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August 3, 2010 1:34 PM   Subscribe

Breaking the Fourth Panel: Neonomicon and the Comic Book Frame (1, 2) Alan Moore’s recent Lovecraftian comic dissected. (MLYT, Possibly NSFW language and SAN loss)
posted by fearfulsymmetry (18 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
I want to watch this, but I can hardly hear the narrator over the music. A shame.
posted by Western Infidels at 2:16 PM on August 3, 2010


Yeah, I had the same trouble - but there's captions/transcript you can turn on (-1d4 SAN)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:24 PM on August 3, 2010


Hmm. Might have to dig out the preview comic with Moore's script in the bakc to see how much if this is intentional and how much is just the artist lining things up or sheer coincidence. My suspicion is that it's mostly the later.

The narrator certainly seems a bit credulous and easily impressed, it's not like there haven't been a whole bunch of weird fourth wall breaking stuff in comics before, within Moore's work and especially within Morrison's.

That said, i wonder if there is something a bit weird and clever going on within Neonomicon... the bit where a character brings attention to the literary in-joke nature of so much of it suggests that maybe we are in for a bit more than a spooky story with a ton of references to Lovecraft, Chambers, Machen et al...
posted by Artw at 2:24 PM on August 3, 2010


I found great pleasure reading League of Extraordinary Gentlemen again and comparing panel by panel the website that provides annotations. Alan Moore knows the score.
posted by Catblack at 2:32 PM on August 3, 2010




Is it the tradition to pop round and break all the windows every so often, just in case?
posted by Artw at 2:47 PM on August 3, 2010


I'm pretty sure that everything in there was put there intentionally.
posted by empath at 3:21 PM on August 3, 2010


more trippy comic books that break the 4th wall:

Animal Man by Grant Morrison - including a great story about Wyle E. Cyote as the cartoon messiah that has to die over and over (anvils, rockets) for their sins. One character finally acknowledges the reader and complains to you, and Grant himself shows up to prove that everything is fiction. It's a trip.

Promethia by Alan Moore is about fictional characters in the real world, set in a fictional universe, and is also an essay about the Qabalah.

Supreme by Alan Moore is about a world where old characters go after they get redesigned forgotten about or retconned. This limbo is filled superman knock-off that had short comic runs. Super-ape, Super-horse, Black Superman and 40's Superman who can't even fly are some of the characters that try to figure out whey they were written out of the continuum. Fun!
posted by joelf at 4:20 PM on August 3, 2010 [3 favorites]


guh, I thought this was Neoconnomicon, and wondered why Moore was writing about US politics.
posted by boo_radley at 4:41 PM on August 3, 2010


while the commentary is well written, his delivery makes me want to smack the narrator. SPEAK UP!! Was much more enjoyable after I muted it.
posted by Parannoyed at 4:50 PM on August 3, 2010


Bulletin: artists use the conventions of a medium, abstraction, and references to external media to express meaning. Film at eleven.
posted by charlie don't surf at 6:02 PM on August 3, 2010


Bulletin: artists use the conventions of a medium, abstraction, and references to external media to express meaning. Film at eleven.

This just in: Please find a less tired and hackneyed way to express your dismissiveness, if only to make it more difficult for others to dismiss whatever point it is you would like to express.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:38 PM on August 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


Might have to dig out the preview comic with Moore's script in the bakc to see how much if this is intentional and how much is just the artist lining things up or sheer coincidence.

Because comics, like their nearly identical sister-medium, the book, are entirely the creative output of a writer, in which the artist serves merely to please the eye while the words are digested.
posted by cthuljew at 2:01 AM on August 4, 2010


@cthuljew As an academic who studies comics, I regularly emphasise the role the artist plays in the creation of a comic, but in this case perhaps you need to see one of Alan Moore's scripts. Take a peek at one and you'll understand Artw's comment.
posted by sadmarvin at 3:57 AM on August 4, 2010


For example, the one script I looked through for a single Watchman comic was about 300 pages, or about ten pages of prose to describe each page of comics. Everything in the extremely detailed Dave Gibbons drawings was specified in the script.
posted by KS at 4:14 AM on August 4, 2010


Alvy: (whooshing sound above head)

Update: Sometimes MeFi commenters use hackneyed conventions of a medium, basic abstractions like metaphor, and references to external media to express their disgust that the ideas in this video essay were a bunch of ridiculously obvious truisms, like that rectangular pages have rectangular frames. Film at Eleven, in a rectangular frame in a rectangular screen on your TeeVee.

Come on man, this is MetaFilter, get up to speed.
posted by charlie don't surf at 9:51 AM on August 4, 2010


sadmarvin: I own the collector's edition of the Courtyard, and have read the script, and, yes, Moore does give pretty clear instruction about certain elements of the comic. However, he does not make sweeping statements about tone and style and what color the walls should or shouldn't be. I dunno. Maybe Moore is that much of a pedant, but I somehow doubt it. He wouldn't still be writing comics if he were.
posted by cthuljew at 6:03 PM on August 4, 2010




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