Providence 7 four ghoul variant covers – by Jacen Burrows and Michael DiPascale
In this week’s big exciting Providence news (sarcasm) issue #7‘s ghoul variant covers are now available for individual purchase. Prior to 2019, these had only ever been available in sets of four.
During the 2016 Cinema PurgatorioKickstarter, Avatar Press first offered these four ghoul variant covers for Providence 7:
Boyleston Street Subway Incident
The Great Molasses Disaster
Stolen Finery
Miss Lowell is Buried in Copps Hill Burial Ground
These uncommon variants are limited to 1,000 copies each. Continue reading →
…we will finally begin shipping end of March. The Slipcase Sets look lovely, and the ultra-thick board we used for them is very robust. However there was a shortage of that board that took a surprising amount of time to resolve. But you can see for yourself above, these are pictures of the production prototype unit, the first one all assembled with the final materials, for final size confirmation and proofing.
…We will get the slipcases delivered the week of March 19, and then it’s show time. We of course have a ton of these to pack, so please do be aware that it will be many, many weeks from the first set shipping to the final one out the door. Certainly all of April, and it could run well into May, before we are done, but there will be mountains of boxes going out every week and as you ship, you will get tracking emailed to you from Comic Cavalcade. Every single person will get confirmation as they ship. These are almost sold out, so zero copies will ever be offered to stores or Amazon, so no worries about it popping up somewhere else before you get your set!
If you were lucky enough to be one of several hundred Kickstarter patrons to purchase the new collected edition, look for your copy arriving as early as March 2018. Continue reading →
Jacen Burrows character design drawing for Providence‘s Ronald Pitman – detail from Dreadful BeautyDreadful Beauty hardcover cover – art by Jacen Burrows
This trade paperback of Dreadful Beauty: The Art of Providence is in stores this week. The 176-page art book features Jacen Burrows artwork from the extended Moore Lovecraft explorations – from Providence to Neonomicon, The Courtyard, and even Yuggoth Cultures. The book features all of Burrows’ covers, selected pages, and heretofore unpublished character studies.
The artwork is, of course, amazing: detailed, nuanced, and lush – with unerring attention to Lovecraft’s text and Lovecraft’s world.
Dreadful Beauty is all reproduced in black and white. Not to take away from Burrows, but this does, it its absence, draw some attention to the contribution of colorist Juan Manuel Rodríguez. Rodríguez’ colors complement Burrows lines, bringing Providence‘s 1919 world to life. Continue reading →
With the release last week of the hardcover edition of Providence Act 3, any readers who were waiting can now read the full 12-issue series. Act 3 collects issues 9 through 12. The Jacen Burrows cover features Robert Black in front of a snowy Bryant Park exit chamber. The back cover image is from
As with Act 1 and Act 2, the Facts Providence team was eager to look through the new collection, and to see where we could spot differences from the individual issues. We had submitted our list of nitpicks to the publisher, Avatar Press. They corrected pretty much of all of the easily-fixed minor errors that we had pointed out. It appears that only the errors in the body of the comic have been updated, and none of the ones in the Commonplace Book back matter.
Below are a couple of excerpts from Moore’s 7-page introduction:
In my own case late childhood infatuation had, by my self-conscious middle teens, been tempered by increasing unease and abhorrence with regard to Lovecraft’s politics and many prejudices. Less defensibly, I had been cowed by the authoritative critical pronouncements of such disapproving commentators as both Wilsons – haughty Edmund and iconoclastic Colin – and in viewing Lovecraft through their unforgiving lens perceived him as merely a clumsy writer, burdening each clause with adjectives and archaisms, far too fond of indescribability, of final paragraphs delivered in a hyperventilating torrent of bug-eyed italics. Later, on the slopes of young adulthood and perhaps more confident in my opinions, I reread his storied and revised my view to one that once more favourable and more condescending. I saw Lovecraft now as a wild talent, one whose genius lay in transmitting his own sense of overwhelming cosmic terror to his audience despite his literary limitations. Not until embarking on a sixth decade that Lovecraft, for all his senescent affectations, would not reach did I revisit those steep lanes and jutting steeples, armed with vital insights gleaned from the continually expanding field of Lovecraft scholarship, only to find the fiercely individual and innovative prose stylist that I’d previously failed to see.
His general xenophobia was of course still present, along with his poorly reasoned and romantic veneration of the English aristocracy, but those could be viewed with greater understanding (albeir not greater sympathy) in the revealing context of his place and time and circumstances. Lovecraft’s supposed literary defects, on the other hand, turned out upon closer inspection either not to exist or to be misapprehended virtues. The most serious abuse of adjectives and repetition of last-paragraph italics are not in fact to be found in Lovecraft’s work but in that of his devotee and ‘posthumous collaborator’ August Derleth, who, while almost singlehandedly responsible for keeping his late mentor’s name alive, would with his clumsy ventriloquial interventions do much to delay his hero’s literary recognition, turning passing quirks into compulsive cliches. In Lovecraft’s own narratives the adjectives extended in pursuit of that which is beyond description ultimately stand exposed as an ingenious strategy disorienting and unsettling the reader by giving a list of entities that Great Cthulhu doesn’t much resemble, or declaring that the Colour out of Space is only a color ‘by analogy’. On examination, Lovecraft’s touted flaws seem instead to be careful tactical considerations.
The deployment of archaic vocabulary – Domdanie, nepenthe, eidolon and necrophagous, a sesquipedalian torrent – looks on second glance like an attempt to make the very medium that he expressed his stories through, the English language itself, into something creepy, unfamiliar and alienating.
Providence Act 2 hardcover cover – art by Jacen Burrows
This week Avatar Press released the first collected edition of ProvidenceAct 2, which reprints Providence issues 5 through 8. The cover features Robert Black in front of the Witch House that featured prominently in issue #5. The back cover reprints a detail of Elspeth Wade from issue #6’s Women of HPL variant cover. The collected edition is currently only available in hardcover, for a $21.99 cover price. For covers and other details of collected editions, see this page.
As we did with the initial Act 1 collection, and as only hardcore Moore-Lovecraft nerds are wont, the Facts team looked over the new edition to see if we could find any differences from the individual comics that the hardback collects. Mostly we were looking to see if any of the minor errors that we had spotted (and recorded on our nitpicks page, and reported to Avatar Press) had been corrected.
Good news!
Pretty much all of the easy to fix nitpicks have been corrected – though it appears that only the ones in the body of the comic have been updated, and none of the ones in the Commonplace Book.
Many of you have recently expressed your appreciation for our hard work. That means a lot to me personally (Alexx), and I would do what I do without any other reward. That said…
I was last employed in 2013, and not likely to be employed again in the near-to-medium future (I am semi-disabled – too injured to work in my field, but too healthy to collect disability). I’m living off of ever-dwindling savings plus a small annuity left me by my late father.
I have a Patreon set up to help support my ongoing amateur scholarship (mostly annotating Alan Moore, recently – here and at websites for Cinema Purgatorio and Jerusalem). Of late, I’ve been collecting donations from it every other month. That might increase, but only if my productivity similarly increases. If some among you who are in better economic conditions could see fit to join, that would be most greatly appreciated. Alternatively, if you wanted to make a one-time gift, I have a Paypal account for donations at alexx@panix.com.
The Kickstarter campaign also has a dozen more variant covers for Providence #12, with previously unused art. There are options for inexpensive digital editions to very high-end editions signed by Moore and Burrows.
At the time of this posting, the campaign has already far surpassed its $8,300 goal, with more than $40,000 pledged. The high-end limited edition autographed, remarqued $599 package is already sold out, but there are still plenty of packages to choose from for the discerning Providence reader.
After twelve issues – or eighteen, if you count The Courtyard and Neonomicon – we come to the end of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ Providence. To finally have the whole project complete at last, we can finally sit back and reflect. No more annotations, no more stressing over page borders and trying to find the one black cat, no more digging through libraries of Lovecraftian lore to catch each reference, to untangle the hints and shades of meaning, the layers of possible interpretation. To compare notes and swap theories.
It’s been fun. Thanks for reading with us.
The ending is what you might come to expect, once you’ve come to expect it. Alan Moore has always liked the quieter, anticlimactic, introverted sort of apocalypse, “Only the End of the World Again” to steal a line from one of Neil Gaiman’s Lovecraftian tales; Jacen Burrows was never going to deliver anything except crisp artwork, attention to detail in every line, and a loving touch to every monster and bit of alien fungus. More than the previous issues, there is a sense of ritual and finality to Providence #12: the stage is set, the players in their places, and the final drama is almost a formality.
Providence has been, from the beginning, a human story, and humans like their endings. If some readers have felt that the final issue didn’t deliver, it may be because their expectations were in the wrong place. Providence is the end of the human story, but not the end of all stories. An apocalypse for the human ants milling about on planet Earth is just one small step for Cthulhu. As in several of Moore’s previous apocalypses – Watchmen, Tom Strong, Promethea, Swamp Thing – the end is a time for answers, but not all the answers; it provides a sense of closure, while reminding us that there is no final closure. With its final pages, Robert Black and Aldo Sax and Merril Brears are laid to their literary rest…but there are a few more points to ponder, a few unsolved mysteries, and some final reflections.
The Forgotten
Several threads in the series were quietly dropped and never really picked up again. The “white powder” in The Courtyard never played any part of Neonomicon or Providence, perhaps because while Arthur Machen’s “Novel of the White Powder” was influential on Lovecraft, the Old Gent from Providence never used it in his own Mythos. Likewise, some bit characters disappear: Randolph Carter of the Ulthar Cats is a no-show in Providence, and most of the inmates of Haven released by Brears when she rescued Sax likewise disappear quietly off-screen, the motivation for their curious dismemberments never truly revealed.
Aldo Sax himself feels almost like an afterthought in issue twelve, there for a moment and then quietly dispatched off-screen. In many ways, the narrative had long outgrown him, a symptom of Moore continuing a story which was initially self-contained (The Courtyard), and then grew an unexpected sequel (Neonomicon), which finally laid the groundwork for a much more ambitious story (Providence). Maybe there’s a no-prize for the reader that can fit the pieces together – certainly there is an argument, looking back from the end of Providence, that some of the events of The Courtyard might have been orchestrated (or pre-ordained); without Sax, the FBI would likely never have found Club Zothique and Johnny Carcosa, and Merril Brears might never have followed Carcosa’s trail to Salem and the Dagon cultists there.
The Mysteries
Johnny Carcosa himself represents one of the great enigmas of the series; an avatar of Nyarlathotep whose origins and role shift from series to series, too valuable to throw away and yet remaining essentially unexplained. In The Courtyard he is a dealer in esoteric drugs, sex toys, and enlightenment who lives with his mother; Neonomicon sees him step out of this role, becoming the apologetic messenger of unnamed forces; and in Providence he begins to take an increasingly leading role in events – the quasi-human face for the inhuman forces at play. Yet his origins, his nature, his history remain quintessentially unknown. Was he always an avatar of Nyarlathotep? Why was he dealing drugs (and other things) from Club Zothique? Was he the manipulator of events, or just another pawn – the needle of the Great Old Ones, dropped down at different points on the spinning record as necessary?
Another mystery is the connection between the Stella Sapiente and the Catholic church. Never detailed, though Moore began to draw comparisons with the Nativity in Neonomicon with the Annunciation of Merril Brears, it is strongly hinted at in the last act of Providence, and the final issue is a parody of the Nativity of Jesus, more blatant than even Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” or Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror,” suggesting that in some way the Order’s eschatology and the Church’s are intertwined. There are hints, never really more than that, of connections between the “binary world” of Earth and Yuggoth and Gnostic beliefs, but the Catholic apocalypse doesn’t quite work on the face of it: Cthulhu is not the second coming of Jesus, Merril Brears is not the Whore of Babylon from Revelations.
Then again, maybe that’s the point. What did Robert Black herald? What did H. P. Lovecraft redeem?
The Reflections
A reader could take Providence at face value: without a familiarity with Lovecraft, The Courtyard, or Neonomicon, it would be a bit of a slog. They wouldn’t really understand the things they saw, even though from the perspective of the reader they would grasp more of the hidden and monstrous world than Robert Black did, until his final moments in Providence #10 and #11. The great virtue of the story really starts to come out when a reader does have more pieces of the puzzle – exactly as it is with Lovecraft’s Mythos. A reader who encounters Lovecraft for the first time does not know what to expect when someone lets loose an exaltation of Shub-Niggurath, nor does their pulse quicken when they find out that Aesnath Waite is from Innsmouth if they have never read “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” In that sense, at least, Providence is an initiation for some readers, and a deeper revelation for others – those who have read The Courtyard and Neonomicon, who are familiar with the work and life of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos, get more out of it.
Too, it is hard not to compare Providence with other works. Most Lovecraftian comics are less ambitious; one-shot adaptations or brief original series based on or incorporating some element of the Mythos, or even Lovecraft himself. From Dylan Dog and Martin Mystere to The Strange Adventures of H. P. Lovecraft, Necronauts, Golgotha, and Young Lovecraft. Few are as lengthy or as complicated as Providence and its two precursors – they lack the level of detail that Moore goes into, the weaving of fact and fiction; the closest, perhaps is the graphic novel Lovecraft(2003, Hans Rodionoff, Enrique Breccia, Keith Griffen), which is also concerned with H. P. Lovecraft and a “real” Necronomicon, a parallel world where the Mythos was real but entered through subterranean gates, but even that does not measure up in terms of the scope and care put into the plotting, and in the end Lovecraft has HPL as kind of nobly tragic figure protecting the world from horrors it thinks are fictions.
Yet in Providence, the world does end, and the last witnesses and participants are left, with the readers, in largely uncharted territory. Lovecraft was clear that when the stars were right, Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones would come back into their own. The details afterwards are a little vague. In “The Dunwich Horror” Wilbur Whateley himself is uncertain, saying only:
“I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it.”
The problem is, once Cthulhu comes, it isn’t a human story, not anymore. Writers like August Derleth wrote pulp stories of fantastic adventure, where humans fought the minions of the Great Old Ones with mystic talismans and even nuked Cthulhu, for all the good it did them. Scott R. Jones in When The Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spiritualitytalks about the acceptance of an ending, the narratives of death and closure we are told throughout our lives, and yet that we come to that moment beyond which we cannot know anything. Different ways of dealing with the same inevitability. Perlman and Brears’ takes on things.
In Providence, the world ended, but the characters still exist. It isn’t their story, not anymore. Perhaps some of them can work out new narratives, find a new place in a world. Readers may already be familiar with the concept: after all, every time a story ends, we close the book and put it back on the shelf, or close the file, or turn off the media player. Their story is over; ours continues. We lived for a time in their world, experienced what they did from our voyeuristic perspective, all the wonders and horrors that Aldo, Merril, and Robert encountered. Now their time is done, the final page turned.
We are all that is left. We who are on Leng, from their perspective, seeing the whole scope of their past and future at once, and every moment in between. The metanarrative of Providence might haunt a bit.
Avatar Press launched a 
Facts Providence co-author Joe Linton talks 
Facts in the Case of Alan Moore's Providence 