By Jacob Cordas — Writer’s Note: This article will for obvious reasons feature spoilers for Moore’s cosmic horror trilogy (The Courtyard, Neonomicon and Providence). I highly recommend reading the series with fresh eyes if possible. It scared the shit out of me. Let it scare the shit of you.

Introduction 1 - Time Is Physical

Time has been crystallized. With the right energy output and the right movements, time is made solid, of sorts. Discovered in 2017, we now have evidence that time is physical. Time can hold a shape. Time can be held and understood. It is eternal in its spontaneous destruction, forever in its spontaneously broken symmetry. Now if the multiple scientists who spent years working on this had simply reached out to me, I would have told them we already have crystallized time. We’ve been publishing these shards of time since the 1840’s.

Comic books have been collecting and dividing time since they started. Panels have worked to control the flow of events, letting the reader see time in bits and pieces. It all comes together to create an overarching world but the flow is dictated by panel rate. Overlapped panels can create a sense of urgency carrying you from second to second. Forms bursting forth from the panel let you know the momentum of the moment - a second becoming eternal and uncontainable.

When panel structures are repeated though, time becomes contained. The world becomes standardized. You know the weight of every second - no more than any other. No comic more perfectly explains this than Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’s Providence. 

Introduction 2 - Cosmic Horror And Bigotry

Let’s talk horror. Horror is arguably the oldest genre of storytelling with the variety of subgenres to match. If you want any kind of story with any kind of setting and any kind of morality, horror has something for you. It is constantly evolving as fears change and develop - more than any genre it is immediate yet reactive. This has the unique side effect of making it both the most innately progressive and the most politically dated genre at once.

All of this is on dazzling display in the uniquely American genre of Cosmic Horror. It’s existentially driven, the fear based in the knowledge there is something unknowable just beyond your perception. Founded by Robert W. Chambers’ fantastic King In Yellow but popularized by Lovecraft, cosmic horror embodied the best and worst parts of the American psyche. It’s a genre that lived in the unthinkable by being grounded in the racism of its propagators.

Lovecraft most notably flourished by embracing that ugliness. I can sit here and wax poetic about the beauty of At The Mountains Of Madness or The Music of Erich Zann but this is still the same man who wrote a poem called On The Creation Of N****** (the censoring is mine, not Lovecraft’s). His racism permeates his work. Once you know it’s there, it becomes impossible to ignore. Mindless cultists with aims to destroy the world are thinly veiled allegories for the Great Replacement.

It’s hideous. And it’s important. Much like any celebrated element of White American art, cosmic horror is at once both an important development and a grueling yet gleeful depiction of the racism that makes up the core of the dominant American ideology.

Even as it has evolved as a genre, cosmic horror has struggled to avoid this trapping. It solidified its understanding of the great unknown as the true nightmare while still trading in the racist dog whistles this reactionary idea innately presupposes. It’s only recent efforts like the works of Caitlín R. Kiernan, P. Djeli Clark,. Victor Lavalle or Matt Ruff that we’ve truly been able to start engaging with the racism intrinsic to the genre, intrinsic to the American mythology.

But no story more embraces this dichotomy nor explores it more thoroughly than Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’s Providence.

Part 1 - It Should Be Boring

One of the first things you’ll notice in Providence is the repeated panel structure. Every page is the same basic thing. It’s four panels in one column - over and over. In theory it should be boring. In theory I should be sitting here exhausted as page after identical page forces its way into your brain. But it never is.

Instead, it’s horrifying.

I like to think of myself as someone who can handle his horror. I love horror and the way it can overwhelm your senses. It’s the oldest genre and yet it can feel so much fresher than almost anything else. At this point in my life I rarely tap out from fear* (The most notable exception recently is Inside, a French New-Extreme film that centers around a pregnant woman being tortured. Good luck to you if you want to try - I don’t know why you would.) since the feeling is generally comforting. It’s like abstracting out my anxieties is the only way they can truly be comforted.

Providence ignores all of this, instead making every issue past #4 a torturous experience that requires numerous breaks. If it was a movie, I still wouldn’t have finished it. And the reason why isn’t the uniquely horrifying content (though that doesn’t help anything). No, it’s that repeated panel structure.

It worms its way into your mind taking advantage of your brain's process of normalization. Everything can be normalized if repeated over and over. It’s the illusion of truth effect brought to life in art - the lie that is art transformed into truth by the end because it has become reality through sheer exposure.

Alan Moore has always been meticulous with his layout requirements in his scripts. His notes are often comical in their severity. Here is an excerpt from the first page of his Watchmen #1 script with no modifications: “ALRIGHT. I'M PSYCHED UP. I'VE GOT BLOOD UP TO MY ELBOWS. VEINS IN MY TEETH AND MY HELMET AND KNEEPADS SECURELY FASTENED. LET'S GET OUT THERE AND MAKE TROUBLE! THIS FIRST PAGE IS A SERIES OF VERTICAL JUMPS THAT TAKE US UP IN A STRAIGHT PROGRESSION FROM A MINUTE AND MICROSCOPIC DETAILED VIEW OF THE GUTTERS OF NEW YORK UP TO A PANORAMIC SHOW LOOKING DOWN UPON THE ROOFTOPS OF THIS FAMILIAR AND YET CURIOUSLY ALTERED CITYSCAPE. IN THIS FIRST PANEL WE ARE LOOKING STRAIGHT DOWN AT A DRAIN OPENING IN A PERFECTLY ORDINARY GUTTER. TO THE RIGHT OF THE PICTURE THE ACTUAL OUTER WALL OF THE CURBS DROPS DOWN AWAY FROM US LIKE A MINIATURE CLIFF. OVER MORE TOWARDS THE LEFT, DOWN AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PICTURE, WE CAN SEE THE OLD AND WORM METAL OF THE DRAIN COVER WITH SOLID DARKNESS VISIBLE BETWEEN ITS SLATE…” This one paragraph continues for a full page and I have included it to make it clear I am being kind in my quotation.

It requires an incredibly special artist to take page after page of this text and transform it into something that is actually readable for an audience, let alone emotionally moving. But Jacen Burrows takes what he is given and forms it into something magnificent. It’s scary. It’s powerful. And all because it is so repetitive.

It trains you to accept this as real. How can you not buy into it? It ends up emulating the very nature of the horror it is depicting. It makes it real, forcing you to be an active participant in the normalization process by the act of turning the page. Having the reader become the solution to a problem the main character brings up in the backmatter of #4, “Now, if something supernatural were to actually occur to someone in real life, anyone normal would just run a mile… They’d simply flee. I know I would, and I like to think that I’m a normal person underneath it all. I suppose the only way to handle it realistically is to rely on people’s tendencies not to believe that anything out of the ordinary is going on, even if evidence is mounting to the contrary.”

And what we’re reading on these pages is magic, the work of occultists summoning our nightmares into reality - infecting us with the tragedy of knowing there are things bigger than ourselves we will never understand. It’s the American underbelly that never went away but kept growing worse and worse.

That’s where issue #11 comes in.

Part 2 - We’ve Lost

Writer’s Note: Final spoiler warning. At this point I will be going into plot details with complete candor.

It is at this point we know we’ve lost. Over the course of the last ten issues, we’ve seen the culmination of failure. As our protagonist and aspiring-novelist, Robert Black, has explored the underbelly of America. In an attempt to find content for his great American novel, Black has travelled across the North-East allowing himself to get dragged into something truly evil. He has tried to allow himself not to notice it forming around him. He has consistently deluded himself to the reality of the situation repeatedly claiming it to be hypnosis. But at this point he knows the truth. Hope is lost.

In one of only two pages that breaks the four panel page layout, he goes home on a train car filled with his own failures - all the monsters he has allowed to propagate into the future. He takes the train into the city and from there is no escape until the present. Time starts out deceptively slow at first as Black wanders through a city he used to feel safe in haunted by the truth he knows, a record looping in the background reminding him of how hard he fell for the corruption: You made me love you/ I didn't think you'd do it/I didn't think you'd do it.

Even as time begins to speed up, it’s standardized - in units that seem digestible but imply so much more. It picks up speed slamming forward as we see the growth of the infection. Lovecraft begins to spread into the world. It starts with small horrors that stack, as each plot that Black has borne witness to (and by extension us as the audience) unfolds on an ever increasing timeline, while Black’s book spreads as well - first to police and then higher and higher.

Quickly though it’s people outside of our plots. These are new people who serve only to spread the disease. There are people standing proudly publishing his work, intellectuals in coffeeshops having a tête-à-tête, hippies smoking weed and vibing out to the end of days. And it only speeds up from there. The ideas go more and more mainstream. Bigger writers take up the ideas. Book stores sell fake versions that create real effects. In maybe the most horrifying moment for me, it is commodified into plushies and Funko pops. It lets people celebrate the end of the world and the rise of Yuggoth.

The whole time it’s standardized. The comic stands still in a steady pace here creating horror out of this integral pacing. Each moment is weighted to remind you that there is no winning anymore. It is only a descent. The repetitive nature of everything you’re seeing creates a sensation of overwhelming loss. As time flies by us, years and decades boiled down to singular panels, the reader is forced to acknowledge the inevitability of what’s to come.

So much of the core trick the panel structure is its creation of a world you can’t deny the reality of. Whether it be the repeated dream sequence at the end of issue #5, the monstrous conversation in issue #7, or the Holocaust premonition in issue #3, the unreality is given shape and form that infects your mind into believing it as real- your perception being warped by the steady stream of identical panels.

Issue #11 takes this technique to an extreme point. The comic takes the structural technique that has been working on a metatextual level to parasitically attack the reader and here makes it textual. Over the course of this issue the way the reader’s mind has been warped is now directly observed upon the world we’ve been turning the pages through. People succumb to the idea - a plague of toxic ideology being passed from reader to reader, unknowing victim to unknowing victim.

This is time crystalized for terrifying effect. Everything is in its smallest unit of measurement serving as a reminder that it’s over. We’ve lost.

Outro - An Insidious Cultural Disease

Living in a pandemic, it feels almost sinister seeing how easy it is for an infection to spread. People either unwittingly, uncaringly or sometimes even maliciously helping spread something that transforms the world into something terrifying and ugly. In Providence though, the disease isn’t not one of the body, but of the mind - relayed to us through one column of four panels.

To quote Scott Woods, “Racism is an insidious cultural disease.” And here we watch the horror of bigotry, of terrifying ideology spread through small crystalized fragments of times. Decades flash by with the ideas forming themselves into solids. If the ultimate fear of cosmic horror is that of the unknowable just outside of us, then within these pages it is postulated to be the bigotry of America with the language of the end of days, the words of dog whistles and hatred being normalized the same this world is normalized through its standardized artistic language. 

“Our behavior is a product of many contingent factors, not least our cultural vocabulary, and our cultural vocabulary can change.” (Anti-Social by Andrew Marantz) Here our vocabulary is used against us, spreading itself into the worst parts of our subconscious. And yet I still can’t imagine a better piece of horror fiction with a more creative use of panel structure than Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’s Providence.

Read other installments of Comics Anatomy!

My name is Jacob Cordas (@jacweasel) and I am starting to think I may in fact be qualified to write this.