Alan Moore's Neonomicon

Product Information

Christensen] from Avatar Press, and he suggested that he could provide some if I was up for doing a four-part series, so I did.

the art is particularly interesting during this sequence, using the rape victim's blurry vision to startling effect. A sequel to his geniunely chilling and enjoyable short story The Courtyard, inspired by a poem in Lovecraft's Fungi From Yuggoth cycle, Neonomicon takes the worst excesses of something like the New French Extremity movement in French cinema, where outrageous or disturbing subject matter is plastered indiscriminately across the narrative from beginning to end under the guise of moralistic grandstanding, and applies this to the comics medium, resulting in a work that's miserable to look at, miserable to read. This consists of the Courtyard (previously published as a graphic novel) and the four issues of Neonomicon series. The Courtyard was presented in vertical panels, mostly two to a page, while Neonomicon is almost entirely presented in horizontal panels, mostly four to a page. Sax looks like Lovecraft, Carcosa, Aklo, the weird tree in the courtyard, the language, right down to the horror at the end of the tunnel and the chapter subtitles riffing on Lovecraft’s stories - everything is Lovecraft-centric.The courtyard deals with an undercover cop Aldo Sax, grisly and baffling murders, psuedo-languages, bizzare characters like the veiled Johnny Carcosa and his "mother" and a mysterious "drug". As others have noted, the characterizations are not very strong, which is disappointing for an Alan Moore story. Moore’s characters’ dialogue in other comics never stood out as particularly amateurish so I’m going to assume he went especially bad in homage to old HP.

Aldo Sax, the main character of The Courtyard, is in an insane asylum speaking Lovecraftian gibberish after he was arrested for murdering his neighbour. Make no mistake, considered on the story alone, Neonomicon scores highly as a fine story among the Mythos canon. The sexuality that is hinted at but never allowed to enter Lovecraft’s asexual tales is explicit, in text and drawings, in this disturbing story. So although I took it to pay off the tax bill, I’m always going to make sure I try and make it the best possible story I can. As a fanboy of both Alan Moore and HP Lovecraft I've been wanting to read this for a while and wasn't disappointed.

That said, let's try and look at "Neonomicon" on its own merits--let's try taking it for what's there. When the story revolves around the weird aspects of the world, it works, but the departure into sex and rape is really uncomfortable. The illustrations are superb, realistic, heavy on line but not ignoring shading and contour, and the coloring, dark but bursting into explosions of color in the more psychedelic interludes, is equally effective. This book confounds expectations - the reader could be forgiven for thinking it is a cross between "The X-files" and "Silence of the lambs". Fairly early on it becomes apparent that Agent Brears is the brains of the duo, she is also recovering a sex addict.