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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
In his fantastical "Promethea" series, Alan Moore indulges his fascinations with tantric sex and the tarot -- and reveals his take on kabbalistic philosophy.
Jul 1, 2005 | When "Promethea" began its 32-issue comic-book run in 1999, it looked like it was going to be British writer Alan Moore's riff on Wonder Woman: a story about a superheroine with mythological connections, one of the flagship titles of Moore's whimsical America's Best Comics project. By the time it ended a few months ago (the final sequence is collected in "Promethea Book 5," to be published in a couple of weeks by ABC), it had turned into something very different: a rather wonderful excuse for the 51-year-old Moore to explain his version of hermetic Kabbalistic philosophy.
Moore's got a reputation for writing remarkable, formally structured mainstream comic books, including a few that are permanently lodged on the graphic-novel bestseller lists. Most of them are so engaging that Hollywood types thought it'd be a great idea to adapt them into movies, and so complicated and subtle that they've turned out to be unfilmable (like "Watchmen," which Hollywood's been batting around for over a decade), or the resulting films turned out to be travesties (like "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and "From Hell"; this doesn't bode well for the forthcoming "V for Vendetta" movie). In the last decade or so, he's also gotten very heavily into magic of the robes-and-grimoires sort, and has talked about his close relationship with the second century snake-deity Glycon. "The idea of the god is the god," he's said. That's the thesis behind "Promethea," which he's described as "a magical rant seemingly disguised as a superheroine comic."
But Moore doesn't draw the comics he writes; his artistic collaborators on "Promethea" were J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray. They developed a lavish, eccentric visual style for the series, in which almost every two-page spread is unified by decorative design elements and symmetries. Williams is something of a chameleon -- his covers to the individual "Promethea" comics alluded to Alphonse Mucha, Peter Max, Winsor McCay and whoever else seemed appropriate.
In the first "Promethea" book, though, Williams and Gray's art is mostly a graceful variation on the standard superhero-comics mode, and so is the story. College student Sophie Bangs lives in an alternate-world, modern-day New York City that's full of flying cars, futuristic technology and "science-heroes." As the series begins, she discovers that she's the latest incarnation of Promethea, a mythical heroine born in fifth century Egypt whose physical presence can be invoked by acts of imagination and creativity. (Sophie becomes Promethea by writing poems about her.)
Through Book 1 and the first half of Book 2, "Promethea" is Moore at his most playful, having fun with his setup and setting. Sophie's foil is her snarky best friend Stacia, whose favorite pop-culture icon is a lovely, daffy running gag: something called Weeping Gorilla, who appears on omnipresent billboards sobbing into his fur and thinking bummed-out thoughts ("We probably expect too much from George Lucas..."). The high-tech sensory overload of "Promethea's" New York is packed with delicious details that Moore never bothers to explain -- it's only natural that the city's mayor has multiple personalities, even before he's possessed by demons. (Newscast chatter: "Speaking yesterday, the Mayor said 'I am Legion. All shall kiss my smoldering hoof.'") And the chaos in the street scenes frames the series' contrast between the material and spiritual worlds nicely.
Midway through Book 2, things start getting weird. Sophie meets a grubby, creepy old magician, Jack Faust, who says he'll teach her about magic in exchange for sex with Promethea -- and she takes him up on his offer. An entire chapter (an issue of the original comic) is devoted to a tantric sex scene, complete with extensive discussion of the magical significance of clothing and sexuality. At the beginning, it's impossibly squalid -- the idea of the gorgeous heroine in bed with a potbellied, warty lech is meant to make the reader squirm hard. ("Who remaindered the book of love?" thinks Weeping Gorilla on the sign outside Faust's filthy apartment.) But the chapter's tone gradually turns grand and psychedelic (if not exactly erotic), then oddly tender, and it lays the foundation for the rest of "Promethea": the idea that there's magical symbolism in everything, no matter how debased.
The second book concludes with a flabbergasting visual and verbal juggling act: a chapter called "Metaphore," in which the twin snakes on the caduceus Promethea carries explain the history of humanity to her, in rhyming couplets, by way of the sequence of major-arcana Tarot cards. The snakes are named Mike and Mack, as in "micro" and "macro"; they can't keep straight which one is which. (As above, so below, as the saying goes.) Their Tarot isn't quite the traditional version: Every card from the common Rider-Waite-Smith deck is redrawn as a cute little cartoon, and "Judgement," for instance, is replaced by Aleister Crowley's suggestion "The Aeon," its angel replaced on the card by Harpo Marx (symbolizing Harpocrates, the Greek god of silence), honking rather than blowing his horn ("ankh ankh" -- oh, yes, he's wearing clothes decorated with ankhs, rather than the angel's cross).
