The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 956: Prophet - Earth War #6, November 2016

Endings are funny things, aren't they?

And endings of superhero stories are the funniest sort.

The Earth War ends by reminding not only we, the readers, but also our focal characters, that nothing really ends, and that there's always an aspect to conflict that we're simply not aware of. There are yet more bittersweet farewells here, more steps to cease the endless expansion of the Empire, but in the end (whatever that might mean), things continue, as they always have. There's a fantastic section, right at the very end of the story, that reminds us of the passage of time, of the neverending battle to which we consign these modern myths, a section that tells us where we've been, what we've seen, and, both chillingly and comfortingly, where we're going.

I don't have too much to say about this comic right now, but I really feel like Prophet, in this iteration, is one of those books I'll be going back to, time and again, and in which I'll be finding new things to talk about each time. I'll let you know what I have to say, when I have to say it, I suppose.

Back to The Avengers tomorrow. To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 955: Prophet - Earth War #5, July 2016

Hopefully I'm not jumping the gun by saying this, but I'm really glad that this reboot (and, I think, most of the reboots from around this time) avoided bringing Rob Liefeld in as a guest artist, simply by dint of the fact that he "created" these characters. He's just not a good artist, and his style would have been utterly utterly awful in this comic, in Glory, in Supreme. Now, having said that, I'm sure the next issue all Liefeld.

I know I said it yesterday, but I have no idea where this series is going. Obstacles have been overcome, allies are dying, and the enemy seems to have grown more powerful than our intrepid heroes can imagine. Are we heading for an unhappy ending? Will the Earth Empire, or Red Exmere and Multi-Muitox (those two up on the cover), triumph, putting down the free armies' rebellion once and for all? It's possible, and would actually be a really wonderful ending for this story, if only because it would be so unexpected. Superhero comics rarely end in the defeat of the hero. Go ahead. Someone prove me wrong.

After tomorrow's issue, it's going to be slightly jarring to move back into the melodrama of the 80s Avengers. But given that Prophet himself is seen as a thinly-veiled Captain America type, imagining the Prophet series as a possible future for Cap in the Avengers (Diehard as Iron Man, perhaps?) is actually kind of neat.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 954: Prophet - Earth War #4, May 2016

I'm starting to get a little concerned. There's only two issues left of the series and I just can't see how it's all going to wrap up. Though, admittedly, that's also a little exciting. I hate reading a story and knowing how it's going to turn out. Worse is reading a story and figuring out how it's going to turn out. I cannot figure out how all this is going to turn out.

There's some weird dimension-hopping in this issue that I can only assume is going to come back and bite the heroes in their collective butts, but in recognizing this, I'm starting to see the series in very different light. For a long while I'd seen it as the story of a man fighting, literally, against himself for the future of the universe. And that's still a major component of the series. But there's also a subplot that might actually be the main plot of an incursion into Prophet's dimension by an alien entity, one that is corrupted by its presence in our reality. Interestingly, this is quite similar to the story of Secret Wars that we've just finished tangentially reading in The Avengers. I find this a curious story to tell - what is it about our reality that corrupts something not from our reality?

And then, of course, I start thinking on a more Biblical level. Because, really, isn't the story of Jesus the story of a creature from another reality coming to our reality and getting corrupted? And before you point out to me that Christ doesn't actually get corrupted in his story in the Bible, I'd like to point out the corruption of his teachings that fuel much of our current strife in North America, if not around the world. Perhaps the big mythic story that superheroes are trying to tell, the one that Superman starts us out with, isn't about a strange visitor coming to save us, but rather about a strange visitor who could save us, if we weren't so fucking stupid.

Oh. I think I'm feeling a bit pessimistic today.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 951: Prophet - Earth War #1, January 2016

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.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 933: Prophet Strikefile #1, September 2014

The day caught up with me again. Apologies. I'll do this one properly tomorrow. Lots of good stuff in this comic.

(Actually, rather than that, I'm going to review both of them together!)

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 932: Prophet #45, July 2014

The final issue of the ongoing Prophet series does something really lovely for us: it relieves us of the necessity of choice.

SPOILERS FOLLOW. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED

The various characters we've followed through this series have been depicted in a fully-realized manner. And where Old Man and his cohorts are painted at the "good guys," the supposed bad guys working for the Earth Empire, poor, dead Newfather John and his arc, John with a tail, are every bit as well-written. You end up caring about them, hoping against hope that they'll relinquish their fascistic mission, but knowing how unlikely that is. And then Graham and Roy give us just this gift. John Ka sums it up nicely when he says "Brother Greenknife, it looks as though we've got a new arc." I was taken aback by the death of Newfather - we've followed him for so long, and it was, sadly, something of an inauspicious death. Perhaps not all is lost with him, though I somehow doubt a return.

The Earth Empire secures a power that might make them unstoppable. They must be stopped.

But first...

The next couple of issues are the Prophet: Strikefile series that came out in the months before Earth War. They're pretty good, filling in some of the missing millennia of the Earth Empire and the future of the Extreme Universe. They're a timely addition to the series, I think. Though I appreciate the kinds of fiction that simply throw you in, eventually, especially in a world this rich, I want a bit more detail. Strikefile, named for an encyclopedia series that featured Youngblood characters (I think), delivers.

I am concerned at this point that I might not be able to find the final issue of Earth War before I finish what I have. It's only another week. I'll poke about this weekend, but fair warning that both you and I may well be left with a bit of a cliffhanger for a while.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project, Day 929 - Prophet #42, January 2014

Sorry, new work schedule is kicking my ass a bit. I will try to get back on track tomorrow.

Meantime - a nice little story from Diehard about one of his previous run-ins with the Earth Empire.

The 40 Years of Comics Project, Day 928 - Prophet #41, December 2013

There's an unexpected death in this issue, and though it's ostensibly of one of the "bad guys," I was sad to see this character go.

Badrock emerges and strange things ensue with Troll. What I find really quite awful is that all of the small planetoid-like children of McCall are destroyed by Badrock's re-entry into normal space. Not really a great way to treat one's kids.

There's lots of neat space combat in this issue, and it ends (SPOILER ALERT) with a scuttling group of space pirates - once again reminding us that even though there's this really rather epic saga taking place in the series, it's set in a much larger universe. In many superhero titles, it seems the universe revolves around the superhero, that everything that happens to other characters or in other locations is simply background for the main character. That's not the case with this series. There are other things going on in this universe, and other creatures are living their lives oblivious to the epic superhero story playing out before our eyes. It gives the comic a nice sense of perspective. Just because the story of the Prophets is the one that we're following doesn't mean it's the only one happening in this universe.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project, Day 927 - Prophet #40, October 2013

Sorry. A short one today. There's a strange ballet of godlike beings going on in this series right now, and the various Prophets and their allies seem to be caught in the middle of something that they, and we, barely understand. The Troll want to lure Badrock out of the Bleed and into some kind of confrontation.

Where did the concept of the Bleed originally come from? I think it must have been Warren Ellis's Stormwatch, but it seems to have been adopted, at least by the three major superhero publishers, as a shorthand to facilitate crossovers between companies. If all universes intersect with the Bleed, then all combinations of heroes are theoretically possible.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project, Day 926 - Prophet #39, September 2013

I'm fairly certain that this is the first issue of the rebooted Prophet that I read. I picked up most of the tail end of the series at a thrift shop a few years back after poking through them on the shelf, and then I read this one and was hooked. I don't know what it is about the Maximum/Extreme/Awesome studios characters that draws me in. I think perhaps I have this retroactive reading practice after having read Supreme that actually makes the characters and their stories mildly more palatable than they might have been originally. Borges writes an essay about the retroactive effect of Kafka's writing on those writers who came before him - we recognize, prior to his advent, the Kafkaesque in older writings. I think it's a similar effect on these superheroes once viewed through the lens of Moore's Supreme, and, now, the Graham/Roy-helmed Prophet and the Keatinge/Campbell Glory. These stories redeem those that came before, give us a context and let us understand that these mediocre adventures are, in a way, simply preparing the characters (both narratively and literally) for the grand adventures that await them.

Today's comic chronicles the 10000+ year history of Diehard. It's a really, really great story, and a nice one to open up our daily consideration of this title. To be continued!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Weekly Graphic Novel: Week 55 - Prophet: Empire, 2014

Prophet offers some very interesting thoughts on scale and conflict. Up until now, we've seen the threat of the Earth Empire as the most dire presence in the series. Even in the last volume, as a group of Empire-loyal Johns make their way through a space battle that has raged 300 years, we get the sense that this is small compared to the battle that will eventually make the presence of the Empire known.

But then Troll steps in. Yet another amazing revamp of a Liefeld character, Troll was originally a Wolverine-type, complete with wingy hair. But he's been remade here into an eternal and spiritual presence, one who seems to sit outside the concerns of the universe, at least until he senses...something.

A larger threat approaches, one that will require both Old Man and Newfather Prophets to combine their resources for victory. If there's one thing that this reboot of Prophet does nicely, it's to demonstrate the size of the universe within which it's taking place. Even with Old Man on Callisto and Newfather on Earth, we're given a sense of the distance within the Solar System, let alone across an entire galaxy, or indeed between them. So of course there's something more dangerous than the Empire in the galaxy. Infinite space equals infinite possibility, after all.

This is the last collected edition of the series I have, so starting tomorrow, I'll be reading the rest of the series in single issue format for the project. This'll give us a little break from The Avengers, and I'll finally get to finish reading the series, which I never have been able to due to my local comic shops not carrying many copies of the closing mini-series, Earth War.

I will say, before getting into the daily reviews, that I really love this series, and the world that it brings to life. To see this as the future of the Extreme/Maximum/Awesome, etc., etc. universe is fantastic. This is a future unlike any that we've seen in superhero comics, in which the human race, or something quite like it, is still in existence, and still somewhat powerful. This series, instead, sees us reduced to a single person, multiplied out in numerous combinations and permutations. What can we tell of our species when it is condensed into a single man named Prophet?

Next week I'll review the revamped Glory series. It's every bit as amazing and beautiful as this series. And so very different. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Weekly Graphic Novel: Week 54 - Prophet: Brothers, 2013

The narrative threads start to come together - we don't know why there's an Earth Empire that's completely Prophets, but we do know that they're out to take over everything and Old Man Prophet and his allies stand in their way.

There's some nice shout-outs to old characters in this series. We've come across two of "McCall's Children" thus far - Brainrock and Moorrock. These are ancestors of Youngblood member Badrock, one supposes. Prophet and pals also happen across a armada of potential allies whose power source appears to be Ethan Crane, aka Supreme. Not a happy ending for the Man of Might.

What I think Prophet is really quite good at is building the world of the story without diving headlong into extended exposition. Social customs are not explained but demonstrated. We're meant to remember the names of the various alien races we encounter, because there won't be a handy reminder the next time they show up. As I said last week, it's science fiction that moves quickly and that you have to pay attention to.

I had meant to note last week the creative team for this series. There are four main creators: Brandon Graham, Simon Roy, Farel Dalrymple, and Giannis Milonogiannis. And between the four they divide art and writing chores. Each artist handles a different character, at least for a little while, but when we look at the pages at the back of the book that show the creative process behind the series, it really does look like a communal creation. Perhaps this is part of the reason it's so good: it's a work that is taking complete advantage of the collaborational nature of comics. If you can find a group of artists who work extremely well together, they'll feed on one another, and produce something larger than the sum of their creative parts.

Prophet is proof-positive. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Weekly Graphic Novel: Week 53 - Prophet: Remission, 2014

Oh my. It has been a while.

So I dropped out of my PhD program a little while back. It's been a strange kind of Summer, in that it's the first one in 9 years that I haven't been thinking about academia. And it's been a relief. As such, I'm going to try to pick up on my project here. I've been reading GNs, but just never getting around to blogging them. Let's see about getting things back on track.

Prophet has to rank as one of my favourite superhero comics. And, like many great superhero comics, it's not really a superhero comic. It's science fiction in a dense, early Heavy Metal-style vibe. Science fiction that demands that you pay attention, because things are going to move fast. They always do in the future, and this is the far, far future.

I read up a bit on the character of John Prophet a bit before jumping back into this series. He strikes me as a take on Captain America, though in a very Liefeldian move, he's also made quite Christian. And violent. I'm still not sure how one reconciles those two. As with many of Liefeld's creations, Prophet never did too well, and tapered off as a Liefeld comic is wont to do. Until someone else came along and got to do whatever the hell they wanted with this defunct character.

Sounds familiar, right? I reviewed a few of the early issues of Alan Moore's spectacular reinvention of Supreme. (And having just looked back at that, I realize I was in the middle of a comparison reading of Supreme and Miracleman until I had to stop buying Miracleman, but now I've got some more issues, and I should get back to that!) Supreme is one of the best comics I've ever read. And what happened was that Moore was given free reign with the character, no holds barred. It's brilliant. And the same can be said for this new vision of Prophet. Still violent, still driven, the placement of this character in so alien and unforgiving a universe manages to realize the mythic weight a name like "Prophet" carries. It is one man fighting against himself, both literally and figuratively. And if that "literally" puzzles you, read the series and see for yourself.

What this raises for me is the question of why this is something that happens with Liefeld's characters? The reimagined Glory series by Joe Keatinge and Ross Campbell is equally brilliant. Perhaps once I'm done the Prophet GNs I'll get on to that. In fact, the only one of the recent Extreme Studios reboots that I read and didn't enjoy so much was Erik Larsen's continuation of the Moore Supreme run. He finishes off the storyline well-enough, but where he heads from that point was quite disappointing - a return of the original, hyper-violent Supreme. The title tanked.

So how about this? Liefeld's characters are themselves thinly-veiled pastiches/parodies of more well-known characters. Supreme is Superman. Glory is Wonder Woman. So does this mean that when another writer takes over the character, they're in essence taking over the more iconically-charged character from which Liefeld took inspiration? And without the weight of a corporately-enforced set of entrenched rules, creators are able to show us some of the best stories of these contemporary myths. If the Greek myths have taught us anything, it's that mythic characters cannot be confined to a particular set of narrative rules or media. Each iteration is another story added to that myth, another expression of something that that mythic structure has to tell us. And such a thing cannot be reigned in by the forces of Capital. So by utilizing this Superman that is not Superman to tell stories, we can add new iterations to the myths, rather than retreading the same boards over and over.

Another volume next week! Onward!