The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alan Moore, with J. H. Williams III · a comic in thirty-two issues · America’s Best Comics, 1999 to 2005 · script by Moore, pencils and page design by Williams, inks by Mick Gray, colours by Jeromy Cox, letters by Todd Klein, with other hands on a few issues and pages; script, page design, drawing, colour and lettering scored as one text, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and none of its sentences quoted
Mode
A superhero comic turned treatise on magic; a visionary book in which words and pictures are one work
Mythos
Promethea, the story that takes flesh; Thoth and Hermes, gods of writing; the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the Tarot, and the end of the world as revelation; Sophie, whose name carries Wisdom
Phase
From an Alexandrian origin in the early fifth century, through the hosts of the twentieth century, to Sophie’s finding, her instruction, her ascent of the Tree and the end of the world
Presentation
Thirty-two monthly issues, 1999 to 2005, some seven hundred pages by estimate; collected in five books and later in three Absolute volumes; the last issue built as pages that, removed and joined, make two large images
Register
Williams’s drawing, changing manner from sphere to sphere, held in one finish by Gray’s inks, Cox’s colours and Klein’s lettering; Moore’s captions and dialogue, from action-comic banter to lecture
Scale
One young woman, one widow, a line of hosts, and the universe from its origin to its end
Governing Proposition
A girl in Alexandria in the early fifth century, whose pagan father is killed by a Christian mob, is taken by Thoth and Hermes into the Immateria and lives on as a story that takes flesh in whoever imagines her. In a city of science heroes a young woman, Sophie Bangs, becomes her host by writing a poem, is taught magic, climbs the ten spheres of the Tree of Life, and brings the world to an end that is a change of consciousness. The wager of the work is that imagination is a real order of being, that art and magic are one act, and that a monthly superhero comic, its words and pictures made together, can be the instrument that shows it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Promethea ran to thirty-two issues, the first in 1999 and the last in 2005, from America’s Best Comics, Moore’s line within Wildstorm, which DC owned. It was monthly in intention, and the schedule slipped in the later years. At the ordinary length of an American comic of its time it runs, by estimate rather than count, to some seven hundred to seven hundred and fifty pages, collected in five books and later in three Absolute volumes. The desk scores the thirty-two issues as one work and as one text: Moore’s script, Williams’s pencils and page design, Mick Gray’s inks, Jeromy Cox’s colours and Todd Klein’s lettering, with other hands on a few issues and pages. The artist is co-author, and the drawing is weighed under The Made as a film’s photography is. The script alone is not scored.
The work begins with a myth it built for itself. In Alexandria, in the early fifth century, a girl’s pagan father is killed by a Christian mob. Thoth and Hermes, the gods of writing, take her into the Immateria, the world of imagination, and she lives on there as a story: Promethea, who takes flesh in whoever imagines her. Across the twentieth century she has had hosts, and among them are writers and artists, so that the history of the figure is also a history of the art that imagined her. A heroine survives by being a story. The whole work is an argument that this is not a metaphor.
In a city of science heroes a young woman, Sophie Bangs, becomes the current host by writing a poem. It is the act the whole work turns on: Promethea is summoned by imagination made into words, and the first arc, six issues long, is the finding of her, with the earlier hosts and the Immateria brought in around the new one. Sophie’s name carries Wisdom, and the work means it to. What follows is a sequence the spine requires: Promethea told, then taught, then proved in the ascent, then released on the world.
Movement II
The first arc is told in the grammar of an ordinary action comic, and it is a handsome one. Its city belongs to Moore’s imprint: science heroes, the Five Swell Guys, and the billboard panels of the Weeping Gorilla. The inheritance is plain. Promethea is the Wonder Woman figure, the heroine with a mythic origin, and she arrives after Moore’s own deconstructions of the superhero in the 1980s, which had given the genre its grim turn.
The swerve is from both. By its second year a monthly superhero title from a corporate imprint had become a treatise on magic, the Kabbalah and the Tarot, and it ends not in a battle but in a revelation addressed to the reader. The stake was real: sales, readers who came for a heroine and got a syllabus, and a writer’s standing staked on sincerity after a career built on irony and dread. The occult comic and the psychedelic page have precedents, in Ditko’s Doctor Strange and in the underground, so the turn is in register more than in kind; but the register was turned all the way.
The city stays, and it costs the work. The science-hero scenery, the gorilla and the crossovers of the last third are permitted rather than compelled: they serve the imprint more than the argument. The work’s own law is meant to take them in. Everything is story, and stories are real, so a billboard gorilla and the divine stand on one continuum. The work states that law and sometimes earns it, but villains, demons and federal agents drive a plot whose physics is the action comic’s, and the seams between the comic and the gnosis show.
Movement III
After the finding comes instruction. Jack Faust gives Sophie her lesson in sex as a sacrament of the ascent, and the Tarot follows. The work becomes, openly, a course of teaching, and it has been called a grimoire in comic form. The description is accurate. It is not a defence: a work may set out to teach, but it is still asked whether its parts are required and what it uncovers, and a work that explains its own disclosure in captions has stated that disclosure rather than uncovered it.
The Tarot issue, “Metaphore”, is where the teaching is done by form. It is one unbroken procession of images through the major arcana, from the origin of the universe onward, a history of everything laid out as a single picture. Its claim, that the cards tell one story, is made by drawing them as one image, and it cannot be paraphrased: told in prose, the claim survives and the proof goes. It is among the highest pages of the work and among the most finished of Moore’s constructions.
That is the work’s living form at its best: an argument that word and image together make worlds, made in the one medium where word and image are made together. The disclosure it serves can be stated: imagination is a real order of being, and art and magic are one act. It holds as a proposition. What it uncovers of a human condition is thinner, because Sophie, Barbara and Stacia are sketched and then carried by the lecture.
Movement IV
The ascent is the work’s centre of gravity, by page count and by design: roughly eleven issues of thirty-two, about a third of the whole, given to a guided journey through the ten spheres of the Kabbalistic Tree and the abyss, one sphere to an issue or nearly. Sophie climbs, and Barbara, a widow, climbs with her in search of her dead husband, Steve.
Williams changes manner sphere by sphere, so that each stage arrives as a new visual world, with Gray’s inks and Cox’s colours holding the changes in one finish. Here the drawing earns the axis the work earns most often: the approach to the supernal spheres, Barbara’s reunion with Steve, the crossing of the abyss, and the dissolution into light at the crown, where Sophie and Barbara pass into light. Render these issues in prose and the teaching would survive, while the knowledge, which lies in the changing manner of each sphere, would go.
The ascent also carries the work’s heaviest charge. Whole pages are lecture: Barbara asks, Sophie explains, the sphere is described, and the next issue repeats the shape. The captions often carry what the pages already show, and the dialogue is a tutorial. The myth is built, and load-bearing, but its bricks are inherited, the Hermetic tradition, Crowley’s Thelema and the Golden Dawn’s tables, and they are expounded, so that the archetypal is catalogued more than lived and its pupils become guides in a borrowed scheme.
Movement V
The last third brings Sophie back to the world and puts her in hiding, pursued by federal agents. It is the flattest stretch of the work: a plot of hiding and pursuit that could be told in any form, drawn at times by other hands or at a lower pitch, its pacing sagging into waiting. The millennial temper of an end-of-the-world plot is the part of its surface most fixed to its moment.
The end, when it comes, is a change of consciousness rather than a destruction: the world ends as everyone wakes into the Immateria and sees at once what Sophie has seen. The last issue is built as pages that, removed and joined, make two large images, so that the reader’s own hands perform the magic the work describes. It is a height of a strange kind, and the clearest case of the work’s form being its knowledge. Its last pages answer Sophie’s first poem.
The work stands at 8.0, at the foot of Tier IV. Its nearest kind on the desk is Blake’s, the visionary book in which word and design are one work: Milton and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell stand at 8.7, and Milton wins eleven of the twelve axes against it, losing only The Made, 8.5 to 8.8. Crowley’s Little, Big, a novel of imagination as a real order, stands at 8.4 and wins every axis; Kiefer’s Breaking of the Vessels, made on the Kabbalah’s own cosmology, stands at 8.2. What holds Promethea below them is not its medium but its words: a work that knows what it means and says so, on pages that had already shown it.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is required. Promethea is a story that lives by being told, and the work must show her told, in the hosts and the Immateria; taught, in Faust’s lesson and the Tarot; proved, in the ascent; and released on the world, in the apocalypse. The subtractive test bites on the rest. The science-hero city, the Five Swell Guys and the Weeping Gorilla panels are scenery from Moore’s line, and the crossovers of the last third serve the imprint more than the argument. Inside the ascent whole pages are lecture: Barbara asks, Sophie explains, the sphere is described, and the next issue repeats the shape. That holds the axis at the foot of the twelve: a third of the length could go and what the work knows would remain.
Score: 7.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: imagination is a real order of being, art and magic are one act, and an apocalypse may be a change of consciousness rather than a destruction. It holds as a proposition, and the work tries to make it felt: Barbara’s dead husband, Steve, found again, a grief resolved in a world of story; the end of the world arriving as everyone seeing at once what Sophie has seen. But the disclosure is stated far more than it is uncovered. It arrives as teaching, in captions and dialogue that tell the reader what the Tree means and what magic is. What it uncovers of a human condition is thinner: Sophie’s coming of age, Barbara’s widowhood and Stacia’s reluctance to give up a body of power are sketched, then carried by the lecture.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The axis the work earns most often, and the drawing earns it. Williams changes manner sphere by sphere, so that each stage of the ascent arrives as a new visual world, and several of those arrivals are among the most elevated pages in the medium: the approach to the supernal spheres, the dissolution into light at the crown, the Tarot issue’s single unbroken procession of images from the origin of the universe onward. The last issue’s two great images, made by the reader’s own hands from its pages, are a height of a strange kind. Frequency is real and uneven: the first arc is a handsome superhero comic, the hiding and pursuit of the last third are flat for long stretches, and the transport often comes on a page whose words are explaining it.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Myth built, in the plain sense. The origin is made for the work: a girl in Alexandria in the early fifth century, her pagan father killed by a Christian mob, taken by Thoth and Hermes into the Immateria, and living thereafter as a story that takes flesh in whoever imagines her. The structure is load-bearing: the ascent is the Kabbalistic Tree, the turning-point is the Tarot, the end is a revelation, and Sophie’s name carries Wisdom. What holds it below the gate is the second half of the test: the particular does not stay particular. Sophie is less a person who becomes an archetype than an occasion for one, and the myths, assembled from the Hermetic tradition, Crowley’s Thelema and the Golden Dawn’s correspondences, are expounded, catalogued more than lived.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is the American superhero comic, the Wonder Woman figure most of all, and Moore’s own deconstructions of it, which had made the genre’s grim turn. The swerve is double. In matter, a corporate superhero monthly became, by its second year, a treatise on magic, the Kabbalah and the Tarot, ending in a revelation addressed to the reader. In form, the page itself is bent: the Tarot drawn as one continuous image, a last issue that is a pair of posters. The stake was real: sales, readers who came for a heroine and got a syllabus, and a writer’s standing staked on sincerity after irony and dread. Held below the gate because the occult comic and the psychedelic page have precedents, in Ditko’s Doctor Strange and the underground, and the swerve is in register more than in kind.
Score: 8.4 / 10
At its best the form is the knowledge. The work argues that word and image together make worlds, and argues it in the one medium where word and image are made together. Render the ascent in prose and the teaching survives while the knowledge, which lies in the changing manner of each sphere, goes. The Tarot issue cannot be paraphrased: its claim that the cards tell one story is made by drawing them as one picture. The last issue makes the reader the operator of the magic it describes. In long stretches the form is the container: the opening arc is told in the grammar of an ordinary action comic, the hiding and pursuit of the last third could be told in any form, and in the ascent the captions often carry what the pages already show.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Formal depth yields on return: the correspondences of colour and number in the ascent, the design of the poster issue, the echoes between Sophie’s first poem and the last pages. A reader with the Golden Dawn’s tables in hand will keep finding what was placed. Semantic depth yields less, for a reason the work itself supplies: it says what it means. Its open questions are few, because its captions answer them, and its readers return to look rather than to argue. The evidence of re-examination is real and modest: a quarter of a century of attention among readers of comics and of the occult, the Absolute editions, a place in studies of Moore, and little sustained argument over what the work means, as against what it shows.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The field is English-language comics from 1999 to 2005. The force is real and bounded. The work showed that a mainstream monthly could carry a whole metaphysics and make the page itself an instrument of argument, and Williams’s design, the page as one designed object and the panel border as meaning, set a mark later artists measured themselves against. It extended a line of formal ambition that ran through Moore’s earlier work and others’, and did not reorganise what comics are for. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the design is widely cited and carried on by Williams into later work, and the work is a reference for comics about magic; but no school can be shown to have turned on it, the field was not redirected by it as it had been by Moore’s work of the 1980s, and its reach outside comics is slight.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The work was completed in 2005, twenty-one years ago, its first issue twenty-seven years back, and survival over about twenty years carries the axis to 8.3 or 8.4 before any charge. The form survives whole, as published, in print in the collections and the Absolute editions; the fabric takes no charge. Presence is charged. It is continuous but narrow: read among readers of comics and of the occult, much less across the culture than the most widely read comics of its decades, and owing part of its presence to its author’s name. Its surface is in part fixed to its moment, in the millennial temper of the end-of-the-world plot and in the imprint’s science-hero scenery, which reads now as the furniture of a line that has not lasted as the work has. The charge on presence sets it a tenth below the figure its span would give.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as prose or film. Williams’s command is among the highest the medium has shown in English: a draughtsman who changes manner with conviction from sphere to sphere, and a page designer whose layouts carry meaning in their architecture. Gray’s inks and Cox’s colours hold the changes in one finish, and Klein’s lettering is built into the designs. Moore’s script is exact in construction, its issue-length forms, the Tarot procession and the posters, as finished as anything he wrote. The making is load-bearing. Charged: the dialogue, a tutorial in the ascent and leaning on the line’s in-jokes in the comic interludes; the comic relief of the first arc; and the last third, where the drawing is at times by other hands or lower in pitch and the pacing sags. Held below the nines for the words, not the pictures.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Weeping Gorilla panels and the science-hero banter of the first arc, and the crown of the Tree, where Sophie and Barbara pass into light. One law is meant to govern both: everything is story, stories are real, and a billboard gorilla and the divine stand on one continuum. The work states that law and sometimes earns it. The superhero apparatus and the treatise do not always obey it: villains, demons and federal agents drive a plot whose physics is the action comic’s, and the apocalypse is reached as much by the needs of the line’s ending as by the inner law. The range is very wide, which the axis rewards; the seams between the comic and the gnosis show, which it charges.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Many orders, attempted on a cosmic scale and achieved unevenly. The sacred and the cosmological are held in full: a history of the universe in the Tarot issue, the ten spheres of the Tree, the abyss, a creation and an end. Consciousness is the work’s own subject, imagination as a world. Love and death are held in Barbara’s search for her dead husband, sex as sacrament in Faust’s lesson, history in the hosts through the century and the Alexandrian origin, the state in the agents who pursue Sophie, art in the hosts who are writers and artists. Labour, class and the family are glimpsed; the city is a science-fiction stage; Sophie’s own life is a frame. The orders are joined by one idea more than by one life, as a scheme rather than as a world.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.8, then The Sublime, The Swerve and The Living Form at 8.4. Williams’s drawing, changing manner sphere by sphere, with layouts that carry meaning in their architecture; heights in the ascent, the Tarot procession and the last issue’s two images; a monthly superhero title turned into a treatise on magic at real cost; and a form that, at its best, makes word and image together the instrument of its claim that they make worlds.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.0: the spine is required, but the science-hero scenery, the crossovers of the last third and the repeated lecture of the ascent are permitted rather than compelled, and a third of the length could go without loss of what the work knows. Next above it, The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6: a disclosure stated in captions more than uncovered, and a page design widely admired that redirected no school.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.0 falls five tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.8, The Living Form at 8.4, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five axes: The Swerve at 8.4, The Archetypal Deep at 8.2, The Imperishable at 8.2, The Unconcealment at 7.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.0, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.0, at the foot of Tier IV, short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Promethea, written by Alan Moore and drawn by J. H. Williams III, who also designed its pages, with inks by Mick Gray, colours by Jeromy Cox and letters by Todd Klein, and other hands on a few issues and pages; published in thirty-two issues by America’s Best Comics, Moore’s line within Wildstorm, which DC owned, from 1999 to 2005, and collected in five books and later in three Absolute volumes. It is scored as one work: the thirty-two issues, with script, page design, drawing, inks, colour and lettering as one text and the artist as co-author. The drawing is weighed under The Made, and Moore’s script alone is not scored. The work is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a page, and none of its sentences is quoted; the one title given is that of the Tarot issue. The length of some seven hundred to seven hundred and fifty pages is an estimate from the ordinary length of an issue, not a count. Counts of captions, dialogue and panels are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the cover months of the first and last issues, the issue numbers of the instruction and of the ascent, any colourist beyond Cox, the layout of Faust’s lesson, an issue laid out on a Möbius strip, an anagram in the Tarot issue, and which of the imprint’s characters appear in the last third, are not given. Citations are by arc and by named issue.