I Really Should Read This 21: Promethea 20th Anniversary Edition Book Two, by Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III

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

2001-2003, 20th Anniversary Edition published in 2019

When Promethea was first coming out, I thought I understood what it was about in the two or three issues I read before dropping off. The other comics series writer Alan Moore helmed with his America's Best Comics line, like Tom Strong and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, had a decidedly pulp tone, and as modern as they felt, they had a foot set in the history of comics and media. I figured Promethea was a Wonder Woman analogue that would allow Moore to explore her mythos as Supreme let him look at Superman. I was completely wrong.

I'm not going to rant about it, but that DC logo on an ABC book is gross

Promethea is Promethea. And I still don't know exactly what that is, but it's barely even a story in this volume, the second of three. It follows a few subplots, but the majority of the book does not function as a story in a traditional sense of the word. It's a series of dialogues on a theme.

So this is not so much a super-hero book except in it's overall look and shape

Promethea is a legendary character that gains form in the material world, AKA our reality, by channeling her creatively. The first volume of the series had the current Promethea, Sophie Bangs, learning about the Immateria, the realm that exists parallel to ours and is based in the power of ideas. The more humanity thinks of something, the more it exists in the Immateria.

In this volume, Sophie follows the previous Promethea into the afterlife and explores the different realms of existence.

The spheres of the universe are mapped out like the London Underground

Moore is famously a magician, and has a non-traditional philosophy about how the universe is. How directly the mythology of Promethea parallels his own personal view of the universe, I can't say, but I suspect they are roughly the same. He describes the universe as levels of spheres that are connected to each other. Each embody principles and fundamentals of (human) existence, and the gods humanity has created reside there too.

Promethea and Promethea visit a new sphere

Sophie travels through realms of emotion, of anger and passion, of fatherhood and motherhood, and ultimately God, and not the bearded Christian one. Things happen to the characters as they travel through, but it's hard to see it as a story, as there isn't a real goal or conflict. Rather, it is a kind of exploration of what existence is. 

The thing it reminded me of most was reading the dialogues of Plato when I was a young man absorbing the classics. He wrote dialogues which seem like a story, but are much more of an information dump. That type of writing has been common in philosophical writing throughout history, (I recall reading Chinese philosophy that explained things using a similar device, as well as Piet Mondrian's book explaining De Stijl). Maybe some writers still use that idea today, but I've checked out on that form of text so I can't say. Moore has one up on those writers though: J.H. Williams III.

Williams draws an issue in high contrast to show what inner fire is about

Williams is a lover of art, and channels all sorts of art traditions through history to bring feeling and experience to Moore's writing. To name drop a few, he does pastiches of Alphonse Mucha, Vincent Van Gogh, and Renaissance Christian art in different places. Other places, he simply draw upon his ample ambition and talent to bring the book to life.

While most of the book is done in conversations, even that falls away at points

I've long had a preference for comics where the writer and artist were one. I prefer when a book is one person's voice, but Promethea really puts that to the test. Neither Moore nor Williams would be capable of this book by themselves, and this is truly an idiosyncratic vision. It's amazing.

The reason I picked this up was because I had head some folks say this was arguably Moore's best work, and yeah, it's like some of those really out there issues of Swamp Thing he did blown up to a three book set.

I was most of the way through the book when I realized the title pages were mapping the spheres for us as we went along. Lots of thought in every aspect of this book

That said, I could completely understand if someone didn't enjoy this book. This second book is a description of the universe with only the lightest sprinkles of story layered on. It's not what someone signs up for when they buy a monthly comic book.

God

In stark contrast to the book I reviewed yesterday, Sick, I mostly share the principles that Moore gets into here. He makes a point to dismantle popular Western concepts of God, good, and evil. God is not an active player, but the universe itself, with the universe a manifestation of God, more or less. Evil is not a thing to fight, but an idea within you to understand.  It's a fusion of ideas from different religions and philosophies, and it's a soothing world view. Certainly it doesn't ask us to worry about Hell and eternal suffering. 

I've now read two thirds of Promethea, and have one book left. I have no clue where it's going, but I suspect I'm going to like it.

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.

I Really Should Read This 2: From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

1999, new color version 2020

This was a slow read for me, about a chapter a week for the past three months. Now that I've read the Eisner and Angeloume award winning book? It's good, but I don't exactly know what it was about in places. I feel a little like when I was reading literature for the first time in high school, needing to have the significance explained to me. The second half, when I had a better handle on the cast of characters, was a lot smoother to read though, and the appendix about the industry that Jack the Ripper has created was pretty interesting too.

It's a weird thing, to read a book about the Jack the Ripper murders, hypothesizing the method and motives, and then mix some witchcraft and magic into it. I know Moore is a believer in magic, but it's just a form of science fiction to me. It firmly makes this book a form of fiction, but he's gone to great lengths to base the story in known facts. Very weird stuff.

But it was good, it was compelling, and in places stomach churning. I probably will read it again in five or ten years.