PROMETHEA
Alan Moore, J.H.Williams III, Mick Gray, Todd Klein, Jeromy Cox
America's Best Comics
What if stories could walk the Earth?
Promethea is the tale of Sophie Bangs, a quiet college student with a trampy mother and a sarcastic best friend. In the course of writing a college paper on Promethea, a fictional character that had appeared and reappeared throughout history in different guises, Sophie discovers that Promethea is very real. Sophie learns that Promethea can be brought into the real world through the act of telling her story�but that she needs a human host to make it work.
Cue legions of demons, trying to stop Sophie from becoming the new Promethea, while the last surviving host tries to enlist the aid of all the Prometheas that have gone before. Throw in a multiple personality mayor (whose psyche is so fractured, even his personality facets have their own problems), a science-fiction New York, with flying cars and floating billboards (with comicbook advertisements - how fictional is that?), and a team of white-collar adventurers who are really just Five Swell Guys, and you have the first chapter in the story of Promethea.
While the comic has a lot of the trappings that one would normally associate with superhero books - secret origins, special powers, nefarious villains, corsets, and so on - Promethea is really about other, more enlightened things.
The first story explores the history of the character, through the eyes of Promethea's various incarnations. Each is brought into the world through different media, and in vastly different forms, from the elfin handmaiden borne out of a poet's pen to the whimsical comicbook character/writer with a "magic wand" for her special agent boyfriend.
Sophie learns that Promethea was once a real little girl, whose father, a magician, sent her into the land of stories to escape Christian zealots. She also learns that Promethea was sent to bring about the end of the world.
The second arc is also an odyssey of sorts. Barbara, the previous (and now entirely deceased) Promethea, takes Sophie on a journey through the higher spheres, ostensibly in search of her dead husband.
I say "ostensibly:" neither of these stories are entirely about secret histories or dead writers, so much as they are about stories themselves, and where stories come from.
Odyssey really is the best word for this book. Moore takes us on a journey through what he has referred to as "ideaspace:" that shared superconsciousness from whence we draw our inspiration. Because Moore is a magician and a storyteller, ideaspace - the higher spheres, heaven, whatever - takes the form of rolling magical landscapes, loaded with meaning upon meaning. Tarot symbolism side-by-side with Hebrew law. Mercury and the Messiah.
Moore's use of language, from the most cringe-worthy pun to the grandest stanza, supersedes any and every comicbook on the market today. Promethea is a magical primer one minute, and a philosophical and philological text the next. Wonderfully paced, it moves from the meandering to the dashing, covering more intellectual ground than half a college library. And let's not understate it: I'm a (former) man of science: I don't believe in
magic. But if I did, I would want it to be like this.
And it's funny, too: light-hearted, even. For someone who's supposed to bring about the Apocalypse, Promethea has a wicked sense of humour.
Moore explores a lot of different concepts in Promethea, including the significance of the male and female aspects of the universe. In one truly touching chapter, Promethea is taught the secrets of male and female magic by an elderly mage, the acerbic Jack Faust. Basically, it's an issue-long sex scene.
And nobody writes comicbook sex like Alan Moore. The sexual act is symbolic - as it should be when a picture of a living story engages in a representation of an act of carnality with a picture of a dirty old magician - of so much more than the coming together (ahem) of one man and one woman. In many ways, as the characters themselves note, it symbolises all men coming together with all women, throughout time. And it's beautiful.
I don't know exactly what Alan Moore is releasing with this book: a lifetime's worth of pent-up ideas, a new comics paradigm (in fact, Moore speaks directly to the reader, in no uncertain terms, on more than one occasion), or even just the thought that people's supposedly important philosophical differences are made both irrelevant and even more meaningful by saying that, yes, whether they are really real or just storybook real, these ideas all stem from the same grand source. Either way, Promethea is probably the single best new comicbook of the last ten years.
It's certainly the most beautiful. J.H. Williams, Mick Gray and Jeromy Cox provide the acme of artwork. Even when depicting the "real" world, the pages exhibit a stunning depth of field, and a mastercraftsman-like attention to detail. Williams, Grey et al. play with the page layout as often as not, giving the comic an aesthetic freshness that even the better of the more traditional books lack.
And play is right: one notable sequence sees the characters walking around a Moebius strip as if it were Finchley High Street. This had a peculiar effect on the narrative, as well as this reader. I'm still a bit dizzy today.
These experiments are always successful, which just goes to show you how good the individual players are. The grandest experiment took place in issue 12, which was conceived as a looping narrative - once you got to the end of the comic, you were back at the beginning again, and so on. Absolutely perfect in it's conception and execution, it remains one of my favourite comics of all time.
Williams, Gray et al. draw on so many artistic influences in this book - far more, unfortunately, than I am able to name. The colours are rich and vibrant, without becoming brash. The figures are perfect, and the sense of wonder overwhelming.
Promethea is a visually stunning book which can be read on as many levels as you feel you need: as a straight adventure book; as a meandering journey through the imagination; as a philosophical and magical primer; or as the happiest, most hope-filled book this side of The Little Book of Calm.
However you read it, make sure that you do, for Promethea is probably the richest, smartest, most worthwhile comicbook this writer has ever read. It's funny. Intellectually, it takes you places that you might otherwise pass by. It makes the world a better place.
In short, it's magic.
Review text (C) Matthew Craig
Originally published in the pop culture magazine Robot Fist