GLORY #1

By: Tony Whitt
Date: Sunday, January 20, 2002

Gloria West is a waitress in a diner in New York who also happens to be a registered schizophrenic and who believes herself to be a superhero named Glory. Problem is, Gloria West really is the superhero named Glory. She's also the daughter of the goddess Demeter, who allowed her daughter to share the body of a mortal and explore what it means to be human. However, neither Demeter nor her daughter is aware of he danger posed by Lilith, who has decided to destroy Glory using the only weapon she can against someone so pure of heart: love itself.

If you're not already convinced that Alan Moore is a god among comic writers, this title should finally convince you. Moore's done some interesting reworkings of older comic characters before-his TOM STRONG series, for example, manages to combine elements of the Superman and Captain Marvel mythos-but this may be his most interesting one. It makes far more sense for a being like Glory, the younger sister of Persephone, to inhabit the body of a human rather than taking on a human alter ego-even DC has wisely done away with Wonder Woman's Diana Prince persona, presumably using the same logic. It also makes sense that such a possession might just be a problem for the human involved. Gloria West herself is an innocent, a young woman whose best friends are the toys she collects and whose most enjoyable pastime is reading the comic book adventures of her alter ego as she appeared in the 1940s in TEMPTATION COMICS-ring a bell?. One can't help but sympathize with her condition, especially when she herself is constantly aware of it. Granted, it's surprising that Moore calls that condition "schizophrenia," which is not synonymous with "multiple personality disorder" as most people think. Still, any writer who throws a word like "tribadic" into a comic like this, in a scene which is an absolute scream, deserves all the credit he can get. Moore brings to light some of the darker elements of the Wonder Woman mythos, and in doing so he creates something daring and new. Pity that Stan Lee wasn't this imaginative with his own Wonder Woman "reimagining." Even when Moore doesn't move too far off from the source material, he's still doing more with it than Stan the Man has.


The only stumbling block in this title is Marat Mychaels and Robert Jones's artwork, which is almost too ornate for a book like this and takes far too many of its cues from the other T&A-oriented books that Avatar Press produces. It's precisely the kind of artwork that overwrought fanboys lust after, and it jars a bit with the very beautiful story that Moore is telling. The middle section of the book, however-a reproduction of TEMPTATION COMICS #35 drawn by artist Melinda Gebbie-goes a long way towards making up for that "heaving bosoms" artistic style, capturing all of the weirdly perverse innocence with which William Moulton Marston wrote those bondage fantasies of his back in the ?40s.

This book has something for everyone. It'll make Alan Moore fans happy; it'll make Wonder Woman fans furious, but they'll get over it and eventually be happy; it'll make the T&A fanboys happy; and it'll make the higher-ups at Avatar Press extremely happy, once this book ends up the hit it's bound to become.

ALAN MOORE'S GLORY

Grade: A-

Issue: No. 1

Author(s): Alan Moore, Marat Mychaels, Robert Jones, Melinda Gebbie

Publisher: Avatar

Price: $3.50