Review: Prophet #21
When the end of 2011 rolled around, I found myself wishing I had kept better track of the comics I had particularly loved in the year previous. With that in mind, and with the goal of sharpening my critical faculties over the coming year, I’m going to post some brief reviews, mostly, I imagine, of stuff I really dig, rather than stuff I’m hating on (this post has a little bit of negativity built in, but not much!).
I’m a late comer to the Brandon Graham bandwagon: I picked up an issue of King City (#12, the final one, it turned out, tho’ I didn’t realize it at the time), and was a bit lost and kina “eh” about what I saw. But leading up to the release of “Thickness” #2, I saw previews he put up online of his “Dirty Pairody” comic, and I was really looking forward to that anthology on the strength of that strip alone (when I actually got my hands on it, I was also blown away by Michael Deforge’s “College Girl by Night,” my nominee for story of the year). I loved Adam Warren’s “Dirty Pair” comics back in the day, and Graham’s hyper-eroticised version was a great extrapolation of that strip’s cheeky sexuality brought into the light of day. It managed to have its cheesecake and eat it too, and this short dose of Graham’s layered, punning humor turned me into a fan. I’m eagerly awaiting the King City collection, due in February, and I made a beeline to the comics shop to pick up the relaunched Prophet #21, with Graham writing and Simon Roy and Richard Ballermann on art duties.
Graham et al have crafted a messy, dirty, and downright nasty sci-fi world, and the reader is tossed right into the mix with as little prior knowledge as the title’s eponymous hero, John Prophet. Emerging from a drill-tipped suspended animation pod, Prophet proceeds to vomit up a stimulant-filled pod, hack apart a five-legged predator, and chow down on his expired enemy, all without saying a word. Motivated by dreams, Prophet makes his way through a far-distant future inhabited by a mix of new lifeforms, like the already mentioned tulnaka and the hiber xull, a massive fish-like creature, and familiar, but disturbingly mutated animals, like wolves with parasitic growths and a whole colony of alien settlers. This is a post-human environment, where mankind has been reduced to the level of a farm animal, as Graham writes “The old land is harsher, now. Unforgiving.” There are echoes of Planet of the Apes, but also After Man by Dougal Dixon and the ecological invasion themes of the War Against the Cthorr series by David Gerrold; this is a world where superhuman strength and an enhanced digestive track aren’t the makings of a super hero, but basic equipment that’s required for survival.
The first issue’s narrative is remarkably focussed on environmental and bodily details; much of the plot concerns the food culture of this future earth, one of the most frequently recurring images is that of John Prophet casually chowing down on everything from bisected squirrell to the drumstick of one of the devolved humans the aliens keep as livestock. Sex also shows up in a way that jaw-droppingly subverts genre formula. If John Prophet is a later day Conan the Barbarian, a man of few words and great appetites, he’s certainly far less squeamish than his literary predecessor ever was. If this is how the new Prophet storyline starts out I can’t wait to see where it goes, the promised levels of body-horror and mind-bending storytelling seem like they’ll certainly be far more “extreme” and genuinely transgressive than anything in the previous incarnations of the Extreme Comics titles.
Simon Roy’s art is pleasantly chunky and raw-looking, and the realitive simplicity and boldness of his line is well-served by Richard Ballermann’s colors, even when those colors muddle and confuse Roy’s marks; the contrasts between the bright outdoor action and the dark and psychedelic scenes in the Jell City are wonderful. The art is highly suggestive of a well-realized environment and character-design without being fussy, and there’s plenty of Graham’s signature style here as well, with enumerated inventories and animate and personable opjects that will be familiar to readers of King City. I particularly love the cartoony, lumpy face they’ve crafted for Prophet’s character, he looks like a disinterested lummox, and it will be interesting to see if the his character eventually bucks this initial stereotype or runs with it, I can imagine him being worth reading either way.
Prophet has all the trappings of an indie hit… I’m fascinated by this relaunch, and the Extreme revival in general. I came at the revival from the angle of Graham and Roy’s Prophet, and to a lesser extent Joe Keatinge’s take on Glory, and at first I thought the entire concept was a bit of a throwing in of the towel by Liefeld: “You know what, these characters really aren’t going anywhere, and my era as an artist/writer is behind me… why don’t I give ’em up to some hot-shot, crazy indie dudes and see what happens!” But now I see that Liefeld himself is taking on some of the art responsibilities for the new Youngblood comics (see a preview of all the new Extreme titles over on Robot 6), not to mention his resurgent career at DC comics… And the whole thing seems more bizarre.
When I went into the comics shop to pick up Prophet #21 (interesting, and I think, wrong-headed move to maintain the previous numbering in this case… And obviously a late change, the ad in the back advertises Prophet #2 as coming out in February), the front of the stack was wrapped in a Rob Liefeld variant cover that starkly shows the contrast between the old guard and the new. I hate to admit it, but I find Liefeld’s art distasteful enough that if there hadn’t been some of the lovely Marian Churchland covers in the shop I would have held off on making this purchase until I could find one (if you’re a nasty snob like me you can also wait around for Simon Roy’s very nice 2nd printing cover, too).
Will there be any crossover between the fans of the new Prophet and say, Bloodstrike or Youngblood? More importantly to me, will there be any crossover in the plotlines of those other, rather awful looking books and this new run of Prophet? Let’s hope not. I was excited to give some of the new DC titles a chance because I thought they would be largely self-contained, crossover-free stories, and that didn’t last for long. I hope the folks at Image and Extreme know a good thing whe they see it and leave Graham and his co-creators their own private sandbox to play in.