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Perhaps it's appropriate to go over the provenance of this series. The Awesome Preview from 1998 prints, in black and white, the entirety of the prelude story to "Glory and the Gate of Tears." The colourized version is presented in 1999 in the Awesome Entertainment zero issue. It's interesting, as that issue actually takes two of the pages and turns them into double-page spreads, albeit ones that are to be read vertically rather than horizontally. The the Avatar preview issue prints, again in black and white, the first few pages of issue 1. Add to this that today's zero issue includes a history of Glory, unique to the Avatar Press zero issue, which replaces sketchbook material that was included in the Awesome Entertainment zero issue. And it reverts the two double-page spreads to the single pages that were seen in the Awesome Preview. Which, since it's substantially different from today's zero issue, means I'll get around to reading the story again some time. As I've noted before, this is not a series that I'm in any way unhappy to revisit. Aside, of course, from the its truncated nature.
The prelude to "Gate of Tears" is a nice set-up not only for Glory's new situation (a Rick Jones/Captain Mar-Vell-style body sharing situation), but also for the exploration of symbolic nature that comes to its apex in Promethea. I touched briefly upon this in my introduction to the "Faces of Glory" series of posts, and Glory creator Rob Liefeld has often claimed that without Moore's work in the Awesome Universe, there would be no ABC Comics, Promethea, Tom Strong, etc. I find this amusing coming from someone whose biggest claim to fame is a team book that was originally a Teen Titans pitch. Again, however, there are substantial enough differences between both the characters and the universes within which they exist that the exploration begun here and exploration undertaken in Promethea would have been significantly different, even if they arrived at the same places.
Another thing to bear in mind about the Avatar Press series is that it was prepared as a mini-series, consisting of the zero issue and 4 regular issues. Which means, if I'm not mistaken, that there's at the very least bare bones outlines of what happens later in the series kicking about somewhere. And given how the series "concludes" in the second issue, I'd love to get at least a tiny bit more. Pun intended.
More to follow.
Further Reading and Related Posts
I've written a bit about Alan Moore for the blog. Mostly to do with Supreme and Glory.
And for a deep dive into Glory's origins, here's some stuff about Extreme Studios, from whence she originally sprang.
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