When Promethea does “end the world” in #31, this ending takes the form of awakening humanity to its status as a holy part of God. In the wake of this apocalypse, or revelation, life goes on, but the formerly dreary NYC the characters inhabited has become a playground of vaguely Orientalist architecture and nascent religious sects: the future as Late Antiquity, the time of Promethea’s origination. Nothing better demonstrates the weakening of Moore’s imagination than this architectural solution to human existential despair. Who would believe this is the same writer who unmasked the beautiful Christian architecture of London as a patriarchal plot to bind the energies of women and destroy their historical continuity with their own forms of art and worship in From Hell? Moore once knew that all gods are not equal, that all culture is not on the side of the oppressed and that some magic, language and art is used to dominate and destroy.
Moore makes much of language throughout Promethea; in the final issue, he writes that, since our only access to the universe is through our own conceptualizations, then the universe (i.e., God), is largely to us a phenomenon of language, our chief conceptual mode. How sad it is, then, that this comic features some of the lamest wordplay of a man who has a large claim on the title of comics’ greatest line-by-line writer. When Moore jokes in #32 that IGUSs, the acronym for Murray Gell-Man’s characterization of perceiving entities as “Information Gathering and Utilizing Systems,” might better stand for, “It’s God, understanding something,” we have to wonder what deity would stoop to manifest through those words. Similarly, Moore’s history of the universe in atrocious Augustan couplets in the famous #12 is sad coming from the writer of credible blank verse and free verse in his spoken word performances. He’s on more solid ground when he suggests, in #32, that comics are the ideal medium of communication because their words and pictures fire both the left brain and the right. Indeed, when Moore’s left brain falls down in Promethea, penciller J.H. Williams III, inker Mick Gray, and especially colorist Jeremy Cox and letterer Todd Klein work their right brains to give us a comic book as aesthetic object: a tapestry to be laid out end to end as in the aforementioned #12, a pastiche of van Gogh’s style in #19 or a vibrant psychedelic poster to be assembled by the reader in #32. Williams and Gray have a superb sense of design and transition, if their figures can be a bit stiff or insufficiently expressive, while Cox always unerringly set whatever mood Moore calls for and Klein’s lettering ensured that the words were part of the art and never a distraction from it or an obstruction on top of it, especially when his sometimes transparent word balloons allowed the language to lay over the pictures. These artists’ contributions always allowed Promethea to look beautiful, even when it didn’t make much sense.
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