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.
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