Promethea - I am going to miss this comic (OPPD 14)

In honor of the last issue of Promethea coming out today, here's an image from the Kabbala journey section, during the heaven issue ("The Serpent and the Dove", issue 23). If you look closely (enlarge by clicking on the image) you can see a number of interesting images in here, including a shot of the WTC in lower right.

Promethea is my favorite of Alan Moore's comics work, which is not to denigrate his other works which are always brilliant and occassionally genius. But this book is the most invested with meaning to me right now, and it seems to have a lot of meaning to Moore as well. It is a "difficult" work, esoteric, odd, intricate, not inclined to explain its directions or interests and expects you to keep up with it as it explores the cosmos. Moore has always had cosmic/spiritual/psychic journey aspects to his work and characters who tend to close themselves off from the common world, either physically or just mentally, to explore the inner space. I'm thinking here of Swamp Thing's journey through the universe after his "death" on Earth, Dr. Manhattan's trip to the moon, and William Gull's "dissection" passage in From Hell. Promethea is almost entirely a spiritual journey, and even when she's not journeying through the afterlife or the immateria she is progressing through her stages of being to reach the ultimate stage of being. The ingenious part of the last segment of Promethea is the buildup to Apocalypse, which is genuinely frightening, versus what it really leads to, which is a kind of throwing open of all the doors, tearing down all the walls, a general opening of everything and everyone to the universe, to the All. It's almost the inverse of those earlier characters, who closed themselves off to explore the horrors of their singleness, that Promethea opens herself up to all humanity, and them to each other. I think this is Moore's wish to share with us what he has learned through his magickal studies, how we can infer that he has grown over the years. It's beautiful.

And the artwork, good god, the art. Beautiful, dazzling stuff, just unlike anything comics has seen before. I'm already seeing other books incorporating what Moore and Williams did with panel borders, with the center(staple) space, with color themes and stylistic themes to signify place or time. I think we'll find this to be a milestone series probably most of all in its artwork, and credit to Moore, J. H Williams, Jeromy Cox (gorgeous colors. wow.), Mick Gray (great inker), and Todd Kline's lettering (excellent as usual).

There's an excellent Promethea annotations website that most usefully zooms in on aspects of the artwork and symbolism used in the series.