By Edward Saul

Excitement abounds for we enthusiasts of Alan Moore, HP Lovecraft and Weird Fiction, as the crashing denouement to Providence looms overhead. Considering that the exact release date for Providence #11, let alone #12, is aptly unknowable, now is the prime time for speculation. Such speculation should not, of course, be limited merely to theorizing on what happens next, but could also stretch to the overall motives and meanings behind the series, and how that might predict what happens next.

This can be logical and precise, based on the evidence presented; those of us eagle-eyed readers, for instance, had by the release issue #3 or #4 realized that Prof. Alvarez’s comparison of Robert Black with that other Herald reporter who found Dr. Livingstone was subtly foreshadowing Black’s inevitable encounter with Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Equally, it is also possible that such theories become outlandish, echoing the excesses of 9/11 truthers in their drawing together of thick black lines between distant, disparate dots. Or, rarely, there might be a happy medium between the two.

I put it to you, fellow readers: Providence isn’t just about Lovecraft, his fiction, its meanings and its impact. It’s also a riposte to True Detective Season 1.

Stay with me here.

My curiosity about the subject was piqued by an observation on Bleeding Cool, the news-aggregate website run by comics enthusiast Rich Johnston and paid-for by Avatar Press, publisher of Providence, following the broadcast of the final chapter in True Detective S1. It was pointed out that the final conversation between the two titular detectives, Cohle and Hart, echoes that used in an issue of Top 10, Moore’s series with Gene Ha and Zander Cannon, which originally takes place between a middle-aged space adventurer and a cosmic chess piece fused in a teleportation accident.

When Providence began, I did not think much further—until this very website alerted me to the existence of the series’ ‘Weird Pulp’ variants. If you’re not aware, a popular plot element of True Detective as it was broadcast was its passing mentions of Chambers’ King in Yellow—and the variant for issue #1 of the series clearly shows the titular monarch, standing silently over a host of those driven mad by the fictional play named for him. This visual connection—in concert with the frequent mentions of Chambers and his work in that first issue—gave me the idea that series creator Nic Pizzolato might have cribbed more from, er, Moore. My first google-search to that effect yielded a result that hardly argued in his favour: a candid admission that he has long been a fan of Moore, whose work (and Grant Morrison’s) taught him the storytelling method.

When you examine the visual motifs of the series, the parallels with The Courtyard and Neonomicon do stand out. In both works, we have otherworldly themes being explored in very humdrum, domestic settings. In both, we have the same provincial ‘simple folk’ of whose lives Lovecraft wrote perpetrating atrocities. Aldo Sax in The Courtyard, like Rust Cohle in the flashback storyline of True Detective, is a skinny figure with a shaven head; when we see him again in Neonomicon, it is when two other investigators have come to listen to his unintelligible ramblings, Burrows’ panel work practically storyboarding the camera angles for that same scenario unfolding in the present-day storyline of True Detective. After his encounter with Johnny Carcosa, Sax carves a swastika on his forehead; the Carcosa cultists that are revealed in the TV series are not shy in adorning their bodies with fill-foots.