Promethea, Book 4

The Promethea series was the most interesting and inspiring graphic novels I've ever read. I can't see how Moore can top these.

I have been slogging through the Promethea books, always learning a little something, but mostly dazzled by the inventive methods Alan Moore and his collaborators have been activating what is otherwise a fairly static story and one that I barely understand. The pictures make it worthwhile , but you'd think it would have been easy enough to supply a reason why Sophie Bangs felt it necessary to forsake her earthly duties to follow Barbara Shelley into the beyond. OK, I know she's there to make sure Barbara doesn't feel lonely, or get lost, but come on, Sophie, all of your home planet is falling into pieces, and what's worse, you have arbitrarily matched up Grace and Stacia and made them into a weird, punk amalgam of Prometheas that just don't mix, plus, she's evil. So what is the excuse? Dozens of issues later and I still don't know what a science villain is, nor a science hero, but that is probably just me being slow on the uptake. My favorite part of PROMETHEA BVOLUME FOUR comes when she and Barbara spot Aleister Crowley sodomizing Victor Neuberg on the desert floor, a real life incident that led to Neuberg's eventual mental collapse. Neuberg was a very great English poet whose works have been strangely neglected, but maybe this comic will make young people reach for his verse once more? Some of the details have been changed, I think, but Alan Moore probably knows what he is doing (for one thing it was Neuberg who played the active role in the desert working, something which abhorred him to think of afterwards and which led to his cycles of madness and his extreme shivsring whenever one of his circle even dared mention that name of the man whom he'd topped all those years before), but pictorially it is probable better to have the ugly man do the mounting, plus it reflects an earlier issue in which Sophie sought out the caress and the "wand" of hideous fat old Jack Faust. That trial at the end of the book, though, what cheese.

The pace picks up in this continuation of the Promethea saga, starting where P3 left off. P-Sophie is wandering the ethereal realms guided by previous Prometheas. (Yes, they're deceased, but they consider it bad form to dwell on the little things.) P-Stacy is on duty back in the real world, and getting to like her job. After all, in that world, "super-hero" (or something like it) is considered respectable work. There are two problems, though. First, P-Stacy isn't exactly considered a hero, and the FBI is on her trail. Second, P-Sophie is done with her trip to The World Beyond, but P-Stacy doesn't want to hand the job back. So, we have problems. Moore's story moves faster in this volume, with a lot less of the oppressive pseudomysticism that bogged down in earlier volumes. Art by Williams and Gray only makes it better, and in varied visual idioms. Chapter 1 features painterly cloudscapes, with the occasional nod to Seurat. Ch. 3 switches to a flat, graphic, woodcut style. Ch. 4 experiments with color saturation - or lack of it. Ch. 5 draws on the comic idiom itself, but without smug self-referentiality. And, as in any good narrative art, the art moves the narration forward, adding its own meaning to the script. The Promethea series has been good but uneven. This is not just a step forward for her (their?) story, but a step up. //wiredweird