Prophet is the Tits

I don't know what you heard, but this comic book Prophet is the kipper's knickers.

It is a comic you should be reading.



Look at this splash and tell me that you are not curious.

The above splash page is the tone of the piece. It's about a displaced Conan who rides on a giant bug and sometimes is heavily involved in slime men and eating random bits of creatures he finds on his journey. It's as exciting as a comic can be and it is as completely mad as a thing can be without becoming nonsensical. It's great because for the past ten years or so comics have been immensely concerned with this concept of realism at the detriment of good ideas. Just look at the amount of stitches and seams that have appeared on the costumes of super-heroes lately and think about how creative those sartorially inclined heroes have become.

Prophet, for a relaunch of one of the most infamous comic creators of the 90's, strikes me as an old fashioned way of making comic books. A few months ago I read the original run of OMAC and my friend Beef was recently talking to me about reading Kamandi for the first time and we both basically agreed that as wonderful and as ecstatic of a writer/artist/creator as Jack Kirby was, he was as unhinged and as all over the place as a comic maker could be. This current run of Prophet, I feel takes the best aspects of Kirby's energy and makes it into something modern and wonderful.

I'll get back to that in a moment, but first I want to denigrate comics as they are now. It'll be more fun this way.

Instead of using an issue to go over the various ins and outs of the Avengers going over the new psychological problems of Norman Osbourn for five years or how they should maybe buy a new shelf from Ikea, this comic book has a giant battle involving alien elephants. Then it moves on. Because it can. It can afford to throw those things away and because there's so many of them and there's a story that can wrap it all together in a nice, little package. It's an exuberant comic book.

The art is pretty great, as well. It should go without saying, but it's pretty important that a book as nuts as this not look like hell. It's important that the ideas look as awesome as they are on the page. In this case it does. Simon Roy has knocked the hell out of the crazy plate of junk that King has handed him. It's great looking and it is great to the point that it makes me want to double-down on my own art. I won't ever get to the point that Roy is at, but. . . man, making aspirational art is a serious endeavor. It's a sign of something.

As you can tell the art style simple and cartoony and that somehow melds well with the subject matter. At the very least it's an excellent way to separate it from the muscled madness of previous Prophet. I've been following the work of Simon Roy for a while and I've always liked his stuff. It's cool that his art has shown up in a work that interests me this much. Overall it's a nice melding of a kind of serious art style with a fun and representative style. It's exactly what Jack Kirby would have been pleased to see.
















But I'm babbling.

As we speak I'm fairly certain that the new arc of this comic has come out with a new artist, as well (same writer, though). I've wasted my time here and I've wasted the little time I did put to any use. The point here is you should read Prophet.

It's a good comic. Good comics deserve love, too.

The fact that I'm saying this about a Rob Liefeld production should speak enough to its quality.