The Lurker Within

[arbre_rieur]

The fourth and final issue of Alan Moore's NEONOMICON's finally out. And hey, this one's actually safe for work.









This is followed by the final page of the issue, which is just a duplicate of the very first page of the first issue, its words now carrying further significance after everything we've learned:

Comments

[grimmbear]

Yikes. That makes a lot of sense in a very sick twisted way. i honestly love it.

[blackruzsa]

This was sicker than Alan Moore's usual, but in the end, I'm still getting the brilliance vibes. I love how it gets me to think, but doesn't frustrate me.

[wizardru]

Well, at least I know how it ends and where he was going with it. I nearly threw the second issue in the trash, it made me so angry.

[ian_karkull]

That's pretty clever and makes a lot of sense since the actual Lovecraft expressed similar disgust towards all things sexual.
The story works on a number of levels, so it's good to see that Moore hasn't lost "the magic" after all.

[althechi]

What does "A nun, see Asian merry" come out as when said quickly enough? I can't quite get it.

[baihu]

A previous poster figured it out: "What this is, is your annunciation, Mary/Merry."

The most relevant definition in this case: Annunciation Christianity.
The angel Gabriel's announcement to the Virgin Mary of the Incarnation.
The feast celebrating this event.
March 25, the day on which this feast is observed.

So basically, she's evil Mary.

[espanolbot]

Hrrm, I guess a woman who is trying to couple with sex addiction makes an interesting reflection of Mary, who is seen to be an archetypal virgin in many ways.

Interesting, but not pleasant.

[icon_uk]

Do you mean "cope" with sexual addiction, because that's one awesome Freudian slip! :)

[espanolbot]

Yeah. XP

[arilou_skiff]

Yeah. This is... Yeah.

[baihu]

Out of all this, the most disappointed I was, was that freaky fishguy was neither very freaky nor fishy enough.

He looked like a murloc from a WoW doujinshi.

[tsunamiwombat]

Incoming WoW Murloc love fanfics...

[halloweenjack]

Something that looks "like a murloc from a WoW doujinshi" isn't freaky or fishy enough for you? Oh, dear.

[baihu]

If the standard of Lovecraftian imagination is what festers in the mind of yaoi doujinshi mangaka, we are all thoroughly fucked!

[kamino_neko]

The image of murloc porn is something I didn't need, damn you.

[halloweenjack]

The idea of her pushing Baby Cthulhu around in a stroller in Park Slope amuses me greatly.

[golden_orange]

I just pity whoever's responsible for that particular delivery.

"Oh my goodness, what a beautiful... thing."

[jlroberson]

"Congratulations, it's a OH GOD!KILL IT!KILL IT NOW!"

Seriously, it's a good thing he stopped the story here, because from that point on? It becomes potentially freaking hilarious.

This seemed appropriate

[darkblade]

[mullon]

Disgusting tripe from beginning to end. Alan Moore must be losing it, and no longer in the fun way.

[espanolbot]

Hm, well we do have the new LoEG book coming out in May, hopefully that won't be completely meanspirited, unlike the previous installment of Century.

Jenny. :( WHHHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!???????

Though in regards to this story, half-human hybrids, downer endings and the futility of existance are things that are present in Lovecraft's work, so following it to create an accurate homage is understandable at least. So complaining about those aspects is like complaining that Crossed, a homage to the zombie apocalypse/hate plague, a la Screwfly Solution, genre of horror fiction was too scary/horrifying.

[jlroberson]

Jenny being "mean" comes from THREEPENNY OPERA, so blame Brecht. What you see there is her song come to life.

My opinion of this is that Moore dressed up what in the end isn't the most terribly imaginative treatment of Lovecraft with cheap rape sensationalism. Which she adjusted to absurdly well without explanation. And keeps calling a "fuck"--I have never ever seen anyone raped call it that. EVER. Moore, I am getting the vibe, isn't terribly sensitive to the issue and talks about it like someone from, well, his generation might have. IN THE SIXTIES.

This piece did not merit going quite that far, for such a popcorn fart of a payoff. A derivative one at that.

[espanolbot]

I didn't mean that Janni was mean, I mean that what happened to her was.

I LIKED that there was a girl who decided that she was going to make her way in the world and not become a monster like her father... but then fate intervened, leading her to get gangraped by her employer and his friends in an alley, causing her to implictly not only become worse than her father, but also enforces her/his ideals and methods on her children and grandchildren as well.

And then there's the implication that she married Broadarrow Jack because she's was made pregnant by the attack and that she married him because he was the only white dude she knew that she was on good terms with despite him being twice her age, in the very least.

Blech, the whole trade gets me down now. *sigh*

[jlroberson]

I haven't got a problem with it. What do people think oppression of nonwhite women looks like? Especially in that time.

But what happens there is that she embraces her destiny, even if it took that to push her to the degree of misanthropy her father had. All that's happened is that she's become like her dad. Why do you think Nemo was what he was? The brutal oppression of his people by the English.

As for "mean"--I don't think we ever stop sympathizing with her. She's our POV character. So I don't see that. I do see it with Merril.

An interesting point to consider though: the rape--which is CLEARLY a rape in CENTURY, another reason I have no problem with it here--is very carefully shown, in that it barely is. You only see enough to know what happened. And it comes off as horrible. Whereas the way Moore presents it in NEONOMICON, explicitly, it becomes "rape at first." Consider the difference and why.

[espanolbot]

Yeah, I know that there is a difference between the two. For example, in Neonomicon they are riffing her being the quasi-demonic Virgin Mary stand-in, so in her the position of being Bizarro Mary means that she has to be into sex (even monster-sex) to polarise the difference between her and her Biblical counterpart. So in keeping with that, it leads to the unpleasant notion that the woman in Neonomicon was meant to be so addicted to sex that even being raped by monster won't turn her off for long in order to make her a more of a backwards reflection of a religious figure about whom their is angry debate as to whether her hymen was still intact AFTER SHE GAVE BIRTH.

In Janni's case, the gang rape was to act as the catalyst to turn her into a hate-filled mysanthrope like her father. Admittedly it gave her a sympathetic backstory and explanation for her "Start of Darkness", but... why did it have to be rape? Moore appears to have women brutalised in nearly everything that he writes (the exception being Tom Strong, where it was the male main character who was molested... twice), the inclusion in this story as well just bent it opinion of it out of shape.

It works for tragedy, I guess. Both on the level that it was a horrific thing that happened to a likeable character, and that it derailled her attempts to not become her father, thus dooming her child and her child's child to the same path that she had thust upon her.

I just wish that he didn't resort to turning rape into a plot device for the umpteenth time.

[jlroberson]

I think though, going to a different angle, this is going into something deeper about Moore's writing history. Is it only me that saw in this some unresolved threads that might have started with Alec & Abby back in SWAMP THING? Perhaps something about this reflecting something he could NOT do back then?

Given there's reputedly supposed to be some "fuck you" to the comics industry about this, that's one thing that occurred to me.

[midnightvoyager]

Aside from the fact that I didn't like any of the previous stuff, that there's some damn flat exposition. Vaguely gross, without the redeeming virtues of being interesting or frightening.

Also dull. Dull dull dull.

"so yeah like it sniffed my pee and i guess that means i'm pregnant or something so ia ftaghn, i guess? i dunno."

[silicondream]

Yeah, it reads to me like, well, a fairly lazy pastiche. It's like someone wrote down twenty Mythos tropes on an index card and started checking them off one by one. "Hey, fish-fucking! I'll use that. Only having fish-babies afterwards would make too much sense, so I'll have the kid be..." *flips coin* "...Cthulhu."

And the most interesting bits, like the Old Ones being near-future descendants of humanity and the time-worm image, seem swiped from heavily derivative of Zenith and The Invisibles.

[meatwhichdreams]

I agree, it was very much...just....flat. But I felt like I was supposed to be all flipping out about how it all made sense because you see she was pregnant! And now her life has meaning! -_-

Didn't a bunch of posters all foresee this once she started getting raped by the fish man?

[philippos42]

Banality of evil, perhaps?

Coupled with her terror at being made to couple with the thing, her acceptance of bearing its world-eating spawn is a creepy case of mental change.

[jlroberson]

Banality of evil is masses dying because of a bureaucratic mistake. Not a woman being repeatedly raped by a fishmonster. I'd say that "banal" is not a word I'd use.

Except for Moore's imagination in this instance.

[icon_uk]

"A book of names... new ones, not dead ones"

So the new Many Angled Ones may well have names like

Olivia or Jack or Ruby or Harry or Emily or Alfie or Grace or Thomas or Lily or Oliver?

They lack a certain... squamous quality, don't they?

And Zenith did sort of the same thing when the superhumans realised the Lovecraft monsters they'd been fighting all this time were actually themselves (and their children), from the future, having achieved their ultimate states of being and time travelled.

[silicondream]

Dangit, you beat me to the Zenith reference. The "humans as 4-D timeworms" image is straight out of The Invisibles, too.

I assume what she meant is that Olivia, Jack, Ruby, etc. are the "dead names," since humanity'll be extinct shortly.

[gamerguy]

Necronomicon == Book of Dead Names

[darkblade]

Well maybe they will be less concered about exterminating all life if they weren't named in long lost tounges of beings yet to be.

[jlroberson]

I noticed the Morrison...similarities...too. Granted, both come from the same basic source, but Morrison's flavor is definitely detectable in this angle on the idea. That's a bit disappointing coming from Moore.

[venatosapiens]

Didn't like the miniseries in the slightest, found it disturbing and dull and not nearly as clever as it could have been.
That said, that is a hell of an ending page. It belongs in a much better work, in my opinion.

[jeyl]

So, what was the ultimate point of this story? Was it to show that a big lizard creature can impregnate someone and figure out she's pregnant by doing funny things to her urine? And now she's like a believer?

This is about as interesting as a trip to a highway gas station bathroom.

[meatwhichdreams]

Well put. My levels of disgust at this story were well at the "highway gas station bathroom" level at not at all near the "eldritch horrors" level Moore seems to want to elicit.

[khamelea]

It's like Rosemary's Baby with a cardboard Lovecraft mask on.

[jlroberson]

I hate to say it, but frankly, to me, this ending seems kind of obvious and pat. And more, this has two basic (if coincidental) concept rips from Grant Morrison. One's from Zenith, the other from the Invisibles. It's true Lovecraft was the basic source for both, but not in the manner in which Morrison approached these ideas. Something about these seems a little too close.

[bradhanon]

I've honestly never seen this reading of Lovecraft before, the "was, are, and shall be" lack of timesense thing. It works startlingly well, IMHO.

Also, that's the best drawing of Tralfamadorian vision I've yet seen.

[redkingcrab]

Dear Alan

can you please stop shoehorning rape into everything

thanks,
everyone.

[golden_orange]

Dear redkingcrab,

Good Christ, I know what you mean.

Cheers,
Me

[kagome654]

Co-signed.

[proteus_lives]

"Austrian accent"

"Mr. Moore, tell me about your mother."

[lakrids404]

NO!!

[proteus_lives]

Such a great movie.

[jlroberson]

He did that already, in the Birth Caul. ;)