Earlier, I mentioned en passant that Alan Moore’s Promethea, Book 3 was pretentious and dreary. Well, okay, I didn’t say it specifically about Book 3, but I could have done so with precise accuracy. However this series started out, it’s now taken a horrible, horrible wrong turn.

Rather than a story with characters and plot, Promethea is now a tutorial on the occult, thinly veiled behind the merest facade of story. I kept paging through this volume, hoping that this bizarre digression would end soon, but it never did. As much as I hate dumping series in the middle, I’m dumping this one. It’s difficult to believe that something as painfully dull and pretentious as this is written by the same guy who writes the enormously fun Tom Strong and Top 10.

To wash the bad taste of Promethea out of my mouth, I read some other comics, Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise: Child of Rage and Strangers in Paradise: Tropic of Desire , the ninth and tenth volumes in Moore’s SiP series.

Strangers in Paradise is far outside of the mold of what most people think of as comic books in that it doesn’t involve any superpowers or fantastic elements. It is, at least at first, focused solely on the relationships between a group of people (by virtue of which it’s gotten something of a reputation as a “chick comic”). As the series goes on, it gradually picks up a suspense/crime/conspiracy subplot, which is less interesting than the main story, but occasionally overwhelms it. (As an analogy, consider how much less interesting Sluggy Freelance is when it’s focusing on all the dull Hereti-Corp business. Same kinda thing.)

Fortunately, these last two volumes finish up most of that subplot early, and then get back to the interesting stuff. I’m not entirely pleased with the ending, which smacks far too deeply of “It was all just a dream” — which, after ten volumes, is even more galling than usual — but otherwise, I found these quite enjoyable.