Last week I began my first foray into Promethea, a series that I had initially thought had some kind of basis in mythology, but was a fiction Alan Moore had created as the foundation for a sprawling story centered around the idea of his own creation. Not content with only looking at one volume of this story, I had to dive in further by reading though the second volume as Promethea, Book 2 from Moore, J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray, Jeromy Cox, Jose Villarrubia, and Todd Klein explores even more of this character and what she’s going to do to her world. 

The last time we had seen Sophia Bangs, she had passed out while her mind was in the Immateria, learning more about the different aspects that make up the idea of Promethea. But while she’s been out, The Temple has been making moves, namely moves to have every demon under their command attack the hospital Sophie is in to get rid of Promethea now before she can come into her own. But with the death of her mentor, Barbara Shelly, in this fray, Sophie is more focused than she’s ever been—namely on revenge against The Temple. Revenge, though, is a strange thing as all that remains of the The Temple—the ancient cabal that began the lineage of Promethea by murdering a young girl’s father—is a few geriatrics throwing a birthday party for their grandchildren.

While Promethea as a series has so far been various shorter stories touching on the vastness of Moore’s interests in the occult and storytelling, it’s in this volume that we see the more experimental side of Williams’ art emerge. Our opening issue has his art slowly melt away until we’re seeing photos of real people layered over illustrated backgrounds to better demonstrate the strata between the Immateria and real world. Another issue has us turning the issue on its side to better view the action of a wide-screen comics story, complete with a city-terrorizing monster and explosions. And the final issue of the volume has no panels at all—simply a structure implied by speech bubbles that break through the meta-contract we have with traditional comic storytelling. But every experiment here is always in service to the story, either highlighting some aspect of the world at large or some broader point on the nature of magic. Williams takes what we know about how a comic should be structured and goes in a dozen different directions to show us that, through non-traditional comic storytelling—we can tell a non-traditional comic story.

While this volume of the series is twenty-five years old at this point, it does feel like a creative zenith that many creators would try to emulate later in the decade after its initial release. There was something about series that were coming out right at the turn of the century that seemed to be competing with one another to who can make the best comic right as we entered the next millennium. It does remind me of another series that stretched back to the eighties I may need to look at later.

Get excited. Get twisty.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.