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(16 February 2005...April 2005)
(32 pgs.)
This will probably be an ongoing project for me for a while so please send any corrections or additions to eroomnala@yahoo.com.au
COVER:
Still to be done properly.
Nice little joke AFTER THE END in the signature
Issues 30 and 31 both had major arcana tarot card covers based on their number
30 = The Sun
31 = Aeon or Judgement
and this continues
32 = Universe
Notes from JH Williams about the cover
The psychedelic cosmic effect that composes her body is a collage of photos then digitally painted and blended and then color tweaked until I got the look that I wanted. The strange letters and shapes (P & L, the one that looks like an anvil with 3 circles inside) are actually creations of mine based on the concepts of Spare’s Alphabet of desire and I can't tell you what they mean because then the incantation will become void and no longer have any power. I chose for the odin runes the creation combination if I'm remembering correctly
TITLE:
A wrap party is the name given to a party at the end of the run of a play or the production of a film.
Note how the W and ty are mirror images of each other as re the P's and R's
SYNOPSIS:
Still to be done
QUOTES:
Still to be done
NOTES & ANNOTATIONS:
Before this issue was published JH Williams III told me that
[This issue] is all me even 90%
of the color that you will see is me as well. The
rest of the art chores are handled by Todd [Klein]. He and I worked very closely together on this to achieve what
was needed. This was also necessary to reduce the
numbers of hands in the pot to gain a more exacting
look to what was being called for by Alan. Issue 32
will be unlike anything you've seen before in comics.
so be prepared!
Advice on how to read this issue given by Alan to Jose Villarubia
“I just got off the phone with Alan and he gave me some advice on how to read Promethea 32 that I would like to share with you:
First read the Promethea dialog only in all the pages in the order that they are printed. When the pages are upside-down, just rotate the page and read the dialog (monologue, really), left page first and then right and left side of the page to the right and top to bottom.
After you are done, go back to the start and read the additional captions on each page in the same order you read the dialog...
Then, take off the staples, and be careful with the bits of glue that hold the pages together. Tape all the pages in the correct order, two new giant pictures will appear and read each one of the sides again, this item in a slightly different order from the first that according to Alan will make even more sense... there are also paths of stars and ankhs connecting the captions that define yet another sequencing...
Alan told me that he likes to make his readers work... no kidding”.
First of all 3 reviews of this issue:
Comic Book Galaxy
Line of Fire
The Fourth Rail
The message board for this issue can be found at the Wildstorm site Promethea Message Board
some more comments from JH Williams
Todd and I worked very closely together on this because it was easier to have just two people involved in creating the images. Since Todd knew what the page dimensions needed to be I had him put the art together digitally after I sent him the drawings and paintings on disc. He would colorize the drawings and place them onto the paintings and would send proofs to make changes and corrections. So there was a lot of communications. If I knew more about the technical side of things I would have done all of the combining myself but it worked out really well this way
The process for this issue was rather easy actually. Before Alan wrote the script he made a dummy copy by folding a piece of paper to see how it lays out for the page order. then wrote the script based on that. so i just followed the basic descriptions for the page drawings. then these were digitally layed over the paintings. the paintings though, were actually done at 11 x 17 size and then digitally blown up to a much larger size in order to fit to the printed comic/poster size. this was done to exaggerate the paint textures to be less congruant when viewed as the stapled comic version. this way there was no way to remotely see what the paintings formed until put together and viewed in poster form. also of interest is that the paintings' colors were digitally manipulated drastically to from their original colors to enhance the over all psychedelic qualities that I wanted bring out when seen as the comic or the poster. after this was done we then, along with assistance of todd klein, adjusted the line drawings into colored inks to blend into the painted art for additional psychedelic effect.
Rather than do my normal annotating as for the previous 31 issues in the spirit of this issue I thought I'd do things differently this time. So:
Bibliography
Books mentioned directly in this issue
John Marco Allegro The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East
[London] : Hodder and Stoughton, [1970] [30]
Helen Cixous The Book of Promethea
(1983; English translation by Betsy Wing 1990) [1]
Douglas Hofstadter Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
An Interlocked Collection of Literary, Scientific, and Artistic Studies
New York: Basic Books, (1985) [27]
Stuff and Nonsense pgs. 213-231
James Joyce Finnegan’s Wake
London : Faber, (1939) [16]
Harold Morowitz Rediscovering the Mind is the title of an article which appeared in
Psychology Today New York: Ziff-Davis Pub. Co
(August 1980 Volume 14 No. 3) pgs 12-18. [6]
Jeremy Narby The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge
New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam (1998) [21, 25]
Numbers in the square brackets are page numbers in this issue
Biography
* John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922)
* Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Sigmund Freud (1865-1939)
Murray Gellman (1929- )
Robert Graves (1895-1985)
Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Julian Jaynes (1920_1997)
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)
Winsor McCay (1896-1934)
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)
Humphrey Osmond (1917-1994)
Obituary
Another Obituary
* Promethea Sophia Bangs (1999-2004)
Prometheus
* Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956)
* Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1722)
Robert Anton Wilson (1932-)
* before a name means the persons is already mentioned in previous 31 issues
Images
Page 1 Moth
Page 2 Sun Zipper Brain
Page 3 the Artemis of Ephesos mentionned in the Bible, Acts of Apostles
Page 4 Scientist test tubes microscopes & angel
Page 5 Head of Promethea with wings for ears
Page 6 Heisenberg
Page 7 Monteverdi + Stained Glass Window (Jesus and 3 disciples)
Page 8 Cave art + Gertie the Dinosaur
Page 9 Aleister Crowley
Page 10 Madonna Crescent Moon
Page 11 Serpent Swallowing Tail ring crown & 3 crescent moons
Thomas Lautwein notes
There are other works of literature you can read in different ways, French authors Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec did similar things. Queneau once published a book with ten sonnets where the lines of the sonnets are sliced so that you can permute the lines and recompose a new sonnets - The number of possible combinations is 100 millions or so. And in Perec's "La vie mode d'emploi" (Life - A Users Manual is the English title) the reader must hop from chapter 9 to chapter 38 or 95 or 46, it's like a puzzle of 99 pieces. Moore takes up the tradition of experimental literature.
John Coulthart adds:
one could also mention Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch:
"To begin with, it is a pretty lengthy and dense story. Briefly, it tells the story of Horacio Oliveira, a middle-class expatriate Argentine with a pronounced intellectual inclination living in Paris in the late 1950s. The story involves his search in the present for a lost love as well as his recollections of their relationship. This search begins in Paris (and all the flashbacks take place in aris) but then moves to Buenos Aires, Argentina. The novelty of the book, and a big part of its claim to fame, however, lies in its structure, and the ways in which the novel's preoccupations are expressed in part through Cortazar's experimental organization. The novel consists of 155
chapters, number 1 through 155 and divided into three sections: "From the other side" (Chapters 1 through 36), "From this side" (Chapters 37 through 56), and "From Diverse Sides: Disposable Chapters" (Chapters 57 through 155). But it is preceded by a "Table of Instructions" in which the reader is informed that the book contains many books but above all it contains two. The first book, we are told, consists of Chapters 1 through 56, read in sequence. The second book includes all 155 chapters (except for Chapter 55, whose contents, in any case, are
distributed among a couple of other chapters). The "Table" further gives a "random" order for the reading of this second book. We begin with Chapter 73 then "hop" to Chapter 1, then to 2, then to 116, then to 3 and so on."
or BS Johnson's The Unfortunates:
"One of the lost classics of the 1960s - and a legendary experiment in form - is here reissued for the first time in thirty years.
A sports journalist, sent to a Midlands town on a weekly assignment, finds himself confronted by ghosts from the past when he disembarks at the railway station. Memories of one of his best, most trusted friends, a tragically young victim of cancer, begin to flood through his mind as he attempts to go about the routine business of reporting a football match,B. S. Johnson's famous 'book in a box', in which the chapters are presented unbound, to be read in any order the reader chooses, is one of the key works of a novelist now undergoing an enormous revival of interest. It is a book of passionate honesty and dark, courageous humour: a meditation on death and a celebration of friendship which also offers a remarkably frank self-portrait of its author. "
Pages 1-16 (First Poster)
From Thomas Lautwein
there is a passage on page of path 12 with the picture of C.G. Jung where Moore writes: "According to R.A. Wilson, on one day in 1920s, Aleister Crowley, Albert Einstein and James Joyce were all in Carl Jung's Vienna and could have met." I don't understand why he says "Jung's Vienna", Jung was Swiss and spent most of his life in Zurich; Vienna was Freud's city. I also can't remember that Crowley ever was
in Vienna.
A friend of Alan's notes:
This is the problem with the comics industry... Alan can be a bit lazy sometimes with his facts, like many writers he doesn't always check things. Copy editors at book publishers or at certain newspapers and magazines would query something like this but comics editors don't know
enough (or care...) to go to the trouble.
Yes, it should be Zurich, the whole of Robert Anton Wilson's Masks of the Illuminati is about just this kind of meeting.
Pages 17-32 (Second Poster)
