Tag Archives: Alan Moore

‘The Courtyard’ is a short story, written by Alan Moore and first published in 1994, as part of an anthology named The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute To H. P. Lovecraft. The prose was later adapted into comics form by Anthony Johnston, with artwork by Jacen Burrows, and published by Avatar Press in early 2003. The same publisher re-released this title in four different editions between 2003 and 2009. This success led Avatar to offer Moore the opportunity to continue the story, and Neonomicon was published in four issues from July 2010 to February 2011. It is a direct continuation of ‘The Courtyard’, to the extent of making the two stories indissociable.

One of the most typical aspects of the “Lovecraft mythos” is how the author designed his fictional world to be an open literary game that could be played by other writers. Lovecraft was joined in this game by some of his contemporaries, and even replied to them by reusing their characters or fake myths in his own stories, thus creating a rhizome of citations that grew without control, like memes, incorporating elements conceived by various authors into a masterful puzzle of fake occultism and make-believe mythology.

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‘The Hasty Smear of My Smile,’ a four-page story which ran as a backup feature in the final issue of Peter Bagge’s Hate (#30), is a miniature masterpiece. It’s a capsule version of Moore’s considerable skill and the epitome of everything that makes him fascinating as a writer. The story essentially brings personality, perspective, voice and history to the Kool-Aid man character, a ubiquitous corporate mascot used to sell swill to unsuspecting children.

The Kool-Aid Man, originally named the ‘Pitcher Man,’ was created in 1954 by Marvin Plotts, an otherwise anonymous art director for a New York City advertising agency hired by General Foods, the powdered drink’s corporate manufacturer. Plotts, who claimed that the inspiration for the character – a glass pitcher full of cherry red Kool-Aid with arms, legs, and his signature broad smile – came from watching his son draw smiley faces on a frosted window. Fairly simple in concept, Plotts could not have imagined how successful his character design would become. Within just a few years, his beaming ‘Pitcher Man’ was at the heart of a massive advertising campaign aimed at America’s schoolchildren.

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‘In Blackest Night’, a perversely clever short story by Alan Moore and Bill Willingham, featuring Katma Tui of the Green Lantern Corps, allegorizes two pillars of disability theory: the social model and accommodation.[1] Seeking to recruit a new Green Lantern in a lightless void called the Obsidian Deeps, Tui befriends the native silicone life form Rot Lap Fan and offers him membership of the Corps. But there is one big problem.

To her shock Tui discovers that, living in an abyss, Fan has no eyes – therefore the concepts of light and color hold no meaning for his species. Consequently, the translator function of Tui’s power ring utterly fails to convey the phrase ‘the Green Lantern Corps’ into Fan’s language, rendering it ‘the (untranslatable) Corps’ (3). Similarly, it turns the Green Lantern oath, with lines such as ‘brightest day’ and ‘escape my sight,’ into an incomprehensible mass of ‘(untranslatable).’ ‘Mmm,’ responds a bemused Fan to Tui’s futile efforts, ‘Perhaps it loses something’ (4, emphasis in original).

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