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Prophet

Details

Category: Comics

Created on Sunday, 21 June 2015 18:49

Written by KTP

Prophet:  "A man emerges, finally awake from the long sleep of the hyperpod."

You may remember Prophet from the “extreme” 90's when chromium covers pushed sales and putting pockets on characters was the comic trend of the time. Image comics was the biggest at the time pushing their comics with a style over substance mentality. If you read Youngblood, it was one of the worst offenders where you have horribly trademarked Liefield art mixed with stories that make SuperPro look like fucking Shakespeare. Somehow, out of that pile of dogshit came Prophet which told the story of a genetically modified soldier that liked shortswords and pockets. It was just as bad and only lasted about twenty issues which should have been forgotten by time. It wasn't. In probably the best and strangest revap ever, writer Brandon Graham and artist Simon Roy hacked away at Prophet making it unrecognizable. What we are left with is a comic that feels more epic than Star Wars, more bizarre than any classic Doctor Who episode, and more of a Heavy Metal issue regular than anything that Image Comics is comfortable with.

Take a wild fucking guess as to which one has the better story. The right or the left?

Instead of a reset, Prophet starts back up at issue 21 where we are introduced to John Prophet awaking from hyper sleep on an Earth that has become alien. As he navigates through his strange surroundings and hunts even stranger creatures, what drives him forward is his mission. The mission is to scale the Thauilli Van towers and “restart the Earth Empire”. As John completes his mission through the dangerous and utterly alien Earth, we soon find out that he is not alone. He is one of many clones in the Empire and just one of many performing missions in its service. Seeking to stop the Empire is the Old Man Prophet with his slowly growing team of warriors. As the sense of scale grows so do the threats as we see who is really pulling the strings as the heroes start to converge towards each other.

Scale is one of the things Prophet gets down just right.

Prophet is amazing, but it doesn't expect you to make sense of the chaos right away. As we see the motivations and mindset of the Empire through the various Prophet clones, we start to see everything slowly coming together. While the Prophets sometimes raise more questions than answers in their journeys, seeing the plot threads get revealed is a treat and sometimes with reimagining of old Image heroes. Diehard and Badrock are fucking fascinating. It may also sound fucking nuts (and it is) but we see not only Simon Roy designs of bizarre worlds, but also Farel Dalrymple and Giannis Milonogiannis throw in their concepts as well creating one of the coolest tapestries of alien life. While we wait to see if they continue after issue 45, those of you that missed this one owe it to yourselves to visit one of the craziest and awesome reboots ever done.