A Rare Mosaic
by Rey Armenteros
Prophet graphic novels were made by a team of creators, headed by the popular cartoonist Brandon Graham. It was no corporate work-for-hire — well, not in the standard manner that those kinds of products are built by editors-in-chief, presidents of big companies, and their advertising departments. The team was put together by professional friendships, when a couple of buddies traded ideas while they were hanging out one night, perhaps on one of those drives back home after a big comic book convention, in long conversations to while away the time, throwing impressions back and forth and then coming up — years later! — with a mosaic of countless images running through a storyline that went along a web of interconnected events, and so on and so forth.
I don’t know how true this little backstory was, but it grabbed my attention, and I wanted to read it. I had heard so many good things about this work, that my expectations came high. It took years to finally board the train and go through the ride, myself, after ordering every volume from my local library and having them come in all at once, like serendipity prognosticating the things that were about to be unraveled in this undulating story.
The Prophet from the title was the main character, and yet he was also only a clone. He was in a state of deep sleep when he finally woke up, and the world was nothing like it was when he and his brethren were ruling it. It was time to change that. His mission, as we learn, was to bring back the Earth Empire. He was in the role of a survivor. Armed with tools stored for hundreds or thousands of years, not all of which made it intact, he was hacking his way to the destination. Our eponymous protagonist was a thoroughly ugly human, more reminiscent of a neanderthal than of a more ideal human from the future, hiking along the terrain, snapping off things to chew — always eating just about anything, as we would soon come to understand. If there were a going theme in many of the stories to come, it was about the necessity to eat, and every clone of John Prophet was designed to eat almost anything. He would brandish large teeth and take a bite out of some manner of bloated insect, chewing thoughtfully, sometimes holding a twig in his mouth while he freed his hands to inspect something along his trail.
He was a hero, surely — almost superheroic in his exploits. But he was also a part of the human comedy. There was nothing too serious about how he was depicted, because in the end, he was as human as any of us.
The world was nothing like ours and it had not as many resemblances to the worlds of science fiction that we were used to. It never spoon-fed what was happening either. Much of the story relied on details on the art, and I was reading these dynamics in the story with warm attention. I knew I was going to like most of this epic story in the first few chapters. There was too much creativity at stake to ignore. I felt that it was not just about the story, but it was the way it was delivered. I recognized Brandon Graham’s hand, having read enough of his solo projects that I knew some of the quirky word balloon art and how the ways the technology worked must have come from his singular mind. But it was a large collaboration, and the various creators that would chime in along separate chapters were bringing their own vision into it. It was not just a soup but various soups perilously mixed into one large pot which still managed to have an aroma that made you look forward to the flavors that were coming.
The concept of cloning propounded in the story came from a fresh perspective, where the clones were not exactly like the host or like each other. Some of them were women, and each clone had its own characteristics. Though they were all called John Prophet, they had nicknames that suited their characteristics. The science leaned on bio-technology where body parts and organic objects had useful traits that accommodated its user.
The antagonist to this story was at first the new environment that the awoken John Prophet in the first chapter had to contend with. It was man against his environment. Man triumphed in that first story, and the clones of Prophet were reawakened.
But it soon got more complicated. Some of the John Prophets were not onboard for the changes in store for their take over of this future Earth. Prophets would go to other galaxies. When the good guys won, it was soon shown that the good guys were becoming bad guys. I found parallels with the lessons we learn in real history, and no matter how advanced mankind has become, we still make the same mistakes.
I was taken away into these unpredictable developments, luxuriating in the dynamics of the places and creatures of other worlds and contemplating the story developments from centuries before that were being rationed to us as very important things were happening within our present.
The main characters were several John Prophets, and they were not immune to death. The one with the white beard that was known as Old Man Prophet seemed to eventually become the main character, and it made you wonder if this was the original Prophet from which all the others were cloned. So, was it? And the answer was no, because you learned that he was just an earlier clone. The events of these new stories happened so many uncountable years into the future, you had no link to any past from which they originated.
Simon Roy was the first regular artist, but when the other artists came, they came with styles different enough to have you recognize them, and yet the change of art never felt jarring. Overall, it had an alternative comic book look; the art brought excitement to the stories because of the different styles. The style changes made sense in the story, because if the creator Farel Dalrymple did an issue, it was one where the story was following the Prophet which had a tail. The next time we saw the tail-enhanced Prophet, it was Dalrymple drawing it again. The first half of the epic would parcel out some of the art chores like that, according to which artist was doing what character, and they were divided by chapters.
With later chapters, you’d get a montage of various artists making individual pages, where every time you flipped a page, it was a different look on different characters, depending on which character was being represented. As the series continued and you could start to detect these patterns, they would eventually be broken in favor of even newer creators taking their part to put their spin on the ever growing story. There were individual panels that were so powerful, like a color harmony or piece of figurative distortion. The art might have been the single greatest feature of this incredible experiment if the story itself weren’t so damn thought-provoking! Actually, I still don’t know which one was better. I love the crafted nature of the story, but the art, even with the computer coloring, feels handmade.
Prophet appears to have been a grand experiment, and it made me think that this is one of the true collaborative efforts in comics, where “collaboration” means everyone has a role to fulfill. Though Brandon Graham did most of the writing, it seems to have been something like a duet he was playing with Simon Roy at first, and then with others, as they came onboard. I can see these excited creators inventing the specifics of their macrocosm, as they were fishing for new species, laying out blueprints for new technologies, delving for better ways to tell an innovative story. Not all experiments are successful on all counts, and yet I can find no fault with this series of books. It is so well-put together, you would never think it was made by various minds working in some kind of comic jam session.It must have been serendipity!
The one big question I could not ignore is why did Brandon Graham and company choose to ever do Prophet? This was not their own invention. They chose someone else’s property. The original Prophet was just another Image Comics rehash of superhero ideas by none other than Rob Liefeld himself, the poster boy for comic book inanity of the 1990s. As it stands, there is no resemblance between Liefeld’s Prophet and their work, except for maybe one or two points of connection. My question is why didn’t they just place these stellar ideas into characters of their own making? It could have easily been “John Apostle.” Why touch that old, bad stuff in the first place? And why line Liefeld’s pockets in the process? Could it be they wanted Liefeld’s name so that it could make more money?
The pragmatic answer may in fact be that it is attached to a ready-made audience of aging youths from the 1990s who would like to see their nostalgia served with higher purpose. In that sense, Brandon Graham and Simon Roy and everyone else were serving their great story to a larger readership.
But reading and rereading this impressive work, it eventually hit me that the creative team themselves were the audience for the original Prophet when they were kids, maybe going off into other universes the first version might have inspired in them and consequently made their clones of the work, making their boyish dreams of such work into reality. I have no doubt that is what drove them to make that old makeshift product shine in that way that it does now. That genuine love for this universe that grew out of that simplistic, thinly-made original is what made their imaginations explode, and they had been taking the pieces of that explosion with them since their first contact with it until they day they got together to put it back together.