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?
