Night Raven: Snow Queen, 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.

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.

Night Raven: Snow Queen, 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.

Snow Queen, Part 1

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

In my imagination, I assume this is the story that Moore wanted to tell with Night Raven from the beginning, but needed the hero to become an immortal and still be active in modern times to do it, and so everything has been prologue for this. Is that true, who knows? I'm not sure Moore has ever talked in depth about his work on Night Raven, so maybe the legends are better than the facts.


The other nice thing about this series are the great black and white illustrations by Alan Davis. The Alans were working on Captain Britain at the time and Davis volunteered some drawings for Night Raven the same as Moore volunteered the stories so the magazine could stay afloat and let them do what they want with the good Captain.

Anyway, we're now up to the 1970s. I love the choice of narrator in a young, gay junkie who calls himself Cancer Divine and hangs out at a place called the Grease Gun. Can you imagine reading that in a mainstream comic magazine in the early 1980s? Cancer Divine is in the hospital, dying and telling the police his story. And what a story it is!

A while back Divine was hanging out at the Grease Gun and was feeling bad, so he struck up a conversation with a girl called Chinese White, an albino Asian woman. Chinese White was a depressive who loved talking about death. And as they were talking, the Snow Queen came in. The Snow Queen being the drug cartel-running Yi Yang, of course.

After a conversation, the two Chinese women left together. Meanwhile, Divine went to score cocaine from his connection, Spanish Eddy (who works for Yi Yang). As he's there, Night Raven breaks in and starts tearing through Eddy's men, even after a bullet goes through his chest.

Eddy spills the beans on Yi Yang and eventually pays for it with his life. But this is just the start:

"It was the first shot in a war. A war like you can’t imagine.

"A war between two people. Two people who weren’t human. Two people who were going to live forever. Two people who hated each other worse than anybody on the planet.

"A war. And New York city was the battleground.

"And me and Chinese White...

"Well, I guess me and Chinese White were just the first casualties."

It takes Moore a while for the story to get rolling, but Divine is quite the character and a refreshingly new voice to the superhero stories in the early 1980s. And I can't help but chuckle that the terms Snow Queen and China White are both nicknames for cocaine.

We'll see the war develop more next time.

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: ...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.