Promethea

Thirty-two issues by Alan Moore, J. H. Williams III and Mick Gray. A student becomes the vessel of an imaginary goddess and then climbs the Tree of Life, one sephirah at a time, over a long central sequence — with the art changing register completely at every station.

⭐⭐⭐ THE GOLD STANDARD FOR DECLARED PROVENANCE, AND THE BEST ARGUMENT IN THE WING FOR WHY THE GRADES ARE NOT A RANKING. Moore's Kabbalah is Hermetic Qabalah — it descends through Lévi, the Golden Dawn and Crowley, and is therefore at four or five removes from any Hebrew source. And he says so on the page: Crowley, John Dee and Austin Osman Spare appear as characters. The reader is never once misled about where this comes from. A borrowed tradition, declared, is worth more than an accurate one smuggled — and the comic is also, straightforwardly, one of the most beautiful objects the medium has produced.