Page 45 Review by Stephen
"From Earth to the Moon.
"Malkuth to Yesod.
"Shit rains down.
"Nothing is real."
I don't think I've every typed the words "Morrison", "predictable" and "pedestrian" in the same sentence before.
I remember "passionate", "compassionate", "fiercely intelligent", "parapersonality" and "transtemporal, pansexual, mulltidimensional fight for the future's freedom".
You wouldn't really forget that one, would you?
Also, drugs: I remember a great many drugs and extreme vacillations between "Comics are ephemera, bound only for bins" and "Comics are the last medium unsullied by compromise with corporations - like the one that publishes most of my comics" depending on which horse du jour he felt like backing that day.
But before we begin, may I take a personal moment to say how fondly I recognised and remembered Glasgow's Botanical Garden Gates, having lingered there long-time, but not with all those plump, floppy fish seen skewered on its weathervane here?
"Hebrew letter "mun" means "fish". "Fish" and "Death". And death is daath."
Fair enough. I suppose all that has something to do with The Veiled Lady's henchmen wearing deep-sea anglerfish head masks when they kidnap our titular protagonist who apparently will remain nameless and dump him in a supermarket shopping trolley. He tumbles out tellingly because our man and his proverbial trolley parted ways way back in 2001 since when, we learn later, he's been on the run from the police.
Maybe he tried to steal the fuzz's Dream-Key to their Empty Box in a Tombraider-like dream-space? That's what our nameless one's done to The Veiled Lady, which is why she is ever so slightly brittle. Or maybe they want him for pretension, since he's quite evidently got a Christmas-cracker crash-course on the Kabbalah lodged in his throat.
Once rescued, our man of arcane knowledge is told there's an asteroid 14 miles in length and 6 miles wide on a collision course with Earth. It's called Xibalba, otherwise known as the Mayan underworld, the "Place of Fear" because whichever astronomer was on duty that night was feeling portentous as fuck.
In 33 days there will be an Extinction Level Impact somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, but long before that there will be planetary-wide panic. Of course there will! Have you read Dan Berry's THE END? So psychologically astute!
If that wasn't bad enough the asteroid bears a symbol carved into its surface. This sigil is three miles tall and half a mile wide. It's the glyph denoting the door to the Anti-verse, and if you think that already sounds a far from promising picnic spot, there are the transmissions emanating from Xibalba in the Enochian angel language of John Dee - Astrologer Royal to Queen Elizabeth I - which, when translated, don't bode well for hospitality at all!
"Man - every one of you - prepare for wrath."
And that's just the opening gambit. The rest of the message / curse speaks of "one thousand thousand-strong thunders", "torment", "flaming firmament", "poison stars", "Wormwood" (seldom propitious) and "woe". All things considered, therefore, I'd probably stick to the original operational agenda which is fly out to the asteroid, drag it off course using tractor physics from off-planet, then bugger off back to moonbase lickerty spit.
I definitely, emphatically, would in no way descend into the crevasse / scar / open wound and investigate gigantic sealed entrances because I have watched Alien many times over and things went awry. I wouldn't even dispatch drones down there.
Artist Chris Burnham you may remember from Grant's BATMAN INCORPORATED VOL 1 where he did a mighty fine impression of Frank Quitely. While retaining no small element of that, here he comes over all Richard Corben which is perfect for this kind of psychotropic horror. It's the creepiest sort of horror going wherein things grow into or out of you, and Burnham will certainly make you wince more than once on that front. He does diseased and invasion of personal space all too well.
He's also spectacular when it comes to the crevasse's epic contents, its off-the-scale monumentalism, and indeed the textured surface of the asteroid itself as seen from above in the form of a gigantic, circuit-board skull. That's worth the price of admission alone.
In this sort of horror there's nothing you can fight, only things to scare you shitless like the degradation of the body and degradation of the mind - madness itself - and the terror of being lost and alone.
"There's only me left."
There are a great many doors here. Doors can be very disturbing. Opening one is quite the commitment.
As well as psychological horror, Morrison's also very good at that sort of awful, gaping nihilism, here evoking the very opposite of Lovecraft's "most merciful thing in the world" which, in case you're wondering is "the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents":
"Humankind is a disease, a malignant mistake. The natural world seeks to purge its blissful, ignorant Eden of our contagion.
"Self-awareness: there is the black worm in the apple. Our curse is to know there's something terribly wrong with us."
But that's when he uses language one can comprehend and ideas one can take seriously. The rest is occult psychobabble for which I have a notoriously low threshold, and if you think his 'Keys to the Abyss in THE NAMELESS' will clarify shit, I'm afraid it's mostly more mystic mumbo jumbo involving Thantifaxath, Baratchial, the qlippothic Tzuflifu (are you laughing yet, because I have tears streaming down my face) and tarot cards.
For an infinitely more imaginative, coherent and constructive take on the Kabbalah, please see Alan Moore & JH Williams III's PROMETHEA.
