Neonomicon

Neonomicon is a four issue mini series from Alano Moore. It centers around a young female FBI agent who has an addiction to sex. We meet the character as part of a team looking for a serial killer, which eventually leads them to a Lovecraft cult.

Interesting, no? No. No, it's not.

While it is intriguing to start with, the book quickly turns into something that seems to be written by a crazy old man who feels the need to share rape fantasies with his ridiculously loyal fan base.

I have plenty of respect for Alan Moore, simply for creating my favorite comic book character (John Constantine) and I respect his contribution to modern comics but his modern work just seems to be his way of testing the censors; trying to see how much he can get away with.

But is working with Avatar really testing the censors? They publish books like crossed! Crossed is known for being incredibly violent, filled with rape, torture and weirdness but the difference between crossed and neonomicon is that Crossed stays interesting and has a plot that isn't simply "a woman gets raped by a sea monster."

But let's step away from the rape for a minute. Let's take a closer look at the writing.

The characters are painfully generic. They all seem to be copies of every generic FBI agent in the action movie genre. The protagonist is so shallow and 2-D that it's almost impossible to feel any sympathy for her. Her dialogue is painful to read, making her even more annoying. Most of it seems to either recap the previous events or state the obvious.

But I read the whole series so it can't be as bad as I make it out to be. Although, I was planning on dropping it before I found out that I'd be dropping the last issue. I guess there's enough interest there to make you hope that it gets better.

The basic plot is interesting enough but the execution of the story is so awful and slightly offensive that any interest created by the basic plot is lost. I am fine with violence (I'm a big fan of Ennis and Ellis) but when the writing is awful it becomes something worse than just a bad story; it's becomes rape fan fiction.

But the art's nice enough. that's something.