Night Raven: Snow Queen, Part 4

How to read Night Raven

You can read Alan Moore's Night Raven stories by buying the print or digital collection here.

If you're less respecting of copyright or you just want to try it out before deciding to buy, you can follow along here.

 

 

Part 4

My Night Raven read throughs start with The Cure here. My read through for the Snow Queen starts here. And for more background info on Night Raven, go here.

And so we come to the end. And it's an end for so much except the characters who will never end.

Moore starts this episode as he has the previous ones with the framing device of the narcotics cops in the hospital room of the dying Cancer Divine, listening to him tell his story. Moore takes a long moment to take us into the world of Nick Kulbicki, the officer who likes things neat and tidy and doesn't like the puzzle that's in front of him. And the details Moore piles on makes him come alive.

"He had a father who had somehow survived the crushing awfulness of the Warsaw Ghetto, two uncles who hadn't and a sister who was still living in Poland, living in a four-room flat in Krakow with her husband and daughters. She wrote him long letters in which her fears of the Russian Bear, fears that he knew she harboured, were conspicuous by their absence. He wished she could talk about them, but understood why she couldn't. Sometimes the bad stuff is too big to fit comfortably into anyone's mouth.

"He had a partner celled Steve Hubbard. They got on okay now but it hadn't always been that way. Kulbicki had no doubt that Hubbard still knew an endless string of Polack jokes, but at least he had the sense to keep them out of his senior officer's earshot these days. This stemmed, at least partly, from the day when Nick Kulbicki had asked his partner in a frighteningly controlled and even voice just how many Polacks it took to screw a bigmouthed Kansas hayseed into the floor. Hubbard had blinked and looked puzzled. Kulbicki had clapped one hand on the other man’s shoulder, looked him straight in the eye and answered his own question. 'Just one, Steve.' Since then, no more Polack jokes. Not in earshot."

"He had all these things. They were the jigsaw pieces that made up his normal, everyday life."

It's fair to ask why Moore spends so much time on Kulbicki and this framing devices, when all the action has already happened? Why the need for the flashback at all?

While the obvious answer is that this is a serialized story, so the framing device allows him to get the readers caught up each time. It also heightens the stakes of the outcome of the story in flashback, since we know that Cancer is nearly dead from his gunshot wounds. But there's more to what Moore is doing here.

Moore is playing with eternal beings locked in some weird war. Our hero wears a mask and may be something more than human. Our villain is an ancient and deadly thing, who will stop at nothing. It's classic comic book stuff. And if you treat it as classic comic book stuff, that's all it is.

But by bringing in these side characters, who are so wonderfully grounded by the layers of details Moore puts on them, and letting them tell the story, the reader starts to put themselves into the places of the side characters rather than the principle players. We feel their fear and frustration. We feel their mortality. And that just heightens the battle of the eternal characters into something other than classic comic book stuff. It makes it scary.

So, let's get back to that.

Night Raven has entered Yi Yang's house and is about to get shot by her goons when Cancer Divine finds his heroism and yells to Night Raven that it's a trap. Night Raven knocks Cancer down so he doesn't get shot and makes short work of the goons. He moves to follow Yi Yang into the room with the disguised Chinese White (and the cement machines ready to fill it up, as nicely illustrated by Alan Davis above).

Cancer grabs Night Raven by the leg to try to save the poor, drugged-up Chinese White:

"I grabbed at his leg as he stepped over me. It felt funny, under the trousers. It felt like it had ridges or something.

"Please. It isn't her. It isn't Yi Yang. It’s a trap. Please, Night Raven. Don’t kill her. Don’t kill her."

Night Raven ends up in the room with two Yi Yangs and isn't sure what to do when the cement starts pouring in from six different cement machines! Cancer notices that one of the Yi Yangs has a pink eye. Since Chinese White is an albino and has pink eyes, he realizes she must have lost one of her green contacts and pulls her from the room.

Night Raven gets out just before the cement fills up the room and encases Yi Yang forever. And Night Raven leaves Cancer and Chinese White hugging each other:

"He'd gone and I hugged Chinese White, little Kaye, and I was little Gerda and I'd rescued her from the Snow Queen, I'd done something heroic, for once in my life I'd won, y'know? I hadn't screwed up. I was just so happy. Just sooo happy, man."

But this is an '80s Alan Moore story, so there aren't any happy endings here. Chinese White holds out her hand and she's holding a pink contact she had used to fool him. She was the real Yi Yang! And she shoots Cancer. (And what a great drawing by Alan Davis on Cancer getting shot!)

 

"Little Gerda had helped to kill little Kaye and had helped the Snow Queen escape and nobody lived happily ever after.

"And like, then I come round in this hospital, and I know the score, man. I know I'm going to die, but... this is strange... but that doesn't scare me, see? Because, yeah, me and Chinese White, we're dead. We both got to face the long dark tunnel. But we’re the lucky ones, don't you see? Me and Chinese White, we only got the death sentence. But Night Raven and the Snow Queen...

"They got Eternity."

Cancer dies, Yi Yang escapes and Night Raven lives on to hunt her down some more. And that's the end, right?

But it's not. Then we get Kulbicki thinking about what happened. And this is where Moore elevates his story. Kulbicki understands death. And now faced with the prospect of eternity, he even appreciates death:

"We treasure our lives. We treasure them because there is so little of them.

"He stopped and looked at the barely-dark city that stretched in all directions around him, heavy with the presence of a million sleeping souls. He wanted to shout, standing there in the middle of the road, singing out like a madman. He wanted to tell everyone not to be afraid, to tell them that Death was not their enemy, that Death existed only to make sense of life. 'Shake hands with Uncle Death, you suckers. He's not so bad. Hell, there are worse things than death!' That’s what he wanted to shout.

"But he didn't. He just walked home, back to what was his."

What a great story!

That's not to say there aren't flaws. We never get enough of Chinese White for her to pop as a character and for us to be saddened by her death. Moore also underplays the final moments in the concrete room. Night Raven looks at the seeming Yi Yang for a moment and then just walks out. It's not exactly as tense as it probably could have been written.

But the strengths far outweigh the weaknesses. And yet, almost no one knows these stories because they were written before Moore came to fame in the U.S., have almost never been reprinted, and comic book fans have a weird aversion to reading text stories.

Oh well, another of Moore's forgotten awesome.

So now that you've read my take, what did you think? Let me know in the comments.

Shameless plug

A friend and I are creating a comic book called Miskatonic High. Five teens take on H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters and their small-town high school … They’re just not sure which is worse.

Right now we're just putting it together digitally, but plan to do a kickstarter to get it published.

We'd love it if you'd take a look at miskatonichighcomic.com.

Night Raven: Snow Queen, Part 3

How to read Night Raven

You can read Alan Moore's Night Raven stories by buying the print or digital collection here.

If you're less respecting of copyright or you just want to try it out before deciding to buy, you can follow along here.

 

  

Part 3

My Night Raven read throughs start with The Cure here. My read through for the Snow Queen starts here. And for more background info on Night Raven, go here.

Moore starts episode 3 with our narrator Cancer Divine on the verge of death again, and a big, hulking narcotics detective over him, trying to keep him alive. Remember that Alan Moore was writing this in the mid-1980s and the idea of a flamboyantly gay man, addicted to coke being our narrator and having a giant detective holding his hand and trying to keep him alive was truly unheard of in a Marvel publication. In America, Frank Miller is doing some interesting things with Daredevil and starting to grimy up his stories, but Moore is taking it even further in a back-up, text-only feature over in Britain. I can't imagine what the casual reader must have thought.

Anyway, Divine wakes up and continues his story. He decided to break into Yi Yang's house to see what was going on. There he spied Yi Yang talking with Chinese White and discovered a gigantic concrete pouring machine hooked through a tube to the room the girls are in. (And we get a great Alan Davis illustration of it, as well as another, which is one of the most iconic of all the Night Raven illustrations, which I posted above.)

Yi Yang is telling the drugged out, twin-looking Chinese White that they're going to play a trick on Yi Yang's old "friend" Night Raven by giving him a fate worse than death (since he can't die).

Divine figures out that Yi Yang means to trick Night Raven with the disguised Chinese White and while he's trying to deal with her, she's going to fill in the room with fast-drying concrete so he'll be stuck in concrete for ages. Here's how Divine describes it:

"He's gotta stand there with his mouth and lungs full of hard cement and he’s gotta stand there forever. Forever, man. God, you think about that, you wanna be sick, know what I mean?"

What a great evil villain plan. But since Moore has revealed it in episode 3, we know that something else is going to happen. But what? Way to build up the suspense.

As Divine tries to figure out what to do, he has to hide from some of Yi Yang's goons. Hiding in a little alcove, he looks out the window and sees Night Raven approach, and the description of Night Raven's movements are wonderful:

“He didn’t move like a man. He moved... like an insect or something. Like a spider. No. No, it was smoother than that. He sorta flowed over the wall in one movement, you know what I mean? No? No, of course you don’t. You weren’t there.

“The way he moved across the lawn, it was as if he didn't have any weight at all. He looked just like a twisted, torn piece of newspaper blowing in the night wind. It was eerie. It was really, really eerie."

Moore is describing how Night Raven moved, not how he looked on anything like that. This isn't instrumental to the plot. And yet he takes the time to make you feel the details of the story that aren't important, just to build it up in the reader's mind. It's masterful writing.

And that's where he leaves us until the last episode, which I'll discuss later this week.

Shameless plug

A friend and I are creating a comic book called Miskatonic High. Five teens take on H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters and their small-town high school … They’re just not sure which is worse.

Right now we're just putting it together digitally, but plan to do a kickstarter to get it published.

We'd love it if you'd take a look at miskatonichighcomic.com.

Night Raven: Snow Queen, Part 2

How to read Night Raven

You can read Alan Moore's Night Raven stories by buying the print or digital collection here.

If you're less respecting of copyright or you just want to try it out before deciding to buy, you can follow along here.

Part 2

My Night Raven read throughs start with The Cure here. My read through for the Snow Queen starts here. And for more background info on Night Raven, go here.

For episode 2, Moore colorfully sets the scene in the New York City hospital:

"Saturday Night Madness echoed through the off-white, over-lit lobby and into the shadowy tranquilised corridors beyond. Muffled fragments of distant conversations would drift briefly through the jaundiced halo of a sodium lamp before they vanished forever into the maze of swing doors and acoustic tiles, drowned by the clicking of a nurse’s high heels on the tiles of some lonely interward thoroughfare.

"There was a nine year old Puerto Rican girl who‘d drunk half a bottle of bleach. There was a wino with a fractured collarbone. There was a thirty-seven year old teacher and mother of three with windscreen lacerations. There was a three hundred and fifty pound truck driver from New Jersey with a boil on his nose."

All of this is to set up the cops sitting and waiting for Cancer Divine to wake up and continue telling his story. Though, with the gunshot wounds, the narcotics cops aren't sure he's ever going to wake up.

As always, Moore does an excellent job with his descriptions, such as this one for Cancer Divine:

"He was perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six years old. His height was average but he was possessed of a fine and bird-like bone structure that made him appear shorter than he actually was. His dyed orange hair, which had previously risen in a stiff cockatoo, was now plastered to his forehead with sweat. The darkness that encircled his sunken eyes was only accentuated by the ruins of his makeup, dark bruised smears that not even the most diligent ward sister had yet been able to scrub away."

There's a nice Alan Davis image to illustrate Cancer and the cops and I like his second one, setting the scene of the old house even better.

The wait gives the cops time to tell us about the state of cocaine sales in the city and how Yi Yang controls the trade, though someone is tearing through the city shutting all the dealers down. It also allows them to talk about the big house full of dead criminals and the room full of concrete. They don't know what to make of that, but then Cancer Divine wakes up to continue telling his story.

When he wakes up, Cancer tells us about how he's always liked stories and storytelling. He remembers a Hans Christian Andersen story, the Snow Queen:

"See, there was this little boy called Kay, who gets kidnapped by the Snow Queen. The Snow Queen is this incredibly evil woman, who’s just, y‘know, like ice or something. And like, she lets this splinter of ice work into little Kay's heart, and then his heart turns into ice too, so he don't mind living with her.

"But like, Kay's got this friend, this little girl called Gerda, and she loves him, see? So she follows him all the way to the Snow Queen's palace, but the only way the Snow Queen will release him is if he can shape these icicles into the word 'Eternity'. Or something like that. It’s been a long time since I read it. I get confused...

"But you see, that was just like what happened with me and Chinese White and our Snow Queen, Yi Yang. I was Gerda and Chinese White was Kay, only the Snow Queen didn't steal Chinese White's heart by working a splinter of ice into her heart. She did it by letting some crystals of snow get up her nose."

I love stories within stories, which allow you to consider how the outer story parallels the inner story and what it all means. So this will give you something to think about as we go. You can read a summary of Andersen's Snow Queen story here. To spoil the ending, though, when Gerda goes to rescue Kay, she uses her love to warm the icicles in his heart. He bursts into tears, which breaks the Snow Queen's spell and the last of the icicles in his eyes and as the tears fall, they become icicles that spell the word "Eternity", the word he never could spell, allowing them to escape.

Then Cancer gets back to his story. He returned to the Grease Gun and ran into a coked-up Chinese White. She was talking about make-up and that's when he realized she now had green eyes. Apparently, her new lover, Yi Yang, had bought her all kinds of things and they were living in her big house.

Chinese White tells Cancer about the Night Raven and how he's trying to kill Yi Yang. And later, Cancer finds out that Yi Yang and Night Raven's fight stretches back to the 1930s.

So Cancer decided to stake out the big house and see if he could rescue his friend. And on the third night, he sees her and Yi Yang enter the house. But with her new contacts and dyed hair, Chinese White now looks just like Yi Yang.

"As I looked at them there, just for an instant I could tell the difference. There was something in the line of their faces... one cruel and hard, one soft and weak and vulnerable. And then they broke off the kiss and carried on walking towards the house. They passed behind some trees and when they came out the other side I couldn’t tell them apart anymore. That splinter of identity that separated Chinese White from the Snow Queen had melted. Chinese White was gone.

"Forever.

"For Eternity."

Good stuff. And we'll get some more next week! Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Shameless plug

A friend and I are creating a comic book called Miskatonic High. Five teens take on H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters and their small-town high school … They’re just not sure which is worse.

Right now we're just putting it together digitally, but plan to do a kickstarter to get it published.

We'd love it if you'd take a look at miskatonichighcomic.com.

Night Raven: Snow Queen, Part 1

How to read Night Raven

You can read Alan Moore's Night Raven stories by buying the print or digital collection here.

If you're less respecting of copyright or you just want to try it out before deciding to buy, you can follow along here.

Snow Queen, Part 1

My Night Raven read throughs start with The Cure here. And for more background info on Night Raven, go here.

In my imagination, I assume this is the story that Moore wanted to tell with Night Raven from the beginning, but needed the hero to become an immortal and still be active in modern times to do it, and so everything has been prologue for this. Is that true, who knows? I'm not sure Moore has ever talked in depth about his work on Night Raven, so maybe the legends are better than the facts.


The other nice thing about this series are the great black and white illustrations by Alan Davis. The Alans were working on Captain Britain at the time and Davis volunteered some drawings for Night Raven the same as Moore volunteered the stories so the magazine could stay afloat and let them do what they want with the good Captain.

Anyway, we're now up to the 1970s. I love the choice of narrator in a young, gay junkie who calls himself Cancer Divine and hangs out at a place called the Grease Gun. Can you imagine reading that in a mainstream comic magazine in the early 1980s? Cancer Divine is in the hospital, dying and telling the police his story. And what a story it is!

A while back Divine was hanging out at the Grease Gun and was feeling bad, so he struck up a conversation with a girl called Chinese White, an albino Asian woman. Chinese White was a depressive who loved talking about death. And as they were talking, the Snow Queen came in. The Snow Queen being the drug cartel-running Yi Yang, of course.

After a conversation, the two Chinese women left together. Meanwhile, Divine went to score cocaine from his connection, Spanish Eddy (who works for Yi Yang). As he's there, Night Raven breaks in and starts tearing through Eddy's men, even after a bullet goes through his chest.

Eddy spills the beans on Yi Yang and eventually pays for it with his life. But this is just the start:

"It was the first shot in a war. A war like you can’t imagine.

"A war between two people. Two people who weren’t human. Two people who were going to live forever. Two people who hated each other worse than anybody on the planet.

"A war. And New York city was the battleground.

"And me and Chinese White...

"Well, I guess me and Chinese White were just the first casualties."

It takes Moore a while for the story to get rolling, but Divine is quite the character and a refreshingly new voice to the superhero stories in the early 1980s. And I can't help but chuckle that the terms Snow Queen and China White are both nicknames for cocaine.

We'll see the war develop more next time.

Shameless plug

A friend and I are creating a comic book called Miskatonic High. Five teens take on H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters and their small-town high school … They’re just not sure which is worse.

Right now we're just putting it together digitally, but plan to do a kickstarter to get it published.

We'd love it if you'd take a look at miskatonichighcomic.com.

Night Raven: ...the anesthetic, wearing off

How to read Night Raven

You can read Alan Moore's Night Raven stories by buying the print or digital collection here.

If you're less respecting of copyright or you just want to try it out before deciding to buy, you can follow along here.

...the anesthetic, wearing off...

My Night Raven read throughs start with The Cure here. And for more background info on Night Raven, go here.

This story is a prologue for the four-part Snow Queen story that finished Moore's Night Raven run, but what a great little scene setter it is, all by itself.

Moore starts the story with a quote from Velvet Underground musician John Cale's song "Antarctica Starts Here," a song about a terrifying old silent film star (think Sunset Boulevard). While the reference to Antarctica will make sense in a second, it's interesting to compare Night Raven's arch nemesis Yi Yang to that old silent film star of Sunset Boulevard, who I always thought of as a terrible monster from a monster movie. The idea of age and cruelty and a demented mind are brush strokes Moore is using to paint Yi Yang.

He shows us Yi Yang, the 6,000-year-old Chinese crime lord in her sanctuary, Neither Flag nor Wind in 1965. Inside the house, with its beautiful decorations, kneels a man petrified by the sleeping form of his lover, Yi Yang herself. He is petrified by her immortality and what that has done to her.

It's a powerful description of her evil and nicely sets her up as a force to be reckoned with, even though we haven't seen her do much yet (and the one Night Raven arc that featured Yi Yang before Moore started writing the series didn't really paint her as anyone that interesting -- you can read it here if you want).

As a side note, pointing out how brilliant Moore is when he doesn't even need to be, Neither Flag nor Wind is a reference to an old Zen proverb. Two attendants and a lord are watching a flag flap. One says that it's the wind that is moving. The other replies that it's the flag that is moving. The lord replies that neither flag nor wind are moving, it is the mind that moves. What does that mean? Well, some believe that the actions of objects don't matter, it is the observing of them that makes them matter. For this story, it suggests that Yi's power is not in strength or magic, it is her superior mind.

Meanwhile, Night Raven has journeyed to Antarctica to take his cure. A mysterious, masked noir hero in a trench coat wandering in the snow... I wonder if he bumped into Rorschach? We get a nice drawing of Night Raven from Moore's V for Vendetta collaborator David Lloyd.

Night Raven takes the cure in a place where no one can get infected if the cure is really a poison for everyone else like Night Raven was initially told. He can feel it curing him. And while he heals, he uses his detective skills to figure out Yi Yang's motives.

"Why would an immortal woman risk loosing a disease that would destroy perhaps all the life upon the planet save for hers and that of her deadliest enemy? Surely, to one who is assured an infinite future, that would be the bleakest future of all. Hence, Yi Yang was lying about the cure in the bottle having a dreadful plague as a side effect. Probably."

Night Raven clearly has a bit of Batman and characters like that in his DNA. And one of the things that drives me crazy about Batman is how rarely he's shown doing actual detective work and making logical deductions. It's refreshing to read how Night Raven figures out his situation.

So why does Yi Yang make Night Raven immortal, make him feel pain for decades and then give him the cure?

"The only other problem that remained in his deductions was one of motive. Why should Yi Yang take such a risk, simply for the sake of brief and cruel amusement in the midst of an unending lifespan? Why would she risk granting immortality to someone, immortality coupled to a pain that would make he who suffered it hate her more than any other single object in the world? Why would she risk freeing her single deadliest enemy from the prospect of death, and then dangle the means before him by which he could also rid himself of the pain which she had induced? Didn’t she realise?

"Didn't she know what he was going to do to her if this cure succeeded? He would hunt her down, though it took centuries.

"Though she hid from him on the ocean bed he would track her across it to where she cowered.

"Though she locked herself in an impregnable vault for a million years, he would be waiting outside when it opened.

"He would find her. And what he did to her then would make what she had done to him seem almost laughable by comparison.

"Why? Why had she risked loosing such an implaceable and horrifying revenge upon herself?

"Unless she was bored."

I love that! Yi Yang made Night Raven immortal so that the prospect of immortality suddenly has some risk to it, some excitement, some reason.

And so, Moore has made Yi Yang not just a good villain, he's made her an interesting character that we now respect, fear and understand. That's some writing, right there!

In her house, Yi Yang wakes up screaming and kills the boy sitting there, just because.

"Naked and slick with his blood she crouches over him and sniffs at the air like an animal. Something is different. Something is abroad in the world that sets this day apart from two million others that she has woken to. Something dangerous.

"She shudders, and the sensation is almost exquisite."

And with that amazing piece, Moore opens the curtains on his final Night Raven story. But we'll get into that next week. What did you think?

Shameless plug

A friend and I are creating a comic book called Miskatonic High. Five teens take on H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters and their small-town high school … They’re just not sure which is worse.

Right now we're just putting it together digitally, but plan to do a kickstarter to get it published.

We'd love it if you'd take a look at miskatonichighcomic.com.

Night Raven: Sadie's Story

How to read Night Raven

You can read Alan Moore's Night Raven stories by buying the print or digital collection here.

If you're less respecting of copyright or you just want to try it out before deciding to buy, you can follow along here.

Sadie's Story, Parts 1 & 2

My Night Raven read throughs start with The Cure here. And for more background info on Night Raven, go here.

After the great side-story in White Hopes, Red Nightmares, we're back on Scoop's story, but this time told through his widow, Sadie. It's also the 1960s now. There are technically two parts to Sadie's Story, but there's barely enough there for a single story, so I'm doing them both together.

Sadie is telling her story to a reporter. And while some of it is fun (the jabs at J. Jonah Jameson are great), much of the first half of this story is telling us things we already know. This is especially odd as these were the last two Night Raven stories to appear in the Marvel Super Heroes magazine, where it had appeared for a while. The next wouldn't appear until The Daredevils #6, an entirely new publication. Strange.

Anyway, Sadie tells us about Night Raven getting poisoned by Yi Yang and Scoop getting the cure and what happened on that wharf decades earlier. Then she recounts Scoop growing obsessed with Night Raven and the cure around the '50s when the Howard Bates Night Raven started killing people.

But Scoop decided that maybe what was in the bottle really was a cure and that it was a Yi Yang joke to make Night Raven so fearful to take it. And as Scoop was dying from drinking himself to death, he decided to get the cure to Night Raven. He wrote a personal ad in the paper to get Night Raven's attention, but Scoop died before Night Raven showed up.

But Night Raven did show up on the day of Scoop's funeral and Sadie hugs him and cries. There's this nice little bit:

"And then I felt something sort of withered and dry touch me on the cheek." What a great way to use other senses than what he looks like to describe what had happened to Night Raven under his mask.

There's also a nice little bit about Night Raven looking around at Sadie's small house, at the collection of stuff from a normal life. It's a nice little moment, but it's awkward by having Sadie try to read into Night Raven's actions for what he was thinking. It's also hard for the reader to feel the loss of Night Raven's humanity when we were never shown it in the first place. He has no alter ego. He has no friends. He has a home we never see, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense anyway. If there's a flaw in Night Raven, it's that he doesn't come through as a real character very well, even as most of his supporting cast get fleshed out more.

Night Raven reads Scoop's letter, takes the cure and leaves. As I said, there's not much to this story.

And the ending bothered me: how did the Night Raven send the money regularly to Sadie? Maybe Night Raven's manservant on that elusive 13th floor sent it? It's never explained and it's a little too corny for a normal Moore story.

In my opinion, Sadie's Story is the weakest of the Night Raven stories, but it's a nice quiet moment showing that even in enduring pain, Night Raven still retained just enough of his humanity. And it starts to lead toward the great Yi Yang conflict that will wrap up Moore's run on the series.

Shameless plug

A friend and I are creating a comic book called Miskatonic High. Five teens take on H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters and their small-town high school … They’re just not sure which is worse.

Right now we're just putting it together digitally, but plan to do a kickstarter to get it published.

We'd love it if you'd take a look at miskatonichighcomic.com.

Night Raven: White Hopes, Red Nightmares, Part 2

How to read Night Raven

You can read Alan Moore's Night Raven stories by buying the print or digital collection here.

If you're less respecting of copyright or you just want to try it out before deciding to buy, you can follow along here.

White Hopes, Red Nightmares, Part 2

My read through of part 1 was here and my read through of The Cure started here. And for more background info on Night Raven, go here.

Moore starts Part 2 by reminding us what happened in the last issue and tells us that the Howard Bates Night Raven has gone on to strangle a total of nine people now.

We get more of Bates' craziness, with his imaginings of how the original Night Raven must have died, fighting communists to protect the plans for the atom bomb. His sacred body was placed in the Smithsonian where only the president can see it. The mask was cursed and destroyed the lives of several communists before winding up in the junk shop where Bates found it last issue.

It's a crazy legend and yet, it's perfect for the child-like insane mind of Howard Bates:

"That was the story that Howard Bates had made up in his head. It was the legend of Night Raven and Night Raven was the legend and the legend was Night Raven and Night Raven was Howard Bates and Howard Bates was hopelessly, hopelessly mad."

Bates is thinking all of this while sitting in the empty apartment of Minnie Sapirstein, the communist dancer who lives in Bates' building, and the object of his obsession. He's going to kill her that night.

And then we get to see Minnie. I'm amazed at the economical way that Moore quickly sketches out her character, but creates it so fully:

"She didn't even do had things, really. Not to speak of. But she understood Bogeymen. She understood the way in which a Bogeyman would think. She knew that what she and a Bogeyman understood to be ‘bad things’ would have precious little similarity. A Bogeyman was likely to come slithering in the middle of the night and punish her for absolutely no reason at all, the way her father sometimes had when his face was red and his breath smelled funny. She knew you couldn't argue with a Bogeyman.

"You could only run. She'd been running for a long time. She’d run all the way to New York, only to find that New York was the Bogeyman capital of the world. She‘d immersed herself in art and light and dancing and music, and tried to build a world with no dark corners in which a Bogeyman could hide his bloated and leprous sack of a body."

As Minnie goes home, we meet the third player in this tale: the shape that was at one time the real Night Raven. We get his backstory from The Cure. Moore no longer even writes him as a human, just a wasted, tormented thing that can't die. Moore has moved a long way away from the Night Raven as Spirit/Shadow adventurer very quickly.

The shape wants the mask back. In a great little piece of detective writing, Moore explains how the shape figured out who Bates is:

"It hadn't taken the shape very long at all to find who had the mask. To a creature that had spent much of its not inconsiderable life in pursuit of the classic Detective Method, the killer had left unmistakeable signs.

"For one thing the killer only claimed the lives of those with left-wing or Bohemian habits and tendencies. For another thing the killer seemed to have developed a taste for killing women. The last four victims had all been women, and they had all been murdered at their homes, which suggested that the killer had some form of access to their addresses.

"The women didn’t know each other, they lived in wildly differing areas of the city, and, apart from their liberal leanings, there was not one single factor which connected the four of them together. Except...

"Except they all used the same library.

"Through skylights and from rooftops the shape had patiently observed the library branch in question, he was looking for a man of a certain build, a man of a certain bearing, a man with something smouldering and dangerous in his eyes.

"After a while, it became apparent that he was looking for Howard Bates."

The shape is staring at Bates' building when it realized by the light that Bates was in Sapirstein's apartment. I love this bit:

"That little glint of light had given him away. It had been the merest glimmer. If one had blinked, one would have missed it.

"The shape never blinked. It couldn't. It didn't have eyelids."

As Bates tries to kill Minnie, the shape bursts in through a window and kills Bates and takes back his mask. As Sapirstein tries to make sense of this all, there's a beautiful bit at the end, paying off Minnie's story:

"Minnie Sapirstein didn't care. She felt good. After years of running she had faced the Bogeyman and she was still alive and she'd never have to run again. She wasn't afraid of things that lurk in closets and beneath beds anymore. She wasn't afraid because a simple and heartening truth had been revealed to her.

"Even Bogeymen have Bogeymen chasing them."

So the shape is Night Raven again. What that means will have to wait for next time.

This story was so well told, using Moore's skills as a pulp writer, but adding a certain amount of politics and psychology to elevate this into something powerful and unique. It's not hard to see how it's the equal of what he was doing in V and Marvelman, but you can also start to see Moore's future in Night Raven, readying himself for a horror comic like Swamp Thing, and a political take on superheroes in Watchmen.

What did you think?

Night Raven: White Hopes, Red Nightmares, Part 1

How to read Night Raven

You can read Alan Moore's Night Raven stories by buying the print or digital collection here.

If you're less respecting of copyright or you just want to try it out before deciding to buy, you can follow along here.

White Hopes, Red Nightmares, Part 1

You can check out my read through of The Cure starting here. And for more background info on Night Raven, go here.

For my money, "White Hopes, Red Nightmares" is the best of Moore's Night Raven stories.

This second story starts with a big time shift, as we're now in 1957. This allows Moore to deal with the idea of Red Menace (a timely topic in the early Reagan '80s, when he was writing this) and suggests the transformation Night Raven has gone through, left for dead at the bottom of the sea at the end of The Cure.

We meet Howard Bates, who happens to find the Night Raven mask that was left on the wharf in a junk shop and buys it. The white, bone-like thing means something special to Howard:

"He would have been quite prepared to pay five dollars, ten dollars, a hundred. He knew that the pitted, skeletal mask with it's empty, sightless eyes was a genuine sliver of legend, a yellowed shard hewn from the rock of fables itself. It was the splinter of a dream, and it was priceless. Priceless."

Bates is a right-wing nutjob who hates what he sees happening to America: "There was the constant scent of foreign cooking where there should have been the warm and motherly perfume of apple pie or corned beef hash. There was distant, muffled cacophony of Negro Jazz where there should have been the uplifting, confident strains of a Glenn Miller, the pure and noble voice of Kate Smith. It wasn't right. It wasn't good. It wasn't American. It made him feel like an alien in his own home."

In his apartment building lives Minie Sapirstein, the free-thinking communist dancer, who has become Bates' obsession. His other obsession is Night Raven:

"Howard had been ten years old when he first learned of the shadowy figure that was wreaking havoc in the seedy boweries and decadent penthouses of New York's criminal class. An adventurer, resplendent in white trenchcoat and slouch hat, a creature of incredible physical and mental prowess who was repaying the tithe of misery that the Crime Barons had had so long visited upon the poor and the helpless. A character who might have stepped out of the pages of Street & Smith's Detective Story Monthly, a worthy companion to The Shadow, The Spider, to G-B And His Battle Aces, to all the wonderful fictional heroes that had helped the young Howard through many a long night, reading beneath the bed-clothes in the amber beam of a cheap dimestore torch.

"But Nightraven was real. Really really real. To the ten year old boy it had been like discovering that Santa Claus was genuine after all."

We find out that Bates supports Joe McCarthy, John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, the defenders of Bates' America.

When Bates slips on the mask, it all falls into place for him. What he must do. He orders a new trenchcoat and fedora. And nylon fishing line:

"All that remained to be done was deciding. Deciding who he was going to kill first."

Moore then switches characters. He has given up his first-person point-of-view from The Cure to this omniscient narrator point-of-view, allowing him to explore the minds of all of his characters. And so we go from the obsessive Howard Bates to Manfred the Maniac, the commie photographer, who  thinks about the happening that broke up.

Manfred discovers his friend, Mike Lawler, being strangled by the Bates Night Raven and takes his picture. As Lawler dies, he has time to think about what is happening.

"His limbs kicked and jerked feebly, made leaden by the horrifying shock of what was happening to him. He began to sink to the glistening sidewalk, tiny black suns exploding before his eyes. His lungs screamed for breath. His brain clamoured frantically for oxygen. A barely audible rasp issued from his gaping lips, small and brittle and dry as the scrabbling of a cockroach. It was not recognizable as a human sound.

"The miniscule black suns multiplied, filling his field of vision with a whole galaxy of arid, airless blackness. Swimming on the middle of that final, crushing darkness was something white. He tried to make out what it was.

"It was something like a bird, something like a Praying Mantis. Something like the skull of a steer that had bleached in the Death Valley sunshine. Set into it’s awful blank whiteness were two dark slits.

"They were eyes. And they were without mercy."

Manfred's picture of this new Night Raven ran in all the city's newspapers where everyone saw it. Including a shape living in an attic.

We'll find out how all this plays out in part two. See you then.

Youngblood: Bloodsport #2

In my After Awesome series, I talked about how Rob Liefeld and company moved on from Awesome and set up Arcade Comics (it's here, if for some reason you want to read it again). They released the Arcade comics at conventions, to prove there was still interest in Youngblood and the other series.

One of them was Youngblood: Bloodsport. Here's what I said about Bloodsport before:

...Mark Millar started writing Youngblood: Bloodsport, the worst version of Youngblood that actually made it to print. While a number of versions over the years were bad or just mediocre, Bloodsport is downright repugnant. And it revels in it. 

The series deals with a situation where there are too many superheroes and not enough job opportunities. When a new version of Youngblood is being put together, all of the various members show up to audition. The problem is this will be a group put together from superteams from alternate dimensions, so there can be only one Youngblood member from this dimension. In order to decide who it'll be, the Youngblood members have to fight each other to the death to decide who it will be.

Remember all the jokes Moore made through Suprema and the Dazzle Comics about how bad comic writing had gotten, this is exactly the kind of thing he was talking about. Everything is a bad drug or sex joke, designed to offend.

Only one full issue came out. There was a bootleg version of issue 2, but it was printed in such limited numbers it's impossible to find a scan of it online and I've never seen a physical copy for sale.

Josh Hines recently found a copy and was nice enough to send me photos of it. So if anyone has spent all these years looking to read about a fight to the death between Suprema and Twilight, your wish is granted!

Most likely Bloodsport 2 wasn’t really ready for whatever convention they were going to, so they just put it out in this bootleg edition. But because of this we get to see a bit behind the curtain.

One of the more interesting parts of this find is the bits of Millar's script. Clearly, this was intended as a four-issue miniseries. But he also wrote in cameos by the likes of Swamp Thing, the Man Thing, the Heap and even Namor. He meant this as a send-up of all superheroes and not just the Liefeld/Awesome ones. I don't know if that would have made the series any better, but it was interesting, at least.

Anyway, check it out for yourself:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What'd you think?