There’s the Five Swell Guys, a group of science heroes that protect New York City using their knowledge and gadgets. While Sophie is the central character, there are lots of characters who aren’t close to her or even aware of her.

There are telepathic news broadcasts called ThinkTexts that frame scenes where characters are talking, the news often having little to do with those people, but informing us about other aspects of this world that will be important later. Every billboard and newspaper is a crucial piece of worldbuilding and commentary. In the same way, Watchmen used media as a method of telling multiple stories at once we get the same in Promethea. It’s established that the core story is set in 1999, but it is most definitely not our timeline with highly futuristic technology being commonplace. Immateria is the space of the imagination, the core of Promethea’s power, and here, the little girl is transfigured into a goddess, destined to become one with any woman or girl who calls out to her.Ī lot is happening from the outset in this book to the point that I wouldn’t blame any reader for being overwhelmed. The girl wanders into the desert where Thoth-Hermes brings her into the realm of Immateria. Throughout history, she has been connected to women in positions of vulnerability, with her first manifestation of a young girl whose father was stoned to death. Promethea is an iconic figure of feminity that has had multiple incarnations dating back to Alexandria in the 1st century AD. The main character in the title is Sophie Bangs, a college student researching Promethea for a literature paper. We see visual representations of the sephirot as the protagonist exits the realm of the physical and traverses the domain of God. Instead, the book is about one young woman’s personal path of spiritual growth, touching on the Occult, the Tarot, and most prominently, the Hermetic Qabalah. There is a paper thing plot working through the title, which was frustrating to readers who came to the book with expectations of a somewhat traditional narrative. Promethea has been cited as the most personal comic Moore has written in his career, centered around his philosophy and views of magic/the mystic. Each book examined an archetype comics in typical Moore fashion, deconstructing the tropes and reinterpreting commonly accepted norms. Moore stayed in that vein of pulpy, Golden Age stories centering this line around four core titles: Tom Strong, Top 10, Tomorrow Stories, and Promethea. The name was a repurposing of a defunct line of comics from the 1940s, which featured superheroes now lost to the memories of the general public like Black Terror and Fighting Yank.

In 1999 he started his own imprint of Wildstorm (which was then a division of DC Comics), called America’s Best.

Alan Moore has always been a remixer of comics history and iconography.

Promethea, Vol. 1 by Alan Moore