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{"id":894,"date":"2009-12-16T01:30:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-16T01:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/12\/894\/"},"modified":"2009-12-16T01:30:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-16T01:30:00","slug":"894","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/12\/894.html","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

WILL THE FETUS BE ABORTED? BY AND BY LORD, BY AND BY<\/a><\/span>: I just got the second installment of Alphonse<\/span>: \u201cMurder Sleep.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alphonse<\/span> is a horror comic about a fetus who survives abortion; he knows, and thinks, and hates. My review of the first issue is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The cover of this second installment tells the story. A broken doll sits in horrifying suspense in front of the inevitable revenge: a carving-knife. All my Pet Sematary<\/span> terror-feelers started tinglin\u2019.<\/p>\n

Alphonse<\/span> continues to complicate the categories of abortion-horror I talked about here<\/a>. It\u2019s baby-horror and grief-horror at once\u2013almost as if both sides had a point!<\/p>\n

The art is lumpensympathetic. The grays are used to suggest a world of complicity and fog and nightmare. There are some well-chosen, sharp echo images: The light gleams and breaks against the ice in a glass of scotch the way it breaks against the display window of a cell phone. The overall aesthetic is a wash of gray with sharp black character-defining lines coming out of the quicksand.<\/p>\n

The actual storyline is hard for me. This is the second installment, thus we\u2019re getting more pieces on the chessboard; and I guess I don\u2019t care yet about the new pieces. There are suddenly mafiosi (yes, with heavy irony and a pet white cat, but still) and some kind of conspiracy plot. This seems more\u2026 comic-booky, and you know what I mean even if you want to be defensive\u2026 than the basic wrongful-birth plot. So far I\u2019m okay with the comedy-horror of the conspiracists, but I wish we had more sympathy for them. The first issue of Alphonse<\/span> was striking in large part because of its relentless focus on suffering and complicity: No one was exempt from its punishing storyline. This issue, again solely because the conspiracy tropes are hit so hard, seems to exempt its audience from some of its horror. Not all the horror, by any means\u2013the pro-life girl and guy are still really messed-up, and their dialogue is well-balanced and gives a real sense of how people suddenly dropped into an impossible, perhaps miraculous but also horrifying, situation might respond. But this issue seemed to have \u201cvillains\u201d in a way which the first one didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible to talk about this comic without talking about abortion. I think the first installment was less-polarized than this one. Nonetheless I think this comic understands<\/span> the terror of pregnancy and childbearing. So far, I\u2019m not sure this comic will work\u2013especially if it goes too far in the conspiracy direction, which is what soured me on Human Target<\/span>, since I honestly think conspiracy stories are the opposite of complicity\u2013you don\u2019t do conspiracy stories unless you think no one would ever<\/span> do bad if they knew they were wrong. <\/p>\n

But so far, I\u2019d strongly recommend Alphonse<\/span> to every horror-comics fan who doesn\u2019t immediately reject it based on the subject matter. That isn\u2019t a criticism. The politics of abortion are intrinsic to the story. There are at least a hundred reasons you wouldn\u2019t want to read a comic in which that was a plot element. So far, though, I\u2013as a pro-life Cat\u2019lick dyke, who has never been in danger of pregnancy in all her ramblin\u2019 life\u2013think this comic is presented without sentiment, with sympathy for those who support abortion rights, and with\u2026 it\u2019s hard to tell because of the particular storyline\u2026 but with at least some sympathy for women who abort. I think if you can read Alphonse<\/span> as a story about abortion it makes sense; I don\u2019t know if it makes as much sense if you read it as a story of one woman\u2019s abortion. But the narrative hints that we will learn much more about Alphonse\u2019s unwilling mother, and if that happens, I think it will go a long way to addressing my uncertainty about this approach.<\/p>\n