MYTHCOMICS: ["THE END OF MISTY MAGIC LAND"], TOMORROW STORIES SPECIAL #2 (2006)

NOTE: There is no particular title to the "Little Margie" story appearing in TOMORROW STORIES SPECIAL #2; I have imposed one for clarity's sake. 

The complicated background of this story merits enumeration. (1) Alan Moore collaborated with J.H. Williams III on the series PROMETHEA for Moore's imprint America's Best Comics. The title character is a multi-faceted entity from "The Immateria," a land of pure imagination, and thus Promethea has existed in various independent fictional incarnations. (2) In one such incarnation, the heroine is a tutelary figure in a comic strip, "Little Margie in Misty Magic Land," where Promethea guides the little girl Margie through a host of fantasy-realms, the two women accompanied only by a comedy-relief "China boy." (3) "Margie" was Moore's pastiche on Windsor McCay's 1905 comic strip, "Little Nemo in Slumberland," whose installments were full Sunday page comics with no individual titles-- which is why there were no titles when Alan Moore and Eric Shanower created a full "Nemo" pastiche for AMERICA'S BEST COMICS SPECIAL #1 (2001), and no titles for this second and last pastiche from TOMORROW STORIES, executed by Shanower and Moore's colleague Steve ("no relation") Moore. 

Alan Moore's pastiche was pleasant but not particularly well organized. Since Steve Moore probably scripted his tale knowing that the days for America's Best were numbered, he provided a final "Little Margie" story that effectively concludes not only the character's series but also her childhood.

It's a common enough trope that as humans grow older they began to lose the imaginative freedom of their juvenile years, and Steve Moore (henceforth the only "Moore" I'll reference) practically broadcasts this theme on the first page of "End." (He also shows himself the equal of Promethea's creator in coming up with torturous puns, like the above "Prophetta Doom.")

Once Margie, her guide Promethea and comic-relief Chinky have received suggestions of a danger to Misty Magic Land, they seek to learn the danger's source. It does not take long for them to receive the first intimation from a clockwise individual named Thomas Tick-Tock, who discerns that Margie herself may be the problem, since she is a mortal who does not belong to the magical world, yet has not aged in nineteen years. "Perhaps I have not aged because I did not want to," muses Margie, "but should I have wanted to?" Promethea tries to lighten Margie's mood by taking her to the Chuckling Orchard, but Margie remains morose. 

The girls have better luck in the Menagerie of Moods-- but only briefly, for after some brief cheer, Margie falls into first depression, and then conceives race hatred for Chinky (encouraged by a mood-creature in a red Ku Klux Klan robe). 

Then Promethea moves to a deeper theme, though not one with much resonance for childhood: showing Margie how lack of emotional control results in the Horror of War. Margie flees the spectres of war, and it's at this point that Chinky diverges from Margie's of him, renouncing his role as "funny foreigner" and returning to his own realm, a fantasy-China realm.

The exit of the male presence in Margie's world leads her to a fairground, where she enjoys her first kiss with what looks to be Little Nemo himself. She quarrels with Promethea, acting as if the goddess is a controlling mother, and with that, Margie begins to age as she would in the real world, growing out of Misty Magic Land. So the danger to the dream-realm has always been Margie's attunement to it, and this is the last of the author's "Margie" stories, because, as she tells her own little girl, she's lost her connection to her juvenile self, and no longer has any stories to tell.