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COVER:
At least 6 layers of flames emanating from the sun which has been Sophie's Promethea symbol throughout the series. "Sun" on the cover seems to contradict the title given in the previous issue but JHW3 explained that
the word "sun" on the cover was intentional. this represents the sun card which is why we used the word and the image together. which will be much more apparent when the next 2 issues come out, 31 being "aeon" and 32 being "universe".
Jose Villarubia's surname is added the usual list of Promethea creators.
Not that the issue number is spelled out "Thirty" not "30". The only time this has happened previously was for "Number: Twenty-Five". I asked JHW3 about this and his reply was
as far as the numbering being spelled out on the covers...i think todd just did what he felt looked most pleasing for the cover design itself.
TITLE:
According the previous issue Everything Must Go! is the title of this issue. Page 24 of Issue #29 also showed that there are Fantastic Bargains as America's Best Comics is Closing Down so Everything Must Go!
SYNOPSIS:
Still to be done properly
The original ad for this issue was
Everything must go as the landmark series nears its conclusion! As the apocalypse continues to extend its reach from Sophie's mom's apartment to encompass the city and the world, various persons converge on their home to put a stop to it — including America's Best, and perhaps more significantly, the last Painted Doll.
QUOTES:
Still to be done
NOTES & ANNOTATIONS:
still to be done properly
First a link to the Barbelith Underground discussion of this issue
Barbelith Underground
then to the Comic Book Resource Forum for same
Comic Book Resources
Jose Villarubia helped Jeromy Cox with the coloring in this issue.
JHW3 writes
jose's colors are absolutely brilliant. he did all of the morphing painted photo looking pages with me over my fullly rendered black and white digital pencil/painted panels. what i did was try to make the black and white images be as real looking as possible within the time frame i had to work with and then he digitally added color to them and some subtle FX. so pretty much everything that you see in the colored printed version was there in the black and white version, all of the tones and everything. a tremendous amount of work. jeromy's tidbits in this were really very nice as well. i'm very pleased with the result and it looks even better in the next issue.
Special thanks to Thomas Lautwein for his help in annotating this issue. His contributions are marked with TL at the start and end.
TL
First, let's try to analyse the structure and the content of the book.
The leitmotiv of the issue is: reality and perception - life as a story and the end of story - illumination.
The narration is divided in 6 threads that converge in Promethea: the 2 FBI agents, Painted Doll, the ABC science heroes, the President/the US Army, the 2 mayors, the group of Promethea's friends
(Trish Bangs, Dennis Drucker, Ramon). The result is a panorama, realised at the end on page 22/23.
Main symbol: The Sun (card 19), Revelation (card 20).
Page composition: double pages that form a graphical and narrative unity, some of the double pages are composed like medieval triptychs or diptychs, except for page 1 and page 24.
page 1: Agents Hansard and Ball, talk about perception and reality. We see the reality through Hansard's artificial eyes, he sees only crazy people. In the eyes of science, religious experience can only be described as deviant and abnormal. Religious experience explained as result of "EM disturbance" and "temporal lobe seizures". That's the position of reductionism, human experience as seen from the outside. Ball has doubts.
5 horizontal panels, edged by a decomposing wall.TL
See also William James The Varieties of Religious Experiences.
Page 1 Panel 2: Drunk or in seizure. Agent Hansard seems immune to the effect. People shown are in position of the panel on pgs. 2-3 where what they and Agent Ball are seeing is revealed to us.TL
page 2/3: Now we see the experiences from the inside. 5 examples in the upper part of the double page, 4 panels in lower part. A woman sees herself as Virgin Mary and her child as Horus/Jesus (see # 21), a man meets his Holy Guardian Angel (see # 17), children see fairies, a man is eviscerated by demons, a woman sees herself as deformed cubist painting.
Ball suggests that religious experience might cause "EM disturbance". Hansard admits that perception is the world (see Sophie's discussion with Stacia at the beginning of # 13), thus quoting George Berkeley's famous sentence "esse percipi est" (to be means to be perceived).
TL
Pages 2-3 Top Panel: Mary showing Jesus to 2 angels. Man holding Angels’ hand. Children playing with Cottingley(?) fairies. Devils ripping the innards from a man lying on the hood of a car.
Personal Metaphysic Theatre.
Thanks to lonepilgrim for pointing out that
the coloured letters in the 'Personal Metaphysic Theatre'
sign
spell out 'Promethea'
Metaphysic or rather Metaphysics means
“The branch of philosophy that examines the nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, fact and value.”
Source
Everything Must Go!. We only know that this is the proper title for this issue because of the Next: in the previous Issue.
Naked woman appears to be based on Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. Note that part of her right arm has not turned into a cubist painting.
Panel 2: Little red devil riding naked woman on saddle like a horse.
Pages 2 & 3 Panels 3: : Has the policeman or woman committed suicide?
Moths in his/her mouth.
Note that the sun from the front cover is visible at the bottom of this two page spread.
TL
page 4/5: total, view of New York, three small panels with a family and the Painted Doll approaching Promethea. A man says: "This light in everything. this is reality. this is IT." In every mystical tradition, reality is seen as inherently lightful and radiant, mystical experience often makes the reality appear as translucid diaphaneous (christian saints, tantric adepts etc.). Moore says in an interview he considers "God" to be a "radiant singularity at the heart of everything".
The exact quote is:
"If I had to explain my basic feelings on the subject with a crude physical model, I'd have to say that at the core of things there is a blissful, hermaphrodite, endlessly creative white singularity that you might as well call absolute God. This is the light source in the canvas of
existence."
(Smoky Man/Gary Spencer Millidge Alan Moore:Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman. 2003, Page 311)
TL
Page 4: Along the top the Painted Doll’s colored chequerboard pattern from the previous issue fades to white.
Trish’s downstairs neighbours the Browns.
Note that the reality wave is overtaking unrealistic buildings underneath.
Tacitus writes
For Promethea's sermon to the Painted Doll, compare "Snakes and Ladders". She combines two subjects in her speech: evolution and its form principle (what Aristotle and Goethe called "entelecheia") and the self-reflection of the narration (frequent subject in French philosophy of the last 30 years, see Michel Foucault).
TL
page 6/7: Painted Doll and Promethea. Promethea as "storyteller" by the grandmother fireside (typical setting of a fairytale). She tells the story of evolution: "silly chemicals" forming complex molecules, organizing themselves into living beings, developing a consciousness as human beings. A story can be told again and again, so it has a beginning and an end, and yet is timeless. When telling a story, you are part of the story and the story is a part of you, so the fiction is fact and the fact is fiction. The reader is the reader, the narrator and the figure in the narration, because he creates all of them in his mind.
Similar thoughts in "Snakes & Ladders" pages 18-19, 22, 33-37. Especially "S&L" page 33 gives a key to this issue: "Raised from mud to moon" to sun (see the illustration by Eddie Campbell).
Keep in mind that Promethea speaks an embodiment of Babalon/The Godess/Binah, the highest female principle in the universe. The female principle is the form-giver, the material principle, so Binah is the inaugurator of evolution, because evolution means to take a form and to develop form after form. That's why card 21 "The Universe" shows a girl dancing with a snake (see S&L page 18 or Prometheas encounter with The Universe in # 13).
Promethea speaks from "outside the circles of time" (Kenneth Grant), so she says "it's always here, always now".
Note the symetry in the second panel: close-up on P's head - P seen from the Doll' eyes - P's hand // Doll's hand - Promethea seen from Doll's eyes, his hands changed - close-up on P's head.TL
Pages 6-7 : Looking at hands in a dream. I’m sure I’ve read this also in one of Carlos Castaneda’s books. Grandmother fireside.
TL
page 8/9: The science-heroes fail to stop the apocalypse. Total with 6 desintegrating panels. Vertical division of the double page, opposed to the predominant horizontal structure in the rest of the book.TL
Pages 8-9: : Tom Strong goes to confront this thing similar to Tom Strong Issue #2.
TLpages 10/11: total of New York with three descending panels, crisis. Continued on pages 14-17, where the panels are ascending. Crisis, the government fells menaced and reacts with aggression.TL
Pages 10-11: : Bush and Rumsfeld (neither is named).
This is the only time we get to see First American and US Angel from Tomorrow Stories although they have been mentioned in previous issues.
Previous US Presidents depicted in Alan Moore comics include JFK (or rather someone impersonating him) in 1963, Richard Nixon in Watchmen and Bill Clinton in Supreme.
According to JHW3
not showing all of bush's face was an editorial thing. i'm not quite sure what the problem is with that especially since he is never mentioned by name in this issue.
Pages 12-13: : Gabriel blows his horn in the middle panel signalling the end of the world as the dead arise from their graves on Judgement Day.
Page 13 Panel 3: : The first time we learn about yet another Sonny Baskerville personality Rufus the German Shepherd.
Babalon
Beast with two backs. Originally from Shakespeare’s Othello
Iago: 'I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs'.
Referring of course to sexual intercourse
TL pages 14/15: triptych, 5 panels Hansard/Ball, 1 panel with motiv from card 20 (revelation), 5 panels Uvula and Sony Baskerville, makes 11 panels - 11 being Card XI, The Lust, Babalon on the Beast. Uvula and Sony transformed into the harlot of the Apocalypse and the Beast with 7 heads. In the last panel, Uvula's face changed into the terrifying face of Kali or Hecate (destructive aspect of the Goddess).TL
Pages 14-15 : 7 heads on Sonny including a snake and two werewolves??
Rufus the German Shepherd, man with glasses, black man and a little girl.
Captain Burnside
TL suggests that
maybe he is named after US civil war general Ambrose Burnside who
lost the
battle of Fredericksburg against Robert E. Lee in 1863
Captain Chambers.
Nice appropriate names. Burning side and hidden chambers in the bunker.
TL
pages 16/17: total: the harlot and the 7 heads - 4 panels inside a military bunker under the Pentagon, the soldiers seized by the anomaly.
Concerning the 7 heads of the Beast, see Crowley, Book of Thot, chapter XI, "Waratah-flowers": 7 are the heads of the Beast, the head of
A picture of Alan looking at the reader over his left shoulder can be seen on the back cover. Jose Villarubia took the photo.
Mr. Khoury has also written Kimota! The Miracleman Companion.
Page 22 Panel 9: Jack Faust repeats his dialogue from page 18 Panels 1-2.
According to JHW3
the bit with jack faust should be more clear to you with the next issue
Panel 7 That thumb belongs to you and I dear reader.
C’mon now everybody join in and say
“um … but”
Metacomic 22 panels 7 and 23 panels 4 and 6
Alan has previously made a self reference to himself as author in the last chapter of his first novel Voice of the Fire
Close up on Promethea’s Teeth
"Teeth" is the name of the Hebrew letter Shin, and Shin corresponds to the tarot card "The Aeon/The Revelation" (XX).
The sun is linked to path 30 on the tree, so it's no hasard #30 has a sun on its cover.
And Crowley says, The Sun stands for the New Age, the new aeon.
TL
page 24: total, the Sun, stands for illumination or enlightenment. Moore in "Snakes & Ladders", page 44/45: "The soul-sun blisters on the lip of the horizon and across our black and anguished fields, the sudden flooding light of Revelation, of Apocalypse... We parade with the magicians on the endless plazas of the sun and watch them trail gem-warted fingers through six thousand centigrade degrees of protosphere. We walk there at their side, become them, are them. We flourish, We ignite. And as with each, so with us all. So with our culture and our world, where information brinks its melting point, its saturation threshold, and we all look up in that white moment when the sky unwraps and the unfiltered truth of us rains blazing down; a searing, holy deluge where those parts of us we've not yet turned to gold are utterly devoured, are made incinerate. We know this moment and we know its name. We boil away into this mantic brilliance, this consuming luxury, and you can hold my hand, love, for it is your own. We are combusted, gowned in a Pre-Raphaelite inferno, in the furnace tongues of our own possibility."
Pages 44 and 45 or "Snakes & Ladders" show from left to right Earth, Moon and Sun.
The Sun is linked with path 30. Correspondances from Crowley, Book 777 for 30:
Sol, Head, Orange, The Sun, Collecting I, path joins 8-9, Hathor, Ra, Amber, rayed red, gold yellow, Helios, Apollo, Surya, Chrysoleth, Sunflower, Lion, Sparrowhawk, the red tincture, the Lamen.
Kabbalistically spoken, it makes good sense that issue Thirthy of Promethea is called "Sun".TL
Although actually this issue is really called "Everything must Go!". Sun only refers to the cover not the title.
Page 24: Next:
Looks like we're coming full circle with title as #31 will be the radiant heavenly city once again as it was for Issue #1.
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Thanks once again to Thomas Lautwein for all of the annotations he sent me which certainly made my job a lot easier on this issue. As you can see he’s much more thorough and knowledgable than I am.