Alan Moore - The Courtyard

[andydecker]

The Courtyard – written by Alan Moore and Antony Johnston, artwork by Jacen Burrows (Avatar Press, 2003, 2 issues)

The Alan Moore Lovecraft interpretations started with The Courtyard. Originally a short story in the anthology The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft, (1994) Moore teamed up with Antony Johnston, who adapted the story into a comic. The artist was Jacen Burrows, at the time one of the house artists for Avatar.

The story is rather straightforward. 2004. FBI agent Aldo Sax goes undercover in the slums to investigate gruesome ritual murders. In a nightclub in Red Hook, Brooklyn, called Club Zothique, he meets veiled dealer Johnny Carcosa, who sells a new hallucinogenic drug called Aklo. Sax meets with Carcosa in his apartment where he is given a hallucinogenic white powder as a prelude to the Aklo. Carcosa speaks an unknown language to Sax, who experiences terrifying visions. In truth Aklo is not a drug, but the language Carcosa uses. The visions, given to him by Aklo, changes Sax' perspective of reality and drives him to murder his neighbour using the same method as the killers he was investigating. The story ends with the murder.

The plot is at best simple, it follows basically profiler fiction tropes right down to the end. But concept wise the story established most of the concepts of Moore‘s Lovecraft version. Large cities have domes for fear of getting hit by meteors like the one in Lovecraft‘s The Colour out of Space, the Club Zothique is based in the church in Red Hook which was one of the locations of the HPL story The Horror at Red Hook. The text is littered with quotes and allusions to the Mythos. Sax and his superior Perlman are introduced like Johnny Carcosa, who in the sequels Neonomicon and Providence is revealed to be an avatar of Nyarlathotep. And Aklo, a term introduced by Arthur Machen and further developed by Lovecraft, is here finally an instrument for changing human perception.

For what is a horror comic by Avatar, this is tame. A lot of the references will only be understood by Mythos fans, and it is an adaption of Moore instead written by himself. But it gives a better understanding of the sequels.