Shortly after Grant Morrison wrapped up his last attempt at a continuity-defining crossover that would reach to the farthest corners of the DC universe, I described the Final Crisis Sketchbook, a supplemental collection of notes and character designs, as my favorite part of that enervated, overextended event: "Final Crisis in its purest form."
I hope that final judgment proves not to be true of Multiversity and its supplement. At the very least, I'm pretty sure the first one won't.
The Multiversity Guidebook is a huge step backwards into the analogues and pastiches that populated the early chapters of Multiversity--the ones I couldn't be bothered to write about at the time. For all the wildly overhyped diversity of its first issue--a diversity that would all but disappear in subsequent installments--Multiversity #1 offered little more than reflections of existing heroes from established narrative continuities or else paper-thin parodies of the same, an endless hall of mirrors.
We probably shouldn't expect anything more from The Multiversity Guidebook; if anything, the survey of familiar types and territories would be more at home in an almanac than a story proper. But where the Final Crisis Sketchbook at least gave us treatments for characters who never made it into that crossover (and were often more delightful than those who did), The Multiversity Guidebook attempts to catalogue the mostly depressing contents of the DC multiverse in its current form.
That catalogue boils down to the same five or six properties, endlessly recycled; the somewhat more charming (because less exhausted) contents of a couple of other comics companies, acquired by DC decades ago; and pastiche copies of other characters not owned by DC, many of whom started as pastiche copies of characters who are owned by DC. The ink has begun to blur and smear; the copies are no longer legible, and the originals have long since vanished.
Morrison has done this sort of thing before with great success in Zenith Phase Three, which pulled every British superhero into a DC-style multiverse (and a DC-style Crisis) whether his publishers at IPC owned them or not. It felt novel back then, in part because the analogue trick hadn't been repeated so often in 1989 and in part because, in an age when DC was furiously attempting to disavow its own past, the resurrection of forgotten continuities carried a jolt of transgression.
It doesn't anymore. Now the resurrection of forgotten continuities is almost the only trick the superhero publishers have left and they return to it without end. This year it's the premise behind the major crossover events at both DC and Marvel. In this climate, Multiversity is neither a critique nor a celebration of comics; it's repetition. Individual issues may rise or fall on the strength of Morrison's ambitions and his collaborators' talents, but the guidebook gives little sign of any greater ambitions for the project as a whole.
If you don't buy into the premise that its proliferation of copies is endlessly fascinating--and despite a lifetime of reading superhero comics, mostly DC comics, I find myself increasingly pulled into this camp--then almost the only thing to latch onto in The Multiversity Guidebook is the acid humor Morrison reserves for certain of the worlds he has tasked himself with charting. There's the alliterative bombast and fake-hip patter of Earth-6, which contains the characters from Stan Lee's dead-end "Just Imagine" reinventions of the DC properties, so dismal that even straight description constitutes a kind of parody ("...the glistening GREEN LANTERN channels the peerless power of the wondrous World Tree Yggdrasil against the villainous REVEREND DARRK!") There's the uninspired Batman-as-Green Lantern from a mid-90s Elseworlds who now has a whole world of similar mash-ups to inhabit, most of them so insipid (Wonderhawk? Aquaflash!) that they subject the very principle behind the "original" to richly deserved ridicule.
And there is something vaguely funny about watching the derivative creations of Jim Lee or Rob Liefeld receive their own even more derivative copies... at least until the vague laughter passes and you realize that's the only joke in this book, and it's on perpetual replay. Because in the end, nearly all of these worlds amount to mash-ups, generally the kind that leach rather than add meaning to their component parts.
What's the point of combining, say, DC's rich gallery of Western characters with the Steampunk Justice League cosplayers of an old Chuck Dixon Elseworlds? What do we gain by having the asshole superheroes of Howard Chaykin's Thrillkiller books grow into the asshole space explorers of his Twilight? Why fold DC's more optimistic and forward-looking science fiction characters into the post-apocalyptic milieu of the Atomic Knights, and then fold the Justice League into that? In fact, almost all of these cookie-cutter universes devolve into analogues of the Justice League, even when their source material doesn't start that way. In that sense, The Multiversity Guidebook is an encyclopedic demonstration of DC's collapsing publishing aims. The New 52, for all its sins, started out with a game attempt at reviving the company's horror and war comics. Now it's all Batman and Green Lantern. Say what you will about Aquaflash, at least he's honest.
...Wait, did you ask about a story? Oh yes, there's a story here, too. Something about a couple of different versions of Batman meeting and reading the comic whose contents we are holding, which contains the exact same cosmology Morrison gave us in Final Crisis and its tie-ins, updated to include the last couple of crises after the final crisis. There's an ominous threat and the hint of an even ominouser threat and a big purple monster with three eyes and tentacles and a goofy, self-amused expression that would look more at home on the puppet mascot of a television show made for children with extremely low standards. I'm sure by the time this is all over we'll be told exactly which aspect of the comics industry he symbolizes but I can't say I'm in any hurry to get there.
There's no point judging this comic for its story, anyway; the plot as such is just a loosely narrative frame for the catalogue of worlds and the big D&D alignment chart that maps them. Morrison could probably write entertaining stories about most of those worlds, but if the overall plot of Multiversity has shown little interest in doing so, then why should we demand any more from its supplement? As a giant fistful of comic that you can buy for eight bucks and read for an hour or so, The Multiversity Guidebook does what it set out to do. It's an authoritative survey of fifty-two variations on the same handful of bankrupt ideas: an atlas to a country that is no longer much worth exploring.
Empty is thy hand.
Posted by: Illogical Volume | February 02, 2015 at 11:10 AM
" little sign of any greater ambitions for the project as a whole"
That mostly sums up my reaction to his Batman comics, which I couldn't even make it through. His grand themes there seemed to be (a) Batman is awesome and (b) every Batman story actually happened (i.e. servicing continuity). I never bought into the Morrison-as-Messiah schtick, but it's still been dispiriting to watch his abrupt decline
Has he written anything after Final Crisis that was worth reading? How about Joe the Barbarian (which I haven't read)?
(BTW, I finally got a hold of yr monograph on him last year. I thought it made a convincing case for much of your interpretive approach)
Posted by: Jones, one of the Jones boys | February 02, 2015 at 06:38 PM
(not that I thought Final Crisis was worth reading, either. It was at least amusing to see how rapidly that reboot got rebooted. All that ado for nothing)
Posted by: Jones, one of the Jones boys | February 02, 2015 at 06:40 PM
I thought the stuff with the Lil' Justice League being revealed as just toys that can be broken and rebuilt by a distant, cruel creator was inspired.
I wonder if the Empty Hand is basically Adam Smith's invisible hand rendered as a comic book supervillain.
And the art on the Kamandi/BiOMAC stuff was very beautiful (it makes me wish that there was a Kamandi revival series).
Otherwise, you're right, the bankruptcy of DC was laid bare. The empty hand, indeed.
Posted by: Robby | February 02, 2015 at 07:20 PM
I loved Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye. (Joe the Barbarian, not so much.) Individual parts of Multiversity have been great, inversely proportional to their relation to what passes for the plot. And I liked Batman and Robin and parts of Batman Inc., when it stopped being a meta-Batman comic and just settled for being a really good Batman comic.
But yeah, the decline has been precipitous, especially when you consider where he was in the middle of the last decade: New X-Men, the Filth, We3, Seven Soldiers, All Star Superman.
I think part of the problem is that Morrison has traditionally had two outlets for his work: corporate-owned superhero comics and independent(ish) creator-owned work. When he can play both modes off against each other, he produces great work at the intersections. But if he allows either one to atrophy, it pulls the other down with it. For whatever reason, he bet big on the continuity-heavy superhero sagas seven or eight years ago, and the work has suffered across the board.
Posted by: Marc | February 02, 2015 at 07:39 PM
Robby: I think the series is pretty clearly headed towards some sort of metafictional reveal about the villains. That's been percolating through all the books, even the more or less independent ones like Thunderworld; Sivana literally mining the magic out of the Rock of Eternity, and replacing it with a bland corporate office, makes the point more pungently than any number of allegorical antagonists. Morrison seems to be working through his own dissatisfactions with DC and corporate superhero comics, and maybe once I would have gotten a buzz from his decision to do that from the pages of DC's story bible.
But after enough years of reading that story from him, and no others, you have to wonder... why not just do something else?
Posted by: Marc | February 02, 2015 at 09:07 PM
That first Seaguy series is great, if depressing. I decided to trade-wait the second one, expecting to read it all together with the third series, which, yeah, well. Eventually, fingers crossed?
I gather the art gets way more consistent, in quality if not specific style, later in his Batman stuff. I'm down for an unambitious but well-told Batman story, but that earlier art, ugh.
Posted by: Jones, one of the Jones boys | February 02, 2015 at 09:39 PM
Oh yeah, the art improves tremendously: Quitely, Stewart, Irving, Yanick Paquette, and Chris Burnham is amazing pretty much right out of the gate. I even like Andy Clarke's stuff from that run. And I am a sucker for that Dick Grayson/Damien pairing.
Posted by: Marc | February 03, 2015 at 01:19 PM
Marc: I totally understand where you're coming from. You're basically recapitulating my feelings about the first two installments. I didn't feel that as much this time, but it's valid.
But wouldn't you love to read a Paolo Sequiera Kamandi ongoing? My biggest regret was that the Kirby character adventures were so curtailed. More Tuftan/Kamandi/BiOMAC/New Gods in the style of PRINCE VALIANT!
Posted by: Robby | February 03, 2015 at 02:17 PM
I loved the little details, like the drive-in movie theater on the "Island of the God-Watchers" or the vintage Kirby map. Naturally, I would have preferred that they come with a story that wasn't limited to watching Kamandi and co. read notes for a bunch of other stories, which will also never get told. But I think we're on the same page there.
Posted by: Marc | February 03, 2015 at 07:14 PM
Marc: That part was very much "when are they gonna get to the dynamite factory?" for me as well.
Posted by: Robby | February 04, 2015 at 12:38 PM
Is Annihilator any good? On the one hand, Frazer Irving; on the other hand, a screenwriter who finds his creations have blurred the line between reality and ficzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Posted by: Jones, one of the Jones boys | February 08, 2015 at 02:01 AM
That's about the size of it. It's improved a lot since the first issue, but the high concept may constitute a very low ceiling. I'm not quite ready to sign on to the Morrison Renaissance just yet. (Hi, Graeme and Jeff!)
I may write about this and Nameless later--we'll see.
Posted by: Marc | February 09, 2015 at 04:08 PM