Comic review: Alan Moore’s Providence #3- A black, fishy comedy that mocks Christianity

Writer: Alan Moore
Artist: Jacen Burrows
Publisher: Avatar Press
Released: 12 August 2015



I’ve read this book more than a few times now, and have been afraid of reviewing it. The reason being, it’s complex, and a review wouldn’t be easy, and I don’t want to mess it up. However, I’ve read it again today, and can see a slither of meaning amongst the murkiness, and so, I’m ready to give it a go.

Fishy men collecting souls in bottles.

Okay then, so what’s it all about? I think that the following quotation (from the book itself) nicely sums it all up:

‘It’s leaking from the future.’

That’s how I see the book now. That’s why in issue #3 there are weird, disjointed dream sequences, giving hints that are confused (as all dreams are) with events that are currently happening in the life of the main protagonist.

Our man is dreaming of the future, but it’s mixed up with his every day anxieties, his feelings of guilt, and his longings for answers in the present. We are seeing the world through his eyes (as is reinforced by the diary extracts that follow the main comic book narrative) and the confusion that he is experiencing is being transferred into the reading experience of the reader.

The dream sequences (of the main protagonist) are explored in great detail during the diary sections of the book and expand the narrative after the main illustrated part of the book concludes. Within this diary section are clues for the reader, clues that hint at both what is happening, and what is to come. It’s a fascinating story-telling device, and something that adds so much to the comic book reading experience, adding subtle elements, and details that would otherwise have been lost within the necessarily truncated comic book story format.

After reading the main comic book text, and the diary extracts, I cannot help but conclude that our protagonist is a bit of a dim detective. He is preoccupied with homosexual urges that distract him from the clues that can be picked up by the attentive reader, and although he records everything, he is not exactly coming to any big conclusions for himself. I guess that’s our job. Our protagonist records the evidence, and it’s up to us to unravel and make meaning of it all.

Into the caverns of the mind.

Providence is an occult mystery narrative that is dropping clues as it goes along. It’s a complex, involving book, and that’s exactly what you want in a genre book of this type.

The protagonist has to be a bit dim, as he’s laying out the clues, not solving them. The enjoyment to be had here is in following the story, and speculating about what is going on, whilst always being a bit in the dark as the full picture has yet to be revealed.

As for the deeper meanings that lay behind the narrative, that’s even murkier, but at the moment I detect a black comedy that involves jews, fish people, and homosexuals. It’s hinted that all three groups are about to be persecuted by the upcoming Nazi regime, with the black comedy being that two of the group are real, and were persecuted, whilst the other is pure Alan Moore weirdness.

The main focus of Providence #3 is the aforementioned fish people. These half-human, half fish follow a religion that’s part Christianity, and part worship of an ancient Mesopotamian fish God called Oannes.

‘Oannes, in Mesopotamian mythology, an amphibious being who taught mankind wisdom. Oannes, as described by the Babylonian priest Berosus, had the form of a fish but with the head of a man under his fish’s head and under his fish’s tail the feet of a man. In the daytime he came up to the seashore of the Persian Gulf and instructed mankind in writing, the arts, and the sciences. Oannes was probably the emissary of Ea, god of the freshwater deep and of wisdom.’
http://www.britannica.com/topic/Oannes

The fictional fish religion in Providence substitutes Oannes into the role of Christ himself, and is thus blackly blasphemous, disrespectful and contemptuous of Jesus Christ and Christianity as a whole.

Dream sequences include gratuitous nudity, be warned. 

What writer Alan Moore is doing here is insinuating that Christianity itself is a mixed up religion that has taken weird elements from earlier cult worship, creating a new cult that is equally as ridiculous as what came before it.

To further reinforce this point, the book concludes with the ‘Church of St. Jude’s Parish Newsletter.’ This is a comedic, absurdist attack on the origins of Christianity, mocking Jesus by making him a fish on a slab, resurrected and thus followed by all fish that have come after him as the one true messiah of all fish.

‘And they said, let us thake him out and hang him upon hooks that he may cure. Yet many tides did not pass before he was risen from his slab and was descended unto Heaven, through black abysses to dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.’ (The Parish Church of Saint Jude, 138 Bridge Street, Salem, Mass. June- August, 1919)

Pretty silly, isn’t it? Christians are often mocked for taking allegorical Bible stories literally, but this really is taking things to a whole new level.

I have to point out that Alan Moore is picking very low hanging fruit here in mocking the origins of Christianity. It’s something that is allowed, and even encouraged, so I’m not going to applaud him for doing it. If he was mocking Judaism or Islam then I’d applaud him, but he’s not doing that, probably because doing so would be truly controversial, and dangerous.

Alan Moore is not being brave, or outrageous, or scandalous, or cutting edge in mocking the origins of Christianity and talking about a weird fish cult, insinuating that Christianity itself is pretty much the same thing. Sorry, he’s just not. He’s doing what you are allowed to do in our neo-liberal, atheist times, but he’s doing it very well, and Providence is noticeably superior to 99% of the other comic books that I read on a weekly basis.

Providence #3 then is a studious, intelligent, dark occult comic book, but it’s also, very much nestled within the centrally planned social consensus norms and mores of our neo-liberal, cultural Marxist times. Get it, enjoy it, have a laugh with it, but please, recognise it for what it actually is.


Rating: 9/10 (Blackly comic tale that is mocking the origins of Christianity)



Note:
I do realise that Providence is packed with references to H.P Lovecraft and that this book is more than likely a progressive/liberal critique of the identity politics issues within his work. I recognise that, but as I’m not particularly familiar with the PC thought crimes committed by H.P Lovecraft I’ve reviewed this new book by Alan Moore as a stand-alone text. 

Comic review- Alan Moore’s Providence #2- The world, the mind, a cavern

Writer: Alan Moore
Artist: Jacen Burrows
Publisher: Avatar Press
Released: 8th July 2015



Providence #2 can be a bit confusing on a first read, but after you go over it a couple of times it begins to make a lot of sense.

At the end of the main comic book strip there is a section of written text. This written text is the diary of the main protagonist, and in this section he describes what has happened in the main book, directly from his point of view and from his own personal understanding of the unfolding events. This technique of using the protagonist’s diary serves two purposes.

1- It clarifies plot points that might otherwise have been missed by the unattentive reader.

2- It allows Alan Moore to make excuses for the gullibility, and sheer stupidity of his main protagonist.

That protagonist is a journalist, an educated, scholarly man, so to see him blunder through the narrative, missing every single clue that noisily clatters around his feet (and there are lots of them) is a bit too much to take. It stresses incredulity to breaking point and you end up thinking, ‘This guy must be the biggest moron in the world if he cannot work out what is going on, because it’s as clear as day. It’s pretty obvious that the people he is investigating are witches/warlocks and what they are doing is engaging in child sacrifice, eating a weird diet and conjuring demons in order to prolong their lives and well, do whatever it is that witches and warlocks do.’

So why doesn’t this supposedly erudite guy see what is so flippin obvious to the reader? Is he really as foolish as he appears to be? Well, no, he's not, and it’s all explained in the diary section. There are two excuses for his apparent idiocy:

1- He’s blinded by lust/love, so is incapable of seeing what is right in front of his own face.

2- He doesn’t believe in what he sees with his own eyes anyway, due to his reading of dream interpretation theory by world famous bs artist Carl Jung.

If you buy that (and I will, because I want to enjoy the book) then you can let go, and have fun with it. The story is about the occult, life extension, secret societies, hidden books of magic, witches, demons, parallel dimensions, and everything else that goes woooo woooo in the night.

I love reading about secret spooky stuff, and this book is certainly delivering on that front. I read it four times today, and on the last read I found something new, something that I had somehow missed on the first read. I love it when that happens as it shows that the writer is putting a lot of work into the book, and that he expects his readers to put the same work in as well, just to keep up with him.

I really appreciate a writer (and artist) who pay special attention to the smaller details of their book, and that is what you are getting here. As ever with Mr. Moore his work really does stand alone as something a bit special, something that has taken a fair amount of time, effort, research and imagination to construct. Providence is a book that has been carefully laboured upon, and it’s very apparent that it’s meant to be savoured slowly, and enjoyed. For that reason alone it’s a must buy book, and once again my book of the week. Take your time with it, have fun, then read it again, and read it again. The more you read, the more you get, and that really is the sign of a very good book.


Rating: 10/10 (Deep caverns, lots going on)

Comic review: Dark Gods #1- Facebook must be destroyed

Writer: Justin Jordan
Artist: German Erramouspe
Publisher: Avatar Comics
Released: 29th October 2014



This was a strange book. It was almost dead over target, but something went wrong with the guidance systems and its payload ended up being harmlessly scattered over barren wasteland.

I’ll explain.

The narrative begins with a typically white-bread protagonist (think Matt Damon or Mark Wahlberg) telling us that he works for an evil corporation that is carrying out behavioural experiments on it’s users. So far, so good. This is exactly what Facebook was caught doing recently. However, his solution to the problem is to feed this information to the government. What? The government that has been spying on everybody through the NSA? The government that allows huge tax breaks to corporations then uses backdoors in their software to data-mine all of the information the corporations are gathering, including spying on all of our emails? Yes, that government. Why is this guy trusting them? Why would anybody go to the government? My answer? They don’t. They go to alternative media sources like Infowars and Wikileaks. If they went to the government they would be hushed up, arrested, or worse.

Our heroes, Pharaohs and scientists.

Do you see what I mean by ‘strange’ book?

The book then gets even weirder when evil creatures explain to our generic hero that they are feeding on humanity. Who is this guy? Why should we care about him? Do I even care if the monsters eat him? Not really, he’s leaking information to government, so he’s not exactly somebody to root for.

We then get the back-story of the entire human race. There is no God, and humans were created out of nothing. So far, so mainstream. Humans needed gods, so the demons came in, pretending to be those gods. They gave us technology, but this knowledge gave these ‘Dark Gods’ more power over us. Opposing the Gods are men who do things for themselves. These men are pharaohs, scientists and Braveheart apparently. What the Hell? Why isn’t government being mentioned here? What is the one core building block of human slavery that has doomed our entire race since the dawn of time? It’s Pharaohs, Kings, leaders and government. If any demon wanted to gain control over humanity all he would have to do is gain control over the leaders and structures of a society.  When in control of the leaders the demon would control religion, science, history, medicine, education, politics and entertainment, all of the building blocks, and control systems of society. It would be a pretty crappy demon if it limited itself to just one sector of society like a social media website wouldn’t it?

Gods are demons pretending to be Gods. No mention of Islam yet.

Any half-decent control freak demon would want centralised power. The demon would concentrate on government. The biggest and most powerful government in the world today is the US government. The demon would concentrate all of it’s energies on gaining control of this government and would then push for a one-world government so it has centralised control over the entire planet.

It would attempt to establish a New World Order.

That makes sense, right?

The underlying problem with this book is that it wants to tell us a story about evil gods who have been with us since the days of Adam and Eve, but it doesn’t want to link them to government. What sort of useless, feckless villains are they? They want to control and suck off the life force of humanity, but they have no interest in the control systems of humanity? They have no interest in money and power, but they are all over facebook?

That makes no sense whatsoever.

The book ends with a strong independent feminist rescuing our protagonist from the villains, thus emasculating the man, as is traditional in mainstream comic books today, and kind of ending the story in one panel. I have nothing to look forward to now, no reason for picking up issue #2. There is no mystery here, everything has been revealed. The protagonist is a wuss and it looks like the government is going to be the good guys.

Man inventing gods, and evolutionary theory of course

How can a comic book get so close, yet utterly miss the target?

It’s bizarre.

I’ll conclude this review with some speculation, and posit another reason why it all went so wrong. There was a lack of a moral guidance in the story. There was no God, just nothing, and out of the nothing came evil. There was no creator, no deep spiritual moral understanding that we are eternal spiritual beings inhabiting flesh bodies for a short period of time to learn and expand in consciousness.

In place of deep spiritual moral truths there was Braveheart and his modern equivalent, a shotgun wielding feminist with a short haircut and revealing cleavage. I know it’s popular to believe in a godless world these days, at least in the neo-liberal west, but the lack of spiritual awareness leaves a gaping hole in the human psyche, leaving us open to attack by Dark Gods and stupidly relying on government to save us. It’s not progressive, or liberal, or smart, it's just stupid and leaves us easy prey for our real-world government slave masters.

This book gets closer than most, but a lack of understanding about deeper moral truths, human slavery and the eternal nature of the human soul means it’s just another monster book with the usual cast of feminist liberal drippy statist characters.

Rating: 3/10 (For acknowledging that Facebook is a data mining/surveillance control system.

Review: Dicks End of Time #1- Don’t tell the Ulster Volunteer Force about this one.

Writer: Garth Ennis
Artist: John McCrea
Publisher: Avatar Press
Released: 11th June 2014

This is a very rare comic. Not only is it NOT set in fantasy land New York with cold war era Russian’s or some other dated villains, but it’s actually funny and it mentions real life stuff like the Ulster Volunteer Force and how they feel left out of Ireland in 2014. This is very unusual in contemporary comics where a depressingly large number of writers are still lost in the 1990’s. Sometimes they go past 1994 into the dangerous areas of the late 1990’s, but past 2001, or September 2001 to be more precise? That is about as rare as finding an informed young person coming out of one of the Rockefeller funded feminist liberal universities. It happens, but it’s bloody surprising when it does.

In this book you have Eastern European girls working in coffee shops and the protagonists are men in their mid forties who worry about their impending deaths and having nothing to show for their lives. When does this ever happen in comics? Comic book protagonists are usually American 1990’s clichés that bear no resemblance to real people living in 2014. This is amazing; a comic book that has people in it who actually read like they could exist. The main characters in this book feel lost in a new age of mass immigration, religious compromise and the (apparent) lack of anything to fight against. Wow, what an interesting new concept, comic book characters who have some basis in the real world.

Okay so you don’t get any mention of the EU imposed looming debt crisis, unemployment, the decimation of the middle-class and all of the other nightmares attached to the backs of Irish people by private banks operating out of the EU zone, but what you do get at least has some kind of resemblance to 2014 reality.

It’s recognisable, and it’s funny as Hell. It’s totally gross, so I wouldn’t want any kids reading this book, but when a comic book opens with a priest conducting a funeral and telling you what he really thinks about the person in the box, well then that really gets my attention. Here’s how the priest describes the corpse, and remember these words are spoken at the funeral service-

 “A bigger waste o’space than that utter ballacks would be hard to conceive of. Indeed it is difficult to find words harsh enough to convey the sheer disdain I feel for Spence and his kind- The lurching, slabbering, twitching, spineless scum that shame our species with every worthless breath they draw, that must give the almighty pause when he gazes upon the very horrors he has wrought.’ 

Pretty funny, don’t you think? It’s a great way to start a book. I’m already laughing, and although my gradual understanding of the subtext of this book (Irish people over the age of forty are useless scum who need to go away and let the EU continue to rape Ireland), took off some of my enjoyment, it was still a fantastically amusing morning read that made me laugh.

And before anybody criticises me for thinking that the Northern Ireland peace process was a bad thing, I obviously don’t. It was a great thing, and what Garth Ennis is doing in this book by showing the redundancy of some of the old players is not only funny, but it rings true as well as an important piece of socio-political insight. I just wish he would talk about some of the issues plaguing Ireland today. Issues brought by their politician’s complete capitulation to the EU zone, and the private banks that control it.

Am I expecting too much? Probably, but I have to mention it here. I was looking for just one panel that mentioned the current day problems, and I didn’t find it. Is Ireland a paradise today? No, it’s not, so why not mention it? I’m fed up with comic books living in the past, and although this one does criticise the past, it doesn’t appear to be criticising the NOW, just the people of the past who can’t get into that now. Oh, the art’s suitably gross as well. Get the book, for a laugh, but remember the sub-text. This is a comic book written by a man who (and I’m assuming this from what he has written here) thinks that centralised, banker controlled globalism is a good thing, and that people over the age of forty are useless ‘Dicks.’ Anti New World Order comic, when will you come? Not here, but this was fun.  Rating: 8/10