Gloss on See the Strings: Watchmen and the Under-Language of Media

Moore’s Promethea, on the other hand, is something akin to a theoretical text which gives a great deal of attention to Moore’s metaphysical views. Promethea starts as a superhero story, but quickly turns into a meditation on the relationship between reality and representation. In a way, it reminds me of Yeats’ Golden Dawn years, but without the pretension… and it offers further insight into the meaning of an under language. In Promethea, the under langauge is not simply a technique that is available to the comic book writer, but it fits with some primordial sense of what language is and what consciousness does, and models it in a manner consistent with the sort of Hermetic (“as above, so below”) view that underpins Moore’s work. Promethea also picks up on apocalyptic themes developed in the Watchmen and From Hell, but suggests that transformations don’t have to be sinister… they can be utopian, too, if we learn how the proper spells of consciousness.