Alan Moore's Providence

Alan Moore's new comic Providence is set in 1919 in the New England world HP Lovecraft was creating for his Cthulhu mythos. This is nascent Cthulhu in its very beginnings as it came together in the author's mind. Moore imagines Lovecraft (and various avatars for Lovecraft) travelling around northern Massachusetts gathering folk wisdom, archaeological tidbits and weird historical facts that reveal a secret cult that is attempting to infiltrate the "Old Ones" into human society. 
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I recently read Providence #3 and was pretty impressed by what Moore and his artist, the excellent Jacen Burrows, have set out to achieve. As in Neil Gaiman's American Gods, Stephen King's various Maine based fictions and in Lovecraft's work himself Moore imagines an America overflowing with the supernatural and that supernatural seems to come to a well-head most particularly in New England. As Thomas Hardy did in Wessex HP Lovecraft invented his own personal northern Massachusetts that was a mix of real and imagined towns. Providence #3 is set largely in one of these towns, Innsmouth, and thus prefigures the famous Lovecraft story Shadow Over Innsmouth. This being an Alan Moore comic we also get J Edgar Hoover, the women's suffrage movement, prohibition, the 1919 Equity Actors strike and a very odd, gothic and terrifying dream sequence where images from the future WW2 leak into the present relatively peaceful 1919. 
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I think this is the most ambitious thing Alan Moore has done for years and the comic is beautifully produced, drawn and lettered. There are sly references to many other fictional characters in Lovecraft's world and the occult stylings of other writers including homages to Gaiman, King and even True Detective. If I have one complaint about Providence #3 its this: Moore has set his fictional Innsmouth in the wrong place. He's put it south of Cape Anne in Salem. Sure Salem is a resonant name but it's simply wrong for Innsmouth. Innsmouth is said to be on the water close to Ipswich and Rowley and just south of Newburyport. Salem is nowhere near Newburyport, Ipswich or Rowley. I spent every summer on Plum Island, Massachusetts from 1992 - 2009 so that part of Massachusetts is an area I got to know very well indeed. And if you've read Shadow Over Innsmouth (I read it for the very first time in the Newburyport Public Library where the hero of the story goes to find out about Innsmouth!) you'll know that the island with the tricky reef just off the coast where the demons live can only be Plum Island itself. In all the summers and a few winters I spent on PI I never noticed any fish people, undersea demons or Cthulhu himself but that's not surprising because Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn*... If by R'lyeh Lovecraft meant Rowley then Cthulhu is probably hanging out at this place if he's got any sense.
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Still, this griping about the location of Innsmouth aside, Providence is a fine piece of work up there, I think, with the best of Alan Moore. 
*in his chamber at Rlyeh dead Cthulhu lies dreaming...

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 2009

Clearly not a regular customer of Daniel Antony: The Modern Barber of Northampton

a post from two years ago
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Alan Moore's new comic League of Extraordinary Gentlemen III Century 2009 is the third and final part of the third outing of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In the comic book shop where I bought it, it was in a display right next to the DC Comics' Watchmen prequels which came out last week: Silk Spectre, Nite Owl, Minutemen & The Comedian. If Moore had seen that display it might have given him a stroke: his brand new creation donuted by DC's "hack work." Actually I've had mixed feelings about these prequels. Initially I was opposed, thinking them a creatively bankrupt way for DC to squeeze more money out of comic book nerds and Watchmen completists. But then as I saw the impressive cast of artists and writers involved I began to wonder if DC weren't just doing what Moore was doing by appropriating such iconic characters as Raffles, Malcolm Tucker, Jack Carter etc. (without compensating the copyright holders) for his comic; so I decided to give the Watchmen prequels the benefit of the doubt. But last week I finally read the first issues of the first four Watchmen prequels and I have to say that even in this disinterested neutral state of grace I found them pretty underwhelming. The artwork was better than the story, but really if this is the best that the mainstream comics industry can come up with in 2012 then probably the doomsayers are right and comic books are in for a very tough few years ahead. The Watchmen prequels are timid, clumsy and hamfistedly literal in their interpretations of these characters. They lack a cinematic vision and, so far, bring nothing new to the table in terms of mythology. My favourite was probably J Michael Straczynski's Nite Owl, but even that was just so darn...obvious. 
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Back to Century 2009: ok so whats it all about then? Well Century 2009 follows up on what we learned in Century 1969 where Jack Carter, looking a lot like Michael Caine, tracked down the cultists who killed Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and brought East End gangland vengeance to an Aleister Crowley figure who was just about to jump into Mick Jagger's body at a free Stones festival in Hyde Park. The League of Gentlemen were also on the trail of the Crowley cultists because they feared the cult had a plan to bring forth a demonic child who would in turn somehow cause the apocalypse. In Century 2009 the demonic child has been born and he sounds an awful lot like Harry Potter something which I thought was pretty funny. Meanwhile Malcolm Tucker (from The Thick Of It), the Prime Minister's Press Secretary, is trying to defuse an out of control war in the country of Q'mar which got started under President Bartlett (from the West Wing). 
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The main delight in Century 2009 is spotting these borrowings because actually the story isn't that brilliant or exciting until the very end when the most powerful faery in the United Kingdom shows up to save the world from the Harry Potter Moonchild run amok. (Alan Moore and I am in complete agreement as to who this powerful faery might be.) As an intellectual game I think I enjoyed getting the insider refs more than I dug the actual narrative (an Andy Millman here, a James Bond there, a lovely Queequeg's chain of Coffee Shops) which, alas, is probably the weakest installment of League III. 
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So is it worth buying? Aye, I reckon so. In these times of tightened belts I'd suggest that you skip the Watchmen prequels entirely until they come out in graphic novel form to your local library (I believe DC when they say that viewed all together the prequels will form an impressive multi-arcing story) but if you're into British pop culture or Alan Moore or League I and II, then League III is worth getting, just don't expect transcendence. 

There's Something About Mary

We took the kids to see Saving Mr Banks this week, the excellent film about the making of Mary Poppins; so I thought I'd reblog this little piece (below) about watching Mary Poppins for the first time. A couple of guesses in my original blogpost about the nature of Mary Poppins seem to have been born out by time. Like many of the most famous Englishmen and Englishwomen PL Travers was a self creation with the hint of Johnnie Foreigner about her. The Duke of Wellington, Winston Churchill, etc. sought to expunge their foreigness by becoming more English than the English as Travers also seems to have done (although if you listen to her on the BBC's Desert Island Discs there is a distinct Aussie accent.) As an Irish girl growing up in Australia Travers must have been aware of the Tir na nOg which I also guessed at. Since writing the below blogpost I've read Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen III where Mary Poppins is identified as a god-like elemental creature who saves England from an evil mirror-world Harry Potter (seriously). Anyway here's what I thought 4 years ago...
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Watching Mary Poppins for the first time is an interesting experience for a man of my advancing years. In a way the film is exactly how you imagine it from all the clips you have seen but in crucial and exciting ways it's not like that at all. These days of course newbies to Poppins must watch it through the prism of Nanny McPhee and countless parodies on The Simpsons, Family Guy etc. but I'll still try and decontextualise it a bit here. The first thing I want to talk about is the role that Mary Poppins occupies in the film. In Nanny McPhee the mysterious magical nanny comes to help the parents by teaching the children how to behave. But Mary Poppins comes to do precisely the opposite. There's the famous anarchic room tidying scene but that's about the only "lesson" Poppins imparts to the kids. Everything else she does with them is all about living in the moment and going on sprees and having fun just being a kid. It becomes clear that Poppins's role is not to teach the kids anything but rather to teach the parents how to love and respect their children. I was amazed to discover that Emma Thompson's Nanny McPhee is the conformist and Julie Andrews's Mary Poppins is the anarchist.
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I also had the impression that Mary Poppins was prissy, bossy and humorless but she's nothing like that. In fact she's funny, strange, coy, dangerous and erotic. Furthermore Mary is vain, self important, a little drunk with power and seems to take important decisions on a whim, like some wacky sprite or daughter of Zeus. There is a real sexual tension between her and Bert as if they have a long and textured history together in the world of spirits or Tir na nOg or wherever it is that they have come from. Dick Van Dyke does this odd thing with his face when Mary sings "you wouldn't take advantage of me, Bert" which suggests that no he wouldnt, not here, but elsewhere when the kids aren't around...
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Bert too is an odd fish. Everyone mocks Dick Van Dyke's cockney accent but I didn't mind it. Bert and Mary are clearly elemental creatures pretending to be human when in fact they have slipped over from a different world completely. Mary has perfected her chosen persona and accent, but even in the film Bert goes from job to job trying out a variety of voices and personae. Yes the actor couldnt do a cockney accent but for me that doesnt hurt the movie, it actually enhances it and makes it more mysterious. (No one praises Dick Van Dyke's decent upper crust English accent in the other role he plays in the film.) I have no idea who Bert is but he is not and certainly should not be portrayed as a simple cockney chimney sweep. There's a moment near the end when the kids have run away and he talks to them about their father's existential angst and loneliness with a wisdom that could only have come from decades of exile from a faery court.
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Mary Poppins is a strange film. It's got 4 really catchy songs, excellent dancing and a great story arc. Still for me there's a melancholic air throughout. This is London in 1910 just 4 years before Europe's 31 year long suicide attempt. London before the bombs and V weapons start to fall, before Haig sends the flower of England over the top into the wall of death. Bert's Chim Chim Cheroo melody is heartbreaking, it's almost as if he can see all of this coming and maybe he can. Yes Poppins is a tight, well crafted Disney movie, with perhaps one song and one ballet sequence too many, but if, like me, you haven't seen it, it's worth watching and for my money it's a lot darker and weirder than it first appears.

Jack Carter, Alan Moore and A Watchmen Prequel?

Among the highlights of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen III Century 1969 is the appearance of Jack Carter. Carter is an iconic figure in British crime writing culture. People know of him either through the novel Jack's Return Home or from Mike Hodges's brilliant Geordie Noir, Get Carter. If you haven't read the book or watched the film then you are really missing on a treat and you must do so at once! I saw the film first which stars Michael Caine in his best movie role as a London gangster who returns to Geordieland to find out what happened to his recently deceased brother. In the course of one weekend he manages to raise enough hell to last for decades. 
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Century 1969 takes place just before Carter's trip to the north. Although he doesn't officially join The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Carter plays a pivotal role in (temporarily) ending the reign of terror of an Aleister Crowley figure who has not only killed Brian Jones but now wants to take over Mick Jagger's body. With steely determination Carter (drawn in the comic as Michael Caine) finds out what happened to Jones and tracks Crowley down to his lair. As a precaution against the libel lawyers many of the names of real people in Century 1969 have been changed (and in real life of course it was Jimmy Page who was obsessed with Crowley not Jagger) but they're easy to spot with a little effort. 
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Alan Moore has been in the news recently bitching to The New York Times about DC Comics' plans for a Watchmen Prequel. I think DC is making a mistake attempting to do Watchmen without Moore and it will sully the reputation of an almost perfect comic the way the Matrix sequels ruined the mythology of the Matrix. But the big beardy Necromancer from Northampton is attempting to have it both ways. Moore himself freely borrows other peoples fictional creations: Allan Quartermain, Jack Carter, Mina Harker etc. in his League comics. And as Mark Hughes points out in a Forbes Magazine blog (?!) this is only the half of it. Moore's erotica comic Lost Girls takes Peter Pan, Wendy, Dorothy (from the Wizard of Oz) et. al. to places where no one really wants them to go. Lost Girls is not quite as shocking Hughes's portrayal of it in his piece but I completely understand his point about the hypocrisy of Moore's stance. 
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Saying all that though I am firmly in the camp that wishes the Watchmen prequels were not happening. Greed rather than fan demand is what's driving DC here. 

Dont Start With The Moral Objections You Blue Peter Badge Wearing Ponce: Alan Moore's New Hero

Like a sad sack supporting character from the Big Bang Theory much of my information about the outside world comes from the guy who runs the comic book shop on Chapel Street. It was he who informed me that Alan Moore (Watchman, V For Vendetta, Swamp Thing, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen)'s new comic League III 2009 will feature Malcolm Tucker as one of its lead characters. It's going to be fascinating to see what Moore does with Tucker who will be reprising his role as chief enforcer for the fictional PM Tom Rudd. Apparently the US President will be Jed Bartlett in this universe so I for one am hoping for a showdown between Tucker and either Toby or Josh or both of them. If you don't know who Malcolm Tucker is here's a little primer of the man in action. Play this at work I dare you: