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 20th-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.