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.
