Wednesday, May 10, 2006
myth bangs
I've spent the last month reading all five volumes of Alan Moore's Promethea and wanted to share some impressions. "Impressions" is the operative word, I think, since a work this layered and dense is not something that's easy to summarize for myself, much less anyone else, but I like the idea of a story that I can come back to over the years and experience on different levels each time. With that in mind, I decided to just sit down and read the work for the sheer pleasure of it, taking in its surface level and first order enjoyments without digging too deeply into annotations or research. I wanted to experience it first, as best I could, and then come to understand it later.
But first, for anyone late to the party, a little bit of context. Promethea is part of Alan Moore's recently concluded "ABC universe," a family of comic titles including Tom Strong, Tomorrow Stories , Top Ten, and (tangentially) League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, that occupies a loosely connected continuity. In a few interviews, Moore alludes to the idea that the ABC comics are what he envisioned modern comics might have looked like if superheroes had never taken over the medium and there had instead been more room for pulp stories and "science heroes." Each of the titles has its charms -- I have a particular fondness for the smart but simple pleasures of Tom Strong -- but Promethea is, by far, the most controversial.
Promethea starts off as a relatively straight-forward superhero title when the heroine, Sophie Bangs, is surprised to find that she is the next vessel for an entity known as Promethea, the living embodiment of the human imagination. There's of course a horde of demon assassins to be dealt with, not to mention several origin stories (there have been many other vessels for Promethea, and each incarnation reflects their individual characters), but things get progressively stranger and formalist as the story continues -- something that caused quite a bit of consternation among some readers of the title.
See, instead of having a mid-life crisis, Alan Moore decided to become a magician. Not a "there's a rabbit in my hat" magician, but an actual practitioner of magic along the same lines as the infamous Aleister Crowley. For someone like myself who is neither spiritual nor religious, that's a lot to swallow, but after listening to Moore talk about the subject it makes a certain amount of sense. In performing his various magic rituals and researches, Moore has had a number of -- for lack of a better word -- "mystical" experiences and is apparently on very good terms with a particular snake god; but even Moore admits that he doesn't believe he's talking to an actual snake god that's somehow external to human experience, but instead an embodiment of certain human experiences that acts like a snake god -- a crucial distinction. It reminds me a bit of some of the Terrance McKenna work I've skimmed, a way of using drugs and ritual to access levels of the human mind that usually remain beyond our conscious grasp. It's like constructing a debugger for the human brain computer, but one that is of necessity composed of chemicals and thoughts as opposed to silicon and code.
In much the same way that Sophie becomes a vessel for Promethea, the title Promethea became a vessel for Moore to discuss his theory of magic with the audience, a fusion of science, history, philosophy, spiritulism, and flat-out mind games peppered with sight gags and the occasional bit of superheroics. It's easy to see why some people were turned-off as the title grew into a piece of work that really needed to be approached on its own terms without preconceptions of what comics are or should be. But in many ways, I think that's exactly why the story is Alan Moore's masterpiece, and quite possibly my favorite of his works. It's something I'll need to consider for a while and let roll around in my head.
There's an overarching argument that occupies the bulk of the middle narrative in which Promethea and her predecessor travel among the different levels of reality as symbolized by the kabbalistic sephiroth, but the idea explored there -- and made explicit towards the end -- is that all these things are us and they are, in a very literal sense, real, because we are. Throughout the series Moore makes the point that in reading a story we are, in fact, experiencing the story, and whatever feelings it evokes in us are real feelings; therefore, how can the story be anything less? If reading about Dracula makes you so afraid that you want to turn on a light, then whether he's only a thought or a physical entity, Dracula still exists in some manner.
(I'm fairly sure that Moore would disagree with describing such things as "only a thought," or making a distinction between what is real and what isn't, but like I said, this is first order impressions and not a rigorous thesis.)
It's hard to capture the subtlety of this point -- or, at least, hard for me to capture it -- but there is an elegance to it. Several times a character will address the reader directly saying, in effect, "Yes, I'm just a character on a page that was made up by some author, but this is a real page with a real image that you're seeing and real dialog that you're hearing in your head, so how is this less vital than any other experience?" I personally find that an interesting concept -- it stops short of the solipsistic idea that we can never truly trust our senses in knowing the real world, instead embracing the thought that we are our senses and they describe the only world that matters. Whatever we see and hear -- whether "out there" or "in here" -- is equally valid as a way of interpreting everything around us.
He expands on that idea even further, saying that imagination makes the world around us. Nothing can be created by human hands until it's been invented by the human imagination. Our great struggle from the primordial ooze is a triumph of imagination over entropy -- the name "Promethea" a very explicit femininization of Prometheus, the mythological creator of man and the giver of fire (later punished for stealing fire from the gods by being chained to a rock and having his liver pecked out for all eternity...and if you notice a certain similarity to another demigod who sacrificed himself for mankind, Moore's already there).
It's almost as frustrating writing about Promethea as it is exciting reading it because there are so many interlocking concepts layered one over the other. In this case, Moore's ideas about imagination and reality criscross with his ideas of the masculine and feminine. Not the gender roles, but the more philosophical aspects of the universal birth mother coupled with the phallic snake creator. Prometheus brings the fire of imagination to man, but it must be nurtured and given succor by the goddess. A recurring image is the snake dance, a woman/womb intertwined with the snake/DNA (not for nothing is Promethea's symbol the caduceus, two snakes twined around a staff).
Moore spins out all of these thoughts in a dizzying array that's difficult to take in all at once -- I've skipped his explicit but fascinating dialog on sex and magic, or how the tarot suits organize human experience, or what the "end of the world" might mean -- and while often didactic (in the non-pejorative sense of "teaching"), he never seems to lose his sense of fun or take the enterprise with the kind of deadly solemnity that might have turned it into The Golden Bough for the 21st century. There's an amusing parody of the Fantastic Four called the Five Swell Guys (except one of them is no longer a guy after the "Sufragette City incident"), a running gag of ennui-laden billboards featuring The Weeping Gorilla, a hilarious subplot involving demons taking over the mayor ("Speaking yesterday the Mayor said, 'I am Legion. All shall kiss my smoldering hoof'"), a gelatinous monster, and an FBI detective named Lucille Ball for no earthly reason that I could discern. I'm not saying that it's not a massively formalist exercise that takes a little bit of effort -- or recreational chemicals -- to wrap your head around, but there's also a lot of fun and general silliness along the way that keeps it from devolving into smugness or self-parody.
Look, here's a representative sample: In the final issue of the second volume, Promethea asks the snakes on her caduceus to explain magic to her. The snakes -- Mack and Mike, aka Macro and Micro -- proceed to give her a guided tour of all of human history as symbolized by the major arcana of the tarot. In rhyming couplets. While a joke being told by Aleister Crowley runs across the bottom of every page as he ages from birth to death. And anagrams specific to each page are constructed from the word "Promethea" using scrabble letters, but instead of numbers each tile has a Hebrew letter that numerologically corresponds to the tarot card being discussed.
It shouldn't work -- it honest to God should not work -- but I was stunned when it became my favorite issue of the series. You'll either have a similar reaction or else you'll want to beat yourself over the head with a slice of lemon wrapped around a platinum brick (to paraphrase Douglas Adams). Or both.
I've been thinking about this mainly on a textual level, but it would be criminal of me not to mention the gorgeous art by J.H. Williams III, the co-creator of the work along with Alan Moore. Having seen some Alan Moore scripts, I can't even begin to imagine what the scripts must have looked like for this series, or how Williams managed to vividly visualize concepts that seem almost entirely abstract. And not just the illustrations, but the art style itself is often a character in the series and extraordinarily important to understanding a lot of the ideas that get tossed around. It's at the very least as impressive of a piece a work as almost any artist has ever had on the run of a comic, evoking '60s album art, collages, Mucha, Maxfield Parrish, Jack Kirby, and a host of other artists I couldn't even begin to name. Moore explicity states any number of times in Promethea that he believes the combination of word and pictures has been, for the longest time, the chief way in which humans access their own subconscious and connect with the archetypes that hold sway there, in which case Williams' title of co-creater is well deserved.
I know I'll return to this series many more times, and I'm sure I'll glean new insights from it each time I do. I take a certain amount of comfort in that. And even if I don't believe in magic, I do believe in ideas. Whether one is the same as the other is something you'll have to decide for yourself.