(Cover art for Promethea #26 by J.H. Williams III [pencils], Mick Gray [inks], and Jeromy Cox [colours]. Art inspired, I think, by Daniel Clowes of Ghost World fame)
For some reason, I picked up Promethea and started rereading it the other day. Long story short: college student Sophia Bangs researches a term paper on "Promethea," a recurring fictional character woven through several different poems, books, and comics over the decades only to find that she can, through acts of imagination, become Promethea herself. Alan Moore wrote the comic as a re-examination of the Wonder Woman archetype, the old Ditko Doctor Strange psychedelic comics, and as a dissertation of sorts on magical theory. It skirts the line between thesis paper and action comic in a lot of strange ways, and reminds me of plowing through Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World that one week I had pneumonia in high school.
But it's worth it.
The upshot is that Sophie is the latest in a long line of women (and in one notable case, a man) empowered and transformed into Promethea to usher humanity toward some kind of spiritual evolution - the apocalypse. And, following a big old quest adventure into the higher spheres, Sophie finds out that she's the one that has to make the final push. She has to end the world as we know it. And somewhere along the way the FBI finds out and brands Promethea a terrorist, makes the connection that she's Sophie, and tries to take her into custody. Doesn't help that the Promethea entity that possesses Sophie was Egyptian in origin and consequently on the ethnic profiling hit list even without the super-powers.
Having finally reconcilled with her alcoholic mother and the two of them finally making amends, her mother pushes her out into the night with some money to escape New York and avoid the Feds. Sophie leaves. She leaves for three years that pass between #25 and #26 to live in the city of Millenium (of course) where she gets a crap job in a video store to live a Ghost World life on her own with only the occasional silent payphone call to her mother. And because she doesn't want to end the world, or people aren't ready yet, or she doesn't understand what it means to actually end things...well. She doesn't become Promethea again.
Imagine knowing that you have within you the power to transform into a demi-god or demi-goddess, able to perform astonishing feats of magic (Bullets into doves? Simple! Missiles into parakeets? Like cake!), knowing that you've been given a specific mission from on high to change the world, but choosing not to. For three years. Three years of being a creative person who expresses herself through poetry and not being able to write a poem because the jig would be up, the Feds would find you and try to put a bullet through your brain and you'd have to retaliate. Imagine purposefully deadening yourself with cheap weed and a mindless job to stop yourself from accidentally composing a rhyming couplet in your head that might accidentally make you transcend yourself. Three years of having your plain old mortal body that's just average and a little scrawny when you can become a imaginary, idealized being?
Promethea doesn't just absorb the Wonder Woman "warrior queen" archetype. The Billy Batson Captain Marvel who says "Shazam" to transform is the epitome of the wish fulfillment "boy-into-man" superhero. But Sophie has to create in order to transform, she hasn't been given a magic word by someone else to do it.
So that's the set-up for #26, which remains one of my favourite issues; it's the end of the comic's hiatus period, the beginning of the final storyline where the world ends, and I love the whole premise. The comic follows Sophie through a day in her fake life as "Joey Estrada" with the majority of the art coloured in a two-tone palette that shifts colours between scenes - we start out in pale, oppressive red in the video store to blue to a darker red for two panels of "Joey" making love with her boyfriend to deep blue to green, et cetera. An anxious orange page of Sophie phoning home. And the overwhelming current running under things, the waiting, the waiting, the waiting -- while the two-tone is broken by manifestations of a past Promethea coming to tell Sophie that "it's time" in full palette figures against the two-tone. Then an horribled, disquieted panel of purple sleeplessness.
And after all that, well, Sophie ends up on a roof with a full palette on the final page, as a local hero called Tom Strong descends with a heli-pack to take her into custody because the Feds know who who she is. Tom gets big, thick lettering in his thickly inked speech balloons because he is a big man, a genius super-athlete in the style of Doc Savage. Larger than life. Even his daughter Tesla, who shows up to help him track down Sophie, is drawn as head and shoulders above everything else around. Scale and size are hinted at and emphasized. Promethea is taller, more poised woman than Sophie, she has strong and powerful body posture.
Three years of laying low, trying to act like a normal human being and have a normal, mundane life with all its quiet joys while the world gets shittier (the backdrop of much the issue is snippets of news reports about various world events including Mid-Eastern conflict) and knowing all the time that you're going to have to do something about, that you can do something about to make it better for everyone but they're all going to hate you for it, knowing you have to be a walking Christ figure (and, oddly, the Madonna - Promethea is Mama Coming Home), and absolutely dreading the whole thing.
The next issue is sickly amusing while Tom Strong has his big showdown with Sophie and tries to get her to come quietly, because he doesn't want to fight her, he was friends with a previous Promethea and has been strong-armed by the government agents Karen Breughal and Lucille Ball [no relation]. She can't do anything, as far as they can see, because she doesn't have a pad of paper to write a poem on. Only Sophie tells them that this is no longer the case, and simply recites a poem in loose, unrhyming lines and by the end is transfigured into a beautiful scarlet-clad (bad girl made good!) demi-goddess.
This is important; throughout the series, Sophie's change is always shown with her scribbled poem, where she clearly tries to make the lines scan and rhyme and this break into the world of free verse is significant, as is the confidence with which she delivers the lines. Previously, we get to see the words scribbled out and self-editing that goes along with her compositions. Sophie's grown up, creatively, and come into her own.
And there Promethea is, beautiful and terrible, and the shit hits. Then it's all birds-from-bullets and backwashing colours exploding.
I like her interactions with her boyfriend Carl. They're very nattery and sweet and cute, some light bickering and stupid jokes. It's highlighted when she comes to him after the end starts up, after she's Promethea again (because you know she has to be, the bell can't stay unrung) and he says "You're out of my league now, right?" That's it. They both know it and it's irrelevant at the same time. One of the recurring themes of the series is the destructive narture of loving the divine and this quiet moment is crystalline.