Actually, it’s not over yet. After mulling further on how Promethea and The Invisibles functioned as comics last week, I couldn’t get the thought of their structure and aims out of my head. In lieu, then, of the article I was going to write on another series, we’re diving back even deeper on two series that shown what magic was able to do to the comic medium.

One of the key reasons I couldn’t stop thinking about the two series stemmed from something that I head read from each creator regarding the genesis of the series. On Moore’s side, he had commented on the philosophy of the work—about creating a comic that had something else to say and how that tied into his own studies on magic and the occult. The structure of Promethea, then, was influenced by the structure of Moore’s own views of how magic can function. We see this is many of the Promethea stories as much of what she learns is the basics of magical philosophy. There’s a kind of rigidity from this kind of structure within the work, namely as Promethea herself follows the 22 paths of the Kaballah’s tree of life. Contrast this, then, with how Morrison brought about The Invisibles and imbued many of its pages with the chaos magick they had been practicing. When looking through their biography/history, Supergods, Morrison talks of touring the US at the height of their Arkham Asylum fame and how they began to approach comics as a medium after that. Their personal journey was a chaotic exercise in itself, one that would go onto inform much of what made The Invisibles a vessel for other kinds of magick thinking. That lack of structure would define their series with so many elements working due to the almost happenstance nature of its creation.

Something else that struck me when thinking about both series is how they exist in the twilight of the 90s comic boom. With the comics crash of 1996 looming in the background—even if The Invisibles premiered in 94—there was a sense that much of the mainstream arm of the medium could just disappear. And so now it was the time to do what you could with comics that could still get, relatively, easily into people’s hands. Coupled with Y2K also appearing over the horizon, the apocalyptic presence warped thought around it. For Promethea and The Invisibles, we literally see this as both series end either at the turn of the millennium or in 2012 with the Mayan end of days. From these approaches, we see two series that were able to push their comics into weirder heights—the experimental nature of both showing the kind of freedom that comes from not knowing if you’ll even be able to publish your work.

Comics are a strange thing—even with the threat of oblivion, they continue to persists. Of all the media from the previous century to make it this far from its initial genesis, comics maintain their resilience and magic. Even when their old gods and magic die, new ones always come around again. 

Get excited. Get krackled.

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