Night Raven: ...the anesthetic, wearing off

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.

...the anesthetic, wearing off...

My Night Raven read throughs start with The Cure here. And for more background info on Night Raven, go here.

This story is a prologue for the four-part Snow Queen story that finished Moore's Night Raven run, but what a great little scene setter it is, all by itself.

Moore starts the story with a quote from Velvet Underground musician John Cale's song "Antarctica Starts Here," a song about a terrifying old silent film star (think Sunset Boulevard). While the reference to Antarctica will make sense in a second, it's interesting to compare Night Raven's arch nemesis Yi Yang to that old silent film star of Sunset Boulevard, who I always thought of as a terrible monster from a monster movie. The idea of age and cruelty and a demented mind are brush strokes Moore is using to paint Yi Yang.

He shows us Yi Yang, the 6,000-year-old Chinese crime lord in her sanctuary, Neither Flag nor Wind in 1965. Inside the house, with its beautiful decorations, kneels a man petrified by the sleeping form of his lover, Yi Yang herself. He is petrified by her immortality and what that has done to her.

It's a powerful description of her evil and nicely sets her up as a force to be reckoned with, even though we haven't seen her do much yet (and the one Night Raven arc that featured Yi Yang before Moore started writing the series didn't really paint her as anyone that interesting -- you can read it here if you want).

As a side note, pointing out how brilliant Moore is when he doesn't even need to be, Neither Flag nor Wind is a reference to an old Zen proverb. Two attendants and a lord are watching a flag flap. One says that it's the wind that is moving. The other replies that it's the flag that is moving. The lord replies that neither flag nor wind are moving, it is the mind that moves. What does that mean? Well, some believe that the actions of objects don't matter, it is the observing of them that makes them matter. For this story, it suggests that Yi's power is not in strength or magic, it is her superior mind.

Meanwhile, Night Raven has journeyed to Antarctica to take his cure. A mysterious, masked noir hero in a trench coat wandering in the snow... I wonder if he bumped into Rorschach? We get a nice drawing of Night Raven from Moore's V for Vendetta collaborator David Lloyd.

Night Raven takes the cure in a place where no one can get infected if the cure is really a poison for everyone else like Night Raven was initially told. He can feel it curing him. And while he heals, he uses his detective skills to figure out Yi Yang's motives.

"Why would an immortal woman risk loosing a disease that would destroy perhaps all the life upon the planet save for hers and that of her deadliest enemy? Surely, to one who is assured an infinite future, that would be the bleakest future of all. Hence, Yi Yang was lying about the cure in the bottle having a dreadful plague as a side effect. Probably."

Night Raven clearly has a bit of Batman and characters like that in his DNA. And one of the things that drives me crazy about Batman is how rarely he's shown doing actual detective work and making logical deductions. It's refreshing to read how Night Raven figures out his situation.

So why does Yi Yang make Night Raven immortal, make him feel pain for decades and then give him the cure?

"The only other problem that remained in his deductions was one of motive. Why should Yi Yang take such a risk, simply for the sake of brief and cruel amusement in the midst of an unending lifespan? Why would she risk granting immortality to someone, immortality coupled to a pain that would make he who suffered it hate her more than any other single object in the world? Why would she risk freeing her single deadliest enemy from the prospect of death, and then dangle the means before him by which he could also rid himself of the pain which she had induced? Didn’t she realise?

"Didn't she know what he was going to do to her if this cure succeeded? He would hunt her down, though it took centuries.

"Though she hid from him on the ocean bed he would track her across it to where she cowered.

"Though she locked herself in an impregnable vault for a million years, he would be waiting outside when it opened.

"He would find her. And what he did to her then would make what she had done to him seem almost laughable by comparison.

"Why? Why had she risked loosing such an implaceable and horrifying revenge upon herself?

"Unless she was bored."

I love that! Yi Yang made Night Raven immortal so that the prospect of immortality suddenly has some risk to it, some excitement, some reason.

And so, Moore has made Yi Yang not just a good villain, he's made her an interesting character that we now respect, fear and understand. That's some writing, right there!

In her house, Yi Yang wakes up screaming and kills the boy sitting there, just because.

"Naked and slick with his blood she crouches over him and sniffs at the air like an animal. Something is different. Something is abroad in the world that sets this day apart from two million others that she has woken to. Something dangerous.

"She shudders, and the sensation is almost exquisite."

And with that amazing piece, Moore opens the curtains on his final Night Raven story. But we'll get into that next week. What did you think?

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.

Night Raven: Sadie's Story

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.

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?