Promethea

Alan Moore, J.H. Williams III & Mick Gray etc. Promethea (2005)
There's a book called The Last War in Albion which I vaguely recall having seen pushed as an account of the magical war waged between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison for the soul of England - or something of that general thrust. I haven't bought the book, because I've read a few of the blog posts reproduced therein and have found myself irritated at the presumption of a writer - much younger than myself, fannish, and very obviously American - telling us what it was like growing up in Britishland and getting most of it wrong; nevertheless, although it causes me great pain to admit as much, it does sort of look like there may be something in the idea of Moore and Morrison having spent the last couple of decades taking potshots at each other. There were a couple of points in this one where it occurred to me that Promethea could be Moore's idea of The Unreadables done right, without all the rock star wank and recycled Moorcock; and as Andrew Hickey has pointed out, Morrison's Zatanna was his idea of Promethea done right - or something along those lines. Actually, I've just picked up the collected Multiversity and couldn't help but notice how one chapter - or issue, more accurately - looks a lot like Morrison stood in an upper floor window waving his tool at a passing Alan Moore through the medium of the Charlton comics superheroes which Moore recycled as Watchmen.

Where will it all end?

Did we learn nothing from that thing with 'Pac and Biggie?

On the other hand - momentarily leaving aside that none of it actually matters anyway - some of this may simply be my reading certain things into certain patterns, or things resembling patterns from a certain angle; which neatly and coincidentally brings us to Promethea, because that's mostly what Promethea is about. I never read it at the time so I've been catching up with the collected editions. I read the first two, with volumes three to five still to go, and so I've read the whole lot this time, start to finish, hoping that this concentration of my attention might allow me to make more sense of what is at times a fairly unorthodox narrative in comic book terms; and so as to avoid repeating myself here, churning out another three variations on a review I already wrote back in December.

As someone pointed out to me, Promethea goes on a bit, particularly the visionary journey along the various nodules of the tree of life, an interlude which goes on for something in the region of four million issues. Admittedly each of these issues has a page or two set back in the material world, someone telling a joke or punching a copper or something just to keep us grounded - or possibly interested - but the whole distended guitar solo at the half way point really is a slog, feeling a bit like Alan Moore has you by the shoulders and is shaking you, asking if you get it yet, and for a long, long, long, long time*. It reminded me of the story you always used to find in the Rupert Bear annual where Rupert travels to some improbable realm - fairyland, underground kingdom, floating metal city or whatever - and so we get several pages of the obligatory kindly wizard showing Rupert around, pointing at things and describing what they're for; except here, there's more of a page count and we keep bumping into Aleister bloody Crowley. Qué sorpresa.

Of course, in the context of the entire story, the magical interlude is arguably essential, carrying the main point of the enterprise; and in some respects it's nice how for once we get a version which takes its time to explain in full, and to explain what is meant clearly, at least allowing us to rule out the possibility of it simply being an author picking out which is the coolest t-shirt to be seen in down the sportsfield that evening; and it's a good explanation, well argued and readable with beautiful artwork.

On the other hand, just as I reached my limit for problem children with mutant powers back in about 1993, I'm now rapidly approaching saturation point for:

•  Comic book characters who know they're comic book characters.
• Authors turning up in their own comics.
• Aleister Crowley.
• Coincidences reliant upon numbers.
• How quantum theory is a bit like what a traditional Shaman does.
• Fiction is real.

Seriously, people - I love the Illuminatus! trilogy as much as the next man, providing the next man regards the Illuminatus! trilogy as quite good but a bit long; and I'm very happy for Huitzilopochtli to be real by all terms that make any sense; but a lot of this stuff was yellowing around the edges even by the time Porridge took to ripping it off and claiming it for his own work back in 1982. It's fun and it's diverting and I suppose it's probably of arguably greater moment than Spiderman in yet another sense-shattering punch up with the Juggerynut; but simply pointing out that pomegranates are mentioned in the Book of Kings, and that Pom is Australian slang for an English person, and that Australian aborigines believe in the Dreamtime, and that the Dreamtime is a bit like what Alice experienced in Wonderland, and that Lewis Carroll was a Pom - deep fuckin' breath - doesn't actually mean anything out here in the material realm, regardless of how many kiloblakes of poetry may be generated by the suggestion; and after a while it all starts to remind me of the wisdom of the Sphinx in Mystery Men.

When you doubt your powers, you give power to your doubts...

 

I get how fiction is as much entangled with the cause and effect of our reality as anything, but the relative value of that fiction is a different, possibly subjective matter; and whilst Promethea may blush, shuffle her feet and mumble well, I was just saying, in concession to the subjective nature of her experiences, it feels as though we're being told how it really is. This bothers me, it being the how it really is of a very specific perspective, and probably not one that ever had to hold down a job at fucking Burger King for fifteen long years. Similarly, the post-apocalyptic liberty at which the narrative eventually arrives is a very specific kind of utopia, namely the same old thing in which we all throw off our hang ups and shag the neighbours, and Albert Einstein and Timothy Leary were essentially the same kind of dude, y'know? It's more or less the same place to which all those pre-pubescent Gernsbackian supermen once aspired to lead us, just cooler and better read, with more pairs of those little round Lennon specs, and lesbians who don't get all freaked out and uptight when you ask if it's okay to watch. It all seems very familiar.

Promethea is a decent story, well told and well drawn, and with poetically philosophical truths coming out of its arsehole. I'm just not convinced it's inherently any more profound than the antics of Retarded Hitler in Johnny Ryan's Dry Gulch Follies 2005.

*: I think it may have been Blair Bidmead who made this observation.

Promethea book two

Alan Moore, J.H. Williams III & Mick Gray
Promethea book two (2001)
I found this bewildering and had to go back and re-read the first volume in order to make some sense of it. I suppose that would suggest something of a higgledy-piggledy narrative, although to be fair my comic book reading habits have changed somewhat over the years. Once I would have read the first volume four or five times before getting to this one, but these days I tend to give things the once over and then move on to something else; and this was like starting afresh, meaning I suppose that I hadn't retained much from the first six issues.

Promethea really is something of a higgledy-piggledy narrative, and becomes increasingly so as we work our way through the six issues gathered here, beginning with ornate double page spreads more resembling the frontage of Gaudí's Casa Battló than the page of a comic book, with panels like windows which we're not quite sure how to read - one page then the next, or line by line across the full spread; but it seems to work either way, suggesting the possibility of a conscious departure from linearity on the part of those responsible. That this might be deliberate seems supported as subsequent pages exhibit increasingly eccentric patterns, drawing the reader around the sequence of images along a boustrophedon before going all free-form simultaneity in issue twelve, different themes repeating across pages without borders with a rhythm suggesting music as much as traditional narrative; but does it work?

Actually it does, although the medium outshines its message.

Reservations that might encumber,
Pleasure - why, I have a number,
Not least being this rhymed narrating,
In forms I find quite irritating,
For such resemblance that it doth bear,
To poetic arts for which I care,
So very little whilst they strive so hard,
To impersonate a certain bard,
Yet flounder like ships lacking anchor,
As though forged by some fucking wanker,
With pewter mug abrim with ale,
Sentiments which can only fail,
As with one finger in his ear,
He doth sing a song for which I need a lot more beer.

Neil Gaiman used to do it all the fucking time and probably still does. Alan Moore is better at it, but it's still kind of annoying and I'm not sure he really does it well enough to get away with it. Additionally there's the problem of this being yet another treatise on magic, fiction as reality and so on; and it's a problem because magic is an entirely subjective thing, so the successful communication of this stuff tends to depend on who is reading.

My take on magic is that, as Snoop Dogg suggests, the game is to be sold, not to be told; and people who bang on about how to do magick right or how an actual Sumerian God was once manifest in their kitchen following such and such a working tend to be full of shit because really, they're only doing what the singer from Fields of the Nephilim does when he pulls a scary face and sings about the stark goblins of regret - or whatever it was that band did. The clue to this is usually to be found - I would suggest - in an eclectic pick and mix approach to different magical systems, taking a little bit of this from here, a little bit of that from there - Thoth, Baphomet, John Dee, Wotan, Paul bleeding Daniels, the more the merrier; for 'tis all but a veil of illusion and these are but masks for that which resides beyond the realm of language. It works providing you specifically ignore that what you aspire to deal with is itself only language, and whilst it may indeed influence reality, it remains only language - as certain magical systems themselves explicitly acknowledge; and language differs wildly according to culture, particularly with the cultures from which so many of the popular symbols are commonly borrowed. Nahuatl, for example, has a verb amounting to to cause something to fall on the ground producing a slapping sound, and that's one of the more readily translatable ones. Languages work by very different means and apply in different ways according to culture, so whilst the one-size-fits-all appropriation of often contradictory concepts looks very nice when trying to convey the sheer volume of just how deep, meaningful, and mysterious you may wish to appear to the uninitiated, it suggests a lack of genuine focus whilst begging the question just why do you need to tell everyone? Why does it matter to you that others should view you in a certain light?

So do what thou wilt, but please try not to be a bore about it.

Therefore, returning to Promethea, my point is that it's a nice tune played well and it has some interesting things to say about myth, reality, and whether there's a difference, but as with many works of this type, it's really not so deep as it thinks it is. The book knows it's a book - t'riffic, but what happens next? Promethea's strengths are in the jokes, the supposedly throwaway details provided as contrast, the interplay of characters; and the enterprise sags when it gets around to doing what it came to do in the first place, the very thing which defines it, the four-hour drum solo by a bloke dressed in Shakespearean clobber. I'm pretty sure it wasn't intended to do that.

Promethea is great, but not as great as it thinks.

Promethea book one

Alan Moore, J.H. Williams III & Mick Gray,
Promethea book one (2000)
Without having really drawn up any formal plans, I was sort of avoiding this one. I first encountered this same collection in my local library about ten years ago. At the time I'd more or less given up on comics, Grant Morrison's excruciating Unreadables having pretty much driven the last nail in the coffin of that sort of thing so far as my dipping toes into any fresh waters was concerned. The odd thing was that, having at last fully converted to reading proper books, I found I lacked the patience to read a comic, which I know doesn't seem to make sense given the art form supposedly being the more immediate, the less demanding in terms of attention span; but the notion that Alan Moore was still at large, so to speak, was of course enough to inspire curiosity, and so I picked out a couple of collections. Top 10 I quite enjoyed, but Promethea I found incomprehensible, although I now have no idea why this should have been. Maybe I was reading a later volume rather than this one, or maybe my attention span really had developed some sort of incompatibility with comics as a medium. Anyway, whatever the case may have been, I didn't warm to the title, and more recently - at least since I rediscovered the form to some extent - I've been warned off Promethea as just the sort of thing I would probably hate. Much as I love Alan Moore, I've sometimes found his work a little more indulgent than I like, and I tend to avoid certain flavours of esoteric wittering because they remind me too much of the sort of hopeless bollocks that has kept Genesis P. Orrible in Franklin Mint monographed Aleister Crowley collector plates and breast implants for the last couple of decades.

Oh yes, you're really into Spare, are you? How interesting.

Still, I'd just popped into my local Android's Dungeon to pick up the first issue of Multiversity out of curiosity and just in case it doesn't turn out to be complete shite, and Nine Lives Books was next door, and I wasn't going to buy anything but oh fuck it...

Assuming this was the same volume I read way back whenever, I'm not entirely sure what it was that I didn't get. Promethea manages to pile on all of the usual layers of self-conscious magickal weirdness whilst remaining a fairly straightforward and engaging supertale; well - straightforward aside from being way above average and introducing a variety of female characters performing functions other than having breasts and being feisty whilst asking some bloke what he thinks should be done. It's not so funny as Moore's Top 10 from the same era and possibly the same mythology, but it's nevertheless decent, pulling some of the same tricks, not least building a retroactive back story so convincing as make one wonder if there really was a P. Craig Russell version of Promethea knocking around back in the seventies. There seems to have been rather a lot of fiction as magic tales doing the rounds of late, unless I've only just noticed it, and this is definitely one of the more entertaining efforts.

Seven Soldiers of Victory

Grant Morrison and a cast of thousands
Seven Soldiers of Victory (2006)
Seven Soldiers comprises seven four-issue miniseries plus some other stuff, each miniseries featuring one of the seven principal characters as they form a team without actually meeting. It's been collected in the four volumes I have here, which I was going to write about individually until I realised it might become too repetitive. The idea is that one is supposed to be able to read the seven miniseries in any order, and I initially began with order of publication - as they appear in the collected volumes - but it became a little too confusing so I've opted for one character at a time bookended by the two specials.

Okay.

The relationship between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison was vividly and uproariously depicted in the beloved 1970s sitcom That Plonker Next Door wherein the suburban Morrison family find themselves frequently and comically at odds with their neighbours, the Moores, headed by the gruffly bearded Alan who worships Sid's Snake from the old Whizzer & Chips comic strip - with hilarious consequences; and there's probably some sort of irony that the best description of practical magick I could find in a short time just happened to preface an interview with the latter:

Moore believes magic is a grammar—a linguistic, symbolic structure for looking at the world. He has at times described interactions with gods and demons; he insists these entities are not real in the phenomenal sense. They are ideas, but they contain all the power of these gods as if they were real. Moore believes that art and magic are aspects of the same part of human consciousness: the will to create. Magic, for Moore, is not about the material world but the world of the mind. Its only authentic external expression is art.

Much as Moore and Morrison seem to harbour serious reservations regarding each other's continued existence, I'd suggest the above applies particularly well to the work of the latter; and I'm suggesting this just to make it clear what we're talking about here, given how Seven Soldiers of Victory might be deemed an alchemical work, broadly speaking - narrative as ritual.

The story, divided as it is into seven parts which intersect to a lesser degree than you might expect, is reasonably straightforward in terms of mechanics, but disorientating in regard to the whole. This is particularly so as each individual story tends to serve up an odd shaped slice of the fantastic life of its star, chronology leaping around all over before ending seemingly abruptly in a couple of cases; so the whole is some way from being a neat little jigsaw puzzle which slots happily together and dispenses a chewy gum stick of perfect sense when you press the red button at the end. There is a lot going on in this story, so I'm just going to have to concentrate on what made sense to me, otherwise we could be here all evening.

The dominant theme of Seven Soldiers of Victory seems to be that of layered realities, those of the characters and their readership and how we might intersect and so on; all with some of that trendy quantum physics thrown in for seasoning and the sort of mathematics by which it can be proven that the story is a universe in its own right - although I can't remember if I picked that up myself or from one of Andrew Hickey's excellent related essays. Grant Morrison becomes a character in his own comic, not for the first time, writing the lives of people who seem to recognise themselves as essentially fictitious.

Equally significant may be the recurrence of that which springs to life, which emerges from below the earth or the underworld, and the animation of previously unliving matter - variations on a theme which crop up time and again and may be seen as crossings made from lower to higher levels of being, or travelling towards Godhood as I suspect Morrison may see it.

This transmutation is disrupted by the Sheeda - villains of the piece identified with the Sidhe, the fairy folk of myth - creatures who devour culture, pillaging and corrupting their own history and who, it turns out, seem also to embody the aforementioned Godhead towards which everyone else aspires given that they turn out be humanity from the far future at the furthest reach of evolution. On one level this may be deemed to reflect - ooh off the top of my head - Alan Moore's Watchmen recycling the culture of a more innocent age for its own ends, or even what Morrison himself does with the Seven Soldiers in question - each one hired from DC's stable of also-rans, arguably excepting the comic book incarnation of the Frankenstein monster who, by the way, seems commendably faithful to Mary Shelley's verbose original. On another level, the story represents culture as a self-generated institution, symbolic perpetual motion, a universe bringing itself into being, which probably qualifies as magick at least as much as anything Paul Daniels ever did; and the why is addressed in an Ed Stargard newspaper column in the final chapter:

In the fury of bright crayola colours, broken bones, and sound effects that can burst your ear drums if you let them, the themes may seem unfamiliar but trust me, those are human stories, writ large, dressed in capes and riding magic carpets to other universes, and if life with the Super-Cowboys taught me anything it taught me this...

When you use your X-ray vision to really, really look... ever day is mythology.

At least it feels like an answer to me. Obviously it's all much more complicated than can be summarised in four or five paragraphs, and Seven Soldiers of Victory distinguishes itself as a comic which not only rewards repeat reading, but quite possibly demands it and certainly deserves it. I'd rank it as the best thing Morrison has written since Doom Patrol, and therefore one of the best thing's he's written by some way.

Seven Soldiers of Victory volume one

Grant Morrison & others Seven Soldiers of Victory volume one (2006)
He's been on stage for twenty five minutes churning out the same improvised composition for electric toothbrush and washboard when the first bottle is thrown, then a beer can, then a few more at least one of which has been topped up with piss. Play some fucking songs, you tosser, somebody shouts...

I realise that slagging off Grant Morrison has become something of a guilty pleasure, an activity into which I slip all too easily because I think it's funny, and because I have unresolved anger issues stemming from three years or more during which I patiently spent my hard-earned man's wages on issues of The Unreadables with the understanding that it would eventually stop being shit, which of course never happened; so having once had occasion to regard its mystic slaphead author as the greatest comic book writer of all time, I felt slightly betrayed; and it wasn't that I failed to understand The Invisibles - it's just that it was, as I say, shit.

Anyway, everyone's entitled to the occasional droning musique concrète instrumental from time to time, and when the domed one is on top of his game, he really is astonishing. With this in mind I approached Seven Soldiers of Victory, reckoned by those whose opinions I tend to value as being pretty damn snappy.

All the same, I approached it with certain reservations, specifically that there is clearly one hell of a lot going on in Seven Soldiers, and - lacking confidence in my being able to keep track of it all - I was concerned that I might not get the full benefit. For example, I see from an essay incorporated by Andrew Hickey into his An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers that sections dealing with the character of Klarion the Witch Boy draw on Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progess - and never having read The Pilgrim's Progress, I've been dithering over whether or not I should first get into training with Andrew's book. Then again, I reasoned, I was entirely familiar with all the references which The Invisibles kept trying to rub in my face and they really didn't help, if anything serving only to increased my general loathing of that particular excerpt from Morrison's underpants; and there's something to be said for a comic book which can be read without first having to enrol in evening classes.

Seven Soldiers, I am told, might be viewed as a ritual undertaking designed to turn the comic industry into a sentient being, or something of that sort. This is only one of the myriad potentially deep and meaningful interpretations of the series, but I've elected to go in cold and with little idea of what to look out for, just to see if it works because as Andrew Hickey states somewhere or other:
 

Read a mediocre book, and you come out knowing exactly what the author intended, and what she wanted you to know. Read a great book, and you come out thinking things neither you nor the author ever thought of.

Furthermore, I'm going to take the story one volume at a time because that's how I roll, and I only have the first two at present, so we'll just have to see how it goes.

Seven Soldiers of Victory was originally one of those golden age comic books so definitively of its era as to resemble its own parody - now that we're all older and a little more cynical; seven superheroes, one of whom was a cowboy; Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy being two others - a sort of composite human flag I guess. DC Comics has a  long tradition of reviving and revising forgotten characters, generally with mixed results depending upon the writer and how much nostalgia is involved. Some tales were of their time and might have been better off staying that way, but if there's a new angle it can sometimes work.

I can't help but notice that Seven Soldiers seems almost like Grant Morrison doing what Alan Moore did with all those old Charlton characters he dressed up as Watchmen - although it's probably best not to read too much into that - and judging by these first eight issues, it looks like it might indeed work. The grinning kids dressed as flags are replaced by similarly obscure also-rans upon whom, lacking much in the way of back story, Morrison scrawls all manner of weird and wonderful patterns, artfully tying this version into the mythology of its golden age ancestor with some additional commentary on the genre made all the more palatable by the wit of the dialogue. That said, it's quite dense in terms of information, which has presumably led to the accusations of incomprehensibility, although on the face of it I would say it's more the case of Seven Soldiers being something which can't be rushed, and which rewards patience and consideration.

It's not perfect - some of the art seems a little underwhelming, and the Klarion sections keep threatening to become Tim Burton - which obviously no-one wants to see - but these are at present just minor niggles for the sake of keeping my hand in.

On the strength of the first volume, specifically on the strength of all its ultradimensional mutterings, Seven Soldiers has the potential of being The Invisibles that isn't shit: admittedly esoteric but at least it has a bit of a tune.