Tuesday, October 12, 2010

The Shadow Out of Alan Moore

This is a very interesting look at the most recent issue of Alan Moore's Neonomicon, which is the center of some well-deserved controversy due to its content. I'm not going to post any images from it. If you haven't read it, and you want to see the nastiness, you feel free to Google yourself, kids.

I read the issue, and the one before it, and The Courtyard before that, and I can understand why, in terms of the story, Moore went where he did. Derleth and Roy Thomas aside, HP Lovecraft's universe-a universe founded on the nihilistic angles that decorate the stories of the Old Gentleman from Providence-that's going to be a nasty place. Not scary necessarily, depending on your tolerance for seafood and the mysteries of the horizontal mambo, but nasty all the same. And Moore gives us nastiness aplenty in his scrawlings in Lovecraft's commonplace book. Other writers have done much the same, though few of them have been working in the graphic medium when they did it.

That said, it's probably not a place I'll be visiting again, any time soon.

2 comments:

joe bloke said...

and I'll be having the same old pointless arguments with the same old Alan Moore groupies all over again. I actually enjoyed the first issue, and the first half of the second, and then the "porn" kicks in, and I just stopped giving a fuck. I'm not disgusted by it, I'm not in the least bit offended or repulsed, I just can't be arsed with Alan Moore any more. no doubt he'll act all wounded because nobody understands him, but I've given up caring what he thinks. shame.

Josh Reynolds said...

Actually, from recent interviews with him, he seems pretty abashed by the whole thing. Not ashamed, necessarily, but uncomfortable with his work on the series. Which is probably a first.