Promethea: Temporal Analysis (example 1)

For my final paper in my class on Narrative and Time, I've chosen to look at Promethea, a 32-issue comic series written by Alan Moore and penciled by J.H. Williams III (hereafter referred to as JHW3). This series does an incredible amount with time, and my hope is to focus specifically on JHW3's art for my analysis. The pencil work of Promethea is truly groundbreaking for many reasons, but what really fascinates me is the complete breakdown of traditional panel structure, layout, and use of the page. To keep the scope of the paper small enough, the plan right now is to work with just the first collection (issues 1-6). There is so much that happens artistically later in the series, though, that the temptation to look at it all might be too much for me. We'll see.


Promethea Annotation #1: Misty Magic Land

The Immateria is a plane of timeless, fluid imagination, constantly bending to the thoughts of those inhabiting it. Time in this world is not only linear, but circular, square, mobius-stripped, dizzy, and possibly hole-y as well. JHW3 transitions the reader into this world of flowing matter and questionable time by loosening the straight lines of the panel frames (page 7, panels 2 & 3), turning the panels into wavy, gelatinous blobs (pages 10 & 11).













Issue 3, pgs. 7, 10, and 11

Page 11 also shows one of JHW3's ingenious uses of layout to portray both temporal and spatial clues. As we drop down the page, following a fairly linear progression of time, we see each nested panel taking us closer to, and finally deeper into, the Dark Woods. Spatially, the effect is of the woods enveloping the characters, as the panels get larger as we progress down the page. The sequence is odd temporally in that, unless there are points of silence that are not shown, such a journey could hardly take place in the amount of time it would take to recite that amount of dialogue. At the start of the conversation, they are far from the Dark Woods; by the end, they are deep within and ready for a confrontation with the Big Bad Wolf. This illustrates the unstable nature of time in the Immateria.

The Misty Magic Land sequence begins with the transition on page 7, sustains from pages 8-21, and ends with Sophie and Stacia's escape on page 22.


All images are copyright Alan Moore, J.H. Williams, America's Best Comics, and everyone else involved in Promethea's creation. Not me, in other words.