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Post by berkley on Feb 28, 2020 1:13:42 GMT -5
I do rate Promethea as one of Moore's top works, myself - and I have no personal knowledge of or experience with magic(k). I think mrp's description is correct, but even without anything more than a mild curiosity about magic I enjoyed it from a philosophical POV - so the long conversations and explanations, far from being a weak point of the series, were highlights for me.
I read it as a "novel of ideas" in comic book form - which is not to everyone's taste: lots of people can't stand Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain either, and those people often cite the long discussions between protagonist Hans Castorp and his older friend, an Italian intellectual named Settembrini, as the worst, most unreadable parts of the book, but for me, and I assume other readers who do like The Magic Mountain, they were some of the the best.
BTW, I found the episode dealing with the old, unattractive magician performing "sex magic" with the young Sophie distasteful, personally, but at no time did I get the feeling that this character was meant to be a stand-in for the writer.
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Post by rberman on Feb 28, 2020 9:00:21 GMT -5
Promethea (1999-2002)Yet after 24 incredibly talky issues, there’s little effort at character development, and only the vaguest gesture toward plot. It’s sort of like one of those children’s books in which the Cat in the Hat teaches you biology. That's because the story and characters are immaterial to what Moore is doing here. The "story" of Promethea is a gild, not the substance of the work. Promethea is Moore's attempt to write a modern allegory of the ilk of "The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz" a brethren document to the Rosicrucian manifestos, i.e. it is a magical treatise and grimoire in the guise of a narrative, but the narrative and characters themselves are just symbolic parts of the treatise itself, part of the lesson to be taught about magick. Issue #12 that you single out, is essentially the core of the book and each issue is a lesson on particular aspect of magick and issue 12 is essentially the spine of the whole work that holds it together. Moore has essentially said as much about the work as well. Promethea was the summation of all he had learned about magick on his path to becoming a magician. It has more in common with his comic works like Birth Caul and Snakes and Ladders which are comic adaptations of spoken word performances he did which were in essence him conducting magical rituals and those comics were the record of it. Promethea is the record of his magickal journey packaged in a way that the initiated (i.e. those conversant with the principles of magick he is teaching) can follow in his footsteps and take their own magickal journey. The fact he can take what is essentially a magickal grimoire and present it in such a way that it is a viable comic book story is quite impressive, but telling a story was secondary to what he was doing with this book. Trying to critique it as simply a comic narrative is off target at best and missing the entire point of the work at worst. You mentioned it was a personal work for Moore, and it was, but it wasn't about telling stories, it was about teaching lessons to the initiated in the guise of stories, or rather providing a sort of crash course initiation to those who were seeking such. Unless of course, you believe Moore was simply full of it about becoming a magician and practicing within occult traditions and having one over on folks. PS But what I think Moore was having one over on folks about was getting a bunch of fanboys to financially support his efforts to write a magical grimoire by doing it as a comic book with allegorical characters who resemble super-heroes because they would blindly buy anything by Moore with superheroes in it. Well, that's the thing about authors: They build a reputation with their readers. Moore has a reputation for couching big ideas in interesting stories. The nature of comic book periodicals is that you're a long way into the series before you have a vantage point to look back on exactly what you have. It seems unfair to blame readers for that state of affairs. Me, twenty years after original publication? I could have read reviews, but that can spoil the experience, so I deliberately avoided doing that. In fact, the first issue of Promethea in my trade collection contains a two page essay detailing Moore's research into all the Promethea characters. Then the next few issues contained that exact same information in the mouths of the comic book characters. It totally deflated the reading experience. Moore's style may be faithful to overly preachy grimoires of the past, but that's a low goal. If we treated the art that way, we would be congratulating Williams if his drawings looked like rudimentary Paleolithic cave paintings of stick figures. And we know Moore can put the big idea in an interesting story, because he's done it many times. Like writers from Tolkien to C.S. Lewis to Tom King to Grant Morrison to Jack Kirby to Robert Heinlein, etc. It's hard, but doable. It's not so hard to write an essay and then gild it with a thin narrative turning that essay into a Socratic dialogue. This is the number one complaint people have with most "Christian fiction," that it's so much a vehicle for the big ideas that the story and character development aren't independently interesting. If Moore set his sights so low as to have J.H. Williams III produce gorgeous imagery to accompany doggerel fiction, then he succeeded at that low goal. Congratulations, I guess? But perhaps the "blindness" in that case would consist of thinking Moore has done something great. |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 28, 2020 11:14:42 GMT -5
But for Moore, Promethea wasn't an attempt to produce fiction. For the initiated, "The Chymical Wedding" wasn't fiction even though the story it told was fictional. It was a book of "Truth" and a way to communicate/share ideas with others of similar interests "on the down low" without being obvious about it and without alerting the uninitiated who read it. Moore was doing the same thing with Promethea. Moore had more interest in pursuing his occult interests at that point than he had in writing super-hero comics (or comics in general) and the deal he made with Wildstorm was so that he could pursue whatever interests he had and produce comics in the process and get paid for it. He never cared about audience reaction of fanboy expectations, and by this point he had soured on that even more. The sale of Wildstorm to DC just after he made the deal with Wildstorm soured him even more and further reinforced his desire to do whatever interested him rather than what fans expected of him, and he pretty much stated so in every bit of press leading up to the ABC books and jut after they were released, so people going in should have known exactly what they were getting themselves in to. Unrealistic expectations is the problem of the person with the expectations, not with the one who has those expectations foisted upon them.
-M
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Post by rberman on Feb 28, 2020 11:39:06 GMT -5
I didn't know any of that going in, and I'm probably not alone. I can't hold Moore responsible for how his works are being touted by Vertigo or Amazon today, but the hype copy certainly doesn't lead one to believe that this is a philosophical treatise devoid of real characters or story. Here's Amazon's summary for the version I bought:
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 28, 2020 11:48:23 GMT -5
I didn't know any of that going in, and I'm probably not alone. I can't hold Moore responsible for how his works are being touted by Vertigo or Amazon today, but the hype copy certainly doesn't lead one to believe that this is a philosophical treatise devoid of real characters or story. Here's Amazon's summary for the version I bought: Of course it's not. It's normal corporate sales pitch. Super-hero funnybook readers don't want to read about magick. Hell they don't really want to read about it when it's coached as funnybook magick. Look at how often Dr. Strange has been cancelled and re-booted. |
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Post by mikelmidnight on Feb 28, 2020 12:54:42 GMT -5
I do rate Promethea as one of Moore's top works, myself - and I have no personal knowledge of or experience with magic(k). I think mrp's description is correct, but even without anything more than a mild curiosity about magic I enjoyed it from a philosophical POV - so the long conversations and explanations, far from being a weak point of the series, were highlights for me. I read it as a "novel of ideas" in comic book form - which is not to everyone's taste: lots of people can't stand Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain either, and those people often cite the long discussions between protagonist Hans Castorp and his older friend, an Italian intellectual named Settembrini, as the worst, most unreadable parts of the book, but for me, and I assume other readers who do like The Magic Mountain, they were some of the the best.
I do love the series, and the artwork is a big part of that. I'm not too upset about the level of characterization, given the nature of the story, but there are several points where the plot or characterization strike decidedly false notes, and then I feel like Moore's just being careless.
Interestingly enough, if you read the first sex scene between the old, unattractive Allan Quatermain and the young Mina Murray in LoEG, the similarities are striking, which makes one wonder ...
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Post by rberman on Feb 28, 2020 12:57:43 GMT -5
BTW, I found the episode dealing with the old, unattractive magician performing "sex magic" with the young Sophie distasteful, personally, but at no time did I get the feeling that this character was meant to be a stand-in for the writer.
Interestingly enough, if you read the first sex scene between the old, unattractive Allan Quatermain and the young Mina Murray in LoEG, the similarities are striking, which makes one wonder ...
Likewise between huge, shaggy, unkempt Swamp Thing and young, beautiful Abigail Arcane. |
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Post by berkley on Feb 28, 2020 16:47:36 GMT -5
Interestingly enough, if you read the first sex scene between the old, unattractive Allan Quatermain and the young Mina Murray in LoEG, the similarities are striking, which makes one wonder ...
Likewise between huge, shaggy, unkempt Swamp Thing and young, beautiful Abigail Arcane. Every reader has to go with his or her individual experience of a text, and I can only speak to my own gut reaction, but neither of those have ever struck me as parallels to the Promethea scene in the way they do other people. |
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Post by rberman on Jul 24, 2020 19:45:47 GMT -5
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Book One (1999, #1-6) The Story: The British government prevails upon agent Mina Murray to assemble a team of operatives to deal with a threat in London’s Chinatown. She recruits Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll, and Allan Quartermain. They eventually realize that they are being played for dupes in a long-standing battle between Fu Manchu (called “The Doctor”) and the British criminal mastermind Moriarty, foe of Sherlock Holmes. Both are seeking control of the antigravity substance Cavorite to construct airships of terrible destructive force.  A text pulp story about Allan Quartermain is also serialized throughout these issues. He takes drugs and is sent into the timestream, where he encounters H.G. Wells’ Time Traveler and Morlocks and has a vision of space/time as a four dimensional solid. Upon his return, he must wrest control of his body from a Lovecraftian horror. My Two Cents: Alan Moore was in a retro mood at the end of the previous century, spinning Golden and Silver Age style stories for his America’s Best Comics imprint which started at Image’s WildStorm but was sold with WildStorm to DC, a company on Moore’s enemies list. The story sticks to pure steampunk adventure on this first arc. Only the Invisible Man and Mr. Hyde have any powers. Nemo has tech, and Quartermain and Murray are simply bold adventurers armed only with bravery. I expected Mina to show some vampiric ability due to her Dracula backstory, but Moore didn’t go that way. The most she does is stare down Mr. Hyde once.  Moore and artist Kevin O'Neil present Captain Nemo as a swarthy Sikh. However Jules Verne's novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea" describes him as "pale." Grant Morrison among others has commented on the frequency of rape in Alan Moore stories. This one begins by describing Mina as having been "ravished" by Dracula. She's rescued from rape in Egypt by Quartermain. The Invisible Man has raped and impregnated three girls at a boarding school. Overall a simple but fun beginning to a tale Moore would spend the next twenty years intermittently exploring. A feature film with Sean Connery followed in 2003, which seems like quite a rapid development cycle. It added Tom Sawyer so that a youthful American could join the crew. Fox settled a lawsuit filed by writers Larry Cohen and Martin Poll, who said they had been pitching essentially the same story to Fox repeatedly since 1993.
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Post by rberman on Jul 25, 2020 13:54:12 GMT -5
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 2 (2002-3) The Story: Mars Attacks! For the most part it’s a faithful recreation of H.G. Wells’ novel “The War of the Worlds.” The crater in Horsell Commons. The heat ray. The pack of tripods ravaging London. The Red Weed. The eventual defeat by Earth disease.  Inserting the LEG characters into the story affects three points. First, the Martians attack Earth because they have been driven off of Mars by John Carter and his Barsoomian allies. This is a nice touch.  Second, the Invisible Man, who was a villain in his original novel, takes the side of the Martians. This has no real effect; they do the same things that Wells had them do. And does he really think they’re going to give him some sort of power in their new order?  Nemo’s Nautilus submarine fills the role of the frigate Thunder Child.  Third, Dr. Moreau provides Earth with bio-weapons to fight the Martians. This is fine; it gives our heroes something to do rather than just wait for Earth itself to defeat the alien threat. By the end of the story, the League has disintegrated through deaths, defection, and disillusionment.  Each issue also contains a lengthy travelogue text piece describing the myths and Lost World tales associated with some particular area of the globe. Mina Murray and Allan Quartermain, who have become lovers, figure in some of these journeys, and at one point Allan dies and is replaced by the legacy character of his son, also named Allan. My Two Cents: The main story was fun and fine. The love story between Mina and Quartermain was forced and uncomfortable, whether it’s another example of the “beautiful young woman falls in love with shaggy Alan Moore” trope or not.  The travelogues were obviously fun for Moore to write but don’t have any narrative rhyme or reason. They do introduce the character of Orlando that Moore will use extensively in future editions. An interesting point of comparison is Bill Willingham’s work in Jack of Fables (2011-2015), which sees the titular rogue roaming America, interacting with a wide variety of myths and tall tales in a much more character-based setting. Willingham doesn’t try to cover every single myth in a couple of sentences, but by placing them in plot and character, I find it a more engaging read. See also Neil Gaiman’s novel “American Gods” (2001). 
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Post by rberman on Jul 27, 2020 8:01:56 GMT -5
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier (2007) The Story: In 1958, the eternally young Mina Murray and Allan Quartermain steal documents about themselves from a fascistic Britain run by Big Brother. Two government agents give chase but fail to catch them for long. References to 1950s spy fiction from James Bond to Alfred Hitchcock abound.  Periodically the heroes stop and read the documents, which tell stories about different Leagues of Extraordinary Gentlemen in various time periods, from Elizabethan times up through the Beat period. Each document is in a different style, from Shakespearean iambic pentameter to Fanny Hill through a P.G. Wodehouse homage, government reports, postcards, a free association pulp novel, etc. Moore is clearly having a lot of fun flexing his stylistic muscles with this.  My Two Cents: Moore put this 195 page semi-graphic novel together to employ Kevin O’Neill while planning his own next arc of the League story. We learn that the first League we saw was actually the third incarnation of this super-group, with Orlando as a key figure in pretty much every historical and fictional event known to man. The end of the story intends the use of 3-D glasses which are included. This was one year before Grant Morrison did the same thing for Final Crisis: Superman Beyond 3-D.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Jul 27, 2020 11:27:07 GMT -5
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 2 (2002-3)The Story: Mars Attacks! For the most part it’s a faithful recreation of H.G. Wells’ novel “The War of the Worlds.” The crater in Horsell Commons. The heat ray. The pack of tripods ravaging London. The Red Weed. The eventual defeat by Earth disease.
In general, I enjoyed this arc much more than the first one. My only complaint with it, was that more than half of the first arc was spent, tediously to my mind, gathering the team together, and then the second arc broke the team up. I'd have appreciated one more story where we got to have them as a functional team from beginning to end, is all.
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,222 
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Post by Confessor on Jul 27, 2020 11:46:13 GMT -5
I don't want to come across as being snarky here (though I probably will), but I've got to say that I'm amazed that you can review these League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volumes so briefly and scantly. You reviewed all six parts of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 2 in one and a bit paragraphs. I mean, yes, you also wrote a plot summary, but in terms of putting down your own thoughs on one of the most literate, nuanced and densely packed mini-series that Alan Moore has ever written, all you could muster was two paragraphs -- and most of the second paragraph was about other comics that LOEG reminded you of! And you just did The Black Dossier in a single paragraph (three if you count the plot summary)! I mean...wow. The LOEG is such dense matrial you could easily write a good few thousand words about each volume, and even then just be scratching the surface. I don't mean this to be an attack on you, rberman; it's more that I'm trying to encourage you to put more effort in. At the moment, if I was your English teacher at school, I'd definitely be marking these reviews as, "could try harder!"  |
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Post by rberman on Jul 27, 2020 11:54:06 GMT -5
I don't want to come across as being snarky here (though I probably will), but I've got to say that I'm amazed that you can review these League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volumes so briefly and scantly. You reviewed all six parts of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 2 in one and a bit paragraphs. I mean, yes, you also wrote a plot summary, but in terms of putting down your own thoughs on one of the most literate, nuanced and densely packed mini-series that Alan Moore has ever written, all you could muster was two paragraphs -- and most of the second paragraph was about other comics that LOEG reminded you of! And you just did The Black Dossier in a single paragraph (three if you count the plot summary)! Wow. The LOEG is such dense material you could easily write a good few thousand words about each volume, and even then just be scratching the surface. If I was your English teacher at school, I'd definitely be marking this, "could try harder!" I just didn't find it that compelling. Yes, the travelogue was incredibly dense. But it was intentionally written in a very dry style that just didn't admit of any analysis. There's no over-arching story or character development to it. |
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Post by berkley on Jul 27, 2020 12:29:34 GMT -5
With writers as talented and accomplished as Alan Moore - and I admit there aren't many, especially in comics - I just enjoy the ride, and certainly don't worry about pedestrian Creative Writing 101 concerns like "character development" or "drinving the plot forward". Moore has shown throughout his career that he understands the nuts and bolts of writing fiction better than just about any other comics writer you care to name and to my mind long ago earned the right to break the rules whenever he sees fit.
Obviously it's the reader's right to find fault with writing that doesn't meet what he or she feels are indispensible requirements of worthwhile fiction. I'd even go so far as to agree that for most writers it is a good idea to follow those guidelines - because most writers are pretty limited and need that helping hand, which will at least raise some of them to the level of competence, though it also makes their work feel a bit familar and samey to me.
I'd be disappointed in Moore if he lowered himself to that level, though. I expect more and better from him and while I don't rank LoEG up there with his very best, it usually delivers.
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