Promethea Volumes 1-5 HC 1st prints complete story 1-32 Alan Moore Williams III

$

195

This listing offers the complete Promethea series in 5 Hardcover volumes! You will get every issue of the series including the 2-sided poster of #32 (assembled) included in the fifth HC volume!

Great volumes, all First Printings with these grades for interior-and-dustjacket: 1 NM and VF+, 2 NM and VF, 3 NM and NM-, 4 NM and NM- and 5 NM and VF/NM. Wow!

Media mail shipping within the USA is $6.00, or I can ship the books via USPS Priority Mail for $17 (let me know if you prefer Priority and wait to receive an invoice before paying via PayPal).

Please check out my other auctions - all my listings are carefully graded and photographed.

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So, the business details set aside, let me say more about this great series. Here you will get a beautiful presentation of the complete story by the Wizard of Northampton, Alan Moore, and by the incredible art staff of artist JH Williams, cover designer and letterer Todd Klein, inker Mick Gray, and colorist Jeremy Cox. Same crew for all issues, this series is a labor of love that feels like you've joined a love-of-art party and also fueled by Moore's insights on magic, art, language. The combined result of these ideas and these immensely talented artists is really stunning! Whenever I reread the series I feel like it's an art party with a wizard that I'm lucky to attend! This series is often described as Moore's most personal and it is easy to see why: no other series he has written provides more direct revelation of Moore's insights about magic - here, Moore gives us art's fiercest spark, Promethea!



Here is some more from Moore himself: "With Promethea, when I was coming up with the initial titles for ABC Comics, I thought, well, I want a comic with a strong female character. I'd also like to have a comic where I can release some of the steam of my magical researches." - Alan Moore in interview

"As far as I can remember, the original idea behind Promethea was to come up with something that worked as a mainstream superhero character, maybe looked a bit like Wonder Woman or Doctor Strange in a weak light, and which would enable me to explore the magical concepts that I was interested in before a mainstream comics audience that may never have encountered these ideas before (and may very possibly never have wanted to). It seemed to make sense that we should start at the shallow end, with inflatable arm-bands, so as not to alienate the readership from the very outset (the plan was to wait for about twelve issues and then alienate them). [...] Eventually I decided that the only thing to do would be to at least attempt it and let the chips fall as they may: as it turns out we have lost several thousand readers over the course of this saga, not as many as I'd expected, and the ones that remain are either dedicated and firm in their resolve, or else have had their cerebral cortex so badly damaged by the last four or five issues that they are no longer capable of formulating a complaint, or any other sort of sentence for that matter.
"And speaking for me and Jim and Mick and Jeromy and Todd, I think we're all rather smug about how well the piece had turned out artistically. The strict kaballistic colour schemes, as an example, while they looked very dubious and unworkable on paper, have turned up some beautiful and often startling effects in practice. Issue 23, the issue dedicated to Kether, the godhead of the kaballistic system, had a magical palette of four colours, these colours being "White", "Brilliant White", "White-flecked-with-gold", and most unhelpful of all, "Brilliance". Despite how hopeless this sounded, we decided to stick to our guns and attempt the issue using only white and gold, and apparently the first few coloured pages do indeed look celestially beautiful." - Alan Moore from an interview in Eddie Campbell's publication Egomania #2

More from Moore: "I wanted to be able to do an occult comic that didn't portray the occult as a dark, scary place, because theat's not my experience of it. I don't thinks it's the experience of many occultists. Why would we want to be occultists if that meant that we had to spend our lives in a dark, scary place? Utilizing my occult experiences, I could see a way that it would be possible to do a new kind of occult comic, that was more psychedelic, that was more sophisticated, more experimental, more ecstatic and exuberant. In Jim and Mick and Jeremy I've obviously found people who were exactly right for the book, that have shared my vision of it, and have added their own bits to that vision. So Promethea is about as perfect an expression of the occult as I could imagine doing in a mainstream super-hero comic book" - Alan Moore in The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, pg 188.

and this: "I would prefer to keep my actual opinions about magic confined to Promethea, and God knows some of the readership have trouble with that, so I would prefer it if magic didn't obviously permeate all of my work" - Alan Moore in Heroes and Monsters: The Unofficial Companion to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, pg. 238



A quote from JHW3: Todd [Klein] is the main person responsible for the great cover ideas. He suggests an idea to everyone and we go from there. He designs it all. The main thing I want to see with the covers to Promethea is that we tribute them in some way to another artist or artistic style.



And here is a review of the topics and influences of the various cover designs by Klein and art by Williams:

Issue #1 "The Radiant Heavenly City"

Issue #2 "The Judgment of Solomon"

Issue #3 "Misty Magic Land" - according to designer Todd Klein, "inspired by the famously surreal newspaper strip Little Nemo In Slumberland by Winsor McCay"

Issue #4 "A Faerie Romance" - "after Morris"

Issue #5 "No Man's Land" - "after Leyendecker"

Issue #6 "A Warrior Princess" - "after Brundage"

Issue #7 "Rocks and Hard Places" - cover inspired by romance comics from the mid-20th century

Issue #8 "Guys and Dolls" - "thank you Terry Gilliam"

Issue #9 "Bringing Down the Temple" - stained glass window

Issue #10 "Sex, Stars and Serpents" - riff on the cover to The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, by Peter Blake

Issue #11 "Pseunami" - according to designer Todd Klein, "wide-screen horror films of the 1950s-60s"

Issue #12 "Metaphore" - "after MacLean" referencing psychedelic poster art queen Bonnie MacLean

Issue #13 "The Fields We Know" - "after Parrish" (Maxfield Parrish)

Issue #14 "Moon River" - "attempting Virgil Finlay"

Issue #15 "Mercury Rising" - "thanks Escher"

Issue #16 "Love and the Law" - "thanks Peter Max"

Issue #17 "Gold" - "after Dali"

Issue #18 "Life on Mars" - "after Frazetta"

Issue #19 "Fatherland" - "for love of Van Gogh"

Issue #20 "The Stars are But Thistles" - "after Richard Upton Pickman" (a fictional painter created by H. P. Lovecraft)

Issue #23 "The Serpent and the Dove" - "inspired by Mucha"

Issue #25 "A Higher Court" - "inspired by McCay"

Issue #27 "When It Blows Its Stacks" - "thanks to Ross Andru," specifically the 1976 comic Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man

Issue #29 "Valley of the Dolls" - "with admiration for Warhol"

Issue #31 "The Radiant Heavenly City" - according to Williams, "an imitation of the tarot card 'The Judgement/The Aeon'"

Issue #32 "Wrap Party" / "Universe" - credited to Williams and Klein "after the end"



Along with the writing and the immense love of art displayed in those great covers, it's also true that JH Williams III really opened up and let loose, with more than 3/4 of the pages of the 32 issues presented in 2-page splash pages, and in some cases entire issues (#12!) spanning the entire issue in one long, connecting panel that even connects up the left side of first page with the right side of the last page! A number of the Kabbalah Quest pages (issues 14 to 23) have 4 to 6 page sequences that tie together. Jaw-dropping stuff, seriously! I've also included some samples of these great 2-page splashes below at the bottom of the list of images, some of my favorites! Just WOW!















and here are some of those great splash panels that JH Williams III made for this series, for FLAVOR!

















As a free bonus, I'm including a set of six 4"x6" prints that I had framed before I moved to larger size posters. These work great as bookmarks!



The right 2 show the original paintings that JH Williams created as the backgrounds for issue #32, before all the comic art was added on top (including a color change), while the lower middle image is from the Absolute Promethea book 2 - these work great as bookmarks - they are free additions and if you do not want them, please let me know and I'll give them to someone else:



The upper left image here is an unpublished painting by occultist John Coulthart, the lower left image is Sophie coming out of the Kabbalah Quest "trip" with that look of satisfaction and perhaps exhilarated relief at coming out the other end of the pipe, and the top middle photo is the intro splash panel to the Metaphore special issue #12 that led quickly into the Kabbalah Quest.