End of Dazed and Confused

Promethea Book 5, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray and Jose Villarrubia (2003-2005; collected 2006): Promethea, the 1600-year-old demi-goddess whose current host/personality is young college student Sophie Bangs, will end the world if Bangs allows her to manifest again. So Bangs hides from the government and from herself in New York under an assumed name.

But the paranoid, increasingly militaristic U.S. government has recruited science-hero Tom Strong to track Promethea down because Strong knew one of Promethea's previous avatars back in the 1950's. Strong reluctantly agrees, but he doesn't believe that Promethea really means to end the world.

But she does. She has to. That's her job.

And so the end comes to the Earth of Moore's America's Best Comics imprint, ushered in by the unstoppable Promethea despite the best efforts of Tom Strong and the rest of that world's heroes. From the realms of fiction and poetry and magic and gods descends judgment on everything. But what does the end of the world actually look like?

Well, it doesn't look like the end of the world in Moore's Watchmen. Promethea is a much different bringer of catastrophe than Ozymandias. And violence is not a solution or a means to a solution.

Moore's 32-issue exegesis on magic and the nature of reality comes to a stunning end here, beautifully imagined by both Moore and his artistic collaborators J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray and Jose Villarrubia. This may be one of the most visually beautiful comic books ever created, and one of the most visually complex. It's not for everybody -- this is a didactic essay about Moore's actual beliefs ever since he decided to become a practicing magician (!) in the 1990's.

Images and iterations of the Kabbalah, the Tarot Deck, various occultists and pretty much every religion under the sun get combined and recombined within Moore's apocalyptic vision -- with the caveat that 'apocalypse' derives from the Greek word for "revelation" or "lifting of the veil."

Never has Aleister Crowley made so many appearances in a comic-book series not named Aleister Crowley. Hurry down doomsday! Highly recommended.

Great Chain of Being

Promethea Book 3, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray (2001-2002; collected 2003): Longtime comic-writing great Alan Moore (Watchmen, From Hell) now believes in Magic, and thinks you should too. The five collected volumes of Promethea lay out the structure and content of Moore's belief system with what's often very thin veneer of metafictional superheroics laid on top.

It's didactic, sure, but the material is so interesting -- and J.H. Williams' art so lush and engaging -- that the whole enterprise is terrifically entertaining regardless of how one feels about, well, Magic.

College student Sophie Bangs' research into the recurring mythological/fictional/comic-book character Promethea, who's been popping up in different incarnations in fiction and in the real world for centuries, caused her to become the current avatar of Promethea back in Volume 1. Now Bangs and Promethea seek to discover how magic works -- and, more importantly, why Promethea is slated to bring about the end of the world.

So we get a magical mystery tour through the levels of magical reality stretching from 'our' world all the way up towards the godhead from which all existence flows. Along the way, the Kabbalah, the Tarot Deck, Aleister Crowley and various other occult sources and forces help to shape Promethea's understanding of how things work, and how she works within this immanent, numinous cosmos.

It may sound a bit tedious and self important, but Moore and Williams keep things light at points and wring a certain amount of humour from the spectacle of human beings confronted by living symbols. There's enough stuff going on in the writing and the art to reward multiple readings both hermeneutically and erotically. Highly recommended, but not for everybody.

Apocalypse Rising

Promethea Book 4, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray (2002-2003; collected 2004): College student Sophie Bangs' research into the recurring mythological/fictional/comic-book character Promethea, who's been popping up in different incarnations in fiction and in the real world for centuries, caused her to become the current avatar of Promethea back in Volume 1.

Now Bangs and Promethea seek to discover how magic works -- and, more importantly, why Promethea is slated to bring about the end of the world. But a problem looms.

Bangs has left her friend Stacia and one of the previous, now-dead, Prometheas in charge of protecting the Earth while she goes on her cosmic odyssey. But this new kick-ass Promethea, having cleaned up a whole host of supernatural enemies, doesn't want to go back to normal life (and un-life). Promethea vs. Promethea action looms! However, Promethea's existence has raised red flags in the government and in other places. While the FBI seeks to track her and her friends down, Promethea must resolve her issues with, um, Promethea -- and come to metaphysical grips with her role in the coming apocalypse.

Heavily didactic and expositional, Promethea isn't for everyone -- but the art is gorgeous and complicated, as is Moore's writing. As Watchmen showed a group of limited heroes set against a looming apocalypse, so does Promethea: but the stakes and the meanings have all changed. And violence solves nothing. All this and Weeping Gorilla!!! Highly recommended, but not for everybody.

Imaginary Gods in Real Gardens

Promethea Volume 2, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by J.H. Williams III, Jose Villarubbia, and Mick Gray (2000-2001): Moore's loopy, brain-twisting, gorgeously illustrated metasuperheroine series continues, as fictional god Promethea and her human host Sophie Bangs learn more about how magic works, and what the nebulous realm of the Immateria really is in relation to the material world.

The whole thing basically plays like Neil Gaiman's The Sandman on magic mushrooms...or maybe peyote...as written by someone who really does believe in, and practice, magic. After we finish our tour of Promethea's past incarnations, Moore takes us on a jaunt through the history and theory of magic, and the history and theory of Everything as represented by the 22 face cards of the Tarot deck. You don't have to believe this stuff to enjoy it.

Moore's probably the only comic-book writer alive who can make what amounts to a crazy-ass essay about the Tarot deck both enthralling and dramatically satisfying. Magician Jack the Faust gets fleshed out more (somewhat literally), looking for all the world like an extremely weathered Harvey Pekar. We also find out that the private parts of a goddess have sparkly stars floating around them. Good to know. You never can tell when knowledge like that can come in handy. Are those stars around your vagina or are you happy to see me? Boom! Highly recommended.

Golden Age Doctor Fate Archives Volume 1, written by Gardner F. Fox, illustrated by Howard Sherman and others (originally published 1940-44): Muscly superheroes and supervillains are often captains; magical superheroes and supervillains are often doctors: so goes the unwritten code of the Golden and Silver Age superhero comic book, with the necessary caveat that there are exceptions (Flash villain Captain Cold being one of those exceptions that prove the rule).

Doctor Fate has one of the great Golden Age, four-colour superhero costumes, all blue and yellow with the yellow standing in (we assume if we're grounded in representational four-colour coding) for gold. He begins life as a sort of science magician, using "lost secrets of the Chaldeans and Egyptians" that are really super-science to battle an array of quasi-supernatural foes.

Fate's golden, full-head helmet stays exclusively on for the first year-and-a-half of his adventures, only coming off when he finally reveals his secret origin to oddly named gal-pal Inza Carmer. The removal of the helmet does not bode well, as Fate quickly gains a new half-helmet (the top half, btw) and a much less interesting career as a two-fisted crime fighter whose primary opponents are gangster types who wouldn't be out of place in a Batman and Robin story from the same era.

Then Fate (real name: Kent Nelson) becomes a 'real' doctor, by which we mean medical doctor and not Ph.D., loses his cape somewhere, and slouches towards a 17-year hiatus from superheroing. The first third of the book, in which Fox exhibits his love of 1930's science fiction and horror, is terrifically entertaining; after that, only the appearances of Professor Hugo Strange-like Mr. Who are really interesting beyond a historical sense. One of the oddest things about early Fate is that nowhere in these stories is there much support for later characterizations of Doctor Fate as a sentient, god-like helmet with a person pretty much just along for the ride. There's the real mystery. Recommended.

Golden Age Plastic Man Archives Volume 2, written and illustrated by Jack Cole (1943-44): With all due respect to Will Eisner and company's The Spirit, Jack Cole's Plastic Man is the greatest superhero comic of the 1940's, and one of the ten best of all time. Maybe five best. Cole's talent was only matched by his life-long dissatisfaction with being a comic-book writer/artist, and once he made the "big time" of slick magazine cartoons and a syndicated comic strip, he would try to minimize his comic-book days in his CV.

But more than fifty years after his somewhat mysterious death, Cole's enduring legacy is that comic-book work on Plastic Man. It burns with the hard, gem-like, crazy-ass flame that denotes real art, absolutely serious in its committment to anarchy, hilarity, thrills, and the often untapped potential of the comic-book panel and comic-book page.

'Plastic' in this case comes from its original meaning -- fluid, changeable, protean -- and not how we understand the word now; Cole was originally going to go with 'India Rubber Man' until someone pointed out that this was the stupidest superhero name ever. Unlike later stretchable heroes that include the Fantastic Four's Mr. Fantastic and DC's risibly named Elongated Man, Plastic Man stretched and compacted to almost absurdist degrees -- he could compact himself to the size of a rubber ball, or alter his appearance.

Somewhat presciently, he was also the first superhero that I know of to work for a government agency (in this case, the FBI). His adventures had serious consequences, with murder and mayhem abounding, and yet it was all delivered with an anarchic, light-hearted flair: it's almost like one is looking at the model for much later pop culture confections such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which comedy and melodrama co-exist productively.

In any case, this is serious fun: it zips by, effortless to read, overstuffed with strange and comic images, a work of unduplicated genius from a genius who seemed to actually despise what he had created. As real-world Frankenstein stories go, it's a doozy. Highest recommendation.

Magic and Loss

Promethea Volume 1, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray (1999): Alan Moore's loopy, gorgeously illustrated meditation on the nature of stories and myth, told through the vehicle of a comic-book character whose roots extend back to the 5th century AD, when she was a real girl fleeing the early Christians who killed her magician father in Egypt.

Taken bodily by the amalgam god(s) Thoth-Hermes into the Immateria, the vast realm of human thought, dreams and stories, Promethea would show up in various forms over the centuries. Now, because of the interest of a young college essay writer, Promethea has a new avatar -- and apparently a mandate to end the world.

Moore has his mojo working here. Promethea has, at various points, been a (rough) analogue for such real-world creations as La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Wonder Woman, and Little Nemo in Slumberland. The protean nature of her/its appearances is part of the point, as Moore plays with the concept of archetypes, which may have different attributes to different people formed around a solid 'core' of universality. And of gods, which also change shape or bond together over time (Thoth-Hermes being the first example in this particular book).

The closest thing to this series is Neil Gaiman's Sandman, and I'd imagine if you liked one, you'd like the other. The art of J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray is astonishingly beautiful -- Williams really is one of the three or four best fantasy cartoonists to show up on the scene in the last 15 years, and he's equal to the often herculean drawing tasks Moore has created for him.

There are action sequences and deft characterization and wild and wooly fantasy creatures (including an oddly disturbing owl-headed demon), but the major attraction here is Moore's interest in the nature of stories themselves, how they grow into myths and legends and religions; how myths and legends and religions fall back into story over time; how everything thought-related works itself out with the spectre of armageddon hanging over both the Immateria and the Material World alike. Highest recommendation.

The Light-Darkness War, written by Tom Veitch, illustrated by Cam Kennedy (1987-88): Solid, offbeat science-fantasy adventure from Marvel's long defunct Epic Comics line, which offered at least marginally more adult, creator-owned fare during the 1980's and early 90's.

Veitch spins a tale of Viet Nam veterans dropped into another war in a galaxy far away, where the forces of darkness seek to overwhelm the forces of light. Or is this galaxy in our universe at all? Because the soldiers are, for the most part, already dead. So are Nicola Tesla and Leonardo da Vinci, who do weapons design for the forces of light. Cam Kennedy's painted art is solid and effective without being flashy. Recommended.