Alan Moore’s Light of Thy Countenance: The Magic of Television by Alan Moore, Antony Johnston and Felipe Massafera.
Requirements: CBR Reader, 41 MB.
Overview: Maureen Cooper is not real. She is an apparition summoned to screens, into homes, into the hearts and mind of the viewing audience by Carol Livesly. But Carol Livesly is not the god that creates the illusions that capture the mind and bind the soul. She is only a servant of a higher power. A higher, hungry power, as old as the world and eternally new. As, perhaps, are we all.
Alan Moore’s Light of Thy Countenance: The Magic of Television
- Alan Moore writer, author
Antony Johnston sequential adaptation
Felipe Massafera artist
Published by Avatar Press, 2009.
- Prose poem contemplation on the new god known as Television by Alan Moore, adapted into comic book form by Antony Johnston, with painted art by Felipe Massafera.
Alan Moore, master and magician of storytelling, tears back the veil of one of the most arcane of enchantments – The Magic of Television! Part grimoire, part grim invocation of things that are all too ordinary, Light of Thy Countenance – an original and breathtaking story by Alan Moore – is adapted to graphic novella format by Antony Johnston, preserving every word, with each page painstakingly painted by Felipe Massafera. Maureen Cooper is not real. She is an apparition summoned to screens, into homes, into the hearts and mind of the viewing audience by Carol Livesly. But Carol Livesly is not the god that creates the illusions that capture the mind and bind the soul. She is only a servant of a higher power. A higher, hungry power, as old as the world and eternally new. As, perhaps, are we all.
Alan Moore’s Light of Thy Countenance, Reviewed by Beth Davies-Stofka on Sep 1, 2009 at 11:44.
- This graphic novel is an adaptation of a short story composed by Alan Moore in 1994 and published in an unremarkable anthology called Forbidden Acts (Avon Books) in 1995. The adaptation, by Antony Johnston (Wasteland), faithfully preserves every word of the original composition by Moore. This might be the worst feature of the book. Well, actually, the worst idea was doing it in the first place.
I haven’t heard Moore’s spoken word poetry in his own voice, but I can imagine that it would be fun and satisfying to hear Light of Thy Countenance performed live in a theater accompanied by interpretive performance art, especially if said interpretation were satirical in intent. Moore’s exceptional intelligence and his depth and breadth of knowledge are all on display in this experimental story. But while Moore is likely not a native of the planet Vogon, this torturous monologue crawls across 48 endless pages, making its reader long for the blessed oblivion of the airlock.
Light of thy Countenance is television’s stream-of-consciousness meditation on its birth and its eventual global dominance. It tells us:
- "Sometimes in the dot and dazzle I forget myself.
Become submerged, become embedded in the bright, face-flickered current of the photogeists; the exo-souls adrift within the Bairdo.
Sometimes, in the vast omniscient hiss of me I am amnesiac, senescent luminescence of my world-sized thoughts dissolved in a variety of soaps
Or smashed to sparks by glassy hammer-fisted glowtides, information breakers foamed with car-chase,
chocolate and hallucination, shattered on the reefs of cone and rod , against retinal inlets,
crash of light amongst the tidal debris, long-dead image-claw, husked thorax of idea, the laugh track spray flung shrill and high
And I forget that I am as a god
And lose myself amongst my empty angels."
And yes, it goes on like that for 46 more pages. First television loses itself in Maureen Cooper, a 16-year stalwart of a television series called Jubilee Terrace. But wait, Cooper isn’t real. She’s played by actress Carol Livesey. And wait, that’s not Carol’s real name. Carol Livesey is actually Carol Sugden, who is kind of a sweet person. As Maureen becomes aware of Carol Livesey/Sugden, her illusion is shattered, and she returns to full awareness of what she really is: television, a construct both metaphysical and ubiquitous, born from paranoid delusion and scientific experimentation, and grown into a monstrous hypnotic force that controls the world’s billions by distracting them with pointless banality.
Superior people, of course, don’t watch television. At least, that’s the implicit claim. Through his adaptation, Johnston adds a great deal of vivid interpretive imagery to Moore’s original story. At one point we see a red-blooded young couple break up. As they watch television together, the young man becomes too involved with the images on the screen to pay attention to the young woman. As she leaves, he reaches into his pants and satisfies himself while his eyes remain fixated on the screen. Like that actually happens!
The scorn Moore seems to feel for those who actually watch television is exaggerated by Johnston’s adaptation. It is important to any society for its finest minds to critique its central modes of communicating, and you can read very good critiques of television. The best is Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), or if you want to go straight to the source, read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It is another thing entirely to heap derision and contempt on your fellow human beings, under the presumption that you know what goes on in their minds when they put their televisions on.
While there are many virtues to the ancient traditions of magic, shared by every human culture this earth has seen, magical thinking is also flawed. Magic can be quite powerful, but it can also be a cruel trickster. One of the cruelest of its tricks is convincing people that they can and should attempt to obtain power over others. Moore seems to credit television with this kind of magical power, but in the real world, television is not a metaphysical entity with purpose. It is material, and dependent on any number of material and economic forces. It’s dependent on investors, advertisers, creative geniuses, and bureaucrats. It’s dependent on the ongoing availability of a relatively inexpensive power source, and above all, it’s dependent on people choosing to watch it. From everything I hear the numbers of those choosing to watch it are steadily dropping.
Another review of Light of Thy Countenance might choose to ignore how boring and insufferable it is, and focus on the art. Felipe Massafera’s high-quality photo-realistic pages, similar in look and style to Alex Ross’s award-winning work, is terrific and complements television’s slow self-examination in a number of interesting ways. The book’s imagery also serves to amplify the religious and historical overtones of Moore’s original piece. But the art won’t strike you as special unless you read the words, and that is not something I can recommend.
Visual poetry, Reviewed by Arcadio Bolaños on June 13, 2011.
- Poetry should always awake something in us. Reading a poem could cause many reactions, but indifference should never be one of them. Alan Moore’s Light of thy Countenance is not a comic book per se. After all, comic books (just like films) are narrative. Visual and sequential narrative but narrative nonetheless.
Light of thy Countenance is more akin to poetry than anything else. Originally written as a text about television it was "a freestyle beat poem, a damning essay and historical treatise all in one, condemning both the bland, commercial and hypocritical disgrace that has usurped the medium’s potential, and the sheep who accept such dross without criticism"; years later Anthony Johnston in collaboration with Moore turned that into a comic script; and artist Felipe Massafera accepted the challenge of putting all these crazy ideas and notions into images of incomparable beauty.
Television is something we all take for granted. We never seem to think about what it actually means. Do we trust blindly on mass media? News networks and public share the same opinions about everything? Could we survive without TV ads, without publicity? How many hours do we spend each day, month or year watching TV? As the narrator of this graphic novel announces, had it been a god, Television would have amassed more devotion than any deity one could think of.
Obviously this isn’t a simple criticism on consumer’s behavior. After all, we watch TV (even Alan Moore does) but with different criteria. Whereas television is mind-numbing entertainment for some, for others it’s simply a fun and relaxing alternative to spend time. One thing should remain clear, though. Television deserves to be analyzed as a cultural manifestation.
When Socrates compared the polis with a sleeping horse, he assumed the role of a gadfly. He was ready to sting the horse, id est, to force people to wake up and think. And he lived in a city in which philosophy was one of the most preeminent occupations. We no longer live as he did in Ancient Greece. In a world in which philosophy is now devoid of all purpose, what can we expect of society? The horse was asleep in 400BC, today perhaps it is already rotting, beyond all salvation.
That is why I consider important that someone like Moore takes the time to rethink the basic aspects of television. Light of thy Countenance won’t please many readers, but it is something different and unique. And because of that it gets my undivided attention. Hopefully, it will get yours too
The "glass teat" speaks… Reviewed by Babytoxie on November 15, 2009.
- The summaries I’ve read for Alan Moore’s LIGHT OF THY COUNTENANCE, and even the back cover of the book, make it sound as if the entirety of the story focuses on a character named Maureen Cooper. Well, that’s certainly not the case. Many authors have tackled the question of what gods make up our modern pantheons. From Harlan Ellison to Neil Gaiman, it’s a subject that seems to fascinate writers just as much as readers. LIGHT OF THY COUNTENANCE is one of the better examples I’ve read of this particular subgenre, in which we are treated to a monologue from the great god Television, and "Maureen Cooper" is only one facet of it.
Originally a prose piece written for an anthology, LIGHT OF THY COUNTENANCE has here been adapted as a 48-page comic by writer Antony Johnston and artist Felipe Massafera. Seeing the price, you may wonder why you should pay so much for a comic. Well, for one thing, it’s dense – this is not a book you’ll finish in 5 minutes, and if you do, you’re certainly not focusing on what Moore is saying. We follow Television’s own account of its birth, evolution, power, and place in our lives, culminating in a beautiful yet unsettling 2001-esque moment that leaves just as many questions as the conclusion of that classic film.
While this story was not originally intended for a comic format, Johnston does a solid job of adapting it to the medium. The same can be said of Massafera’s beautiful painted art, which resembles the early work of Alex Ross. Those readers who follow Moore primarily for his superhero work may be in for a disappointment, but if you have marveled at From Hell, Voice of the Fire, or Alan Moore’s Songbook, LIGHT OF THY COUNTENANCE is a worthwhile purchase.
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Light of Thy Countenance: The Magic of Television — http://novafile.com/flx06ftykqvn
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