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.
