Promethea is Moore-the-magician making his big statement, though, so sense-making is at least as important as beauty. The old Moore, who wrote The Ballad of Halo Jones, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Brought to Light and From Hell, believed that the universe was strange, to be sure, but he never suggested, as he does in Promethea, that we would perceive it as fundamentally good if only we could understand it through a language-system like kaballah. In fact, in the characters of Dr. Manhattan and William Gull, he represented such a universal understanding as distinctly inhuman and possibly malevolent. Promethea, another transcendent entity, is a loving mother to our imaginations and seems to put no sanction to anything we can dream (with the curious exception of Bush’s war). In From Hell, our cities of stone and word were prisons for the divine mother, but in Promethea, the mother can only awaken us through language and spur us to higher spires. In #31, Sophie says to a retired FBI agent who’s become a Baptist pantheist, “No, we all woke up, the day after the world ended, and we still had to feed ourselves and keep a roof over our heads.” The Moore who objects to the Iraq oil adventure never wonders who pays for these bright new buildings or how people far away from our glorious cities, the ones who toil in factories for the sake of our lifestyle, feed themselves. It was once said that Alan Moore knew the score, but sometime around his encounter with God, he clearly lost count.
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
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