Berserk Vols. 1-41

From Hell by Alan Moore

Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution by Julia Alekseyeva

Mostly non-ideological slice-of-life bio of a woman of the first generation of the Russian Revolution, who somehow lasted all the way to 2010. Told by her great-granddaughter, a Harvard PhD a year younger than me with health problems relating to Chernobyl. Lola, the great-grandmother, was born in 1910 to a Jewish Ukrainian family and survived the epicenter of probably the greatest bloodletting in human history (by volume, not proportion) as a young, spirited, indomitable communist. Book does a weird thing at the end connecting millennial socialism with Bolshevism, weird not because inappropriate but because it's just alluded to in like a single panel and then it's done. Unclear whether Lola's "a few bad apples spoiled it all" Khrushchevism is really Lola's or Julia's. Alekseyeva also treads lightly over her subject's time working as a secretary for the NKVD in the 1930s and 40s. But I like that it's a perspective from within that first revolutionary generation, which was by far the best (and is deliberately contrasted to the two later, intervening, fundamentally conservative ones), plus quotidian, loyalist life in the midst of now pretty mythologized mass violence. Wish she had talked more about the Party's draw to Jews stuck in profoundly antisemitic milieus. On the other hand, her disinclination to interrogate the whole Party thing much at all is part of the appeal.

Neonomicon by Alan Moore

Don't be that writer where, as soon as women are introduced as main characters in a grimdark world of men, the reader thinks, "oh, well of course she's going to be raped." With Neonomicon, that's what Alan Moore has become. Then he has Merril Brears blandly announce herself as a recovering sex addict, making her eventual Moorian rape all the more inevitable. Moore writes her as a sex addict and a rape victim and very little else.

The opening story, "The Courtyard," which Moore published years earlier, is quite good and stands on its own as a horrifying and eerie tribute to H. P. Lovecraft. It's the later Neonomicon that goes badly wrong. First, Moore involves Lovecraft himself as a metatextual element, and the characters stand around talking about just how weird it is that their case resembles various Lovecraft stories. Actually, it's more accurate to say that Lovecraft's stories exist in Neonomicon as nearly literal histories, which creates weird tensions in the text. Early pages play Moore's usual game of references to The King in Yellow, Ambrose Bierce, etc., until the agents themselves notice that nearly everything they're investigating refers to Lovecraft or his influences, which seems at odds with Neonomicon's conclusion that Lovecraft merely documented supernatural forces already at play. Like, if the cosmic horror came first, why would modern devotees scrupulously reference Lovecraft and co., rather than the forces themselves? Does Cthulhu give a shit about Lovecraft? Also, why does Lovecraft chronicle  so literally what for him would be recent events and call them stories? Sure, you can invent explanations, but you're probably excusing writing that doesn't deserve it.

Much worse is the dayslong, multi-issue rape of Agent Brears, which reads like Alan Moore's private stash of fetish porn, complete with Brears arguably gradually getting into it. It basically is the plot of the second half of the book. 

There's nothing wrong with depicting extreme violence so long as the causes and consequences are treated seriously. But Neonomicon ends with an airy, banal chat between Brears and another character who carved two women into "tulips" while they were still alive. These two people, who are supposed to have had their minds rearranged to perceive cosmic, inhuman reality to the point of psychosis, talk like neighbors discussing the price of gasoline. 

And if Sax is on board with the Cthulhu/Deep Ones mythos, why would he carve a swastika into his forehead? Aren't swastikas the only thing that keeps Deep Ones at bay?

Providence Act 1 by Alan Moore

Fun Home & Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

Locke & Key by Joe Hill and Stitches by David Small (06/11)

I think my friend Will and I have inverse relationships to comics and alcohol.

Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie (05/10)

A very Moorian work. Moore and Melinda Gebbie teamed up to create a gorgeous graphic novel in which the young female protagonists of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan meet as adults in a resort hotel on the eve of World War I. The images are beautiful, and Moore's ideas are intriguing, but the work fails as pornography, its stated aim.

The sex is erotica in that it is implausible and stylized and touches on the multifaceted, often contradictory impulses that, ah-hem, "make us human." It is not quite pornography in that the sex is fraught and painful and, one feels, scarcely the point. You know how most mass-produced porn of the San Fernando Valley reduces people to their junk? This does the opposite. In real life, sex is often not worth having. Lost Girls acknowledges that fact a little too readily. It’s good for looking at and thinking about, perhaps deploying strategically in conversation, but not much else.

Here are a few panels.

Wilde parody:

"So odd were Gray's surrounds that mauve delirium descended, tinged by feverish urgency. He struggled through an undergrowth of kisses, floundered in a dank Sargasso of embrace where time became unfixed and all events were without sequence.

"Knelt in ardent demonstration by his passion-of-the-moment he heard Wooton's sly, ophidian whisper at his ear. 'Dear boy, try not to let events so overwhelm you. Bear in mind that though the Road of Excess may lead us to Wisdom's Palace, like all roads it runs in both directions'" (Book 2, chapter 13, pg. 7).

"'As I ventured whilst you posed for Hallward, we must relish experiences before they accumulate to mere decrepitude. Youth is the time to sin, for vice is quickly past its prime, while virtue never has one.'

"Wooton gestured to the Salon's other clients, nestled with their favorites. 'What a distressing rack of threadbare skulls, too meek to satisfy desire 'til it has all but fled, like wretched poets who deliberate for years before they lift their pens to find the inkwell long since dry'" (Book 2, chapter 13, pg. 4).

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (04/10)

Asks Commentary, "why can't we just depose the Islamic regime?"

Ms. Satrapi is a very appealing lady, in her youth for who she was and today for how she represents it.

Dissipated

The rest of that semester, which just ended, dissipated into a much-advertised haze of depression and booze. I barely read what I was assigned, much less anything extracurricular. I've finished packing the new volumes into my home bookshelf, into every possible cranny, and I'm much too lazy to fish them out again and see which ones I've yet to write up. They were clearly not too memorable.

Nothing extracurricular, with one important exception. I read a phenomenal amount of comics, mostly "mature themed." I read the entire oeuvre, or near enough, of several writers, and devoured five-year series in a single day. Y: The Last Man, by Brian K. Vaughan, consists of roughly 1,440 pages, a massive creative effort that spans some ten trade paperbacks, and I finished the entire work in less than twenty-four hours. Binge reading, to keep my mind off work and despondency. Let's see, I read the better part of Garth Ennis' work (and the man is prolific), quite a bit of Ed Brubaker, Grant Morrison's many projects, including that wonderful, mockable thing called The Invisibles, a few of Warren Ellis' endless efforts, including Planetary, Fell, Desolation Jones, etc., and probably a few other writers whom I can't remember without plugging in my external hard drive. Understand, I read so many comics that I already cannot recall the names of writers whose entire career I either read or heavily sampled. Series with multiple authors included Hellboy, The Authority ("Well, it was inevitable," Will said upon hearing), and various Marvel Ultimates. I believe I have concluded this period in my life. While I may still read comics, I won't scour the internet for scanned downloads, then lose sleep and eyesight scrolling through them compulsively, addictively, in such a way that I cannot remember much of the plot afterward. I'm already back to my Philip Roth, whom I enjoy in the most self-centered way. Expect trenchant analysis.

Oh yeah, Mike Carey. I read loads of Mike Carey. Want to guess how long it took me to read the 7o or so issues of Lucifer? But christ, what he does to Constantine. It's the most fucked-up world of the imagination I've encountered in a while, and John Constantine should be put down in a mercy killing. God, Carey, you have to lift the fuckers up before you send them down to hell. It can't be hell all-fucking-day. Lucifer was fun. Carey's Hellblazer was just miserable. Ennis' recipe for salvation (in the face of testosterone-dripping ultraviolence) is a round of drunken BS with the blokes. Writers are a funny lot, a little touched.

Hitman, Chronicles of Wormwood by Garth Ennis (01/09)

Are you tired of Garth Ennis' war stories yet? Is it possible to be? This run concludes one long, compulsive winter break of comics.

Preacher, Hellblazer by Garth Ennis (01/09)

Three days in a cave with well-written ultraviolence, an addict's need for narrative, debasing. Ugh.

Surprising no one, Garth Ennis kills God...

...and then has John Constantine flip off Satan.

Meanwhile, I finish off another Saturday night in typical fashion.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vols. 1 & 2, The Black Dossier by Alan Moore (01/09)

Fucking delightful - the world of the imagination, written for adults. Also, lots and lots of sex - fairy sex, people sex, immortal sex, goddess sex, immortal-goddess sex, Lilliputian sex, giant sex, bear-man-gypsy sex, invisible dude sex, etc. The only bad sex, really, is when James Bond tries to rape an 80-something-year-old woman, only to get bricked in the face. "Gratuitous!" shriek the latter-day Puritans at Amazon.com, who remain exactly what they are despite more fashionable rationalizations.

Moore helped usher in the age of pitch black comics in the 80s. Now he's resurrected adventuring, the way a middle-class "lad" of Victorian England might read Henry Morton Stanley and stare at the blank space on the map of Africa (graci, Conrad; literature supplants my own memories). Only absent the imperial fuckery, you know. The idea that there are places worth discovering, that the getting there will be an adventure, that the destination will be sufficient apotheosis. And once there, you get to have an orgy, which somehow comes off the way we envision these things in our very few moments of optimism. So, yes. Made for me. Can't help but react as expected. There are mountains in Asia.

Samplings:

First page of a Tijuana Bible from Airstrip One.

Sick of this shit happening in stories, man. "tt" indeed.

The best greeting in literature. Alan Moore and I, prurient little fucks—we deserve each other.

06/08-11/08

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
White Noise by Don Delillo
The Sun Also Rises by Earnest Hemingway
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov
The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov
Despair by Vladimir Nabokov
Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov
Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
Animal Man by Grant Morrison
The Dying Animal by Philip Roth