Night Raven: White Hopes, Red Nightmares, Part 2

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?

Night Raven: White Hopes, Red Nightmares, Part 1

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 1

You can check out my read through of The Cure starting here. And for more background info on Night Raven, go here.

For my money, "White Hopes, Red Nightmares" is the best of Moore's Night Raven stories.

This second story starts with a big time shift, as we're now in 1957. This allows Moore to deal with the idea of Red Menace (a timely topic in the early Reagan '80s, when he was writing this) and suggests the transformation Night Raven has gone through, left for dead at the bottom of the sea at the end of The Cure.

We meet Howard Bates, who happens to find the Night Raven mask that was left on the wharf in a junk shop and buys it. The white, bone-like thing means something special to Howard:

"He would have been quite prepared to pay five dollars, ten dollars, a hundred. He knew that the pitted, skeletal mask with it's empty, sightless eyes was a genuine sliver of legend, a yellowed shard hewn from the rock of fables itself. It was the splinter of a dream, and it was priceless. Priceless."

Bates is a right-wing nutjob who hates what he sees happening to America: "There was the constant scent of foreign cooking where there should have been the warm and motherly perfume of apple pie or corned beef hash. There was distant, muffled cacophony of Negro Jazz where there should have been the uplifting, confident strains of a Glenn Miller, the pure and noble voice of Kate Smith. It wasn't right. It wasn't good. It wasn't American. It made him feel like an alien in his own home."

In his apartment building lives Minie Sapirstein, the free-thinking communist dancer, who has become Bates' obsession. His other obsession is Night Raven:

"Howard had been ten years old when he first learned of the shadowy figure that was wreaking havoc in the seedy boweries and decadent penthouses of New York's criminal class. An adventurer, resplendent in white trenchcoat and slouch hat, a creature of incredible physical and mental prowess who was repaying the tithe of misery that the Crime Barons had had so long visited upon the poor and the helpless. A character who might have stepped out of the pages of Street & Smith's Detective Story Monthly, a worthy companion to The Shadow, The Spider, to G-B And His Battle Aces, to all the wonderful fictional heroes that had helped the young Howard through many a long night, reading beneath the bed-clothes in the amber beam of a cheap dimestore torch.

"But Nightraven was real. Really really real. To the ten year old boy it had been like discovering that Santa Claus was genuine after all."

We find out that Bates supports Joe McCarthy, John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, the defenders of Bates' America.

When Bates slips on the mask, it all falls into place for him. What he must do. He orders a new trenchcoat and fedora. And nylon fishing line:

"All that remained to be done was deciding. Deciding who he was going to kill first."

Moore then switches characters. He has given up his first-person point-of-view from The Cure to this omniscient narrator point-of-view, allowing him to explore the minds of all of his characters. And so we go from the obsessive Howard Bates to Manfred the Maniac, the commie photographer, who  thinks about the happening that broke up.

Manfred discovers his friend, Mike Lawler, being strangled by the Bates Night Raven and takes his picture. As Lawler dies, he has time to think about what is happening.

"His limbs kicked and jerked feebly, made leaden by the horrifying shock of what was happening to him. He began to sink to the glistening sidewalk, tiny black suns exploding before his eyes. His lungs screamed for breath. His brain clamoured frantically for oxygen. A barely audible rasp issued from his gaping lips, small and brittle and dry as the scrabbling of a cockroach. It was not recognizable as a human sound.

"The miniscule black suns multiplied, filling his field of vision with a whole galaxy of arid, airless blackness. Swimming on the middle of that final, crushing darkness was something white. He tried to make out what it was.

"It was something like a bird, something like a Praying Mantis. Something like the skull of a steer that had bleached in the Death Valley sunshine. Set into it’s awful blank whiteness were two dark slits.

"They were eyes. And they were without mercy."

Manfred's picture of this new Night Raven ran in all the city's newspapers where everyone saw it. Including a shape living in an attic.

We'll find out how all this plays out in part two. See you then.

Youngblood: Bloodsport #2

In my After Awesome series, I talked about how Rob Liefeld and company moved on from Awesome and set up Arcade Comics (it's here, if for some reason you want to read it again). They released the Arcade comics at conventions, to prove there was still interest in Youngblood and the other series.

One of them was Youngblood: Bloodsport. Here's what I said about Bloodsport before:

...Mark Millar started writing Youngblood: Bloodsport, the worst version of Youngblood that actually made it to print. While a number of versions over the years were bad or just mediocre, Bloodsport is downright repugnant. And it revels in it. 

The series deals with a situation where there are too many superheroes and not enough job opportunities. When a new version of Youngblood is being put together, all of the various members show up to audition. The problem is this will be a group put together from superteams from alternate dimensions, so there can be only one Youngblood member from this dimension. In order to decide who it'll be, the Youngblood members have to fight each other to the death to decide who it will be.

Remember all the jokes Moore made through Suprema and the Dazzle Comics about how bad comic writing had gotten, this is exactly the kind of thing he was talking about. Everything is a bad drug or sex joke, designed to offend.

Only one full issue came out. There was a bootleg version of issue 2, but it was printed in such limited numbers it's impossible to find a scan of it online and I've never seen a physical copy for sale.

Josh Hines recently found a copy and was nice enough to send me photos of it. So if anyone has spent all these years looking to read about a fight to the death between Suprema and Twilight, your wish is granted!

Most likely Bloodsport 2 wasn’t really ready for whatever convention they were going to, so they just put it out in this bootleg edition. But because of this we get to see a bit behind the curtain.

One of the more interesting parts of this find is the bits of Millar's script. Clearly, this was intended as a four-issue miniseries. But he also wrote in cameos by the likes of Swamp Thing, the Man Thing, the Heap and even Namor. He meant this as a send-up of all superheroes and not just the Liefeld/Awesome ones. I don't know if that would have made the series any better, but it was interesting, at least.

Anyway, check it out for yourself:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What'd you think?