alicemacher (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alicemacher) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
scans_daily2015-10-03 05:40 pm
alicemacher) wrote in scans_daily2015-10-03 05:40 pm
Alan Moore's The Courtyard
"The Courtyard was my attempt to write a story within the mythology of H.P. Lovecraft that did not try to regurgitate Lovecraft's style. It was an attempt to write a Lovecraftian story that was set in what was then the near future rather than in a Lovecraftian Era. As such, I thought it was a very successful story and it has always been a little favorite of mine in terms of my horror output."
--Alan Moore, AvatarPress.com
16 pages of 48 (Two issues; 8 each of 24). Trigger warning for gore.
The Courtyard is the first work in Moore's alternate-Lovecraftian universe which includes Neonomicon (2010-2011), to which it became the prologue, and the currently in-progress Providence, to which it's a sequel. It began as a 1994 prose story published in The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft (Ed. D.M. Mitchell, Creation Books). In 2003 Antony Johnston, in consultation with Moore, adapted it as a two-issue comic book, with veteran Avatar artist Jacen Burrows. It's available both in the original black and white (from which the following scans come) and in a later colourized version published both separately and together with Neonomicon.
Aldo Sax is an FBI agent whose physical appearance and bigotry mirror those of Lovecraft. He's on assignment in the Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn, staying in a dingy rooming house next door to Germaine, a woman with schizophrenia. Sax is investigating three seemingly unconnected ritual murders within the U.S.
Applying his anomaly theory, Sax notes that the first murderer, a classical music fan, nevertheless owns one rock album by the noise band the Ulthar Cats. The second killer, a solitary bookworm and writer, doesn't like music; nevertheless, the Feds found among his possessions a ticket stub from Red Hook's Club Zothique. The third murderer, an alcoholic, was nonetheless upon his arrest concealing a baggie of the drug DMT-7 in his rectum. What do all these anomalies have to do with each other? Let's find out.
Sax heads for Club Zothique, having deduced that it's the common thread in the three cases.
Face points out Johnny Carcosa, a veiled man of indeterminate age. The Ulthar Cats, whose female lead singer goes by "Randolph Carter," take the stage.
While enduring the Cats' set, Sax recalls that all three murderers are known to speak, write or scat-sing a "gibberish" similar to that now coming out of Carter's mouth. Suspecting that Aklo may have been responsible for the frenzied state in which they committed their brutal crimes, he approaches Carcosa as a prospective customer.
At 3:00 A.M., Carcosa invites Sax up to his apartment, where the agent is disturbed to find an elderly, fish-faced woman: Johnny's mother, whom Carcosa ushers back inside in a mixture of English and that gibberish speech, which she also speaks. Johnny then offers a drug to Sax, who recognizes it as DMT-7, the "white powder" and protests that he wanted Aklo. Carcosa explains that you have to take the powder first in order for the Aklo to take effect.
Sax purchases three "hits" of Aklo and, at Carcosa's insistence, snorts some white powder. He's confident nothing bad will happen, as he's taken stronger drugs before.
Later, upon leaving Carcosa's place, Sax finds that he no longer experiences time in a linear fashion, but as future, past and present folding around each other. He also sees himself and his environment as mere unfolded reflections of their ultimate forms, a phenomenon he understands due to his sudden fluency in Aklo.
The scene abruptly shifts to his neighbour Germaine's apartment:
Sax (still portrayed in blood-drenched close-up) inwardly urges Germaine to observe the first cut of the "unfolding." His thoughts rapidly shift from English to pure Aklo as the story ends. The last word, appropriately, is fhtagn.
no subject
In the form of a phone booth? Yes. Not just outrageous, but utterly ridiculous.
no subject
no subject
1) The number of uses of a fax machine where a little cash-register tape (how it's portrayed here) would be a practical printout are rare. And going a bit astray of how it's portrayed here, keeping a pay-phone style fax stocked with properly sized paper would be ridiculously impractical.
2) Think about how badly maintained regular phone booths are. Now imagine one with even more parts that can fail or be vandalized. Now imagine that one might have papers with sensitive private information fed into them (most common uses of outgoing faxes, especially for people that don't own one, involve such), only for them to get stuck, and no way for the user to get them out, and not having an attendant on hand to get them unstuck right then and there.
no subject