Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III’s comic book Promethea is witty and inventive, if not as mindblowing as some of Moore’s earlier work (such as his two best known graphic novels, Watchmen and From Hell). I’ve only read the first paperback volume, containing issues 1-6 of an ongoing series that is already up to issue 25; but I’m hooked…
Promethea is a multiply self-referential, and multiply ironic/parodic, feminist superhero comic. The eponymous heroine is awakened, and incarnated in a living person, when she is evoked in some form of writing or illustration–her history thus involves bad romantic poetry, pulp writing and illustration, and comics. The narrative is set in the near present–New York City in 1999–but this is a present as reconfigured by how it was imagined in 1950s science fiction. Different episodes, and different parts of the same episode, are realized in different visual styles, reflecting the history of pulp representations of the marvelous. The main character, Sophie, finds herself as the latest incarnation of Promethea; she must dodge numerous attempts to kill her, while undergoing an apprenticeship in the realms of story, the Immateria, a landscape that is boh the realm of (capital-I) Imagination, and the repository of hilariously bad plot lines, and purple prose cliches.
Much of the pleasure of the book comes from the way Moore and Williams move fluidly among a multiplicity of levels, not to mention the allusions to everything from the fourth-century persecution of the few remaining pagans by the Christians of Alexandria, to the work of late-20th-century French feminist theorist Helene Cixous.
Overall, the story of Promethea is that of an initiatory quest, into the mysteries of the Imagination, with all sorts of multiple coordinates and reference points for the experience (the Tarot, Platonism, etc). A lot of this is stuff that I have a hard time with–it seems too New-Agey or spiritual for me. I’ve also wondered about, and been dubious about, Alan Moore’s conversion to shamanism and magic; I always worry that belief systems of this sort are ways to evade the darkness of the harsh, open-eyed visions of reality that we see, among other places, in Moore’s earlier work. I can only say that Moore pulls the whole thing off so entertainingly, and with such an open and ironic sensibility, even when he is harping on themes I dislike (such as the supremacy of mind over matter), that I am charmed, seduced, and entirely won over.
Watchmen critiqued the male-juvenile superhero myth from within; Promethea deals lovingly with much of the same pulp and old-style comics material, the cultural detritus of the 20th century; but its energy seems to come much more from outside, from a place that our culture hasn’t quite discovered yet. I’m not convinced, as Moore is, that this place is Mind or Imagination or anything else that could be described as a Platonic ideal; as Jack Spicer said, it is probably a mistake to think that the Otherness we encounter, and that speaks in and through us, is interested in us at all. Nonetheless, I do think that Moore is effectively channelling whatever Otherness he has encountered. For he renders it in all its wackiness and fearfulness and inanity and inconsistency; he recognizes within it that which cannot be captured by any doctrine, not even by Moore’s own.