of course monsters will barely veer into view. That is just her world. It’s not necessarily Alan Moore’s waking world, although it is undoubtedly ‘real’ to him. It’s an awful variant, with variant covers. It’s a comic book, which is to say it IS comic books, which is to say it’s filled with bad magic, which is to say everything good within it is doomed.

And while his League of fictions might clash with wickeder imaginings, away from Comics, the Shadow Out Of America, perhaps to no better a result, or maybe only no result, if indeed it goes on forever… at least there we have a fighting chance for virtue to endure. In comic books, to Moore, this is impossible. It’s only issue #2, and this thing seems just about wrapped up, plot-wise. What’s disturbing is where it might go in the second half, now that the heroic narrative’s overthrown. Hey, maybe digital comics can swoop out of the ether and swallow the whole hot fucking mess? Close all the fucking comic book stores in five years? Find some other cloud in the Immaterial?

Plot twists seem so unlikely now. The final sensation of this issue isn’t excitement or terror, it’s resignation. Closing your eyes and hoping for sleep, and wishing for the world to end so you can get on with the next damned thing.

Labels: Alan Moore, H.P. Lovecraft, Jacen Burrows