Come with me, won't you, back across hundreds of thousands of years, to the Earth of the future and the war with the Earth Empire.
I gotta say, I'm pretty excited. I went on at length in my earlier posts on Prophet that I think is one of the best revamps of a character I've ever seen. So to see where this story goes, and how this iteration ends, is pretty great. While I'm sure that this won't be the final version of Prophet that we see, every now and again a revamp comes along that redefines a character. I, of course, think of Morrison's Animal Man and Doom Patrol, but Moore's Swamp Thing came well before that. But even before that there's the O'Neil/Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow run that continues to be held up as a defining moment for those characters. The mark of a successful revamp in superhero comics is quite often measured by the quality of the comics that come afterward. All superhero properties will, eventually, leave the care of the creative teams that are working on them. But the characters never go away. What a run like the Graham/Roy, et al. run on Prophet does is permanently shift the context within which stories of the character can be told. Much like Moore's introduction of the "Revision Wave" in Supreme. And, more often than not, these paradigms offer so much more scope for storytelling. It would be foolish for any further tales of John Prophet to ignore the events of this series. Though I don't know what's going to happen in the end, the vast canvas of this universe Graham and Roy have created is just too rich to not include in further stories.
But that's not actually what I'd meant to say originally. What these revamps do, in most cases, is actually make it impossible to ignore them in the continuity/contextuality of those iterations that come next. They're so good, and so critically-praised, that they find their way into what we might think of as the canonical stories of a hero or a team. This is where the comparison to those early Morrison series comes in. Animal Man's metatextual run-in with Grant Morrison is so understood a part of that character's fabric that virtually all iterations since have at least a nod to the metafictional point of view Animal Man achieved in that story. Will the future of the Earth Empire become a standard part of the Prophet tale going forward?
Even if it doesn't, even if, in the end, John Prophet is remembered only as a knock-off of Captain America, this is, like Moore's Supreme is for Superman, the best Captain America story that doesn't star Captain America. And that's really pretty great.
To be continued.
No comments:
Post a Comment