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Providence #1-4
Providence
New York, 1919. Robert Black è un giornalista che da poco tempo ha trovato il suo posto nel mondo. L'improvviso suicidio di una persona cara lo porta in una strada misteriosa, alla scoperta del lato oscuro degli Stati Uniti. E una strada tortuosa, labirintica. È la strada per Providence. Per la prima volta al mondo in volume, il primo capitolo del capolavoro di Alan Moore e Jacen Burrows. Contiene Providence 1-4.
160 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2015
About the author
Alan Moore
1,679 books20.4k followersAlan Moore is an English writer most famous for his influential work in comics, including the acclaimed graphic novels Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell. He has also written a novel, Voice of the Fire, and performs "workings" (one-off performance art/spoken word pieces) with The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, some of which have been released on CD.
As a comics writer, Moore is notable for being one of the first writers to apply literary and formalist sensibilities to the mainstream of the medium. As well as including challenging subject matter and adult themes, he brings a wide range of influences to his work, from the literary–authors such as William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Anton Wilson and Iain Sinclair; New Wave science fiction writers such as Michael Moorcock; horror writers such as Clive Barker; to the cinematic–filmmakers such as Nicolas Roeg. Influences within comics include Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Kirby and Bryan Talbot.
As a comics writer, Moore is notable for being one of the first writers to apply literary and formalist sensibilities to the mainstream of the medium. As well as including challenging subject matter and adult themes, he brings a wide range of influences to his work, from the literary–authors such as William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Anton Wilson and Iain Sinclair; New Wave science fiction writers such as Michael Moorcock; horror writers such as Clive Barker; to the cinematic–filmmakers such as Nicolas Roeg. Influences within comics include Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Kirby and Bryan Talbot.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 326 reviews
August 15, 2017
A story walking between reality and dream.
I bought this in its single comic book issues, but I chosen this TPB edition to be able of making a better overall review.
This TPB edition collects “Providence” #1-4, BUT the review that I am doing is covering the whole 12 issues of the maxi-series..
Creative Team:
Writer: Alan Moore
Illustrator: Jacen Burrows
Letterer: Kurt Hathaway
UNEXPECTED THINGS
The first thing that I got amazed that I read the first comic book issue of this maxi-series was to find, in the back cover (that it was used on each issue to put quotes along with dates) was to find my “birthday”, May 18th, it was so unexpected and weird to find that the quote in the first issue of this title made by Alan Moore (which I am a huge fan) such coincidence…
…it was destiny.
The other unexpected thing was to find out that the letterer for this work wouldn’t be Todd Klein, that usually it’s the chosen letterer by Alan Moore. Don’t get mistaken, Kurt Hathaway did a superb job. It was just weird that Klein wasn’t the appointed letterer.
IMPORTANT THINGS
Okay, important thing to know is that Providence is a prequel AND sequel to two precious Alan Moore’s works: Neonomicon & The Courtyard…
…Which I haven’t read yet.
And also, Providence does a tribute to the legacy impact of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos…
…Which I haven’t read yet neither.
So, you must be wondering…
…why the heck am I read it?!
Well, it was written by Alan Moore and it reached to my local comic book store with issues available to buy, so I began to get the series and I waited until got it complete to read it…
…without knowing that it could useful to have read the mentioned material previous of engaging into this.
That’s why I was less harsh to rate it, since my undeniable ignorance in key material is a revelant factor depriving me of a fully embracing on the whole meaning of the developed story.
Oh! And other important thing to mention is that you will find some nude moments of the characters and graphic sexual situations (where even one could be shocking inappropiate (and a felony) if it wasn’t for Alan Moore’s ingenious paranormal twist management of the situation).
So, this isn’t a cookie for any commensal, since some moments can be hard to digest.
WEIRD (IN A GOOD SENSE) THINGS
While you may think that you’re in the regular 1919 setting of United States…
…definitely you aren’t where you think you are…
…since this is a parallel United States where there are subtle difference like having “Suicide Booths” (that they are rooms where you can have a calm suicide while hearing music of your choice) and other difference is that at least certain big cities have domes to prevent a possible meteorite hit (since one happened in a town of the New England area).
Other thing that won’t help you to know what is really happening is that one of the themes is “the Dream Country” (not exactly like in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, but certainly you’ll notice ravens here and cats there), a dimension that people can access with the proper preparation, but...
...Robert Black, the protagonist, former newspaper journalist and now looking for info to make his own “Great American Novel” about the occult heritage of the New England’s area’s towns, is crossing without his control with this dream estate during the whole story.
A nightmarish horror came from the stars and it’s trapped in the dream dimension, but…
…it’s manipulating its Redeemer to do propaganda (never underestimate the impact of propaganda) and its Messenger…
…in that way being able to access…
…to us.
But many time you don’t react to weird things in a dream, right?
Weird things are “logical” in a dream, right?
So…
…how we will be able to be aware when the horror is right in front of us?
I bought this in its single comic book issues, but I chosen this TPB edition to be able of making a better overall review.
This TPB edition collects “Providence” #1-4, BUT the review that I am doing is covering the whole 12 issues of the maxi-series..
Creative Team:
Writer: Alan Moore
Illustrator: Jacen Burrows
Letterer: Kurt Hathaway
UNEXPECTED THINGS
The first thing that I got amazed that I read the first comic book issue of this maxi-series was to find, in the back cover (that it was used on each issue to put quotes along with dates) was to find my “birthday”, May 18th, it was so unexpected and weird to find that the quote in the first issue of this title made by Alan Moore (which I am a huge fan) such coincidence…
…it was destiny.
The other unexpected thing was to find out that the letterer for this work wouldn’t be Todd Klein, that usually it’s the chosen letterer by Alan Moore. Don’t get mistaken, Kurt Hathaway did a superb job. It was just weird that Klein wasn’t the appointed letterer.
IMPORTANT THINGS
Okay, important thing to know is that Providence is a prequel AND sequel to two precious Alan Moore’s works: Neonomicon & The Courtyard…
…Which I haven’t read yet.
And also, Providence does a tribute to the legacy impact of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos…
…Which I haven’t read yet neither.
So, you must be wondering…
…why the heck am I read it?!
Well, it was written by Alan Moore and it reached to my local comic book store with issues available to buy, so I began to get the series and I waited until got it complete to read it…
…without knowing that it could useful to have read the mentioned material previous of engaging into this.
That’s why I was less harsh to rate it, since my undeniable ignorance in key material is a revelant factor depriving me of a fully embracing on the whole meaning of the developed story.
Oh! And other important thing to mention is that you will find some nude moments of the characters and graphic sexual situations (where even one could be shocking inappropiate (and a felony) if it wasn’t for Alan Moore’s ingenious paranormal twist management of the situation).
So, this isn’t a cookie for any commensal, since some moments can be hard to digest.
WEIRD (IN A GOOD SENSE) THINGS
While you may think that you’re in the regular 1919 setting of United States…
…definitely you aren’t where you think you are…
…since this is a parallel United States where there are subtle difference like having “Suicide Booths” (that they are rooms where you can have a calm suicide while hearing music of your choice) and other difference is that at least certain big cities have domes to prevent a possible meteorite hit (since one happened in a town of the New England area).
Other thing that won’t help you to know what is really happening is that one of the themes is “the Dream Country” (not exactly like in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, but certainly you’ll notice ravens here and cats there), a dimension that people can access with the proper preparation, but...
...Robert Black, the protagonist, former newspaper journalist and now looking for info to make his own “Great American Novel” about the occult heritage of the New England’s area’s towns, is crossing without his control with this dream estate during the whole story.
A nightmarish horror came from the stars and it’s trapped in the dream dimension, but…
…it’s manipulating its Redeemer to do propaganda (never underestimate the impact of propaganda) and its Messenger…
…in that way being able to access…
…to us.
But many time you don’t react to weird things in a dream, right?
Weird things are “logical” in a dream, right?
So…
…how we will be able to be aware when the horror is right in front of us?
December 20, 2019
Providentially Speaking
Alan Moore’s series Providence is a dense and complex literary work. And after reading things from Moore like Top Ten and Swamp Thing, it feels at least initially comparatively subtle and almost subdued, thanks in part to the elegant drawing of Jacen Burrows and the muted lovely coloring of Juan Rodriguez. As with Moore’s most ambitious works, it is meticulously researched; if you have no acquaintance with either the ideas or works of H. P. Lovecraft, if you know nothing about Neonomicon—and it’s ludicrous to think very many thousands of readers would!!—you can still very much appreciate this story, but you will miss things. It’s like parents and kids watching the best of the Warner Brothers cartoons—both parents and kids might be laughing their tails off, but at different things. And it’s all good, but re-readings, and reading around the text, will give you a richer experience. As always, with great literature. And I think this just may be for me Great Literature, but I’ve only so far read it through a couple of times.
So when I picked up the first issue of Providence, others told me it was connected to Moore’s long interest in Lovecraft and Neonomicon and related issues. Moore likes Lovecraft, but also saw him as failing to deal adequately with racism and other problems. In other words, Lovecraft’s work and horror itself is all about looking underneath, below the surface, and Moore does that here with horror and the master of horror himself HP Lovecraft. He digs deeper.
Sound like too much work for you, you who just wants to read some kiddie comics? Well, acknowledged. But you know, old Alan has from the very beginning both loved pulpy stories and also theorized their literary and cultural importance. As with Swamp Thing, where he also deconstructs and celebrates the power of horror. Or From Hell, where he looks at the beginning of our twentieth century mass murdering. So: I read and read some of this stuff as backstory. I read some Lovecraft. I also read Moore’s story adapted to comics, The Courtyard, which is a kind of prequel to his other work out of the Lovecraft mythos, Neonomicon. You don’t have to know all this to read Providence, but it doesn’t hurt. All of this is prelude to Providence.
In Providence the main character, Robert Black, is a young journalist hoping to turn novelist in 1919. It’s New England, it’s Lovecraft (meaning he is always commenting on Lovecraft stories and ideas), and it’s a specific time in American history. Black is both Jewish and gay. He keeps a Commonplace Book as he travels, researches, reads, recording ideas for stories, for plot, for themes, even as he experiences things. It’s a writer’s journal, the pages of which alternate with the comic itself. It’s a commentary on the events of the story we are reading, as with Watchmen where there are texts that parallel and comment on the main story. Black is also us, we readers, learning to read not just books but to read the world.
Black is interested in a (Moore’s fictional) Sous Le Monde, a story that he understands to have inspired The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers, an actual collection of horror stories that came out in 1895. Chambers claimed that when some people read his stories they went mad, some even committing suicide. Lovecraft read Chambers’s horror stories in 1927 and folded them into his Cthulhu mythos. Sous Le Monde is, by the way, French for Underworld, a perfect place for horror. Yellow is in Chambers’s and Lovecraft’s mythos the color of horror. Oh, and in this volume Black’s lover Jonathan (Lillian is the cover name for him) commits suicide, hmm.
If you are curious at all about the level of intentionality to this intertextual story, look at the work being done to look at just the very FIRST issue of this (so far, in this volume, at least) four issue comics series!!! (This book collects issues 1-4).
https://factsprovidence.wordpress.com...
I have other things to do, more to read, more reviews to write, but here’s some notes on what I am seeing so far, some ways/themes in which this text connects with Moore’s other work, just to name a few things:
*Books/stories and their (almost) mystical effects on our lives; in this story people read a book, Sous Le Monde, and kill themselves, or so some people say. . . what can stories do?
*The relationship between pulp/comics/popular culture and Literature
*The occult figures in here as elsewhere in so many places
*American history; in the American Gothic sections of Swamp Thing, we see the social horrors of the twentieth century. In Providence we are in twenties New England. How do we romanticize that area of the country; what are its dark secrets in those times? In Moore’s From Hell, he takes a look at the way the Jack the Ripper story presages the horrors of the twentieth century. How does Lovecraft comment on New England twenties America, and what does he fail to comment on, according to Moore?
*Racism, sexism, lgbtq issues: our hero is a gay Jewish writer. What secrets has he concealed just to stay alive in—“Let’s Make America Great Again”—America? Who are outsiders living secret lives, and why? What social horrors does horror help us unveil?
*Sexual violence; rape figures in this story, as it has in other Moore stories, such as Watchmen, and this makes the story deeply disturbing almost from the start. Another kind of deep horror, of course.
*Literary history—in this instance Moore deeply studies horror master Lovecraft; Moore tries to look at HPL in a sort of balanced way, as master of horror, sure, but also flawed in terms of racism and other problems.
*Jung. Dreams, figure in. Is this also funny? Yes, but the way in which images in dreams reflect psychological states is key here.
*Time as an ocean versus a straight line; tesseracts (Wrinkle in Time)
*History matters—it’s 1919, things are about to erupt in twenties history, in America especially—but also there are things underneath surface, where horror lurks. Comics is and always has been a perfect medium for social and cultural commentary. Literature is the best way to understand life, in and through imagery and story.
*Alchemy, which for Moore is also another name for storytelling.
*Sense of humor; much of this work, some of it I don’t even fully get, is satirical. For all of Moore’s erudite verbiage, and in this one he is at times almost restrained in this respect, he also can be silly and make you laugh. He likes entertainment and tries not to forget that he is not primarily writing a scholarly thesis. He’s trying to entertain you, even scare the hell out of you.
This is a creepy, creepy story, but it is starting out slowly, taking its sweet-ass time. Not much has happened. But it will, oh, it will. Heavens protect us, you know it will.
I’m just scratching at the surface here, I’m serious!
Alan Moore’s series Providence is a dense and complex literary work. And after reading things from Moore like Top Ten and Swamp Thing, it feels at least initially comparatively subtle and almost subdued, thanks in part to the elegant drawing of Jacen Burrows and the muted lovely coloring of Juan Rodriguez. As with Moore’s most ambitious works, it is meticulously researched; if you have no acquaintance with either the ideas or works of H. P. Lovecraft, if you know nothing about Neonomicon—and it’s ludicrous to think very many thousands of readers would!!—you can still very much appreciate this story, but you will miss things. It’s like parents and kids watching the best of the Warner Brothers cartoons—both parents and kids might be laughing their tails off, but at different things. And it’s all good, but re-readings, and reading around the text, will give you a richer experience. As always, with great literature. And I think this just may be for me Great Literature, but I’ve only so far read it through a couple of times.
So when I picked up the first issue of Providence, others told me it was connected to Moore’s long interest in Lovecraft and Neonomicon and related issues. Moore likes Lovecraft, but also saw him as failing to deal adequately with racism and other problems. In other words, Lovecraft’s work and horror itself is all about looking underneath, below the surface, and Moore does that here with horror and the master of horror himself HP Lovecraft. He digs deeper.
Sound like too much work for you, you who just wants to read some kiddie comics? Well, acknowledged. But you know, old Alan has from the very beginning both loved pulpy stories and also theorized their literary and cultural importance. As with Swamp Thing, where he also deconstructs and celebrates the power of horror. Or From Hell, where he looks at the beginning of our twentieth century mass murdering. So: I read and read some of this stuff as backstory. I read some Lovecraft. I also read Moore’s story adapted to comics, The Courtyard, which is a kind of prequel to his other work out of the Lovecraft mythos, Neonomicon. You don’t have to know all this to read Providence, but it doesn’t hurt. All of this is prelude to Providence.
In Providence the main character, Robert Black, is a young journalist hoping to turn novelist in 1919. It’s New England, it’s Lovecraft (meaning he is always commenting on Lovecraft stories and ideas), and it’s a specific time in American history. Black is both Jewish and gay. He keeps a Commonplace Book as he travels, researches, reads, recording ideas for stories, for plot, for themes, even as he experiences things. It’s a writer’s journal, the pages of which alternate with the comic itself. It’s a commentary on the events of the story we are reading, as with Watchmen where there are texts that parallel and comment on the main story. Black is also us, we readers, learning to read not just books but to read the world.
Black is interested in a (Moore’s fictional) Sous Le Monde, a story that he understands to have inspired The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers, an actual collection of horror stories that came out in 1895. Chambers claimed that when some people read his stories they went mad, some even committing suicide. Lovecraft read Chambers’s horror stories in 1927 and folded them into his Cthulhu mythos. Sous Le Monde is, by the way, French for Underworld, a perfect place for horror. Yellow is in Chambers’s and Lovecraft’s mythos the color of horror. Oh, and in this volume Black’s lover Jonathan (Lillian is the cover name for him) commits suicide, hmm.
If you are curious at all about the level of intentionality to this intertextual story, look at the work being done to look at just the very FIRST issue of this (so far, in this volume, at least) four issue comics series!!! (This book collects issues 1-4).
https://factsprovidence.wordpress.com...
I have other things to do, more to read, more reviews to write, but here’s some notes on what I am seeing so far, some ways/themes in which this text connects with Moore’s other work, just to name a few things:
*Books/stories and their (almost) mystical effects on our lives; in this story people read a book, Sous Le Monde, and kill themselves, or so some people say. . . what can stories do?
*The relationship between pulp/comics/popular culture and Literature
*The occult figures in here as elsewhere in so many places
*American history; in the American Gothic sections of Swamp Thing, we see the social horrors of the twentieth century. In Providence we are in twenties New England. How do we romanticize that area of the country; what are its dark secrets in those times? In Moore’s From Hell, he takes a look at the way the Jack the Ripper story presages the horrors of the twentieth century. How does Lovecraft comment on New England twenties America, and what does he fail to comment on, according to Moore?
*Racism, sexism, lgbtq issues: our hero is a gay Jewish writer. What secrets has he concealed just to stay alive in—“Let’s Make America Great Again”—America? Who are outsiders living secret lives, and why? What social horrors does horror help us unveil?
*Sexual violence; rape figures in this story, as it has in other Moore stories, such as Watchmen, and this makes the story deeply disturbing almost from the start. Another kind of deep horror, of course.
*Literary history—in this instance Moore deeply studies horror master Lovecraft; Moore tries to look at HPL in a sort of balanced way, as master of horror, sure, but also flawed in terms of racism and other problems.
*Jung. Dreams, figure in. Is this also funny? Yes, but the way in which images in dreams reflect psychological states is key here.
*Time as an ocean versus a straight line; tesseracts (Wrinkle in Time)
*History matters—it’s 1919, things are about to erupt in twenties history, in America especially—but also there are things underneath surface, where horror lurks. Comics is and always has been a perfect medium for social and cultural commentary. Literature is the best way to understand life, in and through imagery and story.
*Alchemy, which for Moore is also another name for storytelling.
*Sense of humor; much of this work, some of it I don’t even fully get, is satirical. For all of Moore’s erudite verbiage, and in this one he is at times almost restrained in this respect, he also can be silly and make you laugh. He likes entertainment and tries not to forget that he is not primarily writing a scholarly thesis. He’s trying to entertain you, even scare the hell out of you.
This is a creepy, creepy story, but it is starting out slowly, taking its sweet-ass time. Not much has happened. But it will, oh, it will. Heavens protect us, you know it will.
I’m just scratching at the surface here, I’m serious!
April 21, 2020
Oof! I was excited to read this. Alan Moore's take on H.P. Lovecraft. Sounds fantastic. Unfortunately, it was a real slog to get through. The entire book consisted of two people talking, interspersed with 10 pages of indecipherable handwritten prose at the end of each issue. I gave up on the prose after the first 2 issues when I realized it's just a recap on what I had just read from the narrator's perspective. Jacen Burrows's art is great, but completely wasted on the setting of the book. (Hey Jacen, that page of two people sitting on a couch looks fantastic!) I'd say this whole thing should have been a novel instead of a graphic novel, but Moore's prose is so bad a novel from him would only be good as starter fuel for a campfire. Unfortunately, this just seems to be another one of Moore's latter day attempts at masturbatory bullshit.
August 29, 2017
Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows reunite to follow-up their Lovecraftian horror comic, Neonomicon, with a prequel of sorts: Providence - and it’s not half bad!
Set in 1919 New England, journalist Robert Black decides to write about a supposedly cursed book, Sous Le Monde (“Under the World”), which seems to kill everyone it comes in contact with. Black’s research sends him on a trail into the blighted netherworlds of the unspeakable darkness…, y’know, HP Lovecraft stuff!
You’ll definitely enjoy Providence a lot more if you’re familiar with Lovecraft’s work - like Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, there’s an abundance of literary references peppered throughout the book. Also like LXG, Moore skilfully intertwines fiction and reality, from giving you a flavour of the political climate of the time with all the talk of Prohibition to working in a real book, Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, alongside the made-up Sous Le Monde and the obviously Lovecraft-inspired supporting cast.
The story isn’t as focused as I’d like and Moore’s certainly in no hurry to tell it either. There was a bit too much dialogue from each new character introduced, most of which didn’t feel very relevant and was irritatingly hard to decipher as Moore writes them in accent (I hate when writers do that). There are also a number of prose pages included here that I just skipped entirely, partly because I picked this up to read a comic and not a novel, and because I’d read Moore’s prose years before in The Black Dossier and it wasn’t worth it - I don’t rate him at all as a prose writer.
But there was enough to Black’s blighted odyssey, taking in strange small towns full of fishy-looking folk and troubled outcasts living in the middle of nowhere that was compelling. (It also reminded me a lot of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s excellent novel, The Club Dumas, which was later filmed as The Ninth Gate, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Johnny Depp - I highly recommend both.)
Moore suffuses the book with a suitably disturbing and menacing atmosphere, throwing in unnerving horror sequences and harrowing nightmares (or are they?) at just the right moments to keep you interested. And I like how there’s important visual stuff going on in the background, besides the dialogue, to focus on. Jacen Burrows’ art is always first class but he excels here, vividly bringing to life early 20th century America with a keen eye for detail.
Like most of Alan Moore’s latter-day comics, Providence, Act One is too wordy and self-consciously literary for its own good but it’s an enjoyably creepy read that’s worth a look if you like horror/weird fiction, and of course if you’re a Lovecraft fan. I didn’t love it but I’m more intrigued than I expected and will continue reading this series.
Set in 1919 New England, journalist Robert Black decides to write about a supposedly cursed book, Sous Le Monde (“Under the World”), which seems to kill everyone it comes in contact with. Black’s research sends him on a trail into the blighted netherworlds of the unspeakable darkness…, y’know, HP Lovecraft stuff!
You’ll definitely enjoy Providence a lot more if you’re familiar with Lovecraft’s work - like Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, there’s an abundance of literary references peppered throughout the book. Also like LXG, Moore skilfully intertwines fiction and reality, from giving you a flavour of the political climate of the time with all the talk of Prohibition to working in a real book, Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, alongside the made-up Sous Le Monde and the obviously Lovecraft-inspired supporting cast.
The story isn’t as focused as I’d like and Moore’s certainly in no hurry to tell it either. There was a bit too much dialogue from each new character introduced, most of which didn’t feel very relevant and was irritatingly hard to decipher as Moore writes them in accent (I hate when writers do that). There are also a number of prose pages included here that I just skipped entirely, partly because I picked this up to read a comic and not a novel, and because I’d read Moore’s prose years before in The Black Dossier and it wasn’t worth it - I don’t rate him at all as a prose writer.
But there was enough to Black’s blighted odyssey, taking in strange small towns full of fishy-looking folk and troubled outcasts living in the middle of nowhere that was compelling. (It also reminded me a lot of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s excellent novel, The Club Dumas, which was later filmed as The Ninth Gate, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Johnny Depp - I highly recommend both.)
Moore suffuses the book with a suitably disturbing and menacing atmosphere, throwing in unnerving horror sequences and harrowing nightmares (or are they?) at just the right moments to keep you interested. And I like how there’s important visual stuff going on in the background, besides the dialogue, to focus on. Jacen Burrows’ art is always first class but he excels here, vividly bringing to life early 20th century America with a keen eye for detail.
Like most of Alan Moore’s latter-day comics, Providence, Act One is too wordy and self-consciously literary for its own good but it’s an enjoyably creepy read that’s worth a look if you like horror/weird fiction, and of course if you’re a Lovecraft fan. I didn’t love it but I’m more intrigued than I expected and will continue reading this series.
February 28, 2020
Diría que este comic es ideal para quienes hayan leído previamente a Lovecraft. Las referencias se entienden mejor, y creo que hay detalles que son importantes de su bibliografía para entender la historia detrás de Providence.
September 26, 2017
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One of the weirder, more complex works by Moore in a while.
What I did like: the history, the horror, the finely detailed artwork, the creepy characters, that persistent feeling of dread and the world being against you, the conspiracy and mystery and occult.
What I didn't like: 30 pages of barely legible prose, the agonizing pacing. I understand this is mystery and classic horror, but damn.
I will definitely read on, but Moore needs to quicken the pace and excite me more.
One of the weirder, more complex works by Moore in a while.
What I did like: the history, the horror, the finely detailed artwork, the creepy characters, that persistent feeling of dread and the world being against you, the conspiracy and mystery and occult.
What I didn't like: 30 pages of barely legible prose, the agonizing pacing. I understand this is mystery and classic horror, but damn.
I will definitely read on, but Moore needs to quicken the pace and excite me more.
April 8, 2017
Well, shit.
I do generally like Alan Moore's writing. Watchmen, of course, is a masterpiece, and V for Vendetta was very influential for me, even if, as a comic, it didn't age particularly well. Killing Joke is an all-time classic. Swamp Thing — early volumes, at least — is a very imaginative series with a lot of great stories to tell.
That said, the man does like to get up his own ass. The last volume of Miracleman, the final couple of volumes of Swamp Thing, every volume of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen after the first one, these were all bad and/or borderline unreadable because of Moore's bad case of word diarrhea. Oh, Alan Moore and his awful prose.
And then there's Avatar Press, Alan Moore's recent publisher of choice (read: the only publisher that would still print his comics). They generally specialise on comics that are trashy, ultraviolent and, more often than not, kinda tasteless. In fact, a lot of my favourite writers — Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, Kieron Gillen, Jonathan Hickman and, yes, Alan Moore — publish comics with Avatar, and almost all of them are garbage (excellent Freakangels being a notable exception).
And so, Providence. The latest Avatar comic by Alan Moore, an epic tale of lovecraftian horror. It's set in 1919, right before the Prohibition, and it follows Robert Black, a young journalist who leaves his newspaper to write the Great American Novel. And that's the whole story, really — for four issues, Robert just travels the country and talks to creepy people. And boy, there's a lot of talking. Every motherfucking stranger has a story to tell, and it's guaranteed to be long, meticulous, vaguely creepy and so very, very boring.
When it comes to the actual horror, there's pretty much none of it in Providence. There is one scene where a creepy glowy thing chases the protagonist (turned out to be a hallucination), and there's one weird dream sequence. And, of course, there's the obligatory rape scene — this time, starring Alan Moore as the rapist! I'm not kidding, guys. Just look at it! This is the most disturbing thing in the whole comic, and for all the wrong reasons. It's as if Alan Moore, the writer, is raping you, the reader! What novelty!
Oh, remember how I said that Alan Moore loves his awful prose? Well, if you love it, too, you're in luck, because every issue comes with a 20-page hand-written diary of the main character, which — you guessed it! — retells the whole issue from the point of view of the protagonist. *so much sigh* Just... why?
Jacen Burrows and Juan Rodriguez at least do a good job with the artwork. Providence is a very pretty comic — just look at the covers! Beautiful scenery, lovely architecture, and the general atmosphere of the early 20th century America is nailed perfectly in every panel.
Sadly, the artwork is not enough to hold my interest in this train wreck of a comic. Maybe I will finish it sometime in the future, but for now...
I do generally like Alan Moore's writing. Watchmen, of course, is a masterpiece, and V for Vendetta was very influential for me, even if, as a comic, it didn't age particularly well. Killing Joke is an all-time classic. Swamp Thing — early volumes, at least — is a very imaginative series with a lot of great stories to tell.
That said, the man does like to get up his own ass. The last volume of Miracleman, the final couple of volumes of Swamp Thing, every volume of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen after the first one, these were all bad and/or borderline unreadable because of Moore's bad case of word diarrhea. Oh, Alan Moore and his awful prose.
And then there's Avatar Press, Alan Moore's recent publisher of choice (read: the only publisher that would still print his comics). They generally specialise on comics that are trashy, ultraviolent and, more often than not, kinda tasteless. In fact, a lot of my favourite writers — Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, Kieron Gillen, Jonathan Hickman and, yes, Alan Moore — publish comics with Avatar, and almost all of them are garbage (excellent Freakangels being a notable exception).
And so, Providence. The latest Avatar comic by Alan Moore, an epic tale of lovecraftian horror. It's set in 1919, right before the Prohibition, and it follows Robert Black, a young journalist who leaves his newspaper to write the Great American Novel. And that's the whole story, really — for four issues, Robert just travels the country and talks to creepy people. And boy, there's a lot of talking. Every motherfucking stranger has a story to tell, and it's guaranteed to be long, meticulous, vaguely creepy and so very, very boring.
When it comes to the actual horror, there's pretty much none of it in Providence. There is one scene where a creepy glowy thing chases the protagonist (turned out to be a hallucination), and there's one weird dream sequence. And, of course, there's the obligatory rape scene — this time, starring Alan Moore as the rapist! I'm not kidding, guys. Just look at it! This is the most disturbing thing in the whole comic, and for all the wrong reasons. It's as if Alan Moore, the writer, is raping you, the reader! What novelty!
Oh, remember how I said that Alan Moore loves his awful prose? Well, if you love it, too, you're in luck, because every issue comes with a 20-page hand-written diary of the main character, which — you guessed it! — retells the whole issue from the point of view of the protagonist. *so much sigh* Just... why?
Jacen Burrows and Juan Rodriguez at least do a good job with the artwork. Providence is a very pretty comic — just look at the covers! Beautiful scenery, lovely architecture, and the general atmosphere of the early 20th century America is nailed perfectly in every panel.
Sadly, the artwork is not enough to hold my interest in this train wreck of a comic. Maybe I will finish it sometime in the future, but for now...
November 25, 2016
Ooh a Jacen Burrows and Alan Moore book! Why not? Having read Neonomicon years ago, Providence provides another healthy and more detailed dose of Lovecraftian mythos to readers who are craving for such, seamlessly amalgamated to american witchcraft culture.
Providence is definitely not a read for everybody. It is not for easy reading. Providence requires some sitting and an ample amount of rest in between in order to fully digest what the material offers to its readers. As the back cover says, Providence is well-researched and man it shows in this wordy graphic novel.
Act one sets the overall tone and pacing of the story, and Alan Moore doesn't care if the story moves like an introverted sloth. He gives us details of the mythology one baby step at a time, hanging and suspending us readers to what is really happening behind the comic panels. The main plot can be easily summarized as Robert Black writing a book about America's "hidden" history and decided to pursue a lead which takes him to the occult world of witchcraft and sea-myths, along the way encountering increasingly weird characters.
The mystery is obvious in the book, hiding in plain sight. Yet Alan Moore, in his smart narrative technique does not fully acknowledge what is really happening. He lets the readers wonder what in the world is happening, which is not much by the way. But the tone and overall mood compensates what is lacking in story development. The texts, though long and sometimes meanders away from the focus, are entertaining to read, giving extra read time which justifies its relatively higher price.
Many little issues are also seen here, like homosexuality, racism, sex, persecution and the Prohibition. These stuff add variety and color to an otherwise straightforward story.
Again, Providence is a fine read which is not for everybody.
Providence is definitely not a read for everybody. It is not for easy reading. Providence requires some sitting and an ample amount of rest in between in order to fully digest what the material offers to its readers. As the back cover says, Providence is well-researched and man it shows in this wordy graphic novel.
Act one sets the overall tone and pacing of the story, and Alan Moore doesn't care if the story moves like an introverted sloth. He gives us details of the mythology one baby step at a time, hanging and suspending us readers to what is really happening behind the comic panels. The main plot can be easily summarized as Robert Black writing a book about America's "hidden" history and decided to pursue a lead which takes him to the occult world of witchcraft and sea-myths, along the way encountering increasingly weird characters.
The mystery is obvious in the book, hiding in plain sight. Yet Alan Moore, in his smart narrative technique does not fully acknowledge what is really happening. He lets the readers wonder what in the world is happening, which is not much by the way. But the tone and overall mood compensates what is lacking in story development. The texts, though long and sometimes meanders away from the focus, are entertaining to read, giving extra read time which justifies its relatively higher price.
Many little issues are also seen here, like homosexuality, racism, sex, persecution and the Prohibition. These stuff add variety and color to an otherwise straightforward story.
Again, Providence is a fine read which is not for everybody.
November 4, 2017
I have always enjoyed Alan Moore's writing. Providence is yet another of his truly interesting books. Eschewing sci-fi, Moore decides to tackle the horror genre by telling a tale of a reporter looking into events that are a true homage to H.P. Lovecraft.
Moore meant Providence to be a fusion of research into the America of 1919 and Lovecraft's concepts. Beautifully illustrated and with a wonderful story to back it up, this is a wonderful read. The strangeness of these places and the characters who inhabit it are truly in the style of Lovecraft. I appreciated that homage. But Moore also does a very good job with the time period and the various societal issues that were the norm back in that time.
Moore's use of notebooks and secondary information serve to make the reader feel as if this isn't just a comic but also a well researched book about the strange happenings. I truly enjoyed the artwork and Burrow's renditions of the locals, some of whom have strange features, is superb. It truly gives a reader the creepy feeling of a Lovecraft story where the normal just isn't normal anymore. Something is "off" and it's very hard to pin down what exactly it is. I won't spoil any more since this is a great story and one well worth anyones time to read.
Providence does a great job of mixing a period piece with Lovecraftian myhtos. The artwork and storytelling are top notch-this is an excellent example of the comic book medium to tell a wonderful and creepy tale. Highly recommended for any Moore or Lovecraft fan. In fact, most anyone wishing for a quality book would enjoy this fine example of the comic genre. hats off to Alan Moore.
Moore meant Providence to be a fusion of research into the America of 1919 and Lovecraft's concepts. Beautifully illustrated and with a wonderful story to back it up, this is a wonderful read. The strangeness of these places and the characters who inhabit it are truly in the style of Lovecraft. I appreciated that homage. But Moore also does a very good job with the time period and the various societal issues that were the norm back in that time.
Moore's use of notebooks and secondary information serve to make the reader feel as if this isn't just a comic but also a well researched book about the strange happenings. I truly enjoyed the artwork and Burrow's renditions of the locals, some of whom have strange features, is superb. It truly gives a reader the creepy feeling of a Lovecraft story where the normal just isn't normal anymore. Something is "off" and it's very hard to pin down what exactly it is. I won't spoil any more since this is a great story and one well worth anyones time to read.
Providence does a great job of mixing a period piece with Lovecraftian myhtos. The artwork and storytelling are top notch-this is an excellent example of the comic book medium to tell a wonderful and creepy tale. Highly recommended for any Moore or Lovecraft fan. In fact, most anyone wishing for a quality book would enjoy this fine example of the comic genre. hats off to Alan Moore.
June 9, 2016
ORGASMO.
August 31, 2021
More like a 2.5. I enjoyed aspects of this, but felt that journalist Robert Black's diary entries bogged down the story, being largely a first-person textual rehashing of the preceding panels. I grew easily bored and annoyed during these, especially when Black goes on and on in detail about his story ideas. The quality of the prose made me cringe. When I pick up a graphic novel, I'm not looking to wade through large swaths of text in handwriting font. I'm not sure anyone is, but I could be wrong (?). If anything, they only created unwanted roadblocks in the pacing of the story.
As a protagonist, Robert Black comes across as stiff and bland, despite the raving physical attraction he describes feeling toward various other characters (it certainly doesn't show outwardly). This could partly be due to the artwork—it's unclear if Black is actually meant to appear wooden as a reflection of his personality or if it's just a stylistic quirk of the artist. Anyway, I felt there was unrealized potential here, and I guess that could have been due to Moore's future plans to extend the series. The Lovecraftian riffs were interesting, but Moore kind of ruins them by only offering glimpses through his uninteresting window dressing. Ultimately, the sluggishness of the story coupled with an unremarkable protagonist doesn't compel me to read further.
As a protagonist, Robert Black comes across as stiff and bland, despite the raving physical attraction he describes feeling toward various other characters (it certainly doesn't show outwardly). This could partly be due to the artwork—it's unclear if Black is actually meant to appear wooden as a reflection of his personality or if it's just a stylistic quirk of the artist. Anyway, I felt there was unrealized potential here, and I guess that could have been due to Moore's future plans to extend the series. The Lovecraftian riffs were interesting, but Moore kind of ruins them by only offering glimpses through his uninteresting window dressing. Ultimately, the sluggishness of the story coupled with an unremarkable protagonist doesn't compel me to read further.
March 23, 2017
I re-read this in preparation for the imminent final issue. It's still one of my favourite comics of the last few years, and my favourite thing Moore's done for well over a decade. His encounter with Lovecraft creates a space where he can indulge his most Moore-ish habits and interests - magic, the nature of creativity, spotting patterns and connections, prolix stylistic pastiche, formal comics game-playing, and more - in ways that feel more productive and thematically appropriate than they sometimes have.
This first act (of three) sets the template for the series: in each issue, the protagonist finds his way into a Lovecraftian situation which he entirely misinterprets. Phrased like that, Providence is a comedy, not a horror comic. And that's not wholly wrong. Of course, it doesn't read or look like a comedy. The relentless beat of the storytelling, four horizontal panels to a page with few deviations, flattens the rhythms comedy (or indeed traditional horror storytelling) needs to survive. There's little room for punchlines or jump scares in Providence - everything, the normal and the outlandish, gets a similar weight in Jacen Burrows' detailed, clean-lined, sober artwork, which of course makes the line between the two blur even more. The smallest detail of a panel may be the pointer to something unnerving... or it may simply be a detail.
It's exactly this steady accumulation of significance that makes Providence so effective. For a start, when you don't exactly know what detail matters and what doesn't, it brings on a state of paranoid watchfulness in the reader, creating an unsettling contrast with the blithe denial of the protagonist. You're constantly looking back, checking details, comparing panels, noticing new things - whereas he strides onward through the story, oblivious. It's the familiar effect of peeping between your fingers at a horror movie character making terrible decisions... except subtly and perfectly restaged for comics.
The dialogue magnifies this even more. Here's where the comedy comes in: Moore has always had a compulsive attraction to irony, and developed several distinctive ways of using it in a comics script - running the dialogue and action of different scenes together so they act in counterpoint, for instance. In his 80s work he uses ironic techniques to the point where they are sometimes a real distraction. Providence represents this approach taken to its furthest possible extreme - almost every line of dialogue has multiple undertones and levels of nested meanings. When you pile up ironies to such an extent, the action starts to assume the slow, fraught pace of a bad dream.
This is the ultimate example of how Providence's thematic concerns (and its plot) indulge what Moore loves doing anyway. For Moore, the Lovecraftian elements represent a reality that exists below, or intertwined with ours - two states of being in superposition, each dreaming the other. Moore writes a comic that makes this idea concrete through its plot, but also through its visual and verbal style.
This first act (of three) sets the template for the series: in each issue, the protagonist finds his way into a Lovecraftian situation which he entirely misinterprets. Phrased like that, Providence is a comedy, not a horror comic. And that's not wholly wrong. Of course, it doesn't read or look like a comedy. The relentless beat of the storytelling, four horizontal panels to a page with few deviations, flattens the rhythms comedy (or indeed traditional horror storytelling) needs to survive. There's little room for punchlines or jump scares in Providence - everything, the normal and the outlandish, gets a similar weight in Jacen Burrows' detailed, clean-lined, sober artwork, which of course makes the line between the two blur even more. The smallest detail of a panel may be the pointer to something unnerving... or it may simply be a detail.
It's exactly this steady accumulation of significance that makes Providence so effective. For a start, when you don't exactly know what detail matters and what doesn't, it brings on a state of paranoid watchfulness in the reader, creating an unsettling contrast with the blithe denial of the protagonist. You're constantly looking back, checking details, comparing panels, noticing new things - whereas he strides onward through the story, oblivious. It's the familiar effect of peeping between your fingers at a horror movie character making terrible decisions... except subtly and perfectly restaged for comics.
The dialogue magnifies this even more. Here's where the comedy comes in: Moore has always had a compulsive attraction to irony, and developed several distinctive ways of using it in a comics script - running the dialogue and action of different scenes together so they act in counterpoint, for instance. In his 80s work he uses ironic techniques to the point where they are sometimes a real distraction. Providence represents this approach taken to its furthest possible extreme - almost every line of dialogue has multiple undertones and levels of nested meanings. When you pile up ironies to such an extent, the action starts to assume the slow, fraught pace of a bad dream.
This is the ultimate example of how Providence's thematic concerns (and its plot) indulge what Moore loves doing anyway. For Moore, the Lovecraftian elements represent a reality that exists below, or intertwined with ours - two states of being in superposition, each dreaming the other. Moore writes a comic that makes this idea concrete through its plot, but also through its visual and verbal style.
June 30, 2017
I officially forgive Moore for Neonomicon. This love letter for the horror of unknown is classy, layered, well inked and filled with passing references to the mythos and influences, starting from it's title. Though Moore brands the series, both as a sequel and prequel to The Courtyard and Neonomicon, I found the early 20th century Providence eerily similar to Lovecraft’s actual historical city, and in slow terraformation with his fictional world.
Every issue of the series so far, opened and closed with a map of ‘Rhode Island’, with bright green highlight on Swan Point Cemetry, the resting ground of H.P.Lovecraft. Narrative follows the POV of a New York reporter Robert Black, in his investigative journalism into some mysterious works. Through the eyes, thoughts and everyday life of Mr.Black, Providence invokes the vibes of stories that form the mythos collective - inquisitive outsider around queer folks in search of secret history. Every panel leaves clues and passing references, whose connection to the plot may or maynot be unraveled in reading; and the illustrated story is followed by a detailed backmatter, elucidating the events in a diary format, with added details in prints and figures. The narrative is somewhat linear, but very layered and suspectedly unreliable, and gives this weird experience outside conventional comic books, by being a novel, graphic novel, diary and research material at the same time.
In my personal interpretation(mostly based on Paul La Farge’s slash fiction - The Night Ocean), Robert Black is a fictional version of ‘Robert Barlow’, Lovecraft’s contemporary writer and corroborator. And Kitab ‘Al Hikmah al Najmiyya’ - ‘Book of wisdom and stars’ is Moore’s ‘Necronomicon’, which he very cleverly fuses with the slanderous rumor King of Yellow is. And Author of Kitab, Khalid Ibn Yazid, commonly known by the name Hali(from Chamber’s The King in Yellow) is Providence’s Mad Arab. I am even inclined to hyphenate Yusaf-Al-Buni, the scholar of Arab alchemy and alphabet enthusiast with real life Iranian polymath Al-Biruni. The first issue had uncanny resemblances with Lovecraft's Cool Air, leaving Dr. Alvarez as a Providence version of Dr. Munz. I picked up a Pitman(Pickman?) painting on one of the panels and Black’s visit to Athol with fishy(adjectivally and literally) people, felt like a graphic novel reenactment of The Shadow over Innsmouth. Also to make matters more complicated(and awesome) Lethal Chambers from ‘The Repairer of Reputations’ make occasional appearances in this universe, thereby bringing the story in par with Yellow mythos.
Though predisposition with King in Yellow and works of ‘the guy from Providence’ would exhilarate and probably exhaust the reading, this series is an amazing intro and great read for any fresh reader, with its incentives and gripping weirdness. This could very well be your all starred True Detective hangover.
Every issue of the series so far, opened and closed with a map of ‘Rhode Island’, with bright green highlight on Swan Point Cemetry, the resting ground of H.P.Lovecraft. Narrative follows the POV of a New York reporter Robert Black, in his investigative journalism into some mysterious works. Through the eyes, thoughts and everyday life of Mr.Black, Providence invokes the vibes of stories that form the mythos collective - inquisitive outsider around queer folks in search of secret history. Every panel leaves clues and passing references, whose connection to the plot may or maynot be unraveled in reading; and the illustrated story is followed by a detailed backmatter, elucidating the events in a diary format, with added details in prints and figures. The narrative is somewhat linear, but very layered and suspectedly unreliable, and gives this weird experience outside conventional comic books, by being a novel, graphic novel, diary and research material at the same time.
In my personal interpretation(mostly based on Paul La Farge’s slash fiction - The Night Ocean), Robert Black is a fictional version of ‘Robert Barlow’, Lovecraft’s contemporary writer and corroborator. And Kitab ‘Al Hikmah al Najmiyya’ - ‘Book of wisdom and stars’ is Moore’s ‘Necronomicon’, which he very cleverly fuses with the slanderous rumor King of Yellow is. And Author of Kitab, Khalid Ibn Yazid, commonly known by the name Hali(from Chamber’s The King in Yellow) is Providence’s Mad Arab. I am even inclined to hyphenate Yusaf-Al-Buni, the scholar of Arab alchemy and alphabet enthusiast with real life Iranian polymath Al-Biruni. The first issue had uncanny resemblances with Lovecraft's Cool Air, leaving Dr. Alvarez as a Providence version of Dr. Munz. I picked up a Pitman(Pickman?) painting on one of the panels and Black’s visit to Athol with fishy(adjectivally and literally) people, felt like a graphic novel reenactment of The Shadow over Innsmouth. Also to make matters more complicated(and awesome) Lethal Chambers from ‘The Repairer of Reputations’ make occasional appearances in this universe, thereby bringing the story in par with Yellow mythos.
Though predisposition with King in Yellow and works of ‘the guy from Providence’ would exhilarate and probably exhaust the reading, this series is an amazing intro and great read for any fresh reader, with its incentives and gripping weirdness. This could very well be your all starred True Detective hangover.
May 17, 2016
"L'abitatore del buio", "L'orrore a Red Hook", "La maschera di Innsmouth", "I sogni nella casa stregata", "L'orrore di Dunwich".
Se avete letto uno o piú di questi racconti di Lovecraft, "Il Re in Giallo" di Chambers o altre storie dei "Miti di Cthulhu", dovete assolutamente leggere questa graphic novel.
Una vera e propria lettera d'amore dedicata al solitario di Providence, dove personaggi ambientazioni ed atmosfere lovecraftiane vengono destrutturate e rielaborate da Alan Moore in maniera eccelsa regalandoci la prima parte di una onirica, macabra, delirante e disturbante discesa nella follia.
I disegni di Jacen Burrows sono stupendi e pieni di dettagli, la ricostruzione storica dell'America anni '20 é accurata, e la storia é assolutamente un must-read per ogni appassionato dell'horror che si rispetti.
Uniche note dolenti: se non ha mai letto Lovecraft, difficilmente il lettore occasionale apprezzerà la miriade di riferimenti e citazioni; il secondo ed il terzo atto ancora non sono stati pubblicati :(
July 3, 2017
Obviando la parte de fan absoluta de Moore, esta es una obra maestra. No sólo por cómo integra Moore la mitología lovecraftiana (personajes, historias, situaciones) a una historia mayor, el cuidado que pone en ir construyendo una historia de iniciación que no sea un mero pastiche para fans de Lovecraft, sino también en el esmerado arte que ocupa Burrows para representar un horror que siempre en las historias fue velado y que ahora despliega a toda página (ojo en especial con la maravillosa forma que tiene de representar a los Profundos y el descenso a los infiernos del protagonista, de apellido sencillo, pero evidente: Black). Es una historia que todo fan de Lovecraft y del horror debería leer.
January 17, 2021
in the Cool Air the King In Yellow shall Repair various Reputations through the use of rare books and secret caves and public suicide boxes. alas, the Horror At Red Hook is but a Shadow of what takes place at Innsmouth which in turn has nothing on the Horror occuring in Dunwich.
full review of the series here.
full review of the series here.
November 4, 2017
They's a hindrance, thuh both of 'um. On'y reason they's heeyuh is cuz it's haow the story's gotta be. In the 'deemer story, s'gotta be thuh crazy granpappy, un' thuh whaht-faced wummum, un' thuh bad-lookin' bwoy. Thet's whah ah ain't wamin' tuh yu. Yur aht uv a diff'run' story awlduhgethuh.
In the end, I have to agree with Willard Wheatley . Robert Black goes traipsing through the conglomerate world of Lovecraft's stories, pursuing a story that is arguably interesting in its own right, making observations of Lovecraft's world that would arguably be interesting in their own right, but Mr. Black unfortunately opens hismouth diary commonplace book, and it spoils the interesting parts entirely. (I was going to subject you to excerpts of the excerpts of pamphlets that Black also crams into his diary which spoil the interesting parts even more, but I've decided I don't have the energy.) That said, there's enough promise here that I'm going to try the next collection in the series and see if it gets any better.
In the end, I have to agree with Willard Wheatley . Robert Black goes traipsing through the conglomerate world of Lovecraft's stories, pursuing a story that is arguably interesting in its own right, making observations of Lovecraft's world that would arguably be interesting in their own right, but Mr. Black unfortunately opens his
May 21, 2017
I've really enjoyed Moore's Lovecraft-related works to date, and here, he's going all out, with a series that seems like an intermingling of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (though with a focus on the characters of Lovecraft's stories) with the detailed history of From Hell. Main character, Robert Black, is a struggling journalist in New York who fancies himself a bit of a writer, and as he stumbles upon a series of increasingly strange incidents, he gets drawn deeper and deeper into a creepy mystery with historical roots in New England. Jacen Burrows' artwork is great throughout and the diary entries, etc., add an extra layer of verisimilitude to things (although they do get to be a bit much, at times, getting longer and longer as the story goes on). Moore has obviously invested a lot of time and research into this work and it shows. Looking forward to Act II.
April 2, 2018
Series review
Clearly the work of someone who has absorbed every minutiae of Lovecraft's plots and cosmology, and all the complexities of his worldview. That a few of the series features (those journal entries, the last few chapters) do not fully convince me does not mean I am not in awe of this project.
Clearly the work of someone who has absorbed every minutiae of Lovecraft's plots and cosmology, and all the complexities of his worldview. That a few of the series features (those journal entries, the last few chapters) do not fully convince me does not mean I am not in awe of this project.
June 27, 2022
Existe un alto riesgo de aburrir o de que parezca absurda una obra cuando se lleva al extremo una idea –sea original y renovadora o no- sobre la estructura narrativa. Recuerdo que no pude acabar “La vida instrucciones de uso”, de Georges Perec, por las descripciones desmesuradas y continuas de habitaciones plasmadas por capricho del autor, a pesar de que las historias que surgen de estas me resultaron estupendas. En este sentido, la estructura de “Providence”, una rotación entre el cómic y el género memorístico (parte ilustrada y parte de diario), se hace lenta y fatigosa en algunos momentos. Sobre todo, en las segundas partes de cada número. Pero también, gracias a esa mezcla, se aprovecha la ambientación y el punto de vista un poco más desapegado de la parte ilustrada con la introspección y los análisis mostrados en la parte del diario. Y así, poco a poco (hablo por los tres volúmenes de la obra), sumando misterios y desasosiego, todo va cobrando cada vez más interés.
Por otra parte, se encuentra la reelaboración y modernización del terror lovecraftiano. Ahí se acerca a la interpretación dada por Michel Houellebecq en su ensayo sobre Lovecraft, donde señala que este busca un terror objetivo, lejos de connotaciones humanas y psicológicas. Es decir, terror para cualquier tipo de inteligencia. Y esa es también la intención de Alan Moore, donde el personaje principal va pasando de la investigación y el razonamiento a la locura irresoluble, añadiendo elementos que Lovecraft tuvo vetados por época o prejuicios: mujeres y sexo, por ejemplo.
Quizá el mayor problema del cómic es que es demasiado referencial. Si llegas con la visión limitada de unas partidas de Arkham Horror, pensando que esto va de pegar tiros a pulpos hipertrofiados, las vas a pasar canutas. Es más, dudo mucho que pueda disfrutarse sin conocer mínimamente la vida y obra de Lovecraft.
Mención aparte merece el penúltimo número, donde se sintetiza el impacto de la obra de Lovecraft en nuestra cultura en unas cuantas páginas. Ver en viñetas a Robert H. Howard volándose la tapa de los sesos o a Borges dictando sus relatos, todo ello en el contexto de este cómic, es impresionante.
Por otra parte, se encuentra la reelaboración y modernización del terror lovecraftiano. Ahí se acerca a la interpretación dada por Michel Houellebecq en su ensayo sobre Lovecraft, donde señala que este busca un terror objetivo, lejos de connotaciones humanas y psicológicas. Es decir, terror para cualquier tipo de inteligencia. Y esa es también la intención de Alan Moore, donde el personaje principal va pasando de la investigación y el razonamiento a la locura irresoluble, añadiendo elementos que Lovecraft tuvo vetados por época o prejuicios: mujeres y sexo, por ejemplo.
Quizá el mayor problema del cómic es que es demasiado referencial. Si llegas con la visión limitada de unas partidas de Arkham Horror, pensando que esto va de pegar tiros a pulpos hipertrofiados, las vas a pasar canutas. Es más, dudo mucho que pueda disfrutarse sin conocer mínimamente la vida y obra de Lovecraft.
Mención aparte merece el penúltimo número, donde se sintetiza el impacto de la obra de Lovecraft en nuestra cultura en unas cuantas páginas. Ver en viñetas a Robert H. Howard volándose la tapa de los sesos o a Borges dictando sus relatos, todo ello en el contexto de este cómic, es impresionante.
November 22, 2022
H.P. Lovecraft. I am of the opinion that he is one of those writers that you either love or hate. I have encountered both in my travels. Some love him with a fanaticism that goes beyond religious and is actually scary. Some hate him with a loathing so strong that it’s almost laughable for someone that, more than likely, the hater has never actually met, nor actually ever will meet.
I am perhaps a bit of an outlier in that I fit somewhere in the middle. I have enjoyed some of Lovecraft’s work, recognizing his importance to the entire genre, while also acknowledging the fact that Lovecraft was extremely racist and misogynistic in his writing. He also wasn’t that great of a writer. All that said, I neither love nor hate the guy.
Alan Moore’s “Providence” is a thinly-veiled examination of Lovecraft’s life and times in graphic novel form. It is also a prequel to “Neonomicon”, which was one of the better Lovecraft-inspired graphic novels I have read in recent years.
Illustrated beautifully by Jacen Burrows, “Providence” tells the story of a young man named Robert Black who gives up his job as a journalist to write novels and research the existence of an extremely rare ancient book of the occult. It is rumored to have incantations and spells for raising demons. His investigation leads him to New England, where he begins to gradually uncover a hidden society of people with occult knowledge.
Fans of fast-paced stories and comic books in which lots of stuff happens may want to avoid this series. There are whole pages in which characters literally say and do nothing. There are also numerous pages of text—-journal entries, letters, articles, book excerpts, etc.—-interspersed throughout, so fans of comic books with actual panel drawings and dialogue along the lines of “Guards, seize them!” or “It’s clobberin’ time!” will be sorely disappointed. This is definitely a more cerebral graphic novel.
I am perhaps a bit of an outlier in that I fit somewhere in the middle. I have enjoyed some of Lovecraft’s work, recognizing his importance to the entire genre, while also acknowledging the fact that Lovecraft was extremely racist and misogynistic in his writing. He also wasn’t that great of a writer. All that said, I neither love nor hate the guy.
Alan Moore’s “Providence” is a thinly-veiled examination of Lovecraft’s life and times in graphic novel form. It is also a prequel to “Neonomicon”, which was one of the better Lovecraft-inspired graphic novels I have read in recent years.
Illustrated beautifully by Jacen Burrows, “Providence” tells the story of a young man named Robert Black who gives up his job as a journalist to write novels and research the existence of an extremely rare ancient book of the occult. It is rumored to have incantations and spells for raising demons. His investigation leads him to New England, where he begins to gradually uncover a hidden society of people with occult knowledge.
Fans of fast-paced stories and comic books in which lots of stuff happens may want to avoid this series. There are whole pages in which characters literally say and do nothing. There are also numerous pages of text—-journal entries, letters, articles, book excerpts, etc.—-interspersed throughout, so fans of comic books with actual panel drawings and dialogue along the lines of “Guards, seize them!” or “It’s clobberin’ time!” will be sorely disappointed. This is definitely a more cerebral graphic novel.
November 28, 2017
The works of Alan Moore are hit or miss for me, and this one is a miss. I think this is partly my fault, as I don't know or understand the works/memes it's paying homage to or building upon, so it's probably just me. There are some cool aspects to this comic series. I quite liked some sections of the story and the art is good throughout. However, I really did not like the stories within stories in this one. While I'm usually a fan of journals, in this case, the journal pages were in a font that I found hard to read, and I found the pamphlets annoying, so I lost steam there. The horror aspect was interesting, the art creepily good, but I didn't like it enough to continue with the series.
August 3, 2016
A tremendous read that won't be for everyone, mostly due to its slow pace and abundance of non-illustrated text, both of which are essential for this story to be told. I certainly have not come close to reading all of Moore's work, nor do I like everything I have read, but this series looks to stand among his strongest work, made even more so by the outstanding artwork of Jacen Burrows. This is a very adult-oriented book, one you have to take your time with, but also one that's a rich reading experience.
June 12, 2017
Providence is another of Alan Moore's excursions into Cultural-History-by-way-of-Genre-Fiction. Instead of the Cold War-era American superheroes of Watchmen or the Victorian-era adventure figures of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, we get Post-WWI America and the Weird Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. Each issue in this volume is a riff on a different Lovecraft story ("Cool Air," "The Horror at Red Hook," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," and "The Dunwich Horror").
Moore uses the opportunity to ground the Lovecraft mythos in a recognizable reality, and to highlight the seething repression, xenophobia, and sexual paranoia that typify both Lovecraft's work and the era of American history in which that work emerged. Moore's protagonist is Robert Black, a man who is forced to hide both his homosexuality and his Jewish ethnicity from the outside world, all while he explores the "hidden America" as represented by Lovecraft's own outsiders: cultists, mad scientists, isolated rural families, and...um...fish-people. Moore has more compassion for these outsiders than Lovecraft does (not being a vicious racist like Lovecraft helps!), but he still captures the lurking dread and visceral horror of Lovecraft's best stories.
Jacen Burrows' artwork isn't flashy, but it has a stately elegance to it that compliments the buttoned-up repression of the protagonist and provides a nice contrast for the moments of true terror.
Moore uses the opportunity to ground the Lovecraft mythos in a recognizable reality, and to highlight the seething repression, xenophobia, and sexual paranoia that typify both Lovecraft's work and the era of American history in which that work emerged. Moore's protagonist is Robert Black, a man who is forced to hide both his homosexuality and his Jewish ethnicity from the outside world, all while he explores the "hidden America" as represented by Lovecraft's own outsiders: cultists, mad scientists, isolated rural families, and...um...fish-people. Moore has more compassion for these outsiders than Lovecraft does (not being a vicious racist like Lovecraft helps!), but he still captures the lurking dread and visceral horror of Lovecraft's best stories.
Jacen Burrows' artwork isn't flashy, but it has a stately elegance to it that compliments the buttoned-up repression of the protagonist and provides a nice contrast for the moments of true terror.
August 30, 2021
Wycieczka po Nowej Anglii śladami mitologii Cthulhu jest świetna, wyłapywanie nawiązań do twórczości HPLa to dobra zabawa, wizualnie trochę rozczarowujące, bo rysunek jest bardzo poprawny i nie ma w sobie nic z atmosfery weird fiction. Queerowy główny bohater bardzo pasuje, dodanie społecznego i historycznego podtekstu (homofobia, antysemityzm, profetyczne wręcz przeczucie komór gazowych, które niedługo nadejdą), wytknięcie Amerykanom pełni bigoterii to też miły dodatek. HPL był nie lubił, a więc to najlepsze, co można zrobić z jego twórczością.
February 24, 2020
Un homenaje al amo indiscutible de terror H. P. Lovecraft, aunque reconozco que por momentos se vuelve bastante pesado, es un viaje increíble lleno de referencias al horror cósmico que solo una mente como la de Lovecraft pudo crear. La literatura de horror no sería lo mismo hoy día sin Lovecraft punto.
May 14, 2017
More recently, it's hard to ignore the fact that many (not all) of the authors that emulate Lovecraft not only fall into the trap of writing hackneyed pastiches but also (perhaps as a result of the publishing industry) use the 'Lovecraftian mythos' buzz-phrase to piggyback off of and increase their readership. Add to this the over-saturation of Lovecraft's creations into popular culture - everything from Cthulu on South Park, to cute Shoggoths on t-shirts or as cuddly toys - and you have a generation that is desensitised to the intended effect of the source material.
Providence provides a tonic to this undesirable state of affairs. Lovecraft's ideas and philosophy really were original and quite shocking on a deeply existential level. Moore is attempting and succeeding, in my opinion, to not just get back to these awesome core ideals but to colour in other details that Lovecraft left out.
This is a world away from Neonomicon, which I enjoyed on the same level I enjoyed Stuart Gordon's Reanimator. There were definite moments of brilliance mixed with moments of over-the-top provocation and an uncharacteristic lack of sensitivity concerning the subject of sexual violence. Even though occult sexual magick was an integral part of that story being an unearthing of the repressed subtexts bulging beneath the topsoil of Lovecraft's oeuvre, the depiction of it understandably left many people upset. As it's set in the same universe, this thread continues here but is alluded to more subtly for the most part.
And it's subtlety that really gives Providence its accumulative power. Moments of strangeness happen constantly on the side-lines of a believable and well-researched context. Small dread details build up, with our hapless protagonist oblivious in the face of his own creative enthusiasm for his own writing. The atmosphere is akin to the hallucinogenic paranoia of Ramsey Campbell's supernatural novels: the drip-feed of surreal subtle details hinting at a terrifying revelation just beyond the veil of everyday reality.
Then there is Jacen Burrows' lush illustrations, brimming with tiny details urging you to return and notice new things. He also has a real knack at depicting truly strange and alien scenes of cosmic
terror that seem to come out of nowhere and fill you with a real feeling of awe. One page in particular towards the end of Volume 4 really took me by surprise.
I envision me coming back to this one more than once, not least for all the allusions and historical titbits I may have missed. Looking forward to getting my hands on the next omnibus when it comes out in a few months.
Providence provides a tonic to this undesirable state of affairs. Lovecraft's ideas and philosophy really were original and quite shocking on a deeply existential level. Moore is attempting and succeeding, in my opinion, to not just get back to these awesome core ideals but to colour in other details that Lovecraft left out.
This is a world away from Neonomicon, which I enjoyed on the same level I enjoyed Stuart Gordon's Reanimator. There were definite moments of brilliance mixed with moments of over-the-top provocation and an uncharacteristic lack of sensitivity concerning the subject of sexual violence. Even though occult sexual magick was an integral part of that story being an unearthing of the repressed subtexts bulging beneath the topsoil of Lovecraft's oeuvre, the depiction of it understandably left many people upset. As it's set in the same universe, this thread continues here but is alluded to more subtly for the most part.
And it's subtlety that really gives Providence its accumulative power. Moments of strangeness happen constantly on the side-lines of a believable and well-researched context. Small dread details build up, with our hapless protagonist oblivious in the face of his own creative enthusiasm for his own writing. The atmosphere is akin to the hallucinogenic paranoia of Ramsey Campbell's supernatural novels: the drip-feed of surreal subtle details hinting at a terrifying revelation just beyond the veil of everyday reality.
Then there is Jacen Burrows' lush illustrations, brimming with tiny details urging you to return and notice new things. He also has a real knack at depicting truly strange and alien scenes of cosmic
terror that seem to come out of nowhere and fill you with a real feeling of awe. One page in particular towards the end of Volume 4 really took me by surprise.
I envision me coming back to this one more than once, not least for all the allusions and historical titbits I may have missed. Looking forward to getting my hands on the next omnibus when it comes out in a few months.
December 17, 2018
I had too much coffee a few hours before going to bed last night, so of course, awake at 2, I turned to reading this. It seemed more focused than some of Alan Moore's previous work, and the blend between comics and written narrative was fascinating. It does have a mood and menace that reminds me of Lovecraft, with only occasional scenes of horror displayed in relation to the narrator's bisexual exploits and his attempts to write a novel about underground occultism in New England. The visit to the farm towards the end of this volume was especially strange and unsettling (when you're reading it at 3 am), and I liked the way that Moore included the bizarre crayon drawings made by Leticia Wheatley. Fans of Lovecraft, Moore, horror, and graphic novels more generally should find this interesting. I'm looking forward to reading the next "act."
Update in December 2018: read this again so that I could finish the second act. Most of what I said in the above review still stands, though I would say that the handwritten journal sections felt more tedious this time around. That said, I noticed more details, such as Black's continued use of the pronoun "they" to hide the gender of his love interests.
Update in December 2018: read this again so that I could finish the second act. Most of what I said in the above review still stands, though I would say that the handwritten journal sections felt more tedious this time around. That said, I noticed more details, such as Black's continued use of the pronoun "they" to hide the gender of his love interests.
May 26, 2016
Years ago I first read Alan Moore's early work, and I recall the visionary intensity of it, the structural and narrative ingenuity. Miracleman, Swamp Thing, V of Vendetta, Watchmen -- I'm a big fan of these. His later work, for me, lacked the same vitality, and somewhere along the way I stopped reading him. For me, this fell somewhere in between the two eras. It's, so far, pretty standard Lovecraftian stuff: a journalist who is led on a trail into the occult secrets of New England, hidden books and so on. There are some nice reversals and surprises too. All in all, I enjoyed it a lot, though I'm not sure it's particularly original. Still, it's well done.
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