Pax Americana

 

Pax Americana continues an encouraging trend, two months and running, of a new sense of engagement and urgency and just plain effort in the comics of Grant Morrison. He and frequent collaborator Frank Quitely (who always seems to bring out the best in him) raid the Watchmen toolbox to tell a new story featuring the Charlton characters who inspired Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and the resulting comic plays out like a morally responsible, artistically daring version of Before Watchmen. Which is to say, nothing like Before Watchmen.

It's also a return of sorts for Morrison, who scripted his earliest American comics (particularly the first four issues of Animal Man) with ironic text/image combinations and loaded scene transitions in imitation of Moore's 1980s work. This time around the homages are just as calculated yet far more affectionate, a nod to a past masterwork rather than an attempt to grapple with influence or simply jump on the gravy train.

The most overt allusions to Watchmen feel like the least necessary ones. Nightshade seems to get saddled with all the references whose only purpose is referentiality (the bottle of perfume, the aging stage mom), but things perk up whenever Morrison adds his own personal touch. The Question is a real treat, ranting about spiral dynamics--a past dalliance of Morrison's, and well in keeping with the tradition of writing the Question as a New Age conspiracy nut--at such length that he blots out his own word balloons. He's also running around dropping cryptic cards that fall somewhere between Steve Ditko's Mr. A and Morrison and Quitely's old friend the Fact. ("He is!!!") The overall effect is a synthesis of styles and antecedents rather than mere repetition.

That synthesis enjoys the full support (and then some) of Quitely's artwork. Pax Americana doesn't rely on the restrained, classicist layouts of All Star Superman or the frankly dull work of Jupiter's Legacy (to be fair, I'm sure Quitely could only do so much with those scripts). This is a return to the experimental bravado of earlier Quitely-Morrison collaborations like We3, albeit in a form that's unique to this project.

Quitely steals some of Watchmen's most celebrated tricks and applies them to completely different purposes. Most of the comic is structured around an eight-panel grid in homage to Gibbons's nine-panel layouts, but where Gibbons opened up his pages onto horizontal or vertical vistas, Quitely goes smaller, subdividing his panels ever further until they can only be read with the aid of some sort of advanced electron microscope. In one bravura passage, he and Morrison plot a scene across the same space viewed at three different moments in time, through a continuous 16-panel grid. The presentation of time and space are reminiscent of nothing so much as Richard McGuire's Here, suggesting ambitions that aim somewhat higher than the usual parade of the same worn-out genre references. In its best moments Pax Americana becomes a meditation on existing in time, viewing the relentless chronology of our lives and our history through a story that runs more or less backwards. (Though I love the conceit that Captain Adam, unstuck in time in the Dr. Manhattan manner, experiences the story as we do, moving through it forwards/backwards alongside us as an unlikely guide.)

On the other hand, the comic spends enough pages dwelling at the 16-panel level that it begins to resemble that other grim and gritty masterwork of the eighties, particularly on the pages where an exterior view of the White House segues into a close-up of an American flag--yep, it's The Dark Knight Returns, deployed at the exact moment when another president calls on another superhero to fix the mess he finds himself in. It's a fleeting nod, but it's enough to let us know that Pax Americana isn't just interested in homaging Watchmen, it's looking at the legacy of all the eighties revisionist superhero comics.

And like its predecessor The Just, it's about more than just superhero comics. Morrison is once again using superheroes as a vehicle to explore larger concerns, in this case turning to perhaps their most "serious" interpretation (and the one most characteristic of those eighties revisionist superhero comics) as stand-ins for American geopolitical power. As he tells Joshua Rivera,

I suppose it’s about America and specifically about America’s self-image as the world’s policeman. It tries to make a mind-devouring narrative Mobius strip out of the complicated, contradictory idea of using violence to enforce “peace.”

I suppose it does--or at least it gestures towards this idea at a few moments. The thing is, we don't actually see a whole lot of superheroes enforcing peace, nor does Morrison have that much to say about this complicated, contradictory idea other than to note the contradiction. The issue's presentation is so terse, so gnomic that it barely articulates the idea at all. And this is largely to its credit, sparing Pax Americana from much of the pomposity of the eighties revisionist superhero comics. But the fact is: Morrison pulls back from this critique before he's even laid it out.

Pax Americana feints at the deconstruction of the superhero before offering a glimpse of redemption, suggesting that at least some of its violent and venal superheroes actually are working for a greater good. More significantly, it does the same with its politicians. The president who initially seems to be exploiting our post-9/11 hero worship for political gain turns out to be the architect of the superheroes' fall from grace; and conversely, the vice president who criticizes that hero worship most explicitly turns out to be the beneficiary of our secret network of spies and assassins. (As in Seven Soldiers, Morrison cannot leave any criticism of the superhero genre unanswered, or any critic untainted.)

The issue unfolds as a weird parable of the Bush and Obama years, of Bush and Obama conflated: the president who campaigns on change and renewal turns out to be a ruthless manager of the military-industrial complex and the superhero state, while the vice president turns out to be the kind of craven schemer that pretty much every pop-culture vice president turns out to be post-Dick Cheney. But as with his superheroes, Morrison offers that ray of hope: maybe it's all going according to plan. Maybe you can trust the president after all, just as you can always trust the superheroes and billionaire CEOs and other authority figures who have starred in his comics over the past decade.

So this is of a piece with Morrison's recent work, even if it's executed with a vigor and a formal daring that none of that work can match. I do find it funny that this installment of Multiversity ends with the validation of the superhero, whereas previous chapters culminated in their unmaking. To be clear: the lack of any connection to the rather thin plot of Multiversity is one of this comic's signal virtues, freeing it to pursue loftier ambitions. But given its source material, you would think Pax Americana would have been most suited to the goal of taking the heroes apart (if only as preparation for their inevitable remaking in the grand finale) and it gives hope that maybe, with any luck, that isn't the goal of Multiversity after all.

This could bode well for Thunderworld, which stars a Marvel family that would seem spectacularly unsuited to the cynical iconoclasm of earlier installments, half-hearted though it was. (Incidentally, this may fall under "setting unrealistic expectations," but having seen Cameron Stewart's unlettered pages for Thunderworld I'm going to predict that his art will be at least as well suited for the magical wonderland of Captain Marvel as Quitely's is for a latter-day Watchmen.) Maybe, if we're really lucky, this and future installments of Multiversity won't have any goal other than making some great comic books.

Comments

[Charles Hatfield]

Just read Pax Americana. Question: how do you see this comic "end[ing] with the validation of the superhero"? I find the storytelling so elliptical that I really can't tell what is being validated, or criticized.

[Marc]

With the revelations that the Peacemaker is working in concert with his apparent victim, that Harley has arranged for Adam's eventual return, that (in his words) only a superhero can redeem the ultimate villain (by which Harley means himself, the superhero-killer) and restore symmetry to a broken world. And, typically for Morrison, the suggestion that superhero comics offer both a structure for apprehending the universe and a moral template for living in it. The comic teases a Watchmen-style critique of superheroes before returning to Morrison's customary affirmation.

[Jones, one of the Jones boys]

I agree, Marc, that the superhero is a-OK by the end of the book...although it is striking that we never see a hint of whether Harley's plan succeeds, or even how that success is supposed to occur. The biggest clue comes when (Governor) Harley tells Adam "only a super-hero can bring the president back to life", but there's no elaboration of what the hell is supposed to happen then, and how that's supposed to bring on peace for all time (or how it relates to Major Max Meets Janus the Everyday Man). On the other hand, that's at least no less ridiculous than Ozymandias' giant telepathic squid (or the Friend's plans for world-unification in 20th Century Boys). Maybe it will become clearer in the final issue of the series.

Is it just me, or is there an art error in the panel with "Major Max"? It seems like those speech bubbles should be coming from Harley, but they're pointed at Adam.

[Stephen Frug]

Marc,

I'm a Morrison fan, but haven't read most of his recent DC stuff. (The stuff I've read has been pretty isolated from the main DC universe - Six Soldiers, All Star Superman, that sort of thing.) Mostly I've read his independent work - stuff you cover in the book, less the JLA.

In particular, I haven't read his Batman run (not counting Arkham Asylum, I presume), Final Crisis, or any of the other Crises he seems to have precipiated recently (frankly, I can hardly keep track of them).

So: can I read any of these comics? I am in particular interested in the Watchmen... parody? Prequel? Rebuttal? Whatever. It sounds like it might be comprehensible. But I'm not sure.

Long question short: how much & what background does this, & the multiversity comics generally, require?

[Kevin J. Maroney]

I'm not sure there's enough information in the issue to know with certainty whether Atom will return to resurrect Quinn. Chronologically, the last parts of the story feature Senator/VP/President Eden celebrating the destruction of the superhero as a thing whose time is past. There's at least one reader (http://multiversitycomics.com/annotations/multiversity-explores-the-multiversity-4-in-which-we-burn/) who thinks that Eden has managed to subvert Quinn's plan, but I am not convinced. Certainly the fact that Atom has read Ultra Comics indicates that the Gentry are at work on Earth-4; since their goal seems to be the corruption and dissolution of the superheroic ideal, it would make sense that if they had corrupted Atom, ruining Quinn's plan would be the strongest possible blow against that ideal.

(Eden is s definitely not a good man--he ruined Eve's mother, which is the strongest reason beyond pastiche for that scene. And he's depicted as a Two-Faced Man in the first of the torture scenes. The strongest argument that Eden doesn't know what's going on is his apparent complete bewilderment at Peacemaker's actions; but he would have to act that way, wouldn't he?)

[Marc]

Wow, you leave for a few days and an honest-to-God discussion breaks out!

Kevin, we don't know with any certainty that Adam will return, but given Morrison's tendencies I think some sort of redemptive reappearance (not necessarily in the same narrative world he departed) is pretty likely. Nor do I think we necessarily need to assume that Eden is specifically working to sabotage President Harley (Quinn's?) plans--he could have independent motives for everything he does, whether it's the destruction of Captain Adam, the burying of the superhero myth, his personal political ascent, or even more venal and petty goals. (There's a line about Harley using Adam to harness black hole energy "so we don't have to rely on oil." How much Dick Cheney would you like in your Dick Cheney?) Morrison likes to overdetermine his stories so it's possible that he could also be a pawn of the Gentry, but everything Eden does works on its own internally consistent level, independent from the larger crossover. This is one of the great assets of Pax Americana.

I think you and Jones are speaking to the same point, which is that Morrison doesn't fully wrap up the plot he sets up in Pax Americana. That could have been as crippling as the lack of resolution in The Just, except that Morrison is saved by his own plot structure: because the main thrust of the narrative is moving backwards in time, he can still produce a satisfyingly complete story (culminating in the revelations about Harley's past and his motives) without tying up all the loose ends in the present. Once again, he's left a lot of work for that final issue to do, but taken on its own terms Pax Americana works brilliantly.

[Marc]

Stephen, I would say that Pax Americana is perfectly comprehensible as long as you have a decent familiarity with Watchmen and are willing to puzzle out the formal games. (Knowledge of the Charlton characters will provide some added bonuses but is not essential.)

Multiversity as a whole has been too bound up in spot-the-reference games... it's not that a familiarity with DC continuity is required, it's just that the first couple issues didn't reward anything else. I did enjoy The Just, which reached beyond those parochial concerns, but don't expect a complete story.

[Skottie]

Am I the only one that understood that Harley manages to survive his own death by Adam causing time to reverse itself in the very form of the comic itself? The comic is a mobius strip, designed by Adam, through which Harley gets to live forever.