Reviews
Appreciated its weirdness but I don’t really care for Conan the Barbarian-esque power trips, especially with a sci-fi veneer.
🤷🏻♂️
I read Prophet, volume 1 without any background information or context, save two details passed on by an enthusiastic Richmond, Virginia comic book seller: It's science fiction. It feels like European, not American sf. Both of these observations proved correct. A quick sketch: Prophet takes place in a far, far future, when humanity has reached out into space, built an interstellar empire, then fallen back. The Earth is now occupied by many alien and often violent life forms. The protagonist, (a) John Prophet, appears on the first page as he wakes up from some kind of cryogenic sleep. He's an agent or operator, tasked with restarting that human empire. What follows is nonstop exploration and action, as John works his way across alien/Earth landscapes. Later issues shift the setting to other worlds, adding other characters. This graphic novel offers many pleasures, the first being an instance of the "dying earth" subgenre. Best exemplified by Jack Vance's classic novel of the same name, these stories take place in a distant future, when Earth shows the ravages of time, and humans are no longer top dog. Other examples include Gene Wolfe's very great Book of the New Sun, the Nausicaa manga and anime, Wells' Time Machine, Brian Aldiss' Long Afternoon of Earth, and Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique stories (my review). Following this lead, on every page Prophet shows us different aliens, new technologies, transformed landscapes, new developments in human evolution. It's a very fleshy, carnivorous future. John's a clever agent, but nowhere near the world-conquering engineer of classic American sf. The Earth looks ruined, slightly rebuilt, definitely posthuman. Very well done. The European feel is certainly there. Prophet reads like a story from Metal Hurlant, or a lost Moebius tale (without the humor). There's a touch of the western, as seen from Europe. I'm encouraged, and look forward to the next volume.
