Promethea
Issues 1-6. Written by Alan Moore, pencilled by J.H. Williams III, inks by Mick Gray, colors by Digital Chameleon.

"I am all inspiration, all desire, imagination's blaze in mankind's dark. I am the rumored one, the mythic bough that reason strains to bend. I am that voice left once the book is done. Who am I? Ha ha ha! Well, that's a good one. I'm friggin' Promethea, you idiot."

Truth be told, Wonder Woman was always something of a washout with me. I realize that her conception came about in an attempt at creating a female counterpoint for DC's flagship character, Superman, but this was mostly due to marketing, as opposed to any real desire for character and plot illumination. This is not meant to detract from the talented folks who have worked on the comic throughout the years (and it is certainly no slight on the... uh... "multi-talented" Linda Carter, who played the character in the short lived 1970s television show), but I could never quite suspend disbelief enough to buy into a concept that revolved around expatriate princesses, lassoes of truth, power bracelets, and invisible jets -- sorry, but that seems pretty hokey, even in the extreme world of superheroes.

Leave it to superscribe Alan Moore to finally get it right.

In Promethea, one of several books to come out of DC's America's Best Comics imprint, Moore has refashioned the concept of the princess/goddess/heroine into a story that has enough weight to carry both cultural icons as well as feminist ideals, if that's what you're looking for, along with enough action elements to keep a legion of fanboys and fangirls frothing at their collective mouths for the next issue. At the outset, Promethea deals with Sophie Bangs, a New York college student living in alternate-Earth year 1999 (replete with flying cars, "science heroes," and holographic TV) who discovers in the process of writing a term paper that her subject, a female goddess character that has existed as a subject of prose and poetry since the 1700s, is actually a living force that is kept alive through the power of words. Specifically, the character was once a young girl living in Alexandria in 411 A.D. who cut a deal with gods Thoth and Hermes to live eternally in the realm of Immateria (stories), as long as there are women writers around to keep her spirit alive. If that all sounds a bit dense, here's the cool side-effect: each successive woman actually becomes Promethea in times of peril and need, and Promethea makes Aliens' Ripley and Terminator's Linda Hamilton look like the Wuss Duet - she's Isis, Wonder Woman, and Elektra with a stable of literate one-liners. Inimitably, Sophie is the next in line for the influx of power, and that's where the fun factor kicks in -- see, there are plenty of forces out there that don't like it at all that this uberchick is back and fighting for the forces of freedom, characters that range from a pair of demonic assassins (in a sly parody of all things Quentin Tarantino) to an sinister cleric with the not-so-subtle moniker of Faust. Of course, they are all itching for a fight, because keen sense of plot and dialogue aside, nothing quite says "comic" so much as a couple of characters senselessly punching each other's heads off.

But let's talk about that knack for story and dialogue, since Moore has it in spades. In the world of modern comics, where characters speak in exposition, force-feeding the reader every bit of information necessary to understanding the storyline, Moore is one of the very few writers who knows how people really communicate. From barbed, sexual insults to veiled threats to ranting diatribes on the nature of femininity, the speech of his characters lets you forget the fact that what you're looking at is merely a collection of words and pictures. With the able of assistance of artist J.H. Williams III, Moore's characters live and breathe on the page. Williams goes against the grain of popular artist that seems to grab their knowledge of female anatomy from the slick pages of Playboy, opting for a natural style in which women are more than just a collection of plastic curves. It's refreshing to see that one previous incarnation of Promethea was a bit chubby, while yet another was tall and gangly, just as it's a nice change to see that Sophie has a bad haircut and no clothing sense. These characters are people, minus the leering pre-pubescent fantasy elements, and that is a rare artistic feat in the medium where heroism is so often associated with breast size.

Most especially, they are people for whom the reader cares, identifiable by their flaws and graces, their acts of kindness and cowardice, and their insatiable thirst for justice. They exist in a fully realized story world that will hopefully keep Promethea alive and kicking long after Wonder Woman's invisible jet has crashed headlong into the Andes.

-- David Rosiak

Promethea, published by DC Comics, is currently available only through comic retailers.

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