Comic Review: Promethea Definitive Edition

Promethea

America’s Best Comics

Writer: Alan Moore

Art: J.H.Williams III, Mick Gray, Jeremy Cox, José Villarrubia, Todd Klein

It was during a warm Saturday in Brazil, about two years ago, when I first came across the face of Promethea. I took a quick glimpse at the cover, it was nice and colorful, filled with various elements of the story. Honestly, I didn’t give it too much importance. The art was beautiful, but something didn’t click,  i didn’t really care to know more about it. Blessed were the vendors at my LCB (shout out to Derek and Jhonny!) that drew my attention to it. I was a regular at the place so they knew what kind of titles I was interested in. First, they pointed out something they knew for sure, was going to pick up my interest: “writer: Alan Moore”. I was then given a quick and passionate summary about the contents of the title and was convinced, then and there, I had to read it.

The story of Promethea follows a college girl, Sophie Bangs, in the sci-fi New York of the year 1999 A.D.. Sophie had decided to write her term paper on a character named Promethea who keeps turning up on all kinds of media from many different times. From 18th century poems to comic books. Bangs figured she should interview Barbara Shelley, the wife of the last author of a Promethea comic book in order to complement her work. Barbara agreed to do the interview but is very dismissive about everything Sophie tries to bring up as peculiar and ends up just sending the girl home without anything to add. On her way home, Sophie is jumped by a shadowy lean creature. However, in the middle of the fall to her death, Sophie gets saved by none other than Promethea herself! The heroine is injured while fighting the creature, which she says is called “a smee”. Turns out that Promethea was Barbara Shelley and now she’s heavily injured and in risk of dying. So Shelley convinces Sophie that it’s her turn to steer Promethea to help others and that’s how we close the first issue.

It may seem, from the last paragraph that I was inconsiderate to the new reader about spoilers but trust me when I say that barely scratched the surface of the content one can find in the whole of the thirty-two issues of Promethea. As much as I like Watchmen and all the many other Moore masterpieces, I love this title on a deeply personal level. Not only because of how I happened to stumble upon it just as I was finding interest in mystic texts and history but because I feel that Promethea was a personal work for Moore himself. You see, in Watchmen and V for Vendetta, which are easily the ones I’ve read and re-read the most of Moore’s comics, we get to see the Mad Wizards’ political view on Britain, on the U.S.A., on superheroes and whatnot. Still, we don’t get to see the Mad Wizard as a wizard. Promethea is the comic in which Moore lets all of his mystic knowledge and beliefs out in a damn finely structured manner, that is to say, he devised the plot of the comic’s chapters and its narrative in order to best represent complex magical system like the Tarot deck of cards and the tree of life from the Kabbalah.

I could write about the double of what I have already about the artwork in this comic. Not only J.H. Williams’s line art is amazing by itself but the final arts by Mick Gray and the colors by Vilarrubia show an enormous range of ability to go with the tremendous magical elements that Moore opted for describing in detail. Yet, what I love the most about it is the page composition, easily.

Promethea not only defies storytelling on the way it was written but the panels in this title are insane! They reflect how the situations shown to take place in time even when time shouldn’t make sense. The most memorable one, in my opinion, is what I call the Infinity Page. Barbara and Sophie, traveling through an astral plane of sorts, realize they’ve been walking in a loop and start to hear each other voices. It’s a pretty cool concept on its own but Williams took up a full double-page panel to show the characters walking in an Infinity Helix. Want more? As long as you follow the loop the dialogue makes sense in every direction. I can’t even begin to explain how amazed and even more in love, I was when I reached this page.

The magical elements in Promethea are, as I mentioned before, what I believe to be Moore writing wholeheartedly about the systems he liked to study and practice the most while discovering magick and becoming The Mad Wizard we all know today. I guess what impressed me the most about it is the way he managed to tightly weave detailed elements of these ancient and complex systems into the plot. He could have settled by stating learning magick was part of Sophie’s journey as the new Promethea, and, sure, this is how he brings out most of the elements. Still, the story flows naturally into it in the weirdest of manners. I know the last statement seems contradictory, but this is just how good Moore was while making this comic. He uses elements of the story which lead to magical elements which lead to incredibly detailed explanations about fundamental truths and back again to futuristic New York. Needless to say, it is one hell of a ride whenever this kind of thing happens (which is most of the comic, thankfully).

Another aspect I think is worth mentioning is the world-building we get in Promethea. It’s easy to talk about the magical elements since its the book’s main focus, but I believe the massive world-building the creators added to this title takes great importance, not only for immersion purposes but also for the impact it causes at the end of the story. Moore and Williams created a dense city for the highly futuristic New York we get. The city has its defined locations such as bars and buildings that are pertinent to the plot. The city has its own superhero team, named The Five Swell Guys, as well as its own plethora of weird futuristic supervillains ranging from evil corporate wizards to rebellious murderous androids that look like clowns. We also get a few snippets of a recurrent radio news broadcast that lets us know how other elements of the world are evolving while we’re not following.

I could go on and on about this comic for as long as I breathe. Unfortunately, there’s nothing quite like reading it first hand. Give it a try. The lettering and pages can be a bit intimidating at first, but that is so with most of Moore’s comics and they’re all worth the effort. This one especially, in my opinion, because not only you’re on a wild ride through a series of philosophical reflections from one of the greatest minds of our time, you’re in it along with pristine and immersive artwork, revolutionary storytelling and straight up just an amazing work of art. So.. yeah… I hope this comic sparks the love in you as it has done in myself because, I, for one, cannot get enough of Promethea.