Alan Moore's Neonomicon - Series Review

Please note that I will RETURN to podcasting in time. For the moment, I am writing individual posts reviewing recent purchases/watches/whatever. I'll be posting a few at a time, divided by subject. It should be set up so that everything viewable on this page is from the same day.

Following is a review of Alan Moore's recent Lovecraft-inspired and highly controversial comic, Neonomicon. Rating system is out of five-stars, with five being GREAT, and zero being worse than that year of "Welcome Back Kotter" that didn't have Gabe Kaplan in it.

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I guess I should start out by saying that whatever else I'm about to say, this is the only comic I've written an entire post about...so I guess it accomplished that, anyway...

Issue #4 of Neonomicon has come and gone. I started out on issue one thinking this was going to be brilliant. I thought it was a return to the Alan Moore we all knew and loved, and a healthy and respectful dose of the Lovecraft Mythos, to boot. Then issue two came out...then issue three... And as time went by, and I was treated to page after page of only semi-Lovecraftian rape porn (featuring an aquatic fish-monster doing a lot of the raping, and depiction of demon semen...yikes), I rethought my stance. (Issue three, by the way, is the only issue of anything--ANYTHING--I have ever seen my local comic shop pre-bag so it couldn't be leafed through in-store, due to the content.) Then I read issue four, and though it was a VERY different tone than the previous two, it still left me walking away hating the series. Before anyone asks, I kept reading it out of a fleeting hope that it would return to a Lovecraftian element and would somehow redeem itself--and honestly, it almost came close for a few pages in issue four. Part of me wanted to see how dark the story would get and if there was any happy ending to it--and unfortunately, I think in Moore's mind the ending IS happy...more's the pity.

To be fair, if you skipped over about 10 frames of gang-rape in issue two (leaving only the necessary-to-the-plot sections) and skipped issue three entirely (since the important part of it is summarized in issue four), then went right to issue four, you might have a semi-tastefully done, interesting story...if not for the last couple of frames of issue four. Up to that point, issue four was pretty good. Everybody is getting what they deserve. The rapists are all either shot by the cops, or many (including the rapist I found most aggressive and disturbing) are killed by the very monster they summoned for their sexual exploits. (The frame of one of the ring leaders with his guts hanging out telling the cops, "W-We only wanted it to guh, to go. S'killin' us." is genius in its poetic justice.) The demon and the rape victim/main character share a brief, unsettling (to the reader) empathetic look as the cops shoot it down and leave it laying in its blood, that was chilling and captivating. Then the story actually kind of gets GOOD for a few pages.

After some time, the main character reveals that after being raped by the fish-monster, she has discovered that she is pregnant. The comic goes on to unpack the concept that HP Lovecraft was right in his vision of the monsters he "created" but wrong in the way they came to be--thereby telling us that the main character is now pregnant with the Lovecraft monster-of-monsters, Cthulhu. That was actually pretty good. I didn't need the (estimated) dozen pages of rape and sexual brutality to get there...but I thought the big reveal was well done. But then, when we're ALMOST free of this story, the main character says the following of her whole ordeal. She reveals that she knows she is pregnant with Cthulhu and that she thinks it serves humanity right, then says, "I feel good. I feel good about myself, about all this. For the first time I got no problems with my self-esteem." (And then some Lovecraft gibberish...)

Uhh... Did Alan Moore just have a woman who was raped for two issues--DAYS in her timeline--say that she feels GOOD about her situation? That she feels positive about her rape-baby/destructor of humanity? That the fact that the Outer Gods liked her enough to brutally rape her (by her count) "about eight times" until she "just jerked it off because my pu**y was sore" [sic] served as a SELF-ESTEEM boost?!? Cause that's what I read. That's what I spent $20 on over a couple of months and can not erase from my brain.

I don't know what it takes to screw someone up so badly that they want to write this kind of rape-saga (which, by the way, I feel is wholly un-Lovecraftian, as I've described in previous podcasts). I don't know what makes someone so set on disturbing their readers that they are willing to even call rape a self-esteem boost (if only in situations involving demons). I don't know what causes that... But I do know it comes direct from Hell, and I'm a worse person for reading it.

And what makes it worse is that I'm pretty sure Alan Moore would take that as a compliment.

Rating: 1/2 Star...and I even have some reservations about that.