Promethea 13-18
Oh my god. Why is it that Alan Moore, by all accounts (including mine) one of the best comic book writers ever, also the only person over the course of this project of mine whose material I have actually given up on? I couldn’t make it through League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century and I’m in skim mode for chunks of Promethea.
It’s so so dull. I don’t care about the 10 spheres and the 22 paths connecting them. I don’t want to read a treatise on love, judgment, truth, death, beauty, or any other abstract concept. Slogging through some of these pages puts me back in college, reading a textbook or listening to a lecture for a mandatory class that I have no interest in taking.
Also, Stacia is so effing annoying.
I would be so ready to dump these books if J.H. Williams III wasn’t so frickin’ good at his job. The art is as beautiful as the writing is stultifying. (That’s not fair. The plot is interesting whenever Moore reluctantly returns to it. He clearly wants to keep speechifying all day long, but throws in some story progression as a sidebar every once in a while to to give people like me hope. Cruel, evil man.)
Back to Williams (JH, not Robin). This must have been a dream project for him. Moore gives him so much to do, in so many styles, and he executes on all of it so amazingly well. Every issue is a whole new exploration of color and layouts. And let’s not forget the rest of the art team - Mick Gray on inks and Jeromy Cox on coloring. So much credit is due to the lot of them.
If only it wasn’t all in service of a dreary god with a boring doctrine. Two more trades to go, I’m going to focus a lot more on the art.
No comments:
Post a Comment