oc book review -- Promethea volumes 1-5

[Promethea a la Eisner: thecreatorhd]

I think I first encountered Alan Moore in my older brother's comic collection. He was not super into horror – he didn't collect EC or any of those publishers, if we even had access to those in rural Kentucky during the early 1980s – but he had Moore's run on Swamp Thing. A friend of mine, my age but with more disposable income than I had, got a hold of Watchmen and V for Vendetta through DC, and Miracleman, probably through mail-order. Only Watchmen made much of an impression on me at the age of thirteen or fourteen, and even that was mostly over my head. At that point I didn't quite get that thing Moore does where the dialogue, the plot, and the images don't match up literally, but on some other metaphorical level. I wasn't quite ripe for it, I guess. When I re-read Watchmen in college I loved it.   

Not content to continue working for other people, Moore started his own line, America's Best Comics. Promethea is the second title of the line I've read (after The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and while LoEG does that Moore thing, Promethea doesn't. There is sarcasm in the way characters speak to one another, and there are visual jokes and Easter Eggs, but even with the TEXTure news commentary, there's very little conflict between messages. The effect is much more like a Socratic dialogue, or Dante's Divine Comedy, or maybe John Myers Myers's Silverlock. It's like the ideas Moore is trying to deal with are complicated enough that he doesn't need to add any extra complexity.

My wife has often asked why my son and I prefer card games that seem needlessly complex to her, as compared to Monopoly or Sorry. For us, the complexity is the very thing that makes them interesting. I know many RPG players who take it even further, who want their games “crunchy,” partly for the purposes of accuracy and precision in simulation, but partly because it allows them to show off their memory capacity and mathematical ability.   

Those ideas that Moore is playing with? Essentially the entirety of Western mythology. Generations of comic writers from Siegel & Schuster to Stan Lee to Neil Gaiman have referred to mythological traditions. Chris Claremont sent the X-Men to Dante's Inferno. Marv Wolfman & George Perez did a mythological take on Wonder Woman. Bill Willingham brought fairy tales into their own New York ghetto in Fables. Even the Runaways comic in my first review today used Biblical monsters. These were mostly piecemeal elements designed to lend some mythological heft to standard superhero stories (The Maxx being one of my favorite exceptions). Promethea does not simply refer to mystical traditions; it maps them, explains them, and draws parallels to modern science. It's almost lecture-ish at points, despite the nudity, the cursing, and the jokes. If the art by J.H. Williams and Mick Gray weren't so adventurous, conceptually, it would get bogged down.   

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I really enjoyed the PBS documentary Superheroes: the Neverending Battle, which interviewed a lot more comic artists than comic writers. In episode 2 there's a great conversation with Jim Steranko, who was famous in the 1960s for experimenting with the form of visual storytelling, in terms of the flow of information on the page. Promethea uses basically every visual technique Moore has ever read in any comic ever, aside from visual illusions and 3d. It's pretty awesome. There are also tons of homage to different eras of comics history and different comic subgenres, from pulps to romance.   

I won't go into the characters or the plot, except to say that college student Sophia Bangs is possessed by a spirit who's kind of like Wonder Woman, if Charles Moulton Marston had been writing now, during our era of Vegas-style sexuality, instead of during the more repressive 1930s. There's some attempt to represent the full range of human sexual behaviors, is what I'm saying, whether they are inspirational or not. This will be upsetting to some people.   

I do have some quibbles with the series, in terms of scientific accuracy and in terms of linguistic chauvinism. As far as Promethea is concerned, language IS thought. 

"Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious."          -Alan Moore

Pretty much any student of Buddhism knows that language as often as not gets in the way of deep understanding. But these are minor things. The five volumes of Promethea are a major artistic achievement, and I recommend them enthusiastically.

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I also recommend this talk on the links between science fiction literature and the modern "hyper-real" pagan religions, posted by @nenad-ristic, which surprisingly does not mention Promethea.