It is a clever, gender-bent retelling of Prometheus. 'Tell me, child, what is your name?' 'Promethea.' It follows a woman who is researching a story for her thesis, only to discover that the story actually lives in the imagination and can explode into the real world in surprising and mystical ways. Promethea is a brilliant fantasy graphic novel by the legendary Alan Moore. I would think fans of Moore will more than likely eat this entire series up.

The current avatar fights monsters and bad guys like she's a magical Wonder Woman knock-off, in a surprisingly coherent story. Said avatars have access to, and eventually end up in, the Land of Imagination. The gist of this is that Promethea is a figment of imagination that comes to life through an avatar, and each avatar reinvents her own version of Promethea. Now, that's not to say I'm interested enough to read any more of this, but it did make me think that I might actually want to give Moore's Swamp Thing a try. Still, storywise it's pretty easy to read. In fact, I thought it was much older than it actually was, assuming (before the McBeal thing) that it was written in the 80s. It just has a dated look to the whole thing even though it is set in some sort of an alternate timeline. I'm not sure why authors think adding pop culture references is ever a good idea. The story shows its age because of things like references to Ally McBeal. Where were the pages and pages of text that I've come to expect from Alan Moore? This was unbelievably like a normal graphic novel! I really thought this would suck and it didn't.

Promethea vol 1