Prophet #34

Written by Brandon Graham with Simon Roy and Matt Sheean
Art by Simon Roy and Malachi Ward

I love Prophet, and all the work that Brandon Graham and his amazing cast of artists have done to take an utterly execrable 90s character and turn him and his story into a sweeping futuristic space epic, but over the last two months, I've not been able to stop myself from wondering if the book has fallen into a bit of a rut.

In this issue, we revisit the John Prophet who we first saw in these pages, in Graham and Roy's earliest issues.  He's the guy who woke on Earth after millennia of hibernation, and who turned on the GOD satellite, which reawakened the entire Earth Empire.  Since then, we've met a number of different Prophet clones on a number of different missions, as well as the original - Old Man Prophet, who is gathering allies to stop the Earth Empire.

This issue has John Prophet come to the Empire's central domus - a large structure that is the heart of its endeavours.  There, he discovers that some in the Empire fear him and want him dead.  Some other things happen too, as they always do in this book, that are pretty wild and wonderful in their own way.

Really, this is an excellent comic, but I feel like it's time for the story to take a few larger leaps forward. It's never been made clear just what the Empire is all about, or why we should be concerned about it.  There are portents of doom galore, but I think we might need some actual doom to hold everything together.

As always, I enjoyed Roy's artwork, and was very intrigued by the back-up story, CARE, by Matt Sheean and Malachi Ward.  Usually these back-ups are stand-alones, and aren't given enough space to grow, but this is the beginning of a serial, which gives the creators a lot more space.