MYTHCOMICS: THE SANDMAN OVERTURE (2015)

 

Some million years ago, I wrote some essay for THE COMICS JOURNAL which included observations on the conflict between what I then called "altruism vs. selfhood." I'm reminded of that sense of conflict-- the need for community with others versus the need for a conviction of one's own stand-alone importance-- as I read SANDMAN OVERTURE for the first time. This work by SANDMAN creator Neil Gaiman and PROMETHEA artist J.H. Williams III was originally published in six continuing issues in 2015, but I first encountered in a huge, coffee-table reprint replete with essays about all of the creators (even celebrated SANDMAN letterer Todd Klein) and with a supplementary reprint of the six issues' art sans coloring, the better to show off Williams' consummate sense of design.

OVERTURE is in one sense a "continuity catch-up" work, in which an author returns to an earlier concept and reveals things he either left out or hadn't thought of earlier, not unlike H. Rider Haggard's WISDOM'S DAUGHTER, a quasi-revision of SHE. In 1989 Neil Gaiman began the saga of his main character Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming, by showing him weakened by some undisclosed conflict, so that he was captured by a mere human sorcerer. This imprisonment was principally a device by which Gaiman could allow the reader to learn about Morpheus' world once he broke free of his confinement, sought to regain control of his dream-dimension once more, and became acquainted with all the ways his world and others had changed in his absence. The reader thus also was painlessly introduced to the other members of Morpheus' family, who were also incarnations of cosmic principles-- such as Desire and Destiny, who alone play crucial support roles in OVERTURE. 

Within his dream-dimension, Morpheus is supreme, but he is inevitably tied to the community of mortal beings-- both Earth-humans and all other species who dream. This makes for a dichotomy that's less one of "selfhood vs. altruism" that of "solipsism vs. universalism." Morpheus is always conscious of his connectedness to the rest of the cosmos, and yet his persona is aloof and haughty, as of one who's seen it all. OVERTURE gives Gaiman the chance not simply to tie up some loose ends from the original SANDMAN series, but to examine the dichotomy at the heart of his best-known character.

Also, btw: end-of-story SPOILERS.

Very little of Earth, even DC-Earth, is seen in OVERTURE. The original comic series established that Morpheus's sovereignty extended to the dream-worlds of other species, but this is without question The Sandman at his most "cosmic." The first page gives us an alien world inhabited by three species, one of whom is humanoid "who believed that their planet was alone in the universe" (which POV will seem like a form of naive solipsism by the time the epic's over). But it's not any of the humanoids who witness the Death of a Dream-Lord, but an intelligent plant.

We never meet any inhabitants of this planet again, but we see the impact of the death on Morpheus, for the death of the Dream-Lord-- an "aspect" of Morpheus' own identity-- instantly draws him from his familiar haunts to a convocation of a few dozen other Dream-Lords, all deeply concerned that one of their own has died. I actually don't recall the regular comic book giving us anything like this "multiversal Morpheus"-- seen at the center of the two-page spread wearing his finest Wesley Dodds helmet; I thought Morpheus himself just "morphed" into an alien Dream-Lord whenever he encountered an alien. But even at this point in the story it's a better use of multiversality than I got from the MCU series LOKI, so I can roll with it.

What follows is structured less like a whodunnit than a "Meetings with Remarkable Beings." After conferring with his other selves, Morpheus eventually finds his way to an entity called "Glory," possibly in some way related to God. Glory informs Morpheus that a star has gone mad, creating the chaos that not only destroyed the Dead Dream-Lord but also several inhabited worlds. Morpheus more or less tells Glory "that ain't my department," but Glory spurs him on in the quest by saying that the chaos is occurring "because a child lived and a world died, long ago." 

After the conversation with Glory, Morpheus is joined by one of his other Dream-selves, whom for the time being I'll call the Dream-Cat. Morpheus and Dream-Cat consult with the Kindly Ones, a version of the Greek Moirai. And then, as if to give the series just a little more grounding in common humanity, Morpheus and Dream-Cat pick up an orphan girl named Hope, whose cognomen is sort of a "call-forward" to one of Gaiman's first stories for the regular series, issue #4's "A Hope in Hell." 

Morpheus and Dream-Cat undertake other meetings-- with a city of sentient stars, and with both Time and Night, the respective father and mother of Morpheus, but they serve more to illustrate the cosmos in which the Sandman moves than anything else. In essence, Morpheus is no longer seeking to solve a mystery, for he knew as soon as Glory spoke of a "child spared" that he Morpheus was responsible for the chaos of the mad star. The madness was created by a woman on an alien world who, through no fault of her own, was born a "dream-vortex," a concept Gaiman had dealt with in a "later" story in A DOLL'S HOUSE. Morpheus sought out the unnamed woman long before she began to create any chaos, but he declined to act because, as his present-self says, "I thought myself too wise, too noble, too gentle, to murder."

This forbearance, then, is what costs Dream one of his dream-selves and lots of collateral damage to boot. Upon confronting the mad star Fomalhaut, the star subjects Morpheus to the ultimate solipsism, propelling him into a black hole, in which there is "no light, no information, no dreams." Morpheus is only "rescued," if one can call it that, by his conceptual brother Destiny, who pulls Morpheus from the black hole because Destiny's own garden has been invaded by a mysterious ship. Morpheus does not recognize the ship, but he acknowledges Destiny's intuition: that the ship belongs to him. Boarding the ship, Morpheus finds it inhabited by Dream-Cat, a ghost-like version of Hope, and a few thousand alien beings, whose purpose is to erase the chaos of Morpheus's mistake by "re-dreaming" the cosmos into a "new continuity." Morpheus succeeds in getting his "do-over," but he's so exhausted by his efforts that-- wait for it-- he's weak enough to be captured by a mere mortal sorcerer, thus setting the entire continuity of the original comic into motion. Then there's a coda, a little on the confusing side, revealing that "Dream-Cat" never existed, for "he" was Morpheus's sister, the aforementioned Desire, who assumed the masquerade because she knew that he was too self-absorbed to accept help except from a being who seemed to be another version of himself.

OVERTURE is a good metaphysical romp. Both writer and artist deliver a breadth of extraterrestrial manifestations that suggests the prose works of Olaf Stapleton, albeit one tied to a previously established continuity, as much as any other "DC crisis." I don't think a reader not acquainted with the SANDMAN mythology would get a lot out of OVERTURE, though.

A small personal digression: as I was reading the section in which the multiversal Dream-Lords confront Morpheus, for some reason I thought of the encounter between Superboy's dog Krypto and "the Space Canine Patrol Agents" from a few of the goofier issues of SUPERBOY in the sixties. There was no literal resemblance between the depictions of Dream's other selves and Krypto's encounter with other anthropomorphic superhero dogs, and yet, that's where my mind took me-- a little before reading the page in OVERTURE #3 in which Gaiman and William humorously depicts the SCPA as a viable entity. I suppose it's possible that I either saw the OVERTURE page if I flipped through the book-- though I don't think I did-- or that on some occasion I read about the SCPA's appearance in some online essay. Or maybe I just-- dreamed it all?

MYTHCOMICS: PROMETHEA #1-32 (1999=2005)

 

I’ll start off my analysis of PROMETHEA by celebrating the intricate, near-visionary artwork of J.H. Williams III. Of the hundreds of artists who have attempted to depict supernatural realms for the comics-medium, Williams deserves to be counted as one of the five most accomplished such raconteurs.

For the rest of the analysis, though, it’s almost inevitable that I must generally speak of this series as if it sprang unassisted from the fragmented brow of writer/co-creator Alan Moore. And there exist two separate but equally important reasons for viewing Moore as the project’s shaping influence.

On one hand, this series was one of several continuing features released by the Wildstorm (later DC) imprint “America’s Best Comics.” Moore founded the company, conceived most if not all the features, and wrote the majority of the scripts. The imprint ran from 1999 to 2005, concluding more or less with the run of PROMETHEA.

On the other hand, the feature was conceived as a forum upon which Moore could expatiate his views on the subject of the Western tradition of occultism. Allegedly, as the result of Moore’s 1990s research into magical concepts for the FROM HELL graphic novel, the author became fascinated with these mystic disciplines, and proclaimed himself as a “ceremonial magician” in 1993. While it’s hard to assess what Moore might have done with ABC had Wildstorm not sold the imprint to DC Comics, it seems unlikely that PROMETHEA would have continued much beyond its 32-issue run, given that the series’ continuity was clearly designed to come to a definite conclusion. Even if PROMETHEA had enjoyed “X-Men sales” in the direct comics market, an iconoclast like Moore probably would not have prolonged the title once he’d said what he wanted to say.

Now, the mere fact that a given work is produced from a hellacious amount of research into a given subject does not mean that the author will produce from that research a work strong in symbolic discourse. In this essay, I cited a Gardner Fox story in which the author reeled off an assortment of factoids about the properties of minerals, but the story as such did not comprise a cosmological myth. The same principle holds true for this work: Moore could not produce a mythcomic simply by deluging his readers with tons and tons of info about mystic systems like the Tarot and the Kaballah, or about the careers of occultists like John Dee, Austin Osman Spare and the unavoidable Aleister Crowley. Many sections of PROMETHEA feel a bit like school-masterish lectures on occultism, or (perhaps worse) the exultations of a fan desperately asking his audience, “Isn’t all this stuff cool?”

Fortunately, Alan Moore does manage to impose a loose structure on the 32 issues (compared by Moore to the 32 paths of the Tarot). The master thread of the series is Alan Moore’s celebration of all things feminine, using as his focal point an icon of heroic femininity, more or less emulating the example of the Golden Age Wonder Woman. Of course, Promethea was not designed to continue as long as readers were willing to buy the heroine’s adventures. But perhaps more importantly, Moore’s heroine is a vehicle of an adult sexuality impossible to the DC character—and in part, Promethea concerns sex because sex is also a vital part of ceremonial magic, at least in Alan Moore’s interpretation.

Though Promethea’s physical appearance conjures with the Amazing Amazon, her nature is probably closer in essence to that of the Golden Age Captain Marvel. College-student Sophie Bangs is the “Billy Batson” of the series. As the result of her research into a supposedly fictional character who appeared in various 20^th-century media, Sophie finds that she can call upon the archetype of Promethea from an otherworld known as “the Immateria.” Promethea then transforms and takes over Sophie’s mortal body in order to battle the evils of the mortal world. But even though Moore gives Sophie the trappings of a life for a “double identity” heroine—residence in a “great metropolitan city,” a handful of supporting characters—the author’s interest is clearly not focused on righting wrongs on the earthly plane, but on exploring the joys of assorted otherworlds, generally patterned on Tarot and Kaballah formulations.

Moore labors mightily to give his heroine a feminist gravitas. She seems to be an archetype who, before encountering Sophie, has conferred her power on numerous women (and at least one man who had a woman’s nature, so to speak). Moore loosely implies that Promethea may be a mythic reaction against Christian patriarchy, since the writer references the historical figure of Hypatia, a female intellectual murdered by religious fanatics during early Christendom. But at times the feminism angle makes a difficult fit with the exploration of occult traditions, since most of the well-known ceremonial magicians—the aforesaid Dee, Spare, and Crowley—were male. Perhaps to make up for this lack, Moore devotes a subsidiary thread to another of his favorite subjects: that of the intertwining history of fictional creations. Some earlier incarnations of Promethea arose from the archetype merging with mortals like Sophie. Yet it seems that some of the incarnations may have been taken on life in the Immateria because they appeared in fictional narratives, which can range from a pulp-fantasy “barbarian queen” to a gender-flipped version of Windsor McCay’s LITTLE NEMO. (Moore does not really bother to suss out this particular cosmos-building point.)

At any rate, focusing on the role of female characters in fiction helps shore up the feminism theme a bit, though Moore’s main purpose is still the exploration of magical states of being. Being a canny comics-maker, Moore probably realized that he needed to sell PROMETHEA as a superhero comic, and so he dutifully introduced many of the requisite elements—marauding villains like Jellyhead and the Painted Doll, a team of local “science-heroes” roughly modeled on the Doc Savage Crew, and even an occult conspiracy-group, the Temple. Moore even rings in a crossover of sorts, revealing that other ABC heroes exist in Promethea’s world. But Moore does little with all of these elements, because they’re essentially commercial distractions from his main concerns.

Considerable narrative space is consumed as Sophie, accompanied by her preceptor and predecessor Barbara, journeys through the various spheres of the Kaballah in search of Barbara’s husband, though he serves no function in the plot but to provide the two females with a motive to go “sphere-exploring.” As I said, some of Moore’s salutes to Chokmah and Binah and all the rest are a bit pedantic—even for a reader familiar with the topics, as I am—but some of them succeed as rough visual poetry on particular themes, of war, of peace, of emotion and of intellect. One of the myth-images that Moore invokes most frequently is that of the Biblical “Whore of Babylon,” though naturally the author turns the Christian connotations around, so the “whore” is just the other side of the “virgin” coin, and both are seen more as vehicles through which the energy of the Godhead manifests. Indeed, in some vague manner Promethea is also consubstantial with the Great Whore, in that both are supposed to bring the world to an end. Moore attempts to give his heroine this myth-status without delivering anything but an “apocalypse deferred,” which might seem fairly original if the author hadn’t used a similar trope at the end of his SWAMP THING run.

I can appreciate that Moore’s vision of a world liberated by his feminine icon is a pansexual world, wherein the author approves of all things sexy, whether they might be despised by the Right (homosexuals) or the Left (old men sort-of getting in on with sweet young things). On the minus side, it wouldn’t be an Alan Moore production if the author didn’t take some gratuitous swipes at other authors. In issue #6 the Promethea with the “barbarian queen” persona takes on an equally fictional wizard who is the conglomeration of all the bad writers who wrote the heroine’s adventures. I’m not sure why Moore thought a jihad against pulp writers was necessary, especially since one of the writer’s attacks is unfounded. (Sorry, Alan, it’s correct to describe a breast as “heaving;” breasts, like chests, heave when the owner is stressed or excited.) And if anyone is unable to cast stones at bad writing, it would be the poet who penned numerous doggerel-lines like this one from PROMETHEA #12:

“Around and round the fable goes,

“Eternal like Ouroboros.”

In the end I remain ambivalent about PROMETHEA. It certainly does have mythic content, though in some cases the intellectual conceits rein in some of his more inspired moments. His most mythic line, and the one most in tune with his concerns, interprets the Biblical pairing of “doves and serpents” as the tension between the serpentine desire to rise and climb in the struggle for life, versus the sacrificial bird’s descent into death for some greater cause than life. If every one of Moore’s lines ventured that deep, I’d be able to talk about him in the same breath as Melville and Hawthorne.