Jeff Lemire and Scott Snyder take note: study Prophet if you want to make your “The Rot/The Green/The Red” stuff start seeming more interesting again. Every issue of Prophet gives us a new unEarthly world, and every issue makes the strange terrain seem jaw-droppingly multifaceted, layered, and interesting to the point of preoccupation. The fictional world — “universe”, really — has clearly been thought-out very well by Brandon Graham and company.

All in all, Prophet has got to be my pick for best comic of 2012. Clearly the most original, most poetically written, most curiously drawn (in a good way) comic in quite a long time. The only previous comic run it may owe a debt to would be the issues of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing in which Swampy’s consciousness skipped from planet to distant planet. But really — unlike the aforementioned, still-pretty-good Lemiere and Snyder comics — Prophet doesn’t ever feel like it’s indulging in nostalgia for early Vertigo. And even though certain aspects of it could be compared to various sci-fi stories, Prophet doesn’t indulge in nostalgia for them either. Here is a rare thing these days: a good comic that is far less concerned with invoking the past than with striking out on its own and doing something new and exciting. What we’ve got here is a genuinely new comic book aesthetic. (Yes, Liefeld characters are name-checked, but these characters may as well be totally new.)

I was a bit worried when I saw Milonogiannis’s name in the solicit. Of the rotating artists so far, he’s been my least favorite. And he is scheduled to do the next few issues (at least) as well. After having read it, however, I was pleasantly surprised. His art isn’t anywhere close to “bad”; it’s just that I prefer the other Graham collaborators better. If the focus for now is going to stay on the original John Prophet, then I think Milonogiannis is a more-than-good choice as penciller for these issues. But I really, really hope Graham and Roy pencil some more issues themselves. I’m sure they will.

All in all, this is the comic I look forward to most every month. You never know what you’re going to get; it’s always going to be different; and it’s always going to be satisfying and engrossing. Every time out, the universe is (literally) charted a bit more; the readers become privy to more and more information, and slowly but surely a great space epic, with a ton of fascinating historical weight, is coming into view.

Please buy Prophet. I’m sure it’s not on the verge of cancellation (knock wood), but it deserves to sell far more than it is. I could easily see this story warranting a 50-issue exploration. Let’s hope Graham & co. get all the time they need to go wild, wield their creativity in impressive new ways every time out, and continue to keep giving us the most original comic IN a long, long time, FOR a long, long time to come.