After Awesome Part 6: Brandon Graham's Prophet

(Welcome to After Awesome, where I take a look at all the subsequent series having to do with the characters from Moore's Awesome Universe.)

At the New York Comic Con in 2011, Image announced that they were relaunching the Extreme line of comics with new creators and mostly new concepts. With all this new stuff, it made sense to launch each series as a new volume with a new number 1 issue, right? No. Image decided to go back to the old numbering on the series, such as Glory, Supreme and Youngblood, but add in numbers for all the issues of spinoff series (so six issues of Supreme: The Return, etc.) and new volumes (so each volume of Youngblood were added together). It was weird, but at this point, if there isn't some weird and misguided aspect to publishing these characters, they're obviously not doing it right.

Anyway, I'll be talking about all of these over the next five posts and how they relate to the Alan Moore material.


Prophet was the first of these series to debut with #21 and has been the most successful, running more than 30 issues. It's an ambitious, beautifully weird sci-fi epic that reads like Conan the Barbarian in space. It's about a bunch of clones of the original John Prophet scattered through the galaxy thousands and thousands of years in the future. They're all seeming to work to either restart the engine of the Earth Empire or to overthrow it.

To be honest, I tried reading this series, which is deserving of all the rich praise it gets, but I lost interest fairly early on and couldn't really tell you what it's about beyond that. It takes place so far in the future that it doesn't have any ties to Moore's Prophet, what little we know of him, and minimal ties to Moore's Awesome universe. But I'm going to talk about the few I did find.

One of the main characters is the mostly robotic Diehard. He's lived well beyond the lives of most of his friends in Youngblood. But through him, we get a bit of the history from our time to this future one:

 

  

  

 

Badrock leaves and has a family, though many of his children become planetoids (as I said, it's a weird series).

 

Diehard travels through the galaxy serving as a warrior for various galactic wars. Eventually he teams up with the Prophet clone who is fighting in rebellion against the remains of the Earth Empire.

Another Youngblood member, Troll, has evolved into some weird shapeshifting thing that is a bit of a powerbroker in the galactic wars.

The family Supreme show up in the series too. The dead body of Supreme is being used as a power source:

 

Radar has evolved into some weird, floating thing:

 

  

And Suprema has given up matter entirely, but still feels anger and pain from her time as a person:

  

  

  

  

I don't think we ever saw Glory or found out the story about Supreme's child but I haven't read the Earth War miniseries that concluded the Prophet story.

I'm sorry, I know I'm not really doing this series justice and I'm not going into the level of detail that I normally do. But these are such sad endings for characters that I love, and it's mostly a sad series about outliving all the things we loved, with only the prospect of more fighting ahead.

I've mentioned this before, but I believe it to be a good thought about endings, so I'll mention it again. W. Somerset Maugam said that endings are where the reader wants to feel that it's okay to leave the characters. We want to know that things will be okay after we leave. That doesn't have to be a happy ending, but for the characters we love, that helps.

I don't feel okay leaving any of these characters here. So, if it's okay, I refuse to believe this is their ending. I think the facts back me up as we still have more series with the characters to talk about. How can this be their endings if more stories of their lives are still to come?

Next time we'll talk about one of them: a new Glory.