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The End of the World
As We Know It
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Promethea Book V
Alan Moore, J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray
America's Best Comics, 2006
Rating: 4.8
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Posted:
January 31, 2006
By
Kevin Forest Moreau
It's not a slight to Alan Moore's America's Best Comics imprint -- viewed by
many as Moore's revenue-generating return to the superhero/adventure comics
genre -- to say that that line of books unintentionally ghetto-ized one of the
richest, most expansive works of his career: Promethea. Books like Tom
Strong and
Top 10, with which it shared shelf space, were and are intelligent
explorations of various facets of the costumed hero, thoroughly enjoyable in
their own right. But even some of Moore's fans looked on the line as little more
than a diversion: Moore playing around with familiar archetypes and themes he'd
long ago dismissed. No one expects to find a masterwork in such a line.
But it's fair to say that Promethea was exactly that. The series was
easily the most ambitious title of the line Moore created for Wildstorm, both in
terms of its subject matter (myth, imagination, magic, space-time, sex, reality
and the inter-connectedness of them all) and its stunning marriage of concept
and image. Nowhere is the latter point more evident than in the last chapter of
this final collection, the pages of which were meticulously designed and crafted
to be fit together to form two 16-page posters.
The story here, if that term can really be said to apply, concerns nothing less
than the titular heroine bringing about the end of the world, or rather, a
radical mass enlightenment that shows off what one can only assume to be Moore's
complex and unconventional worldview. As he's done throughout the series, Moore
constructs his tale (and the occasional dizzying conceptual lesson) like an
elaborate series of puzzle-boxes, toying enthusiastically with the presentation
of words and images, pulling characters and the reader out of the confines of
the book itself. (The entire series, but especially this final installment,
stands as an elaborate, metaphysical meta-fiction.)
Promethea is no less groundbreaking (and in fact more so) a series of
fantasy and myth than Neil Gaiman's Sandman. As an exercise in exploding
the narrative boundaries of the comics medium in the service of a multifaceted
tale with many things on its mind, it stands head and shoulders above even
Watchmen, the mid-'80s masterwork for which Moore is so revered.
And if there's a certain arrogance in the idea of a creator -- even one as
singular and far beyond his closest peers as Moore -- passing off his beliefs as
world-changing enlightenment, well, that comes with the artistic territory. And
this final glimpse into one of his most arresting and intriguing worlds proves
that Promethea is indisputably a work of art -- as intricate, layered and
thought-provoking a work as Moore, or comics, has ever produced.
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