As part of our commitment to ensuring nothing that occurs on this blog could ever be construed as ‘journalism’, what follows is a scrambled and unattributed sample of snippets – only very slightly tweaked to make a semblance of sense – of recent backroom chatter by all (or nearly all) the Mindless Ones on Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ recent cockpunk horrorbook Neonomicon #2. Some extracts may be recognised from other websites and/or previous publications.  Nothing agrees with anything. All opinions are rubbish.

“By refusing to exclude rape from his depictions of violence and power in action in my view Moore is fulfilling an important function. While ninety nine percent of popular fictions are happy to present us with a picture of violence that excludes most of the troubling bits, a violence that is fundamentally fun and entertaining, Moore is prepared to go to much more uncomfortable places and thank God.”

neon1

  • “Using his last ever comicbook series (Jog’s right – as ever – about LOEG being something subtly but definitely different) as such an angry f-you to the industry, at the same time as using someone who is a weak if effective biter of Quitely’s signature moves, is as close as he’s ever come in print to having a direct dig back at La Moz.”
  • “Some stores in the US have refused to stock it? I’m fairly sure they all stocked
    The Rape and Murder of Elongated Man’s Wife”
  • “Prison Pit moves from comedy to horror-comedy, and the lurch is painful and disturbing; Neonomicon moves from horror to comedy-horror and the effect is actually quite a relief. (The dialogue of the swingers is really very funny; the appearance of the traditional big monster is again a campy move back to familiar territory compared to the awfulness that they were already doing in the pool before he comes along).”
  • “I went full Beavis for the first book of Prison Pit, but with this new one I felt like someone had bad-touched my Butthead.”
  • “So as Jog has so eloquently pointed out, the book is to some extent about being trapped in fiction, specifically comic book fiction. Now is not possible that by having a self-confessed nymphomaniac character get raped Moore’s saying something about the depiction of female characters in American mainstream comics? The fact is that woman in comics are consistently presented as sexually available to the gaze of the reader – all those T&A and groin shots, all those suggestive poses, etc. We are encouraged to think of Supergirl as a implicitly sexualised fantasy fodder, in a very real sense we are encouraged to imagine ourselves fucking her, and in the world of Alan Moore, with his elevation of the imagination to the supernatural sphere, that’s gotta count for something. Is the gang rape in Neonomicon an attempt by Moore to rub our noses in how women are represented? I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but unfortunately depictions of rape aren’t easily penned in by authorial intent.”
  • “Moore continues to be (perhaps more than ever – see Dodgem Logic for evidence), a voice for political ideas that run counter to precisely the sorts of things that I dislike about Neonomicon 2.”
  • “There’s a very funny moment in the changing room scene where the speech bubble is very precisely paced for the eyes to immediately afterwards drop right on to a floppy old cock – no chance of any ’I just won’t look at those bits’ self-protection.”
  • “So Neonomicon was fucking horrid. I really appreciated the genuine sense of impending dread and wrongness..I mean this was some very skilled tension-building… BUT It was a long and very nasty rape scene with a nympho FBI hottie and it made me feel very weird. Not good weird, neither.”
  • “I confess I haven’t thought a huge amount about this – I don’t really have the reading or vocabulary for dealing with these issues as well as I’d like, to my shame – but she was established as a nympho in the last issue, right? So is that the same as suggesting she secretly wanted this? I mean, yuck. What would an informed feminist reading of this reveal?”

neon4

  • “Their vulnerability and hopelessness was quietly emphasised during the changing room scene, that shot of them from behind with their heads dipped, almost in resignation, was incredibly tight and effective.”
  • “It all comes back to Prison Pit for me- I have zero expectations that Johnny Ryan will do anything to make me feel more at ease with the rape scene in that comic, but while that makes the comic less easy to deal with, it also makes me wonder whether I subconsciously want all the troubling material to be contextualised in a ‘safe’ way.”
  • “Am I now a desensitised monster because I didn’t think Neonomicon was as shocking as I was preparing for?”
  • “I’m not sure that contextualising it necessarily makes it safe. See my comment about depictions of rape being difficult to pen in.”
  • “Neonomicon 2 was certainly a deeply unpleasant comic, but it’s massively well-crafted, clearly.”
  • “There are scenes where it looks like the guy cop’s chin is going to go 3d it is so big and Quitelyish.”
  • “I think Avatar, whilst/because they publish basically the most horrible work of any creator of note they’ve had, has actually turned into the most interesting serial publisher around.”

neon2

  • “Context is what I want from the rest of Neonomicon, but my extreme discomfort in reading this sort of material makes me worry about what I really want here.  Which, I’m aware, is an awkward rhetorical device to deploy in a conversation about the way rape is depicted…”
  • “Making these Lovecraftian subtexts explicit, showing them in a more doom-laden, banal and socially aggressive way than to my knowledge has never been seen in the Mythos before, is an important reminder to the grown-up, ‘serious’ Lovecraft cultists – Kenneth Grant, Michel Houllebecq, Graham Harman in that article I linked to – of the ‘reality’ of the tropes they’re so keen on using as the basis of their thought experiments. Foregrounding the psychological taint in Lovecraft is something they as well as the Call of Cthulhu RPGers, Great Old One-worshipping chaomages and the legions of Norwegian tentacle-metal bands (I’m just making things up now – I only put ‘Norwegian’ in because it rhymes with ‘legion’) shouldn’t always be allowed to gloss over.”
  • “I’m slightly concerned about the rather simplistic way the word ‘unpleasant’ has been used … Unpleasantness, isn’t, as far as I can tell, what people are objecting to… Is the depiction of rape merely ‘unpleasant’? Is it appropriate to describe this book as misogynistic? These are the sorts of questions which hang around Neonomicon 2 like a bad stink.”

neon3

  • Previous comment on comicscomics :”‘Cthulhu can only get in to places that are bad already’ – be that a racist cop, a ‘willing’ rape victim,the fallen Gnostic/Buddhist Our World of Suffering, or the world inside the outside of the comics borders.”
  • “While this comic reeks of misanthropy and misogyny, and deals in a sadistic kind of horror about which I have very conflicted feelings, I struggle to tie those things up with someone who expresses the kind of humane opinions Alan Moore is on record as expressing, both through his comics and his broader career as a writer.”
  • “The word ‘unpleasant’, or phrases like ‘it’s not to my liking’ worry me because I don’t believe they’re broad enough, or indeed a specific enough to accommodate the sorts of issues that we, as intelligent readers of this book, should be wrestling with… misogyny and depictions of rape have distinctly political and ethical dimensions, dimensions which I believe are obscured by the use of descriptors which are normally associated with matters of taste and feeling… ‘unpleasant’, in this context, lacks the necessary complexity to properly convey the sorts of problems a feminist, say, might have with the comic.”
  • “That’s a thought, but a lot depends on what the comic does next. An overt authorial ‘gotcha’ would be a bit glib, but you’d hope that the framing of the story would give him room to emphasise the critique, if that’s what it is.”
  • “Ennis – I kind of keep coming back to Ennis, too, with this – but he did a really devastating critique of the treatment of Women Who Have Rape in their Backstory in The Boys a year or so ago, where they’re directing whatshername, Starlight, Hughie’s girlfriend and making her wear like these strips of cloth because ‘she’s been raped/it has made her dark & sexual’ and she’s like no, I would probably not be like that, I would go and cry for ages and not leave the house.”
  • “Not to criticise you guys, really not meant that way at all, but I’m kinda fed up hearing what a bunch of blokes with a vested interest think about Neonomicon 2. Where are the female voices? Fucking comics…”
  •  “Xaime Hernandez also has a rape story, I believe, in the newest Love & Rockets book which is – look, it’s, I haven’t read it, but it sounds more perspectivally empathetic with its victim and offers them some agency latterly, reading precis’. Really, I think what Moore is talking about when he talks about “Ech-Pi-El” and the world built around him is himself and contemporary comics – did Jog say this? It didn’t stick if he did. This is, on the one hand, monstrously egotistical but on the other, hard to really debate – Moore is to comics what Lovecraft is to dime horrors. Grant, Machen et al are yr fave writers and not-so-faves, like Brad Meltzer. So then, you’ve got the specialist shop – how weird must it be to be Alan Moore in a comic shop? it might feel a bit like this. How weird is to be a lady in most comic shops, even if you are a lady with a burgeoning or professional interest – there’s an overweened, swollen-balled, teenage beast-of-sexuality in the cellar underneath, the beast needs fed; this is what it’s like.”

and you’ve twisted my arm
And you’ve shown me the road ahead…

  • …Let’s, children, together, let’s let ’em thrive in the cellar. [The Cellar Song, Palace Brothers]

    “It’s problematic because Brears, has no agency so much as a systemic list of devices to interject her to this point, a point which if the above analogy holds true (and certainly there have been newspaper editorials to the effect that this is what it – comics – feels like for a girl, in The Times a couple years back) is just about the crudest conveyance available. It’s not a realist depiction of a foul act which alternatively either makes it even more icky or is, as with yr Fire Walk With Me and child abuse, perhaps the only sensible way to deal with something so awful… it’s a 4-issue series, innit? So the last page of #2 is pretty much the centrepiece. I don’t know if that’s necessarily relevant, but he does like a structure, Alan. Comics, to Alan Moore – and I’d find it difficult to argue the point entirely, are a world built bad upon his shoulders c.1986. The bad world, made by eternally pubescent wrongcocks, is particularly horrible to ladies. This is what lies beneath.

    I’m not wholly convinced, but certainly as Lovecraft is to Neonomicon’s world, I’m pretty sure he thinks he is to comics; hence this is why the book is in some sense, as he says, a grouse about the (fucking terrible, I should always quantify) Watchmen film, and the albatross it’s become for him (and, perhaps inadvertently)  the industry.”

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.