Promethea: Book Two of the Groundbreaking New Series by Alan Moore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The volume where Moore's work begins to slide. The weakest part of this volume is the final issue, the Tarot issue. In it, Promethea is given a lesson in the significance of the Tarot cards -- each one "represents" some moment in the creation of the universe and signifies a step in the path to enlightenment.



Yeah, whatever.



The issue itself is quite well-done, combining multiple levels of visual and verbal narration. There's one thing you can't deny about Promethea as a series and that's that it pushed the limits of graphic story-telling in fabulously inventive ways. But the structural schematics of Moore's cosmology is, at base, crude, over-simplified, and frankly, very juvenile. As with all attempts to map reality onto a human-made conceptual framework, the supposed "discoveries" of the "truths" within the Tarot are, in fact, projections of Moore's own cultural vocabulary. That is to say, he doesn't uncover any meanings in the Tarot, he creates them based on ideologies that organize his thinking.



But besides this one hiccup, the series itself is still quite good at this point. As a meta-fictional tale about the nature of imagination, it's insightful, if not earth-shattering, and Moore's sense of humor and imagination, when he gives it full rein, is wonderful. He should probably get an award for the single greatest creation ever, the Weeping Gorilla. It's a comic-strip within the world of Promethea; each one is just a sad Gorilla crying while thinking about some utterly banal inconvenience of life that is so pathetic as to be tragic. Example: "Everyone said I should upgrade to Windows 95." Love it.



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