Alan Moore's Neonomicon

Moore, auto declarado mago cerimonial desde sua obra From Hell no início dos anos 90, sintetiza aqui de maneira humilde sua tacada no mito em torno de Lovecraft. Para quem conhece a abordagem de From Hell e Promethea, a mistura entre ficção e ocultismo vai fazer mais sentido. Mas não se enganem, os temas são pesados. Para quem não foi iniciado, ainda é uma história de terror assustadora. Quem pesquisar as referências a Kenneth Grant e se aprofundar, pode acabar tendo sua vida mudada para sempre. Isto é Alan Moore escrevendo horror.A arte de de Jacen Burrows e as cores de Juanmar são tão fenomenais quanto.É daqui para Providence.

Excellent.

Mit diesem Werk und den nachfolgenden Providence Teilen begeben wir uns auf die Suche nach dem, was den Mythos ausmacht.

Neonomicon is a graphic novel. I don’t read many graphic novels –I make up my own pictures in my mind to match the words in non-graphic fiction. But I loved comic books when I was a kid and I am aware and appreciative of what a well crafted graphic novel can do. Like this one., Which is excellent. It’s exceedingly well scripted. (Plot and dialogue in a graphic novel are constrained –constricted may be better- by the limit on pages and the large amount of space taken up in the pictures.) The illustrations are superb, realistic, heavy on line but not ignoring shading and contour, and the coloring, dark but bursting into explosions of color in the more psychedelic interludes, is equally effective. Moore wrote story and dialogue, Burrows illustrated, someone named Juanmar colored the drawings. They all deserve praise.The story is a modernization of Lovecraft’s Chulthu mythos. An FBI agent is staking out a neighborhood where a series of brutal ghastly murders have taken place. The killer had no history of violence and only speaks now in a jumble of alien words. He’s hopelessly psychotic. But there are two other recent mass murders and in both cases, killers with same past record –no history of violence—and the same present behavior. There is no apparent connection among the three. The FBI agent is an expert in anomaly theory. He looks for anomalies and tries to fit them into patterns. The only connection seems to be a mysterious drug called aklo and a possible dealer, a man named Johnny Carcosa who hangs out at the Club Zothique. The band there is the Ulthar Cats. They’re beyond punk or Goth, singing songs that starts in freeform descriptions of violence and swerve part way through a (very long) song into a string of alien names which we know (because we’ve read Lovecraft) but the agent doesn’t are names of entities in the Chulthu myth. No one knows how old Johnny is and he wears a veil over the front of his face, covering it from the bridge of his nose down. The agent digs deeper, finds that a similar string of killings and mutilations occurred in the same place in the 1920s. (Think Lovecraft’s time.) He makes contact with Johnny Carcosa and arranges to buy some aklo. Soon, the agent is locked in a cell. He’s killed several people and he too speaks an alien tongue. A new team of agents is sent in to investigate, man and woman, and the story accelerates in tempo and in horror. It ends in an explosion of color and horrific images, with a dire fate in store for all of us.It’s a good recreation of Lovecraft’s twisted world, with one addition. The sexuality that is hinted at but never allowed to enter Lovecraft’s asexual tales is explicit, in text and drawings, in this disturbing story. It works and it’s not intruded gratuitously but if you’re squeamish about such things, you may want to take a pass on this book.

Peculiarissimo, non sapevo cosa aspettarmi e sono stato decisamente colpito dalla storia (carica di citazioni da Lovecraft e co. ma piena di idee originali). I disegni sono ben fatti, e in alcuni casi creano dei "giochi illusori" perfetti per la storia.