Prophet: Remission by Brandon Graham (2012) 136 p.
I’m trying to read more comics, but not being a fan of the whole superhero thing means I have to be fairly discerning when trying to collate a to-be-read list from various internet sources and “100 Greatest lists” etc. As it turns out, John Prophet is in fact a superhero, albeit a short-lived one – but you wouldn’t know it from this comic.
Prophet: Remission is the stuff of dazzling space opera, as Prophet awakes from cryosleep tens of thousands of years in the future and roams across an unrecognisable Earth, colonised by bizarre alien species and scattered with the decaying ruins of long-forgotten civilisations. This is heady stuff, the best kind of fantasy and science fiction hybrid, the sort of thing you might read about at Clarkesworld. Prophet: Remission is low on exposition, and as John survives in a city made from the decaying, crashed body of a once-living spaceship, or joins an alien convoy to travel across a harsh desert, I often had little idea what was going on. But this is what makes comics so wonderful: the visual element means I’m more than willing to forgive the confusion, which I probably wouldn’t be in a novel or short story.
This reboot of the original series – which is apparently little-known even among comic fans – is spearheaded by Brandon Graham, creator of the brilliant King City. Different chapters are illustrated by different artists (Simon Roy, Farel Dalrymple, Giannis Milongiannis and Graham himself), which sounds confusing, but there’s a good plot-related reason for it which I won’t give away, and which makes it very appropriate. Nonetheless, I still enjoyed Roy’s branch the most, simply because at three chapters (half the book) it’s the longest. What always bothers me about comics and graphic novels is that they’re too short, although obviously it takes a long time to illustrate and colour all those fun images. I just wish I could discover something old that ran for decades and has now been collated in a great big bundle – I’m certainly open to suggestions from people with more experience than me.
Grub Street 
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
September 22, 2014 at 6:34 pm
inkposts
Prophet Remission, I’m assuming, was published by a smaller company to that of Marvel, DC or Fatcow for example, so undoubtedly their comic runs won’t be for as long.
As a suggestion, you should try reading Ultimates, The Ultimates 2 and Ultimate Galactus Trilogy, the collected volume. The Ultimates are Marvel’s re-imagining of the Avengers in a far more realistic world compared to the Avengers in mainstream Marvel comics (although I think the latter today has become realistic too.) They’re really quite enjoyable and are definitely some of the best comics I’ve read, especially from the early 2000s.
September 24, 2014 at 11:12 pm
Mitch
No superheroes, I’m afraid! Prejudiced, perhaps, but there you are.
October 22, 2014 at 2:55 pm
Guy
Nexus by Baron and Rude. Space Opera to the extreme, classic in the genre, all published by independent publishers, very non-superhero. Excellent art (Steve Rude is my favorite), great interesting storytelling and deep characters. It ran for 100+ issues, and Dark Horse has recently put out an omnibus of almost everything.
Also the long-runing Grendel series by Matt Wagner is worth a look. It’s what kept me reading comics through the darkly Image 90s. It was printed initially by Comico and then Dark Horse, so it has a very independent streak to it.