Page 45 Review by Mark
Sophie Bangs lives and studies in New York. Not the one we know, but a city full of scientific advancements and strange figures terrorizing the inhabitants. Researching a term paper, she traces the history of the Promethea, a character called upon by writers, artists and poets over centuries. Of course she finds out that Promethea was more than just a muse, more than just an image or spirit used by people to tell a story: she was a force, a force that Sophie comes to embody.
At the start of the America's Best Comics line, PROMETHEA looked the least promising. TOM STRONG had the adventuring hero, TOP TEN was the dense, team book, LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN united two of 2000 AD's biggest names, but the somewhat flowery, near-Wonder Woman image of this Amazon in body armour didn't initially appeal. Now I have to say that it's my favourite of the bunch. I imagine that all those years working on FROM HELL must have produced a backlog of ideas that didn't quite fit into the project in hand. Couple this with the experience of hired-hand work on projects like the WILDCATS run and you've got the ABC books, an overspill from Moore's notebooks of thoughts and connections.
PROMETHEA is all about the power of fiction, the idea of shared belief in an idea making it real and, of course magic. Some of the notions that Moore and Sim discussed in the 'From Hell Dialogue' (from CEREBUS) turn up here. Signs, portents, games, books, incantations, riddles, tarot, anagrams, fairy tales, storytelling, magick and sex are all thrown into the pot.
Lyrical, ever-changing page designs by Williams III, getting particularly fruity and expansive whenever the characters drift off into the other realms.
