Alan Moore is widely regarded as the best writer of comics to have emerged since the medium started to be taken seriously (in fact, Moore's one of the reasons it's taken seriously). While Daniel Clowes is probably as good as Moore, he doesn't quite have the range.
Problem is, Moore doesn't really produce many comics these days. He's irrevocably fallen out with most of the big publishers, and has been so strident in his criticisms of the industry as a whole that he likely wouldn't be welcome with them now anyway. This is a shame, as the author of Watchmen and From Hell (the superb graphic novels, not the godawful film versions) really should be chained to a desk and forced to write until his fingers bleed. All we get is a new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume every couple of years.
So it was great to see a new four-issue miniseries this year, released through Avatar, a small publisher which has managed to lure A-list writing talents like Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis. They’re drawn, presumably, by the freedom to write more adult material than is allowed at Marvel and DC. Moore said in an interview that he only wrote this to help pay off a tax bill, but that kind of candour is one of the reasons his fans like him so much.
This graphic novel in fact contains two stories. The Courtyard was a two-issue story published in 2003. It was based on a short (prose) story Moore had written for a volume of HP Lovecraft tributes, and adapted into a comics script by Anthony Johnson, with art by Jacen Burrows. The main story, Neonomicon, is a direct sequel, and was scripted by Moore, with art by Burrows again.
The Courtyard
The Courtyard is a nifty little horror story. An FBI agent, Sax, an expert in 'anomaly theory' (piecing together patterns from odd and quirky facts in criminal cases) has been sent to the small town of Red Hook. Bizarre, ritualistic serial killing is occurring, and there have been at least three killers with exactly the same MO. Sax's anomalous investigation draws him to a nightclub, Club Zothique, and a new drug sold there, Aklo.
Given its origin, you can expect the references to Lovecraft to flow thick and fast, and so they do. You will 'get' this is you've only a nodding acquaintance with Lovecraft and his ideas, but you'll get more from it the more you've read a lot of the Cthulhu Mythos stuff produced by HP and his followers. Moore being Moore, he puts a fascinating twist on it - Moore has his own mystical belief system which seems to involve language being able to physically change the world, and he neatly distorts some of Lovecraft's ideas into his own.
But it's not just an exercise in Alan Moore showing us how clever he is (an accusation levelled at quite a lot of his work these days, sometimes with some justification). It works well as a horror story. It doesn't exactly have a twist ending, as it’s signposted from almost the start, but it does have one of those nasty, unfair endings that sticks with you for a while after you've read the story.
A twisted ending, rather than a twist ending.
One odd touch is that he makes the main character thoroughly unlikeable - openly racist and misogynistic, much like Lovecraft himself occasionally is, I guess (he's drawn to look a bit like Lovecraft, too). The story is narrated by this character, and it's a bit uncomfortable sometimes. That's fine, horror should be uncomfortable.
Like William Burroughs, when you know what Moore's voice sounds like, it's almost impossible not to imagine all his work being read out by him (and, like Burroughs, Moore has recorded some amazing spoken-word albums). This does get problematic when, as here, you have American characters but you keep imagining them talking in a booming Northampton accent. Oh well.
The problem is the art, which is less than spectacular. Jacen Burrows is quite generic, and while his linework is nice and clear, and he can compose a frame in a way that makes sense, his characters' faces all look more or less the same. There's also a lack of dynamism somehow, a failure to keep the action flowing from frame to frame. This isn't a major problem for a relatively small-scale horror piece, but there are a few pages where things get cosmically weird, and these cry out for an artist more comfortable with teeming chaos (Geof Darrow or Kevin O'Neill both spring to mind as obviously better artists for a project like this).
Neonomicon
It's difficult to talk too much about Neonomicon, as I don't want to spoil The Courtyard for anyone. This has a continuation of the investigation started in the first story, with FBI agents (Lamper, male, black) and Brears (female, recovering sex addict) investigating. Part of this, I guess, is a riff on the X-Files mismatched male and female agent pairing, and they get drawn into much, much weirder stuff than Mulder and Scully ever did. But Moore is presumably also making some kind of point by having his heroes be representative of two groups that Lovecraft was particularly uncomfortable with - black people, and women with sex lives.
This is a modern Alan Moore story, so is littered with allusions to other stories, usually those of Lovecraft. The first issue is a bit exposition heavy, and there's a wince-inducing moment where Moore effectively stops the story to explain the references for anyone who hasn't picked up on them.
The story goes to some pretty dark places. Like The Courtyard, there's nothing too explicitly gory in this, but there is a pretty full-on orgy scene. Alan Moore is in danger of becoming the dirty old man of comics - he has strong beliefs about the social utility of pornography, and his heftiest work of recent years was the rather disappointing porno magnum opus Lost Girls. So there is a lot of nudity here, but at least it’s relevant to the plot, unlike Frank Miller's constant stream of big-titted pin-up chicks in Sin City.
More problematic is the fact that there's quite a lot of sexual violence on offer here. Again, it's an important (even essential) part of the plot, and as I said, horror should be uncomfortable.
But one rape scene, while hardly comic, is treated a bit casually, and you have to do a bit of work to make it as horrifying as it should be, which is hardly what you want in a comic book.
This is probably a fault with the artwork, which as in The Courtyard, isn't quite as good as it needs to be. It has the same problems as The Courtyard, especially when a character wakes up to find themself in Rlyeh, (‘the nightmare corpse-city’), which really ought to be a visual highlight of twisted fauna and non-Euclidean geometry, but sadly just isn't.
I've been fairly critical of this, perhaps to convince myself that I'm not just giving it an easy ride because it's by Alan Moore. But this has some absolutely stunning moments, and is surprising in all kinds of ways. The end, like that of The Courtyard, is unpleasant, all the more so for the almost casual way in which it's revealed. The story feels like it could have been trimmed, perhaps by a whole issue, but it's a great addition to the ever-popular Cthulhu Mythos (with the added advantage of not having to crawl over Lovecraft's prose), and a rare horror comic that manages to actually leave you feeling creeped out.
Of the two stories, I think The Courtyard is slightly better (and despite being its sequel and featuring characters in common, Neonomicon feels like a different work rather than a continuation). But they're both here in this same volume, and both are worth reading. They're not Moore's best work by any means (that would be From Hell, obviously), but they're certainly worth the time it takes to read them.
Wza-y'ei… dho-hna… yr nhhngr 
