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.