Product Description

Just in time for the sequel in 2009, Alan Moore's haunting masterpiece, The Courtyard, is available in color for the first time! The most celebrated writer in the industry, Alan Moore, teams up with brilliant artist Jacen Burrows, to unleash this timeless tale of Lovecraftian psychological horror. FBI man Aldo Sax has an amazing service record with the FBI. His legendary skills at piecing together the most baffling of cases has gotten him assigned to what may be his most confusing case yet. Several murders - no, more like lethal dismemberments - from the most unlikely of suspects just don't addd up. And what few leads there are, all point to The Courtyard. This special collected edition of the series features an introduction by Garth Ennis!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31153 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 56 pages

Customer Reviews

For the Alan Moore completist only?
When Picasso became famous his smallest doodles and scribblings became highly desirable pieces of art. The same is happening with the works of Alan Moore. He has produced at least 3 of the top ten best comic books/graphic novels of the last 25 years, but as well as Watchmen, V for vendetta, Marvelman, Swamp Thing, From Hell and The Man of Tomorrow he has a number of lesser works which have been snapped up by publishers and rushed out in trade paperback format.

The Courtyard is an Alan Moore doodle on the back of a paper napkin. A rogue FBI agent comes up against the Cthulu mythos of H.P.Lovecraft with entirely predictable results. It's at a nice cheap price which is just as well because this is just 2 black and white comics stuck together. It takes less than 20 minutes to read, then you can go back and look for the references, in-jokes and clues that litter Moore's best work - only there aren't any here. Then you may notice that the credit page lists Alan Moore as consulting editor and "story by"; with Anthony Johnston responsible for the "sequential adaptation". This was a short story by Moore from somewhere else that has been turned into a comicbook by other people.

Not great IMHO.

I keep coming back...
Recently introduced to the world of Lovecaft and his Cthulhu Mythos, a good friend of mine employed me to paint the cover image of this graphic novel onto a wall in his house. It turned out to be a great mural, and I had the chance to read 'The Courtyard' once I was done; it made me want to paint the mural on my own wall. What I found was a fantastically engrossing, yet short, story of how bizarre and seductive the Mythos truly is. I am now (perhaps wildly and pointlessly) trying to deduce the translation of some of the lanaguage used.

Though simple, I love it, and enjoy reading it again and again (scarily, rather like the characters in the story). Though it's not actually completely Alan Moore, that's the way with so many graphics now, but the end product is still high in merit. The work is there, and is highly enjoyable.

Not one of Moore's best efforts
I received the Courtyard yesterday, and it took me little over an hour to read - that rings alarm bells in its own right. This is a very slimline volume, and added to that the fact that there are only two panels per page means that it's not the most in-depth read.

I'm a big fan of Moore's past works, although I must confess I think he's gone off the boil a little recently, but I'm always willing to give his stuff a go, because even when he's off-colour he's still pretty good. This story though, is a bit disappointing.

Firstly, the story is very unoriginal and predictable. It's not necessarily based on Lovecraft's style, but rather on the commonly held view of Lovecraft's style. It's almost as though Alan Moore has played a few one-shot adventures of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game and decided to write one of them up as a graphic novel. Alan Moore usually thrills readers who are 'in the know' with a plethora of references to his historical, literary and film influences, but here he seems content to throw in a few HPL story titles, which makes the work lack subtlety. There's even a jarring, throwaway piece of racist dialogue, which doesn't really fit into the story, and is simply an effort I assume to show us AM's opinion on the whole 'was Lovecraft a racist?' question.

The lead character is simply not credible. Having a noir-style narration from an FBI agent is a fine idea, but having him speak in flowery, pseudo-Lovecraftian dialect throughout is weak. Lots of made-up words, crude compound adjectives and onamatapoeia do not poetry make. On top of that there are the spelling mistakes - a couple within the first half dozen pages. Given that there are probably less than 2000 words in the whole book, that's some poor editing!

I would have given this book onne star, had iit not been for the art. Jacen Burrows has an admirable stab at illustrating Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, and this really made the book worth reading. There's a sycophantic intro by Garth Ennis in which he fauns over Moore's work, without much mention of the artist, which in my opinion has it all wrong.

Worth a look, but not worth a purchase.