I Am NOT the Beastmaster

The Multiversity

I didn’t give much thought to The Multiversity #1 when it first came out. It seemed too much of a piece with Morrison’s other superhero comics of late, more concerned with charting DC’s increasingly baroque cosmology than doing anything interesting with it. Even the variety of its cast, which Morrison and his fans went out of their way to trumpet, amounted to little more than a collection of derivative copies of 75-year-old DC characters; when Morrison really wanted to change it up he wrote them as analogues of 50-year-old Marvel characters instead. There was a little diversity among the principals, or at least a certain amount of lip service to it, but creativity was in short supply.

I didn’t get interested in the larger crossover until The Just indicated that Morrison was interested in using the event to tell other stories that were not limited by the increasingly limited horizons of superhero comics in the 21st century—that Morrison was once again approaching superheroes as a vehicle for finding meaning and not as a meaning in and of themselves. Those middle chapters showed Morrison stretching himself again, exploring new themes and trying out new techniques. Even Mastermen, probably the most maligned of the one-shots, had a refreshingly harsh take on DC’s prevailing aesthetic, suggesting it could be adapted to fascist propaganda with little to no alteration. These comics didn’t always work as comics, and most of them didn’t even pretend to tell complete stories, but they showed Morrison trying to break out of his comfortable rut and say something dangerous again.

Unfortunately, with The Multiversity #2 the series has reverted to form as a comic dedicated to exploring endless and functionally meaningless variations on the same depleted stock of character types. The good work of the middle chapters drops away, plunging us back into the continuity obsessions of the frame tale. That continuity obviously fascinates Morrison, but he never translates that fascination onto the page. The stakes are wholly artificial, with antagonists who are little more than unfinished character designs and heroes who stand around explaining what they’re doing in excruciating detail even though they never actually seem to do anything. It’s all weightless, a series of made-up solutions to made-up problems, and it ends with the revelation of an even bigger villain with an even bigger plan that depends on (oh god) an even bigger cluster of multiple multiverses, because apparently this one hasn’t exhausted that concept enough. Perhaps this neverending chain of crises really is the “ultimate statement on the DC multiverse,” as Morrison promised when this series began. But if so, is the statement even worth making?

The comic does have its moments: a fun character design here, a line of dialogue there. I love the Dreddified Batman more than I probably ought to, and I appreciated the note of linguistic determinism in Jason Blood’s rhyme, a reminder of a time when books like The Invisibles had greater aspirations than continuity maintenance. The opening scenes are easily the best ones, as Morrison breaks from the ongoing story to show us developments in another parallel universe where DC’s various supernatural heroes band together to fight off an invasion by backstabbing Sivanas from across the multiverse. That story looks like it would have been a lot more fun than the main plot; I can only wonder at the possibility of a crossover that took its cues from Thunderworld rather than The Multiversity Guidebook.

This is an old trick from Morrison, of course. It’s a replay of the final issue of Final Crisis, which also opened with the introduction of a new world and gave us the President Superman character who could be said to be one of the main characters of The Multiversity, if The Multiversity had characters and not continuity cyphers. (Maddeningly, Morrison’s few President Superman stories never actually show him as president, essentially writing him as a standard Superman character who happens to have a different day job—another example of the series’ paper-thin commitment to diversity and its avoidance of anything that might deviate from the over-familiar DC crossover template.)

There are other nice touches, but even those tend to be lifted wholesale from earlier Morrison comics. The Red Racer, Morrison’s fanboy Flash from another world, defeats the corrupted Nix Uotan with a trick lifted straight from a 1997 issue of Morrison’s JLA—and then says as much on the next page. In other circumstances the self-aggrandizement might rankle, yet the sheer brazenness of it got a laugh out of me. I guess it is true what they say: good artists borrow, great artists steal, even from themselves.

Another such moment comes at the end of the issue when President Superman, realizing the invaders have come from Earth-33 (that would be us), turns to stare directly out of the panel and says the superheroes are coming to hit us back. I kind of like the audacity of that, if only because I can’t imagine how Morrison would actually write that story any differently from the one he’s just told, but I would love to see him try—provided it is different.

The Grant Morrison of Supergods would probably say that the counter-attack has already begun, that superheroes have invaded and conquered every part of our pop culture here on Earth-33. The problem with that argument is that they tend to be the kind of superheroes The Multiversity doesn’t like very much—dour, alienated, depressed, violent, the very qualities it attempts to purge from its corrupted Supermonitor. DC and its owners at Warner Brothers are the industry leaders in purveying these qualities, and Morrison doesn’t really provide any indication of how he would challenge his employers in this regard.

But he does recognize that they are part of the problem. The middle chapters of the crossover, especially the last couple of installments, have been filled with backbiting critiques of editorial directives, corporate owners, and most of all the readers, who drive all these policies through their  (our) purchases—and who Morrison suggests have been wasting their (our) time. Shame and disgust and more than a little self-loathing course through these issues, and that’s okay—these feelings can fuel great stories. But where the middle chapters either pursued these thoughts to their ultimate, grim conclusions or else denied them with ebullient retro stylings (Thunderworld looks better and better as this series drags on to its end), the final issue of The Multiversity doesn’t really have an answer. Rejecting one mode of DC corporate storytelling, the “realistic” cynicism and violence, Morrison falls back on another, the continuity porn. Framed as a victory, the issue feels like a surrender.

Curiously, though, someone is left out of its all-encompassing spite. Some crucial link between the owners and editors and the readers, some hand that shapes the characters (though it certainly does not create them) and delivers them to us, ready for the consumption it both enables and despises. This figure is omnipresent in The Multiversity and yet he receives almost no attention until the last couple of pages, when he claims his well-earned reward:

Rarely are the defenders of work-for-hire comics so honest about their motives: he did it for the money.

Hey, even supergods have to pay the rent.

Morrisonarama

Annihilator:

If this book had committed fully to the over-the-top science fiction saga, Diabolik by way of Alien, I might have been able to get into it. That plot isn’t especially original, but its mining of pop-cultural archetypes is bombastic enough that we understand originality isn’t the point. (I especially like the religious fundamentalist superhero/villain whose henchmen appear to be graphic representations of the four fundamental forces of the universe.) Unfortunately that stuff only leaks in around the margins, more narrated than told, as it’s placed in the service of a shopworn plot about creativity and writer’s block. In a fitting example of the problem, Annihilator doesn’t have much to say about either one.

It’s got art and colors by Frazer Irving so of course it looks beautiful—but even there, the space plot gives him a lot more to work with than the screenwriter one. Both settings are equally sparse, but only one of them has reason to be, and while Irving fills the space station with loops and sworls of teeming chaos or ecstatic creation, his Hollywood seems mostly to be a series of time-saving blank backgrounds. The characterization is equally barren, with clichés that are pardonable among the sci-fi archetypes but far less so in their nominal creators. Why do Morrison’s fantasy worlds always feel so much more real than his realistic ones?

There’s another problem. I loved Morrison’s comic about the lifelike android who is cursed with a soul as part of a competition between two manipulative male creator figures. And the one with the miniature universe contained in a cube. And the one where the world exists as a prison to trap an enemy in a gnostic hell. And of course the one where the fictional character meets his author – well, the first pass at that one, anyway. Morrison’s played all these riffs before, and Annihilator isn’t adding anything new.

I’m afraid this is why I can’t quite sign on to proclamations of a Morrison renaissance. Yes, when he did his best work in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s he was usually feeding off the interplay between his mainstream superhero comics and his more alternative work. I don’t think he’s getting that benefit now because this isn’t really much of an alternative. It’s the same old gestures in a very pretty new package.

Remember, Morrison’s indie work gave us The Filth and The New Adventures of Hitler, but it also gave us The Mystery Play.

Nameless:

Now this is more like it. I had some reservations despite the strong first issue—because Morrison’s also done the comic about the eccentric industrialist who holes up on the moon and marshals his considerable resources to save the human race—but with the second issue that element and the series as a whole have moved in an altogether darker direction, one that’s not quite as trusting in the beneficence of our captains of industry.

The main character is stamped neatly from the Constantine mold, but he’s got an engaging voice and he feels like a good engine for the type of story Morrison wants to tell. I do wish he had a few more characters to bounce off against; it’s hard to care about the slaughter of the astronauts and ground crew when most of them don’t even have names. And the exploration of Xibalba feels a little too heavily indebted to Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, at least before the story shifts and switches focus to all the other things it’s indebted to.

The real strength of the book is its creepy, unsettling mood. Much like his work in Ultra Comics, Morrison throws us off balance by denying us a stable narrative frame from which to read the book. In this task he’s aided by Nathan Fairbairn’s lurid colors, which render dreams all but indistinguishable from reality, and Chris Burnham’s masterful page layouts. Perspectives are constantly shifting, while panels turn into pictures and pictures into panels. Best of all, these games with the surface of the page have no apparent purpose other than to unsettle, no commentary whatsoever.

Nameless and Annihilator and their predecessor, the generally miserable Happy, mark Morrison’s belated realization that the rewards of comics scripting have shifted back to creator-owned work published through smaller publishers with generous terms like Image. His first couple of efforts read like they were written solely to seize the opportunities afforded by this new territory, or perhaps to stake a claim to a little piece of it while there was still a piece left to be claimed. Certainly they were not written for any driving creative purpose, which would explain their exhausted imagery and subject matter. Nameless is a cut above them, not necessarily any more novel or meaningful, but executed with confidence and care.

So far it’s just a well-made sci-fi horror comic. But sometimes that “just” makes the difference between an ambitious failure (or a less than ambitious failure) and a runaway success…

JLA: 

My recent foray into nineties comics (courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service) got me hooked. Desperate for more stories of Steel and Kyle Rayner and Connor Hawke and all those other sadly temporary replacement heroes, I went back and reread Morrison's JLA.

If you invested enough of yourself in these things at the time they become charged with memory; your longboxes turn into calendars that take you back through jobs and apartments and relationships and old friends. I discovered quite late in this reread that a copy of one of Morrison’s JLA scripts, courtesy of one of those old friends, had been sitting in my house for about the last fifteen years. Technically it’s lived here longer than I have. I’d completely forgotten this when I wrote the Morrison book.

I’ve always thought fondly of these comics. When it’s at its best (I would say from the “Flash Fact” in issue three through the end of “Rock of Ages,” with a real shot in the arm when DC One Million comes around) Morrison seems to be simultaneously resurrecting and reinventing classic Silver and Bronze Age superhero storytelling. He balances nostalgia with a more jaundiced take on the genre that I found both massively entertaining and surprisingly thoughtful.

Unfortunately, the best scripts are saddled with some of the weakest art. Howard Porter's work is awfully rough at the start of the series, almost illegible at times, as he tries to accommodate Morrison’s overstuffed scripts with stiff figures and cluttered, perpetually busy layouts.  His pages open up considerably as the series progresses, and his figures improve a lot—he’s one of the only artists to make Kyle Rayner’s costume and ridiculous crab-face mask work—but they’re never so improved that he can’t toss out the occasional howler of a panel, like one hilariously ill-considered scene where Bruce Wayne is walking up to Oracle’s apartment, which sits at the top of a flight of stairs.

But even their shortcomings are more amusing than infuriating, and what these comics lack in polish they more than make up for in raw energy and enthusiasm. They exploit the possibilities of the superhero genre more than they explore them, and they do not strive for any but the most gentle and fleeting of metacommentaries. They do not try to “offer up the ultimate statement on what the DC multiverse is.” They do not try to grant the DC multiverse sentience, as if that were both possible and a good idea. (If the New 52 were sentient, would you really want to be alone in a room with it?) They do not try to convince you that superheroes are quasi-divine mythological beings or ethical role models, although they do have characters who do ethical and quasi-divine things, a rather more efficient means of making the point which Morrison’s recent work has sometimes forgotten. They are, in short, just trying to be good superhero comics. Maybe even great superhero comics.

And that’s enough.

Ultra Comics

We’ve got another cover that appears to be the product of two different narrative registers interacting with each other, as some concerned citizen has helpfully scrawled a “not” across the John Broome-like injunction to read this comic. Like the gaudy frame of Mastermen, which both contradicted and redeemed the crude illustration inside it, this clash of registers is a perfect representation of the comic within—a comic that cannot quite decide what it wants.

I loved the first thirteen pages, as we watch the comic construct itself and narrate its own creation before our very eyes. Self-aware comics are a familiar routine from Morrison, to be sure, but he manages to put a new spin on it that we haven’t seen before : this time he eschews the airy abstractions in favor of an unusual attention to the materiality of the comic, from its production to its reception. Like a band performing a fresh arrangement of a beloved standard, the old number takes on new life.

This rendition is delightfully unsettling thanks to Doug Mahnke’s too-slick art, which seems calculated to provide an uncanny-valley simulation of life, and by Morrison’s refusal to settle on a stable narrative frame. That refusal is anything but arbitrary, and these scenes are neatly constructed: there’s a wonderful fair-play clue on pages three and four, for example, as the alarmed Ultra who stares into the eye of his enemy yields to the sedate executive who reads the comic along with us. That same gimmick seemed hollow and unmotivated when Morrison used it to very different effect in The Multiversity Guidebook, but here he invests it with a malign purpose that’s only clear on the second reading.

These sorts of metafictional games can be delightful over the course of a short story, but they’re difficult to sustain over the long run. Ultra Comics shifts drastically when it moves from the creepy 1950s industrial film to the “nakedly allegorical tale” that consumes its final two-thirds. That tale sends Ultra to a “generic post-apocalyptic urban wasteland” that looks like it came straight out of any number of recent superhero crossovers (including DC’s Future’s End, which has been running for the past year and seems to be the main butt of the ridicule).

It’s tempting to play the allegory game and ask which forces or factions all these new names and characters stand for, which parts of the comics industry they symbolize, which stages in its history they condemn, for at this point in Multiversity it is painfully obvious that they could not stand for anything else. And to be fair, Morrison is not shy about implicating himself in this tissue-thin allegory of cannibalistic children who dine on the corpses of their elders.  At one point the narration gets co-opted by (or does it co-opt?) the most common criticisms of Morrison’s work, criticisms he appears both to mock and to validate. Of all the recycled and redundant characters who inhabit this derivative dystopia, it’s tempting to ask which ones are meant to represent the author of Ultra Comics.

But this is the wrong game. A game the issue courts, to be sure, but also one that accepts the premise that there’s nothing left to do in this post-production era but shuffle around the genre formulas and play spot the reference. More interesting to me by far is the palpable loathing with which Morrison accepts that premise, and the naked self-criticism that drives so much of the issue.

The early pages, when Ultra still dwells comfortably in his official narrative as a fully trademarked savior, present him as a kind of protective idea designed to interact with and inspire us in the battle for our souls. It’s the Supergods approach to superheroes, in other words—and by the issue’s end it has failed utterly. The last-minute reversal of fortunes, the tough kid with a heart of gold who’s inspired by the hero, all the usual formulas that pull out a victory in these kind of situations, they all fall short. The hero saves no one, least of all his readers. The comic ends with multiple voices begging or commanding us to put the comic down, to end the “Oblivion Machine” that has wasted all our time.

Does this represent the end of the Supergods approach to superheroes as liberatory ideas? Has Morrison finally acknowledged how the corporate practices he defended in that book also produced the genre shifts he laments in this one? Surely it’s no accident that the threat that defeats Ultra arises from within the highest echelons of the team that created him.

But this is the wrong game, too. This is just the next level of the all-consuming allegory. The veiled criticism of his corporate employers might be a late addition, but Morrison has been criticizing the superhero genre from within for decades. The genre has little to show for it, except this:

When Morrison wanted to recapitulate the history of superhero comics in Flex Mentallo he did it in four issues, organized loosely around the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the grim and gritty deconstructions of the 80s, and the “ultra-post-futurist” age that Flex was supposed to initiate.

He recapitulates the history of superhero comics once again in Ultra Comics, this time in just four panels. Once again, the first three are the Golden Age, the Silver Age, and the grim and gritty deconstructions of the 80s, but the fourth age, the modern age, is really just an extension of the third, an even more violent and angry hero. The only remaining trace of ultra-post-futurism is the sullen glare as he turns out of the panel to snarl at us:  “What are you looking at?”

But this is the wrong game, too. The whole exercise of recapitulating the genre inside itself is ultra-post-futurist, and it’s been done before. (Though these exercises are not always limited to superhero comics nor so sanguine about their past.) The only result of this twenty-year-plus postmodern turn is the further cementing of the very trends it was supposed to subvert. The promised revolution never arrived. It is always promised; it will never arrive. It’s always midnight in Dark City, but Morrison is always there to tell us the morning will come. It’s always just around the corner, always ultra-something-or-other.

Until this time. Until we reach the cold dead terminus of postmodern self-reflection and it fails on the page as well as off and Morrison tells us in so many voices, including our own, to close the book on it. Stop expecting anything different. Stop wasting our time.

This ends now.

Put the comic down.

Mastermen

Well, that was half of a good comic, wasn't it?

I don’t mean the comic was only half good; I mean that despite its expanded page count, it was only half a comic. Two-thirds at best, leading up to one of the explosive but unfinished endings that have been common to earlier chapters of Multiversity, with any hope of resolution offloaded onto a final installment that’s looking increasingly, hopelessly overburdened.

Mastermen is set on Earth-10, the renamed and updated version of the old Earth-X, where the Nazis won World War II and conquered the solar system. Traditionally it’s been the home of the Freedom Fighters, a ragtag band of heroes who’ve been deputized to bring down the Reich so nobody will notice they're all kind of shit characters. Morrison adds a little more depth by remaking them as members of the various groups the Nazis persecuted and targeted for extermination.

He also decides to present them as antagonists.

The actual star of the book is Overman, a parallel-universe Superman whose rocket landed in Nazi-occupied territory back in 1938. It’s a familiar premise, probably best explored in Kim Newman's short story "Ubermensch"—a surprisingly charming tale given its dark subject matter, filled with elaborate, copyright-avoiding nods to Superman’s history. (It also used the villains and monsters of German expressionist cinema as a readymade rogue's gallery in a pop-cultural pastiche that preceded The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by nearly a decade.)

Morrison has inherited Newman's angsty, guilt-ridden Overman and placed him front and center in this story of a world gone wrong. With its brutal heroes, Wagnerian themes, and angry, melodramatic art by superhero standard-bearer Jim Lee, Mastermen reads like a comic actually produced in the universe it depicts: what the whole hep world would be reading on Wednesday afternoon if the Nazis had won the war.

There is something subversive and deeply unsettling about the decision to focus on the team of Nazi superheroes rather than the diverse band of revolutionaries who band together to bring down their regime. If Morrison's "New Reichsmen" reflect all too easily on their baseline inspirations from the DC universe, then his Freedom Fighters are all too easily cast as terrorists. Their righteous cause, patriotic language, and status as persecuted minorities should make them easy objects for heroic identification, the X-Men of Earth-X. But their war culminates in the destruction of a major American city—by a suicide bomber!—and if they’re cast as the villains in this post-9/11 drama, then the vengeful, torture-happy Nazi "heroes" occupy a position uncomfortably close to our own. Morrison leaves us nowhere to turn in a book that inverts America and its enemies while making all parties look morally compromised if not downright repulsive.

In that respect, it's a lot like The Just—and also like The Just, it doesn't come anywhere close to telling a complete story. The issue ends on a turning point, not a resolution, and the sparse narration (by Nazi Jimmy Olsen!) teases an impending betrayal and a fall that we never actually get to see. In the final pages Morrison strongly implies that Overman is the traitor in his own group, that he wanted to see his corrupt society brought down and hadn't quite realized the price he would pay for it. It’s fascinating character work, but it leads nowhere.

The Freedom Fighters receive even shorter shrift, with fully half of them never shown in action. (Morrison’s script is curiously indecisive on whether they’ve been around long enough to acquire a reputation or whether Sivana just created them before our very eyes—but then, it’s curiously indecisive about a lot of little things, like how old Overman is or whether characters can remember their own dialogue from scene to scene.) The lesser focus isn’t inappropriate given their role as the antagonists, but they receive just enough narrative build-up that it’s perplexing when they don’t do anything. And this is the oddest thing about Mastermen: it may only be half a comic, but it tells two different stories, neither one to completion.

The cover actually manages to hold those stories in balance better than the comic does. The previews for this one had been the least enticing in the entire series, but Rian Hughes's interventions have shaped the final product into both a striking image and an honest representation of the contents within. The pompous fascist Gotterdammerung gets a gaudy photorealistic frame that reeks of artistic pretension—I can’t shake the feeling that this book should have been published in DC’s late, lamented Prestige Format—while the underground resistance gets a deliberately simplistic, propagandistic image printed in just two cheap colors, the better to imply its samizdat circulation. But one story enfolds the other; there's no separating them. And as much as that’s an asset for the story’s dour portrait of the post-9/11 world, it can only be a detriment to its narrative closure.

It’s tempting to speculate whether we might have gotten a more complete story if Mastermen hadn’t been given to a superstar artist who has to push his schedule to produce three panels per page (or, occasionally, three panels per two pages). But that’s not a safe assumption, as there’s no guarantee this story was written specifically for Jim Lee: his participation was announced awfully late in the game, and Multiversity has been in development for years. Lee’s roomy renderings stretch a few scenes out past their expiration date (notably the prologue, which swells to fill more than a quarter of the issue), but he's actually quite well suited for the doomed, operatic arias of the Overman story. In his best moments, his work takes on an excessive, overheated air reminiscent of Morrison’s Batman collaborator Andy Kubert, especially that postapocalyptic Damian issue.

So no, there’s no need to pin the blame on Jim Lee. The flaws of this issue were already apparent in the other chapters of Multiversity; they don’t rest on the artist. Let's just say, then, that Mastermen, like The Just, is one half of an original, disturbing, potentially great comic, with no promise that the other half will ever come.

The Multiversity Guidebook

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.

Thunderworld

I came into this one with very high expectations. Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart do not disappoint.

Stewart had a particularly unenviable task, coming immediately after Frank Quitely's tour de force in Pax Americana. But he proved to be exactly the right artist for the job: the tonal shift between Pax Americana's solemn stylings and Thunderworld's all-ages adventure couldn't be greater, freeing Stewart from the burden of direct comparison, and yet his clean linework and cartoonish figures are just as well suited for the childlike whimsy of the Marvel Family as Quitely's formal experiments were for the clockwork world of Watchmen.

Of course, this comic will invite other comparisons to Alan Moore's work. After all, Moore had already done the supervillain who meets all his pan-dimensional counterparts in Supreme, right down to the psychotic Darius Dax from the grim and gritty '80s continuity--and when he walked out on that series, he worked some of his unused ideas into an issue of Tom Strong that was, coincidentally or not, an homage to the Fawcett Captain Marvel comics. Morrison is definitely covering some well-trod ground here, as Moore will no doubt grouse in his next "last" interview. Even the opening narration sounds like something out of Promethea ("Poised at the dazzling, crystalline pinnacle of imagination's loftiest empyrean peaks")--or at least it does until the old wizard Shazam turns directly to the reader and confesses, "I was just practicing my omniscient narrator voice."

But this doesn't read like another entry in in the Grand Unified Beard Conspiracy Theory of Morrison scholarship. Morrison's quip brings the bombastic narration of the opening page back down to Earth with a winking self-mockery that feels as much a part of the Fawcett books as it does like one of Morrison's characteristic self-reflexive games. This comic is a work of affection, not anxiety, and its primary object is not Moore's interpretation of the same source material, but the source material itself. This is a loving homage to the Captain Marvel comics of C.C. Beck, Bill Parker, and Otto Binder, and it's filled with all the things that made them so charming, including their gentle irony. (Though not without a Morrison edge; the line about Sterling Morris's labor practices cracks me up.) Mary Marvel, Captain Marvel Junior, Georgia Sivana and Thaddeus Jr., Uncle Dudley, Tawky Tawny, the Monster Society of Evil, even the Lieutenant Marvels--this one's got everything you could want from the Marvel Family in forty pages.

In fact, that may be its sole problem. Morrison is adept at writing comics which serve as story bibles for other comics series that never get off the ground. Seven Soldiers was a set of treatments for series that didn't get produced until years later, if at all, when the luster was gone and Morrison had moved on to other projects. Multiversity has much the same feel, with Morrison trying to wring every drop of potential out of these characters before his time is up. This is how you do the Marvel Family, he says, and he's absolutely right--but if history is any guide, no one else is going to do anything with it.

As a self-contained pleasure, though, it's great. And self-contained it is: once again, the story has almost no connection to the Gentry or the larger plot of Multiversity. The final pages, in which Captain Marvel scoffs at the dour endings (or lack of endings) of earlier chapters and throws a copy of Society of Super-Heroes into the dustbin, could almost be read as openly contemptuous of Morrison's  own frame-tale. That frame has been getting less prominent with each new installment, and I have to wonder whether Morrison himself got sick of it at some point in this project's protracted development.

If so, more power to him. The heavy-handed allegories and forced irresolution of earlier chapters aren't allowed to intrude on the general atmosphere of knowing good fun, and the Big Red Cheese gets a well-deserved win. So do his writer and artist. It isn't often that I feel tempted to burst into applause after finishing a comic--that would be weird, wouldn't it?--but damned if this one didn't come close.

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.

The Just

The Just is easily the best chapter of Multiversity so far. In fact, it's probably the best comic Grant Morrison has written since the second Seaguy miniseries back in 2009.

Which makes it all the more frustrating that it doesn't actually have an ending.

Multiversity was always in danger of becoming Final Crisis shoved into a Seven Soldiers-shaped package--a reference-filled, continuity-obsessed crossover of absolutely no meaning or import, adopting the outward form of a much better comic. This issue steered away from one of those rocks only to founder on the other. Because as much as I loved Seven Soldiers, the lack of closure for some of its component miniseries (and the overstuffed final issue that couldn't do them all justice) was a problem. With this issue, it seems clear that the final chapter of Multiversity is also going to have a lot of clean-up work to do. And with Morrison, it's never safe to assume that work will actually get done.

It's doubly a shame for this issue, since The Just is the first chapter of Multiversity that's actually about something other than other comics. The issue is an incisive diagnosis of narcissism and depression and anhedonia--or maybe depressive hedonia--and all the other ailments afflicting the most fortunate sectors of postmodern, post-millennial society. It approaches these concepts through the lurking horror of an invasive idea, an infection that has disguised itself as a comic (not unlike the comic I feared Multiversity would become). Watching this lazy but vicious predator claim cast member after cast member results in Morrison's creepiest work in years.

The Just approaches these concepts through other comics, and references galore, and yet Morrison's choice of source material is so gaudy and unexpected that it redeems the whole project. He's chosen to populate this world of epicureans and epigones with the children of 1990s comics, and their children--all the novice replacements and gritty photocopies who got expunged from DC continuity in the past decade or so, when a new generation of embarrassed fans took over the company. These are the children nobody loves, and they make the perfect stand-ins for the children with nothing to do. They're all surplus to requirements, as out of work in our world as they are in their own. It's a brilliant choice, steeped in subtext and yet openly contemptuous of nostalgia, and yet the most brilliant thing about it is that it only uses those 90s comics as a vehicle to talk about something else, something far more contemporary and not about comics at all. It's not for nothing that The Just reminds me so much of Seaguy, another Morrison comic about directionless children discovering they don't live after the end of history after all. They're basically the same story, just told in different emotional registers.

If The Just has any other failings beyond its lack of closure, it's the fact that the story (like all of Multiversity thus far) is only concerned with the superheroes and their children. The book always threatens to relapse into the compulsive allusions that limited earlier chapters; taken on its own terms, though, it's a book about post-millennial depression that never looks beyond the ailments of the 1%. Seaguy avoids this same problem through its gleeful flight from realism; it's okay if everyone is a superhero in New Venice, or at least dresses like one, because we understand New Venice was always just a funhouse mirror for us anyway. The Just is too, but it's a mirror on one especially exclusive part of us--the part that lives off their dads' trust funds or trick arrows, the part that can be unemployed but never poor.

Still, it's the most ambitious book Morrison has done in a good long while, and the most truly contemporary one to boot. Unfortunately, I'm not at all certain that the last issue of Multiversity is going to give it a proper resolution, not while it's busy resolving six other storylines too. Which is a depressing realization to have about Morrison's best comic in five years.

Week 12: The Gold in Us

This was only the second time I've assigned a Grant Morrison comic; as with the first time, it was a relief when the book taught better than I could have hoped. And like that first time, the class discussion initially gravitated towards Frank Quitely's art.

But that's where the similarities ended. Quitely did strikingly different work in We3 and All-Star Superman, the former most notable for its overt experiments, the latter for its more subtle virtuosity. We began with a close reading of the first eleven pages of All-Star Superman, focusing on how Quitely modulates his layouts to match the action. Superman's mere presence quells the skewed panels that depict the crashing solar probe, a graphic demonstration of the sense of order and security that he provides throughout the book. Even the few showpiece pages in the prison sequence (which we also looked at in some detail) provide a narrative justification for the formal games; Quitely always fits his panel arrangements to the action rather than imposing an external structure like Miller or Gibbons.

The discussion of those parts more directly attributed to Morrison also started off well with a look at his "science fiction folk tales," the mythic retellings that served as a rebuke to the putative realism of recent decades. In a great unplanned correspondence, students were using the concepts we'd discussed in All-Star Superman that morning to make sense of "The Waste Land" in my American lit class that afternoon. They complemented one another better than I would have expected: they are, after all, two works that both trade on arcane references to old mythologies, both follow mythic plot structures, both construct themselves as pastiches of other texts. But for some reason, students have an easier time with the Superman comic...

The problems only set in after the class got caught up in tracing the references to other comics; some of the students felt, my assurances to the contrary, that they needed a Ph.D in Superman to understand the book. I'm not sure I agree, as the nods to Mon-El or DC One Million or "Superman's New Power!" generally provide surplus value for fans in the know, not essential keys to interpreting the work, but once the class got a sense of how far the references extended they began to feel left out. Even that led to a productive discussion, though, as we talked about the narrative posteriority and the superabundance of influences that made All-Star Superman one of the most postmodern texts we read.

We also discussed the retrograde gender politics that appear to have piggybacked in on the retro comics references. The class needed no prompting to point out that the women in All-Star Superman are uniformly passive, denied even the opportunities for heroism given to supporting actors like Jimmy Olsen or Steve Lombard. That part of the book serves as an object lesson in the dangers of recreating past eras and old genre conventions without any critical distance. It also served as a reminder that as the class has advanced towards the present, the gender roles have been holding steady or perhaps even backsliding a bit. The most progressive and varied representation of women--and I say this with some mixture of horror and newfound admiration--was probably in Claremont's X-Men.

We did a lot of looking back over the course of the semester, a task for which All-Star Superman is perfectly suited. The book provided one last chance to revisit Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes, which went over like a lead balloon at the beginning of the semester, but his chapter on Superman's alter ego proved endlessly useful since then. That was fortunate, since All-Star Superman was half the reason I included Feiffer in the first place--specifically the Luthor issue, which Joe McCulloch once described as a riposte to the Feiffer/Kill Bill interpretation of Superman.

(Let me pause here to comment, and not for the first time, that no series of comics posts is complete without a link to Jog--even if I have to reach back nearly eight years to do it.)

That was how I planned to put the two readings in dialogue, anyway. But looking back over the series, it's not at all clear that Morrison disagrees all that much with Feiffer. He takes every opportunity to undercut Luthor's cynical take, and the idea that Superman is looking down on all us mere mortals. Yet when our hero gazes into the Mirror of Truth in issue 2, slumped forward like Clark and wearing his glasses, the figure who gazes back is pure Superman, all heroic posture and no specs in sight. That's the core of Feiffer's idea, that Superman is the real person and Kent the disguise, and Morrison doesn't really challenge it. His twist (a common enough one, these days) is to suggest that Clark is an externalization of Superman's desire to be normal. He's not looking down at us; he's looking up.

It struck me as I was working up my lecture notes that most of this material hadn't found its way into the Morrison book. It's fascinating to see how my take on this series has already changed after just a few short years. That's partly because of the change in contexts, but it's also one of the marks of a great work--that ability to renew itself by supporting new interpretations with each reading. For the benefit of my own work as well as my students, I can think of few finer places to end the class.

Morrison in Glasgow

Last month, I had the pleasure of attending the International Comics and Graphic Novel and International Bande Dessinée Society Joint Conference on “Scotland and the Birth of Comics,” held at the University of Glasgow. The university's Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery is preparing to mount an exhibition on the Glasgow Looking Glass and the history of Scottish comics, but I was drawn to the conference for different reasons: not only had I wanted to visit Glasgow ever since I wrote the Grant Morrison book, but Morrison himself delivered the opening keynote lecture.

Morrison spoke in the university’s Humanities Lecture Theatre, where the Gothic Revival architecture and the chapel-like atmosphere moved him to observe that he felt like he ought to be teaching the audience how to use a magic wand.

His talk, though titled “Scottish Comics,” was less about the history of comics in Scotland—that fell to other lecturers and panelists—and more about the elements of Scottish culture that he felt contributed to the creation of comics. “In Scotland, we’re pretty weird,” he said, arguing that Scotland has a long but generally overlooked tradition of fantastic literature including “Tam O’Shanter,” Robert Louis Stevenson, James Hogg, Irvine Welsh, and Iain Banks.

Morrison also noted the close ties between Glasgow and America that helped Scottish comics creators reach American audiences. He called Glasgow “a lost state of America” and described its city center as “New York on a tiny scale.” (Later in the week, other conference attendees would mention the many films in which Glasgow doubles for America, including World War Z.) In Morrison’s telling, many Glaswegians want on some level to be American; he said that as a child, he thought he could grow up to be a cowboy without leaving his neighborhood of Govan.

He also outlined Glasgow's strong ties to America, first through the tobacco and slave trades that built the city’s fortunes and later through the US nuclear submarine bases at nearby Faslane and Holy Loch. (His father, Walter Morrison, protested these bases as part of his anti-nuclear activism.) The US Navy brought American popular culture into Scotland; Morrison suggested the Yankee Book Store in Paisley might have been the first shop in the UK to sell American comics. Echoing a point he made in Supergods, Morrison said the submarine bases brought a nuclear target with them, but also Superman, who could survive the atomic bomb.

Morrison also delivered some pointed comments on contemporary American culture when he said “the American empire in its crumbling state has begun to feel a lot like here,” meaning that a British sensibility honed by a century of post-imperial adjustments speaks to the more recent American sense of decline. He cited American culture’s current focus on zombies and the apocalypse, arguing that the British empire also imagined its own decay at the end of the Victorian era. (This recalled a point he made in The Invisibles back in 1998.) He suggested the British view of American icons is actually less cynical than current American one, with specific reference to Man of Steel and its Superman who is powerless to save Metropolis. He wished for the return of the more confident, optimistic Superman who can overcome any obstacles.

While Morrison didn't focus specifically on his own career, he touched at various points on his work in Scottish comics publishing, including his stint writing science fiction stories for DC Thomson. (All of his scripts for Starblazer came back with the note, “More space combat.”) He published his earliest work in Near Myths, the Edinburgh-based “ground level” comic that also serialized the first installments of Bryan Talbot’s The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, a comic that Morrison credited as “one of the primary sources of what comics became in the 1980s.”

After the talk I had the distinct honor of serving as the respondent, which in practice amounted to starting the question and answer session with a query about Scotland and Scottish identity, two subjects that rarely appear in undisguised form in Morrison’s own work. Morrison noted that, in addition to the countertradition of fantasy he delineated, Scotland also has a much more widely recognized tradition of social realism, pragmatism, hard work, and Scottish Protestantism—but it discourages creativity, art, escape, all the things Morrison values and pursues in his work.

I also tried to tease out his thoughts on the ownership and adaptation of his work for the large comics corporations, particularly DC Comics. Although Man of Steel briefly quotes his work in All Star Superman, Morrison disclaimed any expectation of payment for his small contribution to the film. He also mentioned that following Paul Levitz’s retirement as president and publisher, such royalties had become much more scarce.

Later, in response to another question, Morrison argued that shared-universe, corporate-owned superhero stories ought to be generational, circular, and repetitive—since they cannot be brought to an end, writers might as well play up the mythic angle and retell stories for each new generation of readers.

One young guest wanted to know what Morrison's favorite comics from his own catalogue were. (His answers: The Filth, Doom Patrol, and Superman Beyond 3D.)

After the talk was over, Morrison graciously lingered outside the lecture hall and showed audience members binders full of unlettered pages from his forthcoming Wonder Woman graphic novel with Yanick Paquette, as well as two of his “Multiversity” projects, “Pax Americana” with Frank Quitely (all but nine pages done, reportedly) and a complete set of “Thunderworld” pages by Cameron Stewart. I'm happy to report that Quitely's work was up to his usual jaw-dropping standard, but Stewart's sprightly pages might be even more stunning. I think it's safe to say that when these books finally come out, Morrison's most recent phase will be a thing of the past.