This is an essay by Moore which has been adapted as a graphic novel, beautifully illustrated by Felipe Massafera.

Moore's point is that television is our new God. It's omnipresent. we devote four hours a day to it on average. After prolonged exposure, we cue our relationships, our emotions, our sexual fantasies from it. We distance ourselves from our loved ones to watch it. It's often the first voice we hear when we're born, and the last when we die.

Other writers have explored this theme before, and have lamented TV's disproportionate role in our lives. Some may the style Moore uses here (it's the style he uses in his spoken word pieces) pompous. Some may find his poetic language pretentious. But what Alan Moore does well is juxtapose ideas. He expresses abstract ideas through commonplace images. He makes artful segues.

He uses his strengths well here, but he's leading us down a pretty well-traveled road. ( )

Although Alan Moore's principal fame is as a writer of comic books, he wrote Light of Thy Countenance as a straight prose piece, and I can't help but wonder if it wouldn't be more effective that way. It's not that I have any objections to the general pacing and structure of the adaptation by Antony Johnston, and the fully-painted illustrations by Felipe Massafera are all wonderful in their way. But the words of Moore's "story" are so powerful and still so challenging to digest, I'm afraid that the other elements of this comic book repackaging might distract from the text more than amplify it.

I put "story" in scare quotes, because the narrative element is rather slight, even though much of the text is built around a chronology. The genre here is actually that of an oracle: the thoughts of a god reduced to human language. And the god is the transcendent self-consciousness of Television, regarding with sublime contempt the human psyches that it exploits and impoverishes. "I am the silence of the will," it declares. "I am the last voice you will ever hear."

Even Cronenberg's film Videodrome couldn't make TV as creepy as this Light does. There's nothing supernatural or counterfactual in Moore's treatment. It's just a brutal confrontation with the global and individual consequences of the mass psychological experiment cum global cult called commercial television. All that makes it fiction is giving the phenomenon an honest single voice.

This is actually a short story written by Alan Moore that I read a long time ago in story format and totally loved. I think the graphic novel has ALL the text of the short story but it's broken up over a bunch of pages with images. It's really just a rambling diatribe against the evil god known as television (though it is the god himself that is doing the talking).

Moore (as anyone that's read his stuff knows) is a genius. I can't count the number of lines in this story that made me say out loud - "BRILLIANT!", "AMAZING!" etc....

Very cool, highly recommended in either format. ( )