What is a pick of the week?

Is it your favorite release of the week? The most memorable? The most 'entertaining'? The best value for your money?

For myself, I can't say. To be honest, I never thought about it that much, until now.

Why now?

Because this week I've chosen Neonomicon #2, by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows, which is one of the most horrific works of fiction I've ever experienced. Indeed, one of the most horrific works of art, period, up there with, say, Hieronymus Bosch paintings or European free jazz.

So it's a bit awkward for me to just say, "Yes, that one was my favorite." Because I'm saying something much different by picking this than I do when I pick, say, a great issue of a Batman series.

For those who haven't been reading, we basically have a pair of police detectives who are investigating a series of murders. It leads them to a kind of Cthulhu-obsessed secret society ("H.P. Lovecraft Trekkies", their Sergeant suggests). The two officers pose as a married couple and go to a shop (in Salem, Massachusetts) they believe is a front for the group's activities. They talk the lingo to the shop keeper (including a well-timed "Cthulhu Fhtagn R'lyeh"), and he invites them to some kind of 'event' that night.

It turns out that the event is essentially an orgy meant to summon a demon. Well, after they've arrived (and stripped), they get nervous, the other members get suspicious, and the male gets shot and killed. As his body is being dragged away by the cultists, we hear one of them suggesting necrophilia.

Then the female officer gets a gun put to her head and is forced to participate in a variety of sexual acts. She protests, but to no avail. She's removed not only all her clothing, but her contact lenses as well, and we get some very creepy blurry panels from her point of view. Ultimately, the demon appears. The final panel (the cliffhanger, I suppose) is her first glimpse of this creature's eyes.

All this is graphically rendered in a realistic style by Jacen Burrows. The coloring (by 'Juanmar') gives everything an eerie glow.

Lovecraft wrote that when Cthulhu returned we would see "men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom." Moore and Burrows, I assume, are showing us the first stages of this process.

And, as I say, it's all utterly horrific. But this is, after all, a horror comic. It is clearly not meant to arouse or titillate, but to disturb. And in that, it succeeds - more, I think, than any other comic I read this week succeeds in its (very different) aims.

Alan Moore has reached that point that so many great artists reach, where one always wants to say of their work, "It's not as good as his old stuff, but it's still better than most of the other stuff coming out." Indeed it is. And this Wednesday, it was better than anything else on my pull list.

POTW.