A Hideous Naughty Strangeness: Alan Moore's Neonomicon, and the Doom That Came to Lovecraft

Neonomicon
by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows

So Alan Moore’s farewell “fuck you” to the comics industry wrapped up recently, and… This unrelentingly dark and unpleasant book didn‘t exactly go where I expected it to, though perhaps I should have. He played fair with his literary mystery, after all, planting clues and images that pretty much told you where it was headed if you chose to view them in the right way. But I wasn’t exactly trying to solve the mystery anyway. I was more concerned with the commentary he was making on the works of HP Lovecraft, which is how I want to look at Neonomicon tonight.

Part of the agenda here seems to have been to give some teeth back to the incredible nihilism, the sheer hopeless existential horror that makes Lovecraft’s work so compelling, and that too often gets glossed over in the modern popular fan interpretations of the work. I mean, in a world where you can buy cute stuffed effigies of Cthulhu (I own one myself), it’s easy to forget how terrifying that fucker’s supposed to be. He’s an avatar of nameless, uncaring evil from beyond, a vast alien intellect that will devour all, and that we have no hope of defeating. He is nihilism made flesh, not a toyetic cartoon mascot.

I can understand how it came to this, of course. One of the ways people deal with scary things is to codify them, make them understandable, and (in the end) make jokes about them. And Cthulhu strikes the perfect balance between the bizarre and the relatable in Lovecraft’s pantheon of evil cosmic god-things. “Big flabby oceanic monster with an octopus for head” is way easier to grasp than, say, “formless boiling madness that sits gibbering at the center of the universe.” But it’s also more pleasingly strange than “black goat of the woods with a thousand young.” But still. Codifying Lovecraftian horrors is pretty much antithetical to the point of them. They are the unknown, the unclassifiable things that terrify us because we have problems wrapping our heads around them. That’s why it’s so difficult to do the man’s work justice on film, or in comics: visual mediums demand that you provide visuals for things best left to the imagination.

Jacen Burrows does supply visuals here, of course, and his Deep One (though a very cool monster) isn’t particularly horrifying in and of itself. But it doesn’t need to be, because of the kind of horror Moore has chosen to focus on. Which brings us back on-point, and into the realm of SPOILERS...

Dreams of Chalk and Fish-Men

So it’s back to the funnybooks for Day 11 of the Countdown to Halloween, with a review of a comic that’s actually current…

Neonomicon #1 & 2
by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows

So, uhm… Wow. This book is pretty hardcore. I mean, it’s a horror comic, so I expected something scary or disturbing, but man! I’ve seldom felt more uncomfortable reading a funnybook as I did reading the second issue of this series. I’m getting way ahead of myself with this intro, but I thought I should get that out of the way up-front: there’s some disturbing content ahead. Lots of SPOILERS, too, so read on with that in mind…

Alan Moore vs Comics

Alan Moore's done a rather lengthy interview over at Bleeding Cool about the "Watchmen 2" rumors, and what DC / Warner Brothers offered him in return for his okay to do sequels, prequels, and etc. It's a great look at Moore's mindset on the Watchmen situation, and on the comics industry in general. Go read it. Now. Then come back here...