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.
