Dr. Manhattan is my Friend (Spoilers!)

In HBO's WATCHMEN series (really a sequel that should have been named AFTER WATCHMEN, and a sequel disdained by original WATCHMEN writer/co-creator Alan Moore, who refused to have his name attached to the HBO series), it turns out that the god-like master of matter and energy manipulation, Dr. Manhattan, can have his powers stolen, and that he can give them to other people. 

The thing of it is that in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel WATCHMEN (1986-87), Dr. Manhattan gains his powers by painstakingly and painfully recreating his body from the quantum level on up after accidentally having his Intrinsic Quantum Field (a fictional idea from Moore) 'removed' in a lab accident. This initial resurrection takes months and features DR. Manhattan occasionally materializing in and around the Gila Flats test facility in various stages of incompleteness. When he finally returns whole, he's blue and he can do just about anything.

So while Dr. Manhattan does indeed have powers, they don't seem to be the same sort of powers as, say, Plastic Man. He didn't wake up after a lab accident able to stretch. Instead, he taught himself how to manipulate matter and energy in the process of rebuilding his body.

As a participant in many discussions about WATCHMEN over the decades, I came to agree with several others that the point of Dr. Manhattan's origin was that ONLY Jon Osterman could have become Dr. Manhattan because he was both a brilliant quantum physicist and the curious, mechanically inclined son of a watchmaker: he was prepared to put things together (in this case his own body) at the quantum level.

WATCHMEN (the comic) seems to confirm that Jon's super-powers aren't easy to acquire. No one, not even super-genius Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias) decides to step into an Intrinsic Field Subtractor in order to turn himself into another Dr. Manhattan. Veidt's genetically modified lynx Bubastis doesn't come back after having its Intrinsic Field subtracted during Veidt's ill-fated attempt to kill Dr. Manhattan by recreating the lab accident that created him.

Though the adventures of Bubastis the Quantum Cat would be more interesting than, say, all of DC Comics' BEFORE WATCHMEN Event, all of it not involving Alan Moore.

So WATCHMEN (the HBO sequel series) posits Jon's powers as something that can be removed, stolen, or even gifted to another. Which would make sense if that other person was a quantum physicist with a keen interest in watch repair. Even then, Jon's powers come from the process of his reconstruction, not simply his exposure to the Subtractor. 

So we move from powers developed by rigorous, time-consuming effort and genius to powers that can be transferred and which apparently work (as most superhero powers do) by the person simply thinking about what he or she wants to do. For all of the HBO series' strengths (and there are many), its creators don't understand the source material.

Swamp Thing (2019), we hardly knew ye

The 'cancelled before it finished production' 2019 TV show SWAMP THING is a curious sort of warning on how not to adapt a comic book (or other long-running source material).

Note that I enjoy the show and that it's mostly well-made, well-written, and well-acted. However...

It shares a major problem with the 2011 GREEN LANTERN movie insofar as it tries to throw a huge amount of comic-book 'mythology' that the original comic accumulated over decades into a relatively small package. 

So much so that the 'Big Reveal' of episode 9 took 11 years to come about in the comics -- and was thus actually a Big Reveal when we learned that Everything We Knew Was Wrong. Nine episodes in, we barely know Alec Holland/Swamp Thing. The Big Reveal is just another plot point without much tragedy or shock behind it.

The show also invents new stories for many of the main characters which are not really an improvement on the original stories.

Then, for reasons I really don't understand, it throws two non-Swamp-Thing-related DC characters into prominent roles, Dan Cassidy (aka Blue Devil) and Madame Xanadu.

Though I do love Blue Devil

And an all-new ghost story plot. And at least three completely new, major supporting characters.

Did I say ten episodes? It actually does all this by the end of episode 5. There's still half a season to go and even more mythology to process. 

Then it throws in this very odd bit in which several episodes bear the titles of Bruce Springsteen songs. If the whole thing were set in New Jersey, I could maybe understand this. But it's set in Louisiana. Jarringly, the show switches from Springsteen titles back to titles from the comic-book series with episodes 9 and 10.

I do give the series a pass on its relative lack of Swamp Thing. It's a TV show, and the budget can't necessarily handle a partially and sometimes fully CGI Swamp Thing being the star of his own show, instead of a muck-encrusted cameo in many episodes. On the other hand, if you're going to make a show about Swamp Thing, maybe only do so if the budget is there.

One last thing that interests me is that the original Swamp Thing comic series, from the early 1970's, basically followed the rubric of The Fugitive. To wit: 

• Mysterious criminals kill Alec Holland's wife and accidentally turn him into Swamp Thing when they blow up his lab and saturate him with the 'Bio-restorative Formula' Linda and Alec Holland had been working on to increase plot yields. 
• Swamp Thing (a name given to him by the media -- he actually goes by 'Alec') sets off on a cross-country journey to find the people behind the murder and avenge his wife's death. 
• The government agent who failed to protect the Hollands pursues Swamp Thing across the country, initially because he believes that Swamp Thing may have played a role in the murders. 
• Each issue pits Swampy against a new supernatural menace.

Like I said, I enjoy the show but spend a lot of time agog. Even if we assume that the producers wanted to make a mythology-heavy, arc-intensive show out of Swamp Thing, they've simply overloaded the concept with too much information and way, way too many characters. I hope that its rapid cancellation means that a different version is on the way, or possibly a more faithful movie version.

But boy oh boy. Even in original works, watch that mythology. And watch out for too many characters introduced too quickly.

Also... how did Blue Devil get into the mix? Was the writers' room drunk that day?

Joker (2019)

Joker (2019): based on characters and situations created by Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, and others; written by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver; directed by Todd Phillips; starring Joaquin Phoenix (Arthur Fleck/ Joker), Robert De Niro (Murray Franklin), Zazie Beetz (Sophie), Frances Conroy (Penny Fleck), and Brett Cullen (Thomas Wayne):

Downbeat, revisionist take on Batman villain The Joker's origin story from the guy who directed The Hangover. Somehow, it mostly works. Director/co-writer Todd Phillips lifts much of the movie's written and visual aesthetic from 1970's and early 1980's Martin Scorsese. Hey, if you're going to steal, you can do a whole lot worse.

The result is a super-villain origin story that plays like the offspring of Scorsese's Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, with just a little After Hours mixed in. It's 1981, and Arthur Fleck, who will become The Joker, is a sad-sack, deeply mentally ill man caught in a family and bureaucratic nightmare of an existence. What larks, Pip!

Films derived from superhero properties don't usually deal with the truly down-trodden and desperate. Why should they? That's not the stuff of CGI! That Joker can be read as a small-scale power fantasy seems to have freaked out all the people who let the truly pernicious large-scale power fantasies slide right by without comment. There's certainly nothing attractive about Arthur Fleck's plight or his apotheosis. It seems to me that Iron Man, aka America's Giant Metal Penis, is a far more dangerous movie than this.

And Joaquin Phoenix is indeed a revelation. There's nothing 'funny' about this Joker, nothing crowd-pleasing or attemptedly crowd-pleasing about him in the manner of all previous big-screen Jokers. He's a man who becomes a monster in part because of forces beyond his control. This Joker is, among other things, physically brain-damaged. Yikes. Highly recommended.

Providence (2015-2017): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Jacen Burrows

Providence (2015-2017): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Jacen Burrows: 

Alan Moore called Providence a version of his own Watchmen for the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. I think he's wrong. It's much more like his terrific Jack the Ripper saga From Hell, illustrated by Eddie Campbell. There's a wealth of factual material especially as related to HPL's own life here, along with an almost encyclopedic tour through all of Lovecraft's fiction. The deadly Boston molasses flood shows up in one issue. That was a real thing !!! The ghouls who got sugar-coated corpses because of it, maybe not so real. I hope.

Technically, Providence is simply named for HPL's beloved home town in Rhode Island. The title accretes other meanings as the story proceeds. 

For the first ten issues, we follow the adventures of Robert Black during the year 1920. He's a closeted gay man who has left his New York reporting job after the death of his lover to research various elements of New England legends and folklore.

Black's name riffs on Lovecraft pen-pal Robert Bloch, who would create Psycho, among other things. Like Bloch, Black originally hails from Wisconsin. Black's homosexuality plays on that of several other Lovecraft 'disciples,' some of whom (all of whom?) appear at least briefly in Providence.

The graphic novel rewards multiple readings and punishes the short attention span. Like Watchmen, Providence increases the density of its narrative by including lengthy prose pieces at the back of the comic book. This is Moore's densest comic-book work since From Hell with its 100+pages of appendices.

All one really needs to know is, um, all of H.P. Lovecraft. Well, no. Indeed, it would be interesting to tackle HPL's work AFTER reading Providence. Be sure to tell me how that goes if you try it!

The world of Providence isn't meant to be ours. One of the fascinating metafictional herein is Moore's use of the work of Robert W. Chambers, one of the acknowledged precursors to HPL in American horror. In the world of Providence there is no Chambers because elements of Chambers' stories exist in the real world -- most notably, state-sanctioned suicide booths. 

But Lovecraft himself exists, and is a writer. And he's about to start writing that crazy Cthulhu Mythos stuff after apprenticing with Poe-influenced horror and works inspired by the wide-ranging whimsies of Lord Dunsany (who also appears as a character).

William S. Burroughs also briefly appears. The anecdote connecting Burroughs and one of HPL's disciples? That's totally true!

Moore's approach to the story privileges psychological and bodily horrors over those of the cosmic. This is a very cloachal approach to HPL's Cthulhu Mythos. The starkest moments of horror, three of them spaced throughout the book, deal with rape as the defining sin of cosmic horror. Providence is not for the squeamish. But the rape scenes are justified, and there's nothing risible about them. They're deeply horrifying.

One of the key structural elements of Providence is the format (and the idea) of the Commonplace Book. Robert Black keeps one on his journeys, containing both things he finds along the way (including a hilarious church newsletter) and his own musings. H.P. Lovecraft kept one. And Providence combines fact, fiction, comics, written sections, and an overwhelming array of different covers to give the work some flavour of the Commonplace. Make of all of this what you will. Providence rewards patient study.

To tell much more would be to give something away. Technically, Providence is both prequel and sequel to Moore and Burrows' The Courtyard and Neonomicon. Search them out! 

As to Burrows' art -- it's perfectly suited to Moore's cold, clinical eye in Providence. It's a horror equivalent of Dave Gibbons' straightforward, subtle art on Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen. Burrows can draw horrible imaginings with great skill, but he's at his best throughout Providence giving the reader the creeps by being matter-of-fact and (seemingly) representational.

Oh, and the ghouls. Moore and Burrows' ghouls are unlike their forebears in HPL's own work. They're a terrific, funny, strangely lovable creation. Not that you would ever, ever want to meet them, in a subway station or a graveyard or in your own living room. In all, Providence is horrifying, sad, funny, satirical, scathing work from one of comic-book-writing's Grandmasters. Highest recommendation.

The Mighty Mighty Swamp Things

Swamp Thing: The Root of All Evil (1994-95/Collected 2015): written by Grant Morrison and Mark Millar; illustrated by Phil Hester and Kim DeMulder: After a lengthy run by writer Nancy Collins, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar were tapped by DC to give Swamp Thing a jolt. And that they do, in the 'Everything You Know Is Wrong' tradition of beloved Swamp Thing writer Alan Moore.

Everything we know really does seem to be wrong in the opening pages of Morrison and Millar's collaboration (Morrison would leave Swampy in Millar's solo hands after six issues). Alec Holland and Swamp Thing now seem to exist separate from each other. Indeed, Holland's 22 years of Swampitude now seem to have been an elaborate hallucination. Meanwhile, Swamp Thing homicidally tears up the Louisiana swamps and bayous.

Of course, not everything is what it seems when not everything is what it seems. Nonetheless, like Alan Moore before them, Morrison and Millar dynamite an awful lot of Swamp Thing mythology, kill off a lot of long-term supporting characters, and introduce weird new quests, situations, and characters to the ongoing saga of our favourite muck-encrusted mockery of a man. Along the way, they also resurrect at least one supporting character who seemed to be irretrievably dead since Moore's days.

Phil Hester and Kim DeMulder do fine work throughout the volume. Hester's rough, sketchy linework works especially well in the swamps and dark corners of the Swamp Thing universe. This volume collects the first third of what would ultimately be the longest sustained story in Swamp Thing's career up until 1994, a 30-issue, 700-page quest with only a couple of standalone issues. Given Millar and Morrison's popularity, it's hard to understand how it took 20 years for DC Comics to collect this run in trade paperbacks. Oh, well -- it's here now. Recommended.

Swamp Thing: Darker Genesis (1995/Collected 2015): written by Mark Millar; illustrated by Phil Hester, Kim DeMulder, Phil Jiminez, Chris Weston, Jill Thompson, Brian Bolland, Tom Taggart, and John Totleben: Once upon a time, Swamp Thing was the mind and nearly-destroyed body of scientist Alec Holland, transmuted into a seven-foot-tall muck monster by an explosion, his own 'bio-restorative' formula, and the alchemical processes of the Louisiana swamp in which Holland's lab was located. 

Then Alan Moore revealed that Swamp Thing was really Earth's Plant Elemental, that Alec Holland had really been dead all those years, and that Swamp Thing was simply one in a long line of Plant Elementals with consciousnesses built on the framework of a human who died as part of their births. Over the Plant Kingdom reigned the Parliament of Trees, a South American grove containing all the plant elementals that ever were.

Now, Swamp Thing has been coerced into running a gantlet of four trials to gain the powers of the other Parliaments. In the previous volume, Root of All Evil, he reconciled the long-standing rift between the two Earth Elemental factions, Plant and Stone, thus gaining control over all aspects of rock on Earth. Here, Swamp Thing faces the Trial of the Parliament of Waves and then begins the Trial of the Parliament of Air.

Writer Mark Millar, regular artist Phil Hester, and guest artists Chris Weston and Jill Thompson seem to have a lot of fun in this volume taking Swamp Thing on a tour of alternate universes where he has different appearances and powers (including being trapped in the body of a Golem on an Earth where the Nazis won WWII). Classic characters that include perennial Swamp Thing nemesis Anton Arcane and forgotten 1970's sword-and-sorcery hero Nightmaster are resurrected in strange new ways and forms. A standalone visit to England brings us Swamp Dog and a story that seems more like an issue of John Constantine Hellblazer than Swamp Thing. 

All that and a recurring James Joyce reference. It all holds together for the most part, and towards the end of the issues here John Totleben, co-artist extraordinaire during the Alan Moore years, returns to Swamp Thing to draw the (splendid) covers. So there's that. Recommended.

Swamp Thing: Trial by Fire (1995-96/Collected 2016): written by Mark Millar; illustrated by Phil Hester, Kim DeMulder, Curt Swan, and John Totleben: Mark Millar and Phil Hester's run on Swamp Thing draws to an end after 30 issues, as does the book itself, cancelled with the final issue here so that it could be resurrected scant months later. 

One could view this as the finale to all the Swamp Things from his first appearance in 1972 to 1996. Certainly Millar writes that way, and subsequent revivals avoid the ramifications of the conclusion of Millar's run because they would make writing Swamp Thing nigh-impossible. In essence, they lived happily ever after. Sort of.

Swamp Thing tries to avoid completing the Trial of the Elemental Air for fear that his increasing power will cause him to lose his moral core of humanity and go on a world-wide killing spree. Alas,, if he doesn't face the Trial of Air, Earth will die screaming. So off he goes. And after that the Trial of Fire. And after that, the two magical factions struggling for world domination believe, the End of the World. Well, unless the one faction successfully summons The Word, a uber-powerful stand-in for uber-powerful 'hero' The Spectre. The Word is here because God is pissed off at Swamp Thing. Or maybe not. Maybe The Word is just a dick. 

In any case, if you're red-green colour-blind, The Word and The Spectre will look exactly alike!

In any case, this is an enjoyable end to this incarnation of Swamp Thing. Well, unless you were a fan of Tefe, Swamp Thing's part-human, part-elemental, part-demonic daughter conceived during Rick Veitch's first issue (#65) as both writer and artist and born during Doug Wheeler's brief stint as post-Veitch writer (#90). Her storyline just gets overwritten again. All this and Magic Wish Matches, complete with a Secret Origin. Hoo-ha! The conclusion of the Trial by Air section does suggest that Millar holds devoted readers of fantasy novels in contempt, so make of that what you will. Recommended.

Hell Above, Hell Below

Hellboy in Hell Volume 1: The Descent (2015-2016/Collected 2016): written and illustrated by Mike Mignola: Mike Mignola's Hellboy series moves inexorably towards its conclusion in this, what may be the penultimate volume in the long-running series. The end of the last book saw Hellboy dead on Earth and plummeting into Hell. And now we open, on the borderlands of Hell.

Hellboy is his usual acerbic self as he fights an assortment of demons and, well, more demons. Some have personal grudges against him as he sent them back to Hell during his heroic, monster-fighting career above-ground. Meanwhile, Hell's capital city of Pandemonium is strangely empty, and Satan himself is asleep in a basement. Hellboy has help in Hell, but will it be enough to see his mission through -- if there is a mission?

Well, that's the question. Hellboy in Hell marked the return of Mignola to drawing Hellboy as well as writing it after several years of having Duncan Fegredo handle the art duties. It's a welcome return. Mignola has simplified his line, his shapes, and pretty much everything about his style. It's a marvelous, evocative evolution of cartooning that can attain startling effects both comic and horrific. 

Hellboy's purpose in Hell seems a bit vague, but some of that reflects Hellboy's own rejection of the 'destiny' the first couple of years of Hellboy set up. He's not going to usher in the final act of the Apocalypse, having rejected his demonic heritage. Why, then, does he not remember committing a major act of violence in this volume?

If you've never read Hellboy, this is not the place to start. If you have been following Hellboy, this is pretty much essential as we approach the end of a remarkable horror/fantasy epic. Highly recommended.

BPRD: Hell on Earth Volume 4: The Devil's Engine & The Long Death (2012/ Collected 2012): written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi; illustrated by Tyler Crook, James Harren, and Dave Stewart: The eruption of Hell onto Earth-Hellboy continues in this collection of two miniseries dealing with Hellboy's former unit, the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence. Things are grim. Monsters are everywhere. This volume contains two 'snapshots' of the ongoing conflict/apocalypse, nicely scripted by John Arcudi and possessed of a number of fine visualizations of those monsters by Tyler Crook and James Harren. 

An unusual, freaky, and disturbingly visualized Wendigo seems to owe at least some of its visual debt to Jack Kirby's white monkey of fear from his 1970's series The Demon by way of Steve Bissette and John Totleben's visual reimagining of the character early in Alan Moore's 1980's run on Swamp Thing. It's all enjoyable, though a bit light on the textual side of things. Recommended.

Constantine X 4

Constantine's first appearance, c. 1984, in SWAMP THING

Oh, occult investigator/magician/former punk-rock musician John Constantine. Invented by Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, Stephen Bissette and John Totleben in the pages of Swamp Thing in the mid-1980's, he's become an eminence grise at DC Comics. His first series ran an impressive 300 issues at what became DC's adult-horror imprint Vertigo, though Constantine started before Vertigo existed. That 300-issue run had an impressive array of writers come and go over the years, along with an army of artists. 

That DC cancelled Constantine's Vertigo title to bring him back into the mainstream DC Universe continues to gall me: the two non-Vertigo Constantine series have been at best pale reflections of Constantine at his best. He looks like Sting. He probably sounds a lot like John Lennon, as they both hail from Liverpool. He fights Heaven, Hell, and assorted supernatural and human forces in between!

John Constantine Hellblazer: Son of Man (1998-99/Collected 2004): written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by John Higgins: Early 1990's Constantine scribe Garth Ennis returns for an arc with gritty artist/colourist John Higgins. Higgins' characters are stocky and brutal, befitting the story. As with many Constantine stories, it begins at the Ravenscar psychiatric facility in which Constantine spent a couple of years recuperating after the disastrous magical events in Newcastle in the early 1980's. A South London crime boss springs the young, unstable Constantine because he needs a magician to bring his five-year-old son back to life. 16 years later, an older Constantine gets pulled back into the crime boss' story again. There are repercussions to raising the dead.

Ennis, the most grotesque and splattery of all Constantine writers, brings the grue here. Higgins is an able collaborator, though he's not the world's best drawer of babies. The regrets of a misspent youth jostle for prominence with the regrets of a misspent present. The climax is comically anti-climactic, as Ennis always enjoyed taking the piss out of all of his protagonists and antagonists. But boy, the one demon we see here is surprisingly talky, given what sort of demon it turns out to be. Recommended.

John Constantine Hellblazer: Good Intentions (2000-2001/ Collected 2002): written by Brian Azzarello; illustrated by Marcelo Frusin: One of a very few Americans to write Constantine's book, Brian Azzarello takes the Hellblazing magician on a tour of rural America. Marcelo Frusin's art is maybe a shade too cartoony at points for the events it depicts. It also gets cheesecakey at an unfortunate point involving Constantine's rescue of a woman who was being kidnapped so as to be raped and killed: maybe not the time for the hot underwear shots. Overall, the story is both weird and occasionally revolting. Constantine screws up, of course, but under the circumstances, almost anyone would. Infamous at the time for strongly implying a sex act between a drugged and drunken Constantine and a dog. I kid you not. Lightly recommended.

John Constantine Hellblazer: Stations of the Cross (2004/Collected 2006): written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Leonard Manco, Marcelo Frusin, Chris Brunner, and Steve Dillon: Mike Carey's lengthy run as Constantine writer concludes here with an amnesiac Constantine beset by foes human and demoniac. Even without his memory, Constantine is dangerous to foes and allies alike. The climactic story, from the double-sized 200th issue, gives us Constantine at his most vulnerable. It's a fine finish to Carey's tenure. The art works throughout, and is especially dark and evocative during Constantine's voyage into the labyrinth below the church of a malign cult. Recommended.

John Constantine Hellblazer:  The Roots of Coincidence (2008/Collected 2009): written by Andy Diggle; illustrated by Leonard Manco, Giuseppe Camuncoli, and Stefano Landini: This volume ends Andy Diggle's run as Constantine writer with a recontextualization of just who Constantine's greatest enemy was and is. Diggle draws effectively on Constantine's long comic-book history for this revelation. It works, though the mechanics of John's battle with his arch-nemesis never become crystal clear. It's a solid end to a solid run of comics, though the horror elements are mostly muted this time out and one of the lesser opponents, Mako, just doesn't have a name that strikes fear into me. Lightly recommended.

Providence Book One: The Ancient Track: (Providence Issues 1-4): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Jacen Burrows (2015)

Providence Book One: The Ancient Track: (Providence Issues 1-4): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Jacen Burrows (2015): Well, I say it's Book One because it took me longer to read the first four issues of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows' 12-issue Avatar Press foray into (all) the worlds of H.P. Lovecraft than it normally takes to read 20 normal comic books. Maybe 30. 

Moore has said that he wants to save Lovecraft's work from its domestication in plushie Cthulhu dolls and jokey pop-culture references. Or at least I think that's what he means in his interviews supporting Providence. As in Moore's previous HPL comics, Providence makes explicit enough disturbing sexual elements that were implicit in HPL's original works to unsettle almost anyone who previously thought Cthulhu and friends were cute, cuddly, tentacled monsters who just need a little lebensraum on dear old Planet Earth.

Moore has also called Providence his Watchmen for the Cthulhu Mythos. This certainly works on a number of levels. As with Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, Providence proceeds as an investigation. It involves pastiches and homages to characters not created by Moore et al., characters reimagined and altered by Moore's sensibilities into new configurations and meanings from their source texts. And Providence contains lengthy text pieces at the end of each issue which expand our understanding of the narrative we've just encountered in the comics portion of the books.

One major difference between this and Watchmen is that Providence seems to aim at dovetailing back into H.P. Lovecraft's original stories by the (as-yet-unpublished) end of the narrative. Most of the post-WWI events of Providence occur before the events of Lovecraft's main horror stories, Mythos and otherwise. Though HPL was indeed writing by the time of this narrative, "The Call of Cthulhu" was still several years away. 

And so our protagonist is Robert Black, a gay, Jewish reporter for the New York Herald when we first encounter him. We don't know much about HPL's views on homosexuality, but we do know that he was anti-Semitic (despite the fact that he married a Jewish woman...oh, paradoxical HPL!). Lovecraft's stories and letters tended to avoid overt references to sexuality, though it was often implied. 

Black, though, is sexually active throughout the first four issues. Moore has set him up as both a Lovecraft proxy and an anti-Lovecraft. Like HPL, he's something of a snob when it comes to about 99% of everybody. But while Black has fled New York, just as HPL once did, he still loves the city, which HPL definitely did not. Given the title of the series and the structure of its protagonist's wanderings, I'd imagine that Black will eventually end up in HPL's beloved home city of Providence, Rhode Island. On Lovecraft's tombstone is the inscription "I am Providence," after all.

The desire to write a non-fiction book about odd rural traditions in New England motivates Black's wanderings first in and then outside of New York. He's also leaving the city for awhile to get over the death of an ex-lover. His initial investigation of a mysterious, ancient book and its lengthy, star-crossed history leads him to characters we've met before, under different names, in New York HPL stories that include "Cool Air" and "The Horror at Red Hook." Further explorations will send us to real-world towns that include Salem, Massachusetts -- only now superimposed upon them are creatures and situations from Lovecraft's demon-haunted, imaginary New England towns of Arkham and Innsmouth and Dunwich. 

But while some situations mirror Lovecraft's stories, Providence really is set Before The Play. And Moore's version of one of Lovecraft's most interesting characters, Wilbur Whateley from "The Dunwich Horror," seems to be aware that he's about to become part of the Story of that Play. And he's not all that happy about it when he meets Black.

Providence appears to be a prequel to Moore and Burrows' present-day Cthulhu comics The Courtyard and Neonomicon. But this may not entirely be the case. One doesn't need to have read those other works to enjoy Providence, though they do add an extra layer of cosmic horror to Black's investigation. He is from the Herald, after all. Or maybe he is the Herald, though of what, no one says.

I'm not sure how well Providence works for people who haven't read at least some of Lovecraft's work. However, Moore constantly puts his own revisionist, totalizing spin on things. What is implicit is often made explicit, and this often works quite well in terms of the horror in the text. The cosmic level of Lovecraft, that Sublime dread, is still absent from the narrative, though it certainly seems to be coming. 

As we end the comics portion of the fourth issue, Moore quotes a Lovecraft poem named "The Ancient Track." It suggests that worse and bigger things are waiting for our intrepid writer, whose conscious mind still hasn't clicked on to the supernatural horrors he's walking through. But the text pieces, journal entries 'by' Black, suggest that his unconscious mind is about one step away from shrieking and gibbering: as Black wonders in one journal entry, what if he wrote a novel about an investigator who doesn't know he's in a mystery until it's too late? And what would be a reasonable reaction to events of the supernatural for this investigator? Would he keep rationalizing what he's seen until it's too late as well? 

Moore's writing is sharp and mordant. Jacen Burrows' slick, hyper-realistic style works for Providence as it did for Neonomicon and The Courtyard. It supplies a sort of hyper-real documentary style that approximates the pseudo-documentarian aspects of Lovecraft's best work. When the horrors come, you almost believe in them. And Burrows really, really nails 'The Innsmouth Look' -- it's a comic-book-art triumph to make Innsmouthians seem visually unsettling again. Highly recommended.

The Bojeffries Saga: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Steve Parkhouse

The Bojeffries Saga: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Steve Parkhouse (1983-1991, 2013; Collected 2013): At less than 100 pages, The Bojeffries Saga is a short collection that's a lot of fun. The original series of short stories about the Bojeffries clan appeared in the early 1980's; it wasn't until this volume in 2013 that writer Alan Moore and artist Steve Parkhouse finished up these adventures with a final (for now) 24-page story. Parkhouse is a winning, droll cartoonist. He's perfectly suited to Alan Moore in satiric-comic mode, as he is here. 

The Bojeffries are a very English riff on the Addams Family or the Munsters, a family of freaks and monsters living mostly unnoticed among normal people. Their ranks include a werewolf, a vampire, a nigh-omnipotent woman, and a Lovecraftian thing that used to be Grandpa living in a well in the backyard. 

Moore was already experimenting with comics form in the early 1980's -- there's a 'musical' installment, and one structured as a series of photographs with captions. The humour is cutting when it comes to racial and social issues, but there's an essential sweetness to the proceedings, especially when it comes to the malaprop-spewing, poodle-devouring werewolf. Recommended.

Horror Comix Anthologies: The Big Book of Taboo

Taboo Issue 4 (1990): edited by Stephen Bissette and Nancy O'Connor, containing the following comics: Text pieces, interviews, and bios by Steve Bissette with Jean-Marc Lofficier; Front cover by Moebius; Back cover by Brian Sendelbach; Frontispiece by Nancy O'Connor; "Dreaming And The Law" written and illustrated by Phillip Hester; "1963" illustrated by Dave Sim; Untitled written and illustrated by Charles Burns; "Babycakes" written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Michael Zulli; "Cholesterol" written and illustrated by D’Israeli"; "Davey’s Dream" written by Mark Askwith and illustrated by Rick Taylor; "Eyes Of The Cat aka Les Yeux Du Chat" written by Alejandro Jodorowsky and illustrated by Moebius (originally printed in France in 1978); "El Topo" written by Alejandro Jodorowsky and illustrated by Spain Rodriguez (originally printed in Europe in 1979);  "Retinal Worm" written and illustrated by S. Clay Wilson; "La Fugue {The Escape}" written and illustrated by P. Foerster;  "Blue Angel" written by Tim Lucas and illustrated by Steve White; "Morrigan Tales" written by Elaine Lee and illustrated by Charles Vess; "These Things Happen" written and illustrated by  Rick Grimes; "Neither Seen Nor Heard" written by L. Roy Aiken and illustrated by Mike Hoffman; From Hell, Chapter Three: Blackmail or Mrs. Barrett written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Eddie Campbell; From Hell Pin-Up illustrated by Alan Moore.

The fourth oversized paperback issue of the late, much-lamented Taboo contains a wealth of great horror and weird comics material. The high point is a reprint of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius's 1978 collaboration "The Eyes of the Cat," a lengthy weird horror tale made up entirely of gorgeous and occasionally disturbing full-page panels by Moebius. Combined with interviews with the two, it makes for quite a treat. Spain Rodriquez's odd 'tie-in' to the Jodorowsky film El Topo completes this part of the package.

The rest of the anthology is excellent as well, from the third serialized chapter of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's epic graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, From Hell, to a horrifying bit of insect craziness from underground comix mainstay S. Clay Wilson. Elaine Lee writes a fascinating new-wave fairy tale illustrated by Charles Vess in his old-school, Hal Foster by way of N.C. Wyeth style. Most of the short pieces are genuinely horrific, and it's interesting to see relatively early, non-Sandman Neil Gaiman as illustrated by the fine, overlooked Michael Zulli, and very early Phil Hester writing and drawing. Taboo was very much cutting-edge horror for its time, and rewards reading now if one can find issues of it. Highly recommended.

The Big Book of the Unexplained: written by Doug Moench; illustrated by Russ Heath, Sergio Aragones, Brent Anderson, Joe Sacco, Steve Leialoha, and many others (1997): Another enjoyable entry in Paradox Press' 'Big Book of' series of single-author, multiple-artist comics anthologies from the 1990's. This foray into the world of UFO's, cryptids, and general all-around Fortean madness (indeed, a cartoon version of Charles Fort is our narrator) is fun stuff with a wide variety of artists working in a wide variety of styles to alternately creep the reader out and make the reader laugh while, perhaps, thinking a little, at least about the credulity of the human animal. Recommended.

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin (1977)

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin (1977): Chatwin's relatively small output is a treasure trove of odd travels and idiosyncratic observations, many of those observations yoked over the decades to Chatwin's fascination with nomadic humans throughout history and prehistory. Indeed, in The Songlines, Chatwin meditates on the nomadic pre-humans of a million years ago or more.

In Patagonia made the very British Chatwin a star in a very specific firmament, that of travel writing. Chatwin himself said that In Patagonia was a "Cubist" approach to travel writing, as the book consists of 97 short chapters focused on very specific incidents and individuals from Chatwin's own encounters and from histories of the Patagonia region.

Oh. Patagonia. It's a somewhat inhospitable area at the southern extremity of South America, shared between Chile and Argentina. Chatwin travelled through the area in 1974, picking up local stories to go with his experiences, and sometimes fictionalizing both. Chatwin was a New Journalist in the style of Tom Wolfe or even Hunter S. Thompson: the factuality of his narrative cannot always be trusted, though the wit of the observations can.

The book's fairly loose structure comes from Chatwin's voyage to the origin point of a Chatwin family heirloom lost in his youth -- a swatch of Patagonian hide and hair taken from the remains of one of Patagonia's extinct specimens of megafauna, a giant sloth. 

Along with a lot of South America's other megafauna, the giant sloth met its end when a land-bridge with the northern Americas brought wave after wave of new apex predators to the continent. Smaller South American animals such as the porcupine and the armadillo successfully colonized North America, but their larger cousins were pretty much wiped out.

Following this animal colonization comes wave after wave of human colonization and extinction, from prehistory to the early 20th century. Chatwin touches upon tales of natives and Europeans and more Europeans, of Americans, of Welsh settlers, of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, of worker's revolts, of South Africans, and so on, and so forth. All these nomads, settling and being unsettled.

Regardless of its truthiness, In Patagonia is a fine work, humane and searching. There's even a hook for horror fans: the section of the book devoted to the Chilitoe legend of the malign male witches of the Brujeria tickled then-comic-book-Swamp-Thing-writer Alan Moore's fancy in the early 1980's. He included the Brujeria, and their hideously and intentionally deformed servant the Invunche, in Swamp Thing's American Gothic storyline. And now NBC's Constantine series, based on another Alan Moore horror hero, has offered us much-altered versions of the Invunche and its masters. Pop will eat itself, indeed, and everything else. Highly recommended.

Shiny Beasts: written and illustrated by Rick Veitch with Alan Moore and S.R. Bissette (1979-1985; collected 2009)

Shiny Beasts: written and illustrated by Rick Veitch with Alan Moore and S.R. Bissette (1979-1985; collected 2009): Back in the long-lost days just before Marvel launched Epic, its own comics anthology magazine to compete with Heavy Metal, young turks like Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette were graduating from the first classes of the Joe Kubert School for Comics Art and entering the American comic-book industry. Veitch brings together his early-career short pieces done for Heavy Metal and Epic here, and they're a dazzling bunch for such a young writer and artist.

Veitch's interests have always tended towards science fiction and satire, and this book offers a heady dose of both. However, the mostly eponymous story, "Shiny Beast", points more towards Veitch's 21st-century graphic novel Can't Get No, with its reliance on pictures to carry the narrative.

Veitch would get better, and quickly, but there's a real charge to watching him play around with various illustrative techniques. His cosmic spacescapes dazzle in a couple of stories, making me wish someone had commissioned him to do a fully painted and airbrushed New Gods story. Blackly humourous twist endings abound, a legacy of both Veitch's work with editor Robert Kanigher at DC and of the long history of twist endings in short comic-book horror pieces, going back to EC Comics.

A generous afterword offers insight about Veitch's grwoth as an artist, his influences and mentors, and his collaborators. Several of those early Kubert School graduates were a close-knit bunch, sometimes living together to be able to afford the rent, and so a lot of work contains material from whoever was able to help out on a given day. It's a short and enjoyable volume, and would go well as a lead-in to some of Veitch's longer work from the same period, especially Abraxas and the Earthman and The One. Recommended.

John Constantine Hellblazer: The Gift: written by Michael Carey; illustrated by Leonardo Manco, Fraser Irving, Tim Bradstreet, and others (2004-2005; collected 2007)

John Constantine Hellblazer: The Gift: written by Michael Carey; illustrated by Leonardo Manco, Fraser Irving, Tim Bradstreet, and others (2004-2005; collected 2007): Mike Carey's fine run on what was DC-Vertigo's flagship title for various stretches of its 300-issue run comes to a mournful close. It's a volume that really needs to be read immediately after the previous collection, Reasons to be Cheerful, as the two collect what is really one long arc. 

Pissed-off, post-punk, Liverpudlian magician John Constantine finds himself in the crosshairs of an entire demonic family, three of whom are his children by a particularly sinister form of magical rape (!!!). And they're the grandchildren of his longest-running demonic foe, Nergal, who's been messing things up for Constantine since the early 1980's Newcastle incident that sent John to the Ravenscar psychiatric facility for several months.

But Nergal needs help against his daughter and grand-children to regain his kingdom in Hell. And John needs Nergal's help before all of John's remaining friends and relatives end up murdered by John's demonic hellspawn.

The whole thing is marvelously written and illustrated, though I occasionally wish that Leonardo Manco would let go a bit in his visuals, especially in those occasionally photo-referenced urban backgrounds. But his character work is exquisite, and in that 300-issue-run, I'd rank him below only John Ridgway and Steve Dillon as long-time artistic chroniclers of the Hellblazer.

Mike Carey's swan song on the title is as gritty and imaginative as ever, with the politics of Hell never so tellingly and squalidly depicted, nor John's anguish. Really a fine end to a fine run, and hopefully DC will collect this and Reasons to be Cheerful in one volume when they reach that point in the re-reprinting of Constantine. Highly recommended.

Prequels, Sequels, and Adaptations

War Against Crime! Volume 2: Issues 6-11: written by Al Feldstein, William Gaines, and others; illustrated by Johnny Craig, Graham Ingels, and others (1949-1950; collected 2001): Beginning in 1950, EC's New Directions comic-book line would represent a brief high point in American comic books. But it didn't spring full-blown from the forehead of publisher William Gaines. A couple of years of experimentation preceded it as Gaines acclimated to the comic-book business and the talents began to assemble at EC.

War Against Crime! ran for eleven issues. It fed off the post-WWII crime comics boom. But by the end of the run collected here, it was clearly showing the way to the artistic and writerly excellence of the approaching New Directions line. And it didn't really die after 11 issues -- it was retitled The Vault of Horror with issue 12 and became one of EC's great horror comics. The stories and art in this volume aren't up to the standards of the approaching EC books, but they're still well-crafted, occasionally gonzo tales of suspense and horror. Recommended.


The Incal: Orphan of the City Shaft: written by Alexandro Jodorowsky; illustrated by Zoran Janjetov (1988-1991; collected 2001): Part of the prequel series to Alexandro Jodorowsky and Moebius's Incal series of the 1970's, The Incal: Orphan of the City Shaft features sharp, detailed, and often grotesquely imaginative artwork from Zoran Janjetov. Jodorowsky's story is bananas, as one would expect. It's all Euro-Comics-SciFi in the tradition of Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant, a dystopian adventure story explaining the origins of Incal anti-hero John DiFool.

Weird, occasionally unpleasant, occasionally poetic, visually and narratively imaginative, it's also compulsively readable and extraordinarily dense compared to most American comic books. The whole thing pays homage to Metropolis and The Time Machine with its stratified society, a literalized hierarchy oriented around a vast shaft sinking deep into a planet. But there's a lot more sex, drugs, and fetishes than in either of those estimable forebears. This is the sort of European comic book that the TV series Lexx tried and mostly failed to emulate. Highly recommended.


Just a Pilgrim: Garden of Eden: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Carlos Ezquerra (2002): Ennis and Ezquerra's brutal post-apocalyptic Western continues here, as the gun-slinging religious fanatic known only as the Pilgrim encounters a team of scientists attempting to flee the devastated Earth to the stars. Terrible monsters and events abound, and Ennis and Ezquerra flinch neither in the grimy, bloody writing nor the grimy, bloody art. Recommended, but not for the squeamish.




Hypothetical Lizard: written by Alan Moore and Antony Johnston; illustrated by Lorenzo Orente and Sebastian Fiumara (1987 - 2004/2005): Alan Moore's World Fantasy Award-nominated novella from the 1980's gets the graphic treatment from Avatar Press. Antony Johnson preserves much of Moore's prose (the album includes the novella) while doing an able job of turning it into a sequential comics narrative.

The art by Orente and Fiumara is competent, though perhaps somewhat too prosaic (haha) for the fantastic goings-on. The novella appeared in a shared-universe anthology with its roots in the weird, magical cities of writers that include Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance, and M. John Harrison. Moore's tale focuses on one tragic relationship in the city of Llaiven, all of it playing out in the weird and sinister brothel known as The House Without Clocks. Recommended.

Cigarette Burned

Tales from the Crypt Archives Volume 2: written by Al Feldstein; illustrated by Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Jack Kamen, Graham Ingels, Joe Orlando, and others (1951-52; reprinted 2010): Another collection of horror stories ranging from good to great, from the days before the Comics Code Authority lobotomized American comic books.

It amazes me how fresh and enjoyable most of the stories in this volume remain. EC had the finest comic-book artists in America for much of its too-short existence. The stories, written for the most part by editor Al Feldstein, occasionally get a bit rote (the vengeance of the dead was always an EC horror staple, along with some truly atrocious puns), but many are clever short stories in their own right.

But the art, of course, is the thing. Wally Wood is a bit out of his depth here -- he was always best on science fiction and non-supernatural thrillers, and the two covers he assays are weirdly non-horrific. But when you've got 'Ghastly' Graham Ingels, Jack Davis, Jack Kamen, and Joe Orlando on the beat, everything's going to be fine. Davis, also a long-time Mad artist, is droll and blackly comic. Orlando and Kamen are fine, moody artists.

And Ingels remains one of the greatest horror artists to ever draw comic books. Many of his monsters are disturbingly malformed. He's the granddaddy of so many modern horror artists, from Bernie Wrightson through Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch. His grotesques anticipate both the distorted spaghetti monsters of films such as John Carpenter's The Thing and the human monsters of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. Highly recommended.

John Constantine Hellblazer: Death & Cigarettes: written by Peter Milligan; illustrated by Simon Bisley, Guiseppe Camuncoli, and Stefano Landini (2012-2013; Collected 2013): 300 issues of Vertigo's John Constantine Hellblazer come to an end in this volume, so that Constantine can continue his adventures, in somewhat altered and youthfulized form, over in a title set in DC's mainstream superhero universe.

Created by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, John Totleben, and Rick Veitch in Swamp Thing in the early 1980's as a sort of punk-attitude occult investigator from rust-belt Northern England, Constantine has had a long, varied, and distinguished career both in other people's comics and in his 25 years of his own title. He's even survived a completely screwy Keanu Reeves movie. And he's getting his own TV series this fall.

For me, the heights of John Constantine Hellblazer were reached early, with Jamie Delano writing the first 40 issues or so. Ably complemented by artists that included John Ridgway (understated and sinister), Sean Phillips and, in Delano's then-finale on the series, cover-artist Dave McKean doing an entire issue, Delano created a dense, kitchen-sink milieu of horror for Constantine.

Most of the humour in the title came from Constantine's sarcastic reaction to the horrors he faced. We were always meant to view Constantine through the lens of his own self-evaluation as a cursed punk, but we were also forced to conclude that he was indeed a very, very dark knight standing between humanity and the inimical forces of heaven and hell alike.

So we fast-forward here, to the end. I was gratified to discover that the Internet had as many problems figuring out just what the Hell the last three pages of the last issue mean. The whole thing ends on a note of ambiguity that may be entirely intended or may be sloppy story-telling. I have no idea.

Writer Peter Milligan gives us a 60-ish Constantine gifted with a super-hot 40-years-younger wife, a suddenly retconned-into-existence nephew who looks exactly like him, and a not-particularly imposing group of supernatural menaces to usher him out of his title. The art's generally so dark as to verge on inexplicable. Also, as some Internet wag noted, the main artists here seem to have forgotten that Constantine was visually modelled on Sting circa 1983, and not on Gary Busey circa 2013. The years have not been kind.

Stuff happens. There are a lot of sex scenes. Constantine's niece, once a capable presence when written by others, shows up as a traumatized shell of her former appearances. What's technically a demonic rape is played strictly for laughs. Did Constantine and his universe deserve better than this? Yeah. But we'll always have Newcastle. Spend your money on the John Constantine Hellblazer collections written by Delano, Garth Ennis, Andy Diggle, or Mike Carey instead. Not recommended.

Demon, Barf

The Demon: written by Matt Wagner; illustrated by Matt Wagner, Art Nichols, and Bernie Mireault (1986-87, 1992; collected 2013): Matt Wagner's done fine work on his own characters and on characters for DC. Alas, his work on The Demon, while sometimes lovely to look at, is also a wordy, needlessly labyrinthine, bleak mess.

As originally conceived and executed by writer-artist Jack Kirby in the early 1970's, Etrigan the Demon was a surprisingly jolly demon who enjoyed beating the Hell out of supernatural menaces but otherwise seemed like a loveable scamp. Kirby's Demon is the clearest, most obvious forerunner of Mike Mignola's Hellboy, another good demon.

However, when Alan Moore reimagined Etrigan in a thrilling, disturbing three-part story in Saga of the Swamp Thing in the early 1980's, the ramifications of that reimagination would be an eternal souring of the pot. Moore's Demon was a barely controlled monster. He also spoke in rhymes all the time, where Kirby's Demon only rhymed to cast spells. Thus was unleashed thirty years and counting of an astonishingly misguided reinterpretation of an enjoyable but minor Kirby character.

Wagner's 4-issue-miniseries revamp of Etrigan makes Alan Moore's version look like a sun-filled romp in a jolly, jolly park by comparison. Jason Blood, the Demon's 'host,' is now a bumbling, easily manipulated fool whose personality in no way resembles either Kirby's dedicated occultist or Moore's tragic, sardonic hero. Etrigan is a monster who speaks in rhymes that often, in their utterly confusing diction, pretty much form an airtight case for why Etrigan should not speak in rhymes all the time. At least not when Matt Wagner's writing him.

The art has some flashes of surreal brilliance, especially in a sequence in which demons invade an apartment through the walls.  The annoyingly intrusive frame narration becomes an unwelcome Greek Chorus very, very quickly. The whole thing is dense and unpleasant, and that narrative density serves a story that's actually paper-thin.

Alas and alas and alas, the depressing view of Etrigan has won out over the last 30 years. A Wagner-penned and illustrated standalone issue from the Demon's early 1990's series is a lot looser and more fantastic artistically. Unfortunately, the whole thing is narrated by Etrigan in a series of rhymes. Somebody please make sure Matt Wagner never, ever writes anything in rhymes again. It's horrible. Wagner can be a compelling writer and artist, especially on his own wonderful Mage and Grendel books. Seek those out, not this. Not recommended.

The Lost Alan Moore Episode

Fashion Beast: adapted by Antony Johnson from the screenplay by Alan Moore based on a screen story by Malcolm McLaren and Alan Moore; illustrated by Fecundo Percio (2012-2013): Alan Moore's lost project, a 1985 screenplay for a never-produced movie, based on a story by music and fashion impresario Malcolm McLaren, here gets adapted into a 200-page+ graphic novel. The redoubtable Antony Johnson handles the actual adaptation, as he has for other non-comic-book Moore work adapted into comic-book form.

Artist Fecundo Percio really draws up a storm here. The art remains relatively representational throughout with two exceptions -- the creepy, wizened monkey-women who are the guardians of the gates of Celestine, a fashion house in a future New York. America fights a war against somebody never named. Fallout is everywhere. The world is collapsing.

And that's only the background to this reimagining of the story of Beauty and the Beast, gene-spliced with elements from McLaren's own life and with Moore's taste for outre philosophy.

Beauty would appear to be Doll Seguin, a transvestite whom we first meet dressed like Marilyn Monroe and working as a coat-check 'girl' at the Cabaret, a stylish blend of dance hall and performance space. The Beast may be fashion-designer Celestine, never seen by anyone but the guardians of the gates, giving his approval or diapproval to auditioning models from behind smoked glass. Or it may be Jonni, a butch, aspiring fashion designer who longs to overthrow the concealing, antisexual fashions of House Celestine and put in their place the freer, more liberated fashions she herself has designed.

And that's just the set-up of the first two issues, after which things get really weird.

Johnson preserves the distinctive style and structure of mid-1980's Alan Moore -- this really is of a piece with Watchmen and 'V' for Vendetta, a sharp and cynical work of action-philosophy over which looms the spectre of nuclear armageddon. It's involving and fascinating on its own. But it also adds to the fictional over-structure of Alan Moore's 1980's work in a pleasing, off-beat way. And Percio's art, as with the art of David Lloyd on 'V' and Dave Gibbons on Watchmen, works beautifully with Moore's colourful, metaphorical, expositional prose by providing it with a solid, seemingly representational counterpoint. Highly recommended.

Contusions of a Dragonslayer

Smax: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Zander Cannon, Andrew Currie, and Richard Friend (2003): Moore and Cannon send big, blue, nigh-indestructible Smax and techno-whiz partner Robyn ("Toybox"), two of the super-powered cops of Moore, Gene Ha, and Cannon's Top 10, to Smax's alternate Earth for the funeral of Smax's uncle, after the events of Top 10 issue 12. Well, adopted uncle, as he was a dwarf and Smax is...well, the book explains his origins.

Jeff Smax's Earth is one on which fairy tales, legends, and myths have all happened, sort of. There are dragons, elves, ghosts, and about a zillion other things, many of them appearing in the background. Cannon's art often emulates the crowded panels of Mad magazine -- here a Troll, there Harry Potter, and over in that corner, Stewie Griffin holding a gun to Maggie Simpson's head.

In the midst of the violent yet comic shenanigans comes the dragon Morningbright, unfinished business from Smax's mysterious past as a dragonslayer who failed to earn his last 30% commission for killing Morningbright because he ended up running away right off his own Earth and onto Earth-10, where he eventually got a job as a cop with Precinct 10. While he's not bright, Smax isn't a coward: Morningbright was a debacle he doesn't want to think about.

Somewhat like the dragon of John Gardner's Grendel, Morningbright can see the future, or at least enough of it to be a real problem. That his powers make him nearly omnipotent is another problem. That Smax has to somehow figure out how to kill him to fulfill a prophecy -- which on a magic-driven Earth is somewhat binding -- is another problem. That Smax and Toybox have to assemble a heroic group while meeting affirmative action quotas is also a problem. There are a lot of problems here. But years before Robyn ever came to Smax's Earth, Morningbright gave Smax a message for her, apparently intended to spook her. Why?

Simultaneously zippy and dense, Smax is a lot of fun -- and the dragon is a fascinating creation both in the writing and in Cannon's depiction of it. Morningbright is super-creepy, especially once the specific nature of his hoard of gold finally becomes clear. Recommended.

NEONOMICON: written by Alan Moore with Antony Johnston; illustrated by Jacen Burroughs

Neonomicon: written by Alan Moore with Antony Johnston; illustrated by Jacen Burroughs (2003, 2010-2011): Winner of the first-ever Bram Stoker Award for a Graphic Novel (from the Horror Writers' Association), Neonomicon is Alan Moore's dark valentine to the life and work of H.P. Lovecraft. 'Neonomicon' is a play on the title of Lovecraft's famous, imaginary volume of terrible knowledge, the Necronomicon.

All the sexual horrors that were vaguely implied in many of Lovecraft's stories are here made manifest, often in graphically disturbing fashion, all of them delineated in a razor-sharp quasi-realistic mode by Jacen Burroughs. It's a spectacular, and spectacularly disturbing, graphic novel that rewards multiple re-readings.

Burroughs's art complements the story beautifully, giving us a Cthulhu Mythos story with both the suggestiveness and the painful exactness necessary to certain sections. The relatively realistic nature of Burroughs's art may be seen as the equivalent of the faux-documentary stretches of many of Lovecraft's finest works, in which an accumulation of 'real' detail from interviews and newspaper articles served the construction of that awful Cthulhuian world.

This collected volume actually contains both the miniseries named Neonomicon and the earlier, shorter set-up, The Courtyard. On a slightly different alternate Earth where the major cities are domed so as to cut down on pollution and the telephones contain fax machines (!), three FBI agents at two different times try to seek out the origins of a strange rise in mass killings by people who seem totally unrelated.

While there are cloachal horrors and sexual horrors awaiting, there are also gratifyingly disturbing moments of weirdness that evoke the sort of cosmic horror Lovecraft strove for throughout his work, a breaking-down of existential categories, a collapse in causality. Moore's humour also plays out, sometimes in perfect harmony with the horror (as one cop says about a disturbing bit of graffitti/art, "I hope that's a tree." It isn't.).

The personal problems of the characters tie directly into the ideas Moore explores in the course of this dark odyssey: The Courtyard's protagonist is a hard-core racist, and his story plays out in the Red Hook district of New York, setting for Lovecraft's early, racist fear-of-miscegenation story, "The Horror at Red Hook." Neonomicon's protagonist is a female FBI agent whose career and personal problems with institutional sexism and exploitation will ultimately play a terrible role in the story's resolution. Lovecraft's stories didn't have female protagonists, and generally didn't have female characters with speaking roles.

This isn't a volume for everyone: it's vicious and boundary-pushing. But it's also an astonishing addition to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Highly recommended.

Man-Sized

Top Ten Volumes 1 and 2: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Zander Cannon and Gene Ha (2000-2002): If you've always wanted to see a drunken, Godzilla-like giant talking radioactive lizard wearing a 'No Fat Chicks' t-shirt, then this is the comic book for you. Moore's jolly yet serious mashing up of the superhero-group and police-procedural sub-genres (think of it as Hill Street Blues meets the Super Friends) is a great book, jammed with satirical material that doesn't detract from the drama of its various storylines.

After World War Two, the vast majority of America's super-beings, super-scientists, super-villains, and supernatural beings were forcibly relocated to the city of Neopolis because normal people didn't like having them around. Also robots and talking animals and super-pilots and a variety of other homages to pretty much every comic-book and comic-strip character ever. And they needed police. And then Earth made contact with a vast confederation of alternate Earths of which it was designated Earth-10. And so the tenth precinct of Neopolis was born: Top Ten.

While mysterious, super-strong, and mostly invulnerable (and initially very grumpy) Jeff Smax and his new partner and new officer Toybox are the focus of this "first season" of Top Ten, we also meet a rich assortment of cops, villains, and others. Moore does a nice job of hiding the "real" major case of the year until late in the game.

The weirdness of Neopolis, with everything from Bugtown to a robot ghetto (robots get discriminated against...a lot), is an endless source of stories. There's a bar where the gods of every major religion get drunk. There are weird new drugs and vices unknown to our world and diseases that only affect people with superpowers. There's Sergeant Kemlo, a dog with a penchant for tropical-themed shirts, operating in a human-shaped cybernetic exoskeleton; and Girl One, a nudist android; and Synesthesia, whose powers are pretty much right there in her name; and King Peacock, the Satanist magician. And others.

Jeff Smax will gradually learn to trust his new partner -- he's still getting over the death of his old one, and he has people issues anyway. Toybox will find out that the hero named The Rumour actually exists. And they'll all find out why Jeff's warning in a dream to "Beware Caesar" is true.

Cannon and Ha's art is terrific, jam-packed without seeming crowded, and with pleasing, and occasionally pleasingly intricate, costumes on everybody (Girl One and King Peacock must especially have been a pain to draw). And of course there's Gograh, that giant drunk lizard, and his trouble-causing, man-sized son Ernesto Gograh. Just don't let a giant drunken lizard with radioactive breath barf on you. Highly recommended.