Prophet [Shotgun Blurbs]

by Contributing Writer Keith Silva

PROPHET

Published by Image Comics
Creators: Brandon Graham, Simon Roy, Giannis Milonogiannis, Farel Dalrymple

What It's About: Scrap the nineteen-nineties. Imagine that there is no (John) Prophet, instead, think Prophets… millions of Prophets. Evolved from an agar of 'Conan in space,' Prophet is a strain of science fiction as kooky, inventive, and improvisational as Philip K. Dick, and sexy, surreal, and avant-garde like Samuel R. Delany. Set 10,000 years in the future, Prophet plays like a riff lifted off an old vinyl LP -- found content remade and set anew -- Paul's Boutique in comic book form. The Prophets are travelers of both time and space, insatiable iterations who find strange many-eyed, limbed, and mouthed creatures, and kill them or eat them or mate with them. Part search for lost time, part action-adventure, Prophet seethes with an organic energy and industry, an inventory of ideas that trades on a reader's expectations in the extreme.

Why You Should Buy It: With apologies to Butch Cassidy, Brandon Graham has vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals. Those familiar with the puns, amity, and goofs of Graham's King City will find Prophet familiar, like a joy ride in your older brother's muscle car, except instead of tear-assing down main drags, you park out under the stars, eat sandwiches, and dream. Each issue stands alone and yet is cohesive, a part of the whole. Artists Roy, Milonogiannis and Dalrymple, along with colorists Joseph Bergin III and Richard Ballermann, act as co-conspirators in Graham's vision; the deep bench gives Graham license to transpose keys (swap artists like Prophets) and still maintain a steady rhythm. For all its groovy loosey-gooseyness, Prophet never feels masturbatory or (gasp) decompressed. Graham and gang cast Prophet as singular, an aggregate of influences; an influential prophecy of comics to come.