“God made me do it,” says the murderous anti-hero near the book’s conclusion, and Morrison’s narrative design ensures that we read it that way. Nameless, by contrast, places the blame for Cthulhu-which is to say, those aspects of human experience for which Cthulhu is a metaphor-on the metaphysical forces that Moore sees as elaborations or avatars of human consciousness. In Moore’s notoriously hideous book, the weakness and squalor of humanity brings Lovecraft’s eldritch horrors into being as in Rorschach’s famous soliloquy from Watchmen, it is us, not fate or the gods, who butchers the children and feeds them to the dogs. Grant Morrison feud, Nameless may be read as a furious riposte to Moore’s Neonomicon. The conceit of Nameless is something like the following: what if Lovecraft’s fiction describes not a cold mechanical materialistic universe, as it is often taken to do by the Rhode Islander’s admirers, but rather the universe as seen by traditional monotheism?įor readers keeping score in the great and largely one-sided Alan Moore vs. The graphic novel spins around a scene of murderous horror inspired by the Deity. Unlike The Exorcist‘s ingenious and intense crypto-papist propaganda, though, Morrison’s book is not trying to make us consider a conversion or reconversion the villain of Nameless is God, the God of monotheism, stranded in our universe as the prisoner of a long-ago galactic and interdimensional war, and accordingly psychopathic and the incitement of psychopathy in His worshippers. Of the events in Nameless, one character metafictionally exclaims, “It’s like the goddamn ‘Exorcist’ meets ‘Apollo 13’!” Even allowing that such a film has already been made-such that the line of dialogue should have run, “It’s like goddamn Event Horizon!”-that description aptly capture’s Nameless‘s mix of space adventure with unsettling and sometimes subliminal demonism.
When I saw Nameless, a work in the undersung genre of space horror, I decided to read it to find out if I had indeed been unjust to Morrison’s later career. But did Grant Morrison deserve my crack about Coldplay toward the end of my review of Greg Carpenter’s British Invasion? After being too pleased with myself for its cleverness, it occurred to me that I had not read a Morrison comic all the way through after All-Star Superman, which is about a decade old and the sentimentality of which I found grating, despite its other many virtues, especially its iconicism.
0 kommentar(er)
