The Monstrous Alchemy of Alan Moore: Promethea as Literacy Narrative

I argue that Alan Moore’s Promethea is nothing short of compositional alchemy: a radically instructive guide to the graphic medium that takes us on a revelatory exploration of the comic/graphic novel qua magical, imaged-narrative. Read as a whole, the comic series forms a primer that teaches the reader not only how to decipher a culturally-abjectified text, the comic, but by bringing traditional epistemologies into question suggests how readers consciously enact the monstrous, mystical causal dance that Scott McCloud explains is “at work in the spaces between panels.” In this essay I further propose that Promethea may be especially compelling for academic readers, since it performs as literacy narrative by telling the story of a scholar who transforms herself into story. Promethea thus forces the scholarly reader especially to become aware, often uncomfortably so, of that continual process of collaborative narrative construction, and of our own complicity, creative power, and responsibility as empowered.