I Really Should Read This 12: Promethea 20th Anniversary Edition Book One, by Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III

Promethea 20th Anniversary Edition Book One, by Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III

1999

I read a few issues of Promethea as it came out, and frankly, I didn't get it. The setting was good, the art was interesting, but I didn't get it. Of Moore's ABC line at the time, I read a bunch of issues of Tom Strong, the first two series of League of Extraordinary Gentleman and a handful of Top Ten issues, but I think I only read two issues of Promethea before passing it over. In the past few years, Moore acolytes have said, "No, that was the good one," making sure I knew I had made a grave error in passing it over. After reading the first twelve issues collected... they were right.

Oh, it's Vertigo, is it?

First of all, a big F-U to DC for slapping their logo on this. It's their legal right, but it's gross, really gross. I have to imagine someone in the department putting this together knew how gross it was, but they rationalized that if it wasn't them, someone else would do it. DC is a gross company that has only gotten grosser under the ownership of AT&T. 

Let's have a drink of water to clean my palette.

That's better

1999 was a special time. I think a lot of folks living in the West will remember it as a peaceful time, an exciting time. It was the verge of the new millennium, and it really felt like the cusp of something. This has nothing to do with the reality of many people's lives, it has to do with being in that quiet lull between the Cold War and The War on Terror, when tech stocks were diverse and Google/Amazon/Facebook hadn't made the Internet the tiring corporate landscape it is today. There was a lot of hope that the world was on the right track. When I open Promethea and see Moore state in every issue, New York, 1999, but always over a sci-fi technopolis landscape, it makes me nostalgic for the world that was in my head back then.

New York, 1999

It's hard to do an elevator pitch for this book, but to summarize: Promethea is a character of myth who lives in the Immateria and sometimes takes on form through mortals who conjure her through creativity. The Immateria is the reality of what is imagined, the other side of the coin to the physical reality we live in. People throughout history have channeled Promethea through writing, comics, poetry or other creative acts. In the world of the book, there are no super heroes, but there are science heroes, and she is labeled a super heroine. As of the twelve issues in this first book, she does some superheroing, but it is not a villain of the month book. Most of the stories about what reality and life is.

This book is complicated. It's overflowing with ideas about humanity, mythology, magic, sexuality and imagination, and lots more stuff that I would have had to be taking notes to keep track of. Many issues tackle big themes. I was particularly taken with issues 10, which portrays a sort of tantric sex experience and explores the meaning of male, female, form and energy. This is a deep, mature consideration of human experience, on par with Moore's Swamp Thing 34, where Abby sees the patterns of life after eating the fruit of Swamp Thing. It was an ambitious and beautiful story. From there, Moore caps the volume with a history of reality and life's place in it in issue 12. He describes Adam and Eve as the self-replicating ameba, with the snake in the garden as the DNA that made sex and death part of life. He describes the arc of (Western) society, and does it all through rhyming couplets for 20 pages. While he does this, he creates anagrams of the name Promethea that comment on the poems, rendered as Scrabble tiles (as an example, for the DNA, Me Atop Her). It is all a bit too much, and I mean that in a good way. This description only scratches the surface of the issue, there are Tarot cards and Alastair Crowley in it too.

I just need some fresh air to process it all. 

The Immateria is a place where dandelions become baseballs

The art is up to the task. J.H. Williams is a gifted renderer, who can channel Alphonse Mucha in his page design, and I don't know who in his art. I want to say Kevin Nowlan, just from the way almost everything is given a harsh dramatic shadow. There are a lot more artists working in a similar style today, but his work doesn't remind me of anything I was looking at in the 90s. The book is almost entirely double page spreads, and for the most part, readable. A few times I didn't intuitively know if the panels read left-right or up-down, but it was a very small amount for the number of spreads in the book. 

Williams is able to imitate other styles here and there as the story calls for it (I enjoyed a Windsor McKay homage character who pops up a few times). The only criticism, and this is a slight one: I wanted him to restrain himself more.

It's a great page, but he didn't really need to make the panel borders be the floor layout of the hospital

Throughout the book, Promethea interacts with the Immateria, which is the reality of imagination, as opposed to the reality of the physical form we live in. Our world is slow to shift, the Immateria shifts quickly. When the layouts of the Immateria overwhelm the comic layout, it thematically makes a lot of sense. When Promethea appears in the our world and is a being of magic and imagination, again, it makes a lot of sense that the comic page breaks away into design. When Promethea isn't there and we're only seeing our world, Williams is still pushing his layouts. I don't think he can turn it off.

That is a minor thing in the big picture of this dense, heavy book. I haven't even wrote about the notable discussion about sexuality Moore is having throughout the book (it's repeatedly noted that Promethea is gorgeous as she is a character made from human imagination, but there is a lot of sex-shaming done as well, done deliberately in contrast to Moore's feelings I think), or the use of popular culture, like the in book character Weeping Gorilla, which by Promethea's rules becomes a form of reality. Moore also gets into magics, and I try to follow, but I can't get it all.

...said Moore in 1999

I ordered the other two books, I'm excited to read them. And I know this will all get a reread in the future, and possibly a Google dive into others' writing on the series, since I suspect better people than me have analyzed this series to bits.