Promethea Book 1 2 3 4 5 TPB set VF/NM 1-32 magic Moore Williams III ABC EXTRAS For Sale

This listing offers the complete Promethea series in 5 trade paperbacks, Books 1-5 in average VF/NM grade, and all are early printings under the America\'s Best Comics imprint, on heavier paper than the later Vertigo printings! Books 3 and 4 are 1st printings, and Books 1, 2 and 5 are 2nd. You will get every issue, 1-32, of the amazing series along with the tri-fold, 2-sided poster of #32 included in the fifth trade paperback (see 12th and 13th pics)! Plus I am including a FREE CD of ART and INTERVIEWS! - see details below.
Great trade paperbacks, ready to be enjoyed and perhaps even studied!

Media mail shipping within the USA is $8. You can also choose USPS Priority Mail for $18 if you prefer much faster shipping. This can also be shipped outside the USA via Global Shipping.

Please check out my other sales - all my listings are carefully graded and photographed.

See my perfect response and offer with confidence.
So, the business details set aside, let me say more about this great series. Here you get the complete story by the Wizard of Northampton, Alan Moore, and by the incredible art staff of artist JH Williams, cover designer and letterer Todd Klein, inker Mick Gray, and colorist Jeremy Cox. Same crew for all issues, this series is a labor of love fueled by Moore\'s insights on magic, art, and language. The combined result of these ideas and these immensely talented artists is really stunning! This series is often described as Moore\'s most personal and it presents the most direct revelation of Moore\'s insights about magic. Here, Moore gives us art\'s fiercest spark, Promethea!For a starter taste, check out this video at YouTube 163Cb1bAW7UIt describes some of Moore\'s central themes, grounded in hermeticism, with occasional references to his works like Marvelman (Miracleman) and Watchmen, but especially fully presented in Promethea!
Here is some more from Moore himself: \"With Promethea, when I was coming up with the initial titles for ABC Comics, I thought, well, I want a comic with a strong female character. I\'d also like to have a comic where I can release some of the steam of my magical researches.\" - Alan Moore in interview

\"As far as I can remember, the original idea behind Promethea was to come up with something that worked as a mainstream superhero character, maybe looked a bit like Wonder Woman or Doctor Strange in a weak light, and which would enable me to explore the magical concepts that I was interested in before a mainstream comics audience that may never have encountered these ideas before (and may very possibly never have wanted to). It seemed to make sense that we should start at the shallow end, with inflatable arm-bands, so as not to alienate the readership from the very outset (the plan was to wait for about twelve issues and then alienate them). [...] Eventually I decided that the only thing to do would be to at least attempt it and let the chips fall as they may: as it turns out we have lost several thousand readers over the course of this saga, not as many as I\'d expected, and the ones that remain are either dedicated and firm in their resolve, or else have had their cerebral cortex so badly damaged by the last four or five issues that they are no longer capable of formulating a complaint, or any other sort of sentence for that matter.
\"And speaking for me and Jim and Mick and Jeromy and Todd, I think we\'re all rather smug about how well the piece had turned out artistically. The strict kaballistic colour schemes, as an example, while they looked very dubious and unworkable on paper, have turned up some beautiful and often startling effects in practice. Issue 23, the issue dedicated to Kether, the godhead of the kaballistic system, had a magical palette of four colours, these colours being \"White\", \"Brilliant White\", \"White-flecked-with-gold\", and most unhelpful of all, \"Brilliance\". Despite how hopeless this sounded, we decided to stick to our guns and attempt the issue using only white and gold, and apparently the first few coloured pages do indeed look celestially beautiful.\" - Alan Moore from an interview in Eddie Campbell\'s publication Egomania #2

More from Moore: \"I wanted to be able to do an occult comic that didn\'t portray the occult as a dark, scary place, because that\'s not my experience of it. I don\'t thinks it\'s the experience of many occultists. Why would we want to be occultists if that meant that we had to spend our lives in a dark, scary place? Utilizing my occult experiences, I could see a way that it would be possible to do a new kind of occult comic, that was more psychedelic, that was more sophisticated, more experimental, more ecstatic and exuberant. In Jim and Mick and Jeremy I\'ve obviously found people who were exactly right for the book, that have shared my vision of it, and have added their own bits to that vision. So Promethea is about as perfect an expression of the occult as I could imagine doing in a mainstream super-hero comic book\" - Alan Moore in The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, pg 188.

and this: \"I would prefer to keep my actual opinions about magic confined to Promethea, and God knows some of the readership have trouble with that, so I would prefer it if magic didn\'t obviously permeate all of my work\" - Alan Moore in Heroes and Monsters: The Unofficial Companion to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, pg. 238 A quote from JHW3: \"Todd [Klein] is the main person responsible for the great cover ideas. He suggests an idea to everyone and we go from there. He designs it all. The main thing I want to see with the covers to Promethea is that we tribute them in some way to another artist or artistic style.\"
And here is a review of the topics and influences of the various cover designs by Klein and art by Williams:

Issue #1 \"The Radiant Heavenly City\"

Issue #2 \"The Judgment of Solomon\"

Issue #3 \"Misty Magic Land\" - according to designer Todd Klein, \"inspired by the famously surreal newspaper strip Little Nemo In Slumberland by Winsor McCay\"

Issue #4 \"A Faerie Romance\" - \"after Morris\"

Issue #5 \"No Man\'s Land\" - \"after Leyendecker\"

Issue #6 \"A Warrior Princess\" - \"after Brundage\"

Issue #7 \"Rocks and Hard Places\" - cover inspired by romance comics from the mid-20th century

Issue #8 \"Guys and Dolls\" - \"thank you Terry Gilliam\"

Issue #9 \"Bringing Down the Temple\" - stained glass window

Issue #10 \"Sex, Stars and Serpents\" - riff on the cover to The Beatles\' album Sgt. Pepper\'s Lonely Hearts Club Band, by Peter Blake

Issue #11 \"Pseunami\" - according to designer Todd Klein, \"wide-screen horror films of the 1950s-60s\"

Issue #12 \"Metaphore\" - \"after MacLean\" referencing psychedelic poster art queen Bonnie MacLean

Issue #13 \"The Fields We Know\" - \"after Parrish\" (Maxfield Parrish)

Issue #14 \"Moon River\" - \"attempting Virgil Finlay\"

Issue #15 \"Mercury Rising\" - \"thanks Escher\"

Issue #16 \"Love and the Law\" - \"thanks Peter Max\"

Issue #17 \"Gold\" - \"after Dali\"

Issue #18 \"Life on Mars\" - \"after Frazetta\"

Issue #19 \"Fatherland\" - \"for love of Van Gogh\"

Issue #20 \"The Stars are But Thistles\" - \"after Richard Upton Pickman\" (a fictional painter created by H. P. Lovecraft)

Issue #23 \"The Serpent and the Dove\" - \"inspired by Mucha\"

Issue #25 \"A Higher Court\" - \"inspired by McCay\"

Issue #27 \"When It Blows Its Stacks\" - \"thanks to Ross Andru,\" specifically the 1976 comic Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man

Issue #29 \"Valley of the Dolls\" - \"with admiration for Warhol\"

Issue #31 \"The Radiant Heavenly City\" - according to Williams, \"an imitation of the tarot card \'The Judgement/The Aeon\'\"

Issue #32 \"Wrap Party\" / \"Universe\" - credited to Williams and Klein \"after the end\"


Along with the writing and the immense love of art displayed in those great covers, this series is a tour de force by JH Williams III. He really let loose, with the majority of the pages of the 32 issues presented in beautifully designed 2-page designs, a number of the Kabbalah Quest pages (issues 14 to 23) have 4- to 6-page sequences that tie together, and in the most extreme (and amazing!) case the entire issue (#12!) is presented as one long, connecting panel that even connects up the left side of first page with the right side of the last page, forming a circle of (artistic) life! Hugely creative pulses!

After the photos of the books you will receive, I have included some of those great splash panels that JH Williams III made for this series, to give you a taste of this series\' brilliance!
Finally, I will include a free CD with this listing (just let me know if you do not want it, and I will not include it for free - it\'s not technically part of what I\'m selling here, just a freebie) that is packed with various Promethea original art images that have been posted by JH Williams III over the years (both black and white and colored, without the cover extras like logo and UPC), plus some extensive annotations of many Promethea issues, some material by Todd Klein regarding his work on the covers and design of Promethea and the trade paperback versions, and finally with many Alan Moore interviews. See the last few images for an idea of the great art images. All this stuff is available on the web, I\'ve just collected it for your ease of access, saving you some bandwidth and time.