(This is a preview from my new book Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics. It has been reformatted slightly for the web. Part one of the preview is available here; the full table of contents is here.)
JLA proves highly critical of nostalgia even though it superficially bears all the trappings of the retro-Silver Age style. Morrison restores the Justice League’s original membership and briefly uses the compartmentalized plot structures established by their first writer, Gardner Fox: in the second issue the team splits into smaller groups to investigate mysterious developments in three remote locales, a Fox staple (Jones and Jacobs 42). The JLA confronts many of the original Justice League’s villains—Starro the Conqueror, the White Martians, Professor Ivo and T.O. Morrow, the Demons Three, the Key, the Injustice Gang, Vandal Savage, the Shaggy Man, the Queen Bee, the Crime Syndicate—and Morrison even resurrects devices as minor as the scientific “Flash Facts” that once peppered John Broome’s Flash comics. The series advertises Morrison’s familiarity with and affection for DC’s Silver Age, but it never mistakes that affection for nostalgia; in JLA, only the antagonists pine for an idealized past. The leader of the Hyperclan reminisces about the days when Martians ruled the Earth, saying “Life was good then. Life will be better” (1.18) as he excavates a buried Martian city. When Morrison reveals that the Hyperclan experimented with terrestrial life, sabotaged humanity’s evolutionary future, and view mankind as their property (4.12), he exposes their nostalgia as an adjunct to their ideology of despotism and racial supremacy, nothing more than a desire to regain the power they once abused.
The next story is even more explicit in its problematization of nostalgia. T.O. Morrow and Professor Ivo, two vintage mad scientists, create a sentient android programmed to infiltrate and destroy the JLA. After their plan fails, as they await their inevitable recapture, Ivo pours the last of the Dom Perignon and proposes “the one toast that never goes out of style… to the good old days!” (5.21). The toast is hardly the first sign of their yearning for the past: Ivo and Morrow have deliberately restaged a classic superhero storyline of betrayal and rebellion, one that Morrow himself first enacted with the android Red Tornado in Justice League of America 64-65 (1968).[1] Morrow takes considerable pride in re-enacting that story, creating another android who can develop a conscience, defy her instructions, and thwart his plans simply so he can boast of his superior programming skills (5.18, 5.20). He does not care that he has created a sentient being only to watch her destroy herself; the nostalgia of JLA’s antagonists is callous and self-centered when it is not downright reactionary. It is also self-defeating, as Morrow’s fidelity to his past achievements trumps his desire to destroy the JLA.
While excessive nostalgia is either reactionary or fatalistic, the wholesale rejection of the past is no better; one hero’s struggle to shed the burdens of tradition causes him to lose his ethical moorings and drives him to treachery. DC One Million (1998), a multi-series crossover conceived and authored by Morrison and centered on the JLA, introduces a new cast of superheroes from the 853rd century who have modeled themselves on the protectors of the late twentieth century. Because publishing imperatives required that these new characters be recognizable to contemporary readers—many of the future heroes took over the starring roles in their predecessors’ books for one month—the heroes of the future assume a depressing familiarity. The DC universe of 85,271 looks uncomfortably like the DC universe of 1998, as even the most transient properties like Chase and Young Heroes in Love have apparently survived eighty-three thousand years into the future despite their cancellation immediately after the end of the crossover. With the future offering nothing more than the replication of the distant past, it is no surprise that one hero should rebel against this monotony. The Starman of the 853rd century betrays his teammates, his ancestors, and his entire society as a means of escaping his hereditary role in a stifling family tradition of heroism that stretches back to the 1940s; in a tie-in issue of Starman written by James Robinson, he briefly contemplates killing his ancestor Ted Knight, the first Starman, as punishment for founding his lineage.
The future Starman also rebels against his role as chief computer technician for a society that “organizes itself around the processing of information” (DCOM 1.8), trading in ideas rather than goods. Contrary to its initial, utopian presentation, the 853rd century circulates and recirculates concepts with such frictionless ease that ideas themselves have become devalued. Starman confesses, “In the System, nothing meant anything because everything was possible. I sold my soul to Solaris because I couldn’t think of anything better to do” (DCOM 3.18). Klock attributes this disloyalty to the century’s freedom from artistic influence and tradition (133-34), but Starman’s other statements and actions indicate that he is motivated by the excessive burdens of eighty-three thousand years of influence and the impossibility of living wholly free of tradition. He repents his defection and is moved to perform an authentically heroic act of self-sacrifice after he meets Ted Knight: “In the end, what made me turn was remembering that light in Old Man Knight’s eyes. The costume. The heritage. Like it was all still new and meaningful” (DCOM 3.18). The burdens of inheritance and the devaluation of recycled ideas drive the future Starman to treason, yet his reconciliation with his family tradition—just one generation past its inception, when it was still novel—redeems him. Morrison furnishes no better example to support Klock’s argument that the JLA regularly confronts “Text, overdetermination, and the limits of handling information overload” (132); like so many other characters in JLA, the future Starman struggles to find meaning in a narrative tradition menaced by the sheer weight of its own accumulated history.
Other characters try to manage the contradictory benefits and burdens of tradition by striking a balance between novelty and nostalgia, viewing the past with ironic self-consciousness. The Key, a longtime foe who has realized the Justice League will always defeat him, constructs a plot that depends on their ability to escape one of his traps (JLA 8-9); aware of his own history, an astute reader of his past failures, he tries to avoid repeating the past instead of recreating it in loving detail as Morrow does. Klock observes that this plot, which locks the JLA in a series of false narrative continuities vaguely modeled on past phases of their publishing history, also banks on the JLA’s ability to recognize they are trapped in fictions—that is, to become at least partially aware of their own fictional status (131-32). In that same story, the new Green Arrow, stripped of his own weapons, is forced to use his father’s fanciful trick arrows, ridiculous Golden and Silver Age contrivances like the boomerang arrow and the boxing glove arrow, weapons that did not suit the revisionist era’s preference for realistic violence. Initially unable to fire these atavistic oddities with any accuracy, Green Arrow learns to master them and stops the Key by accepting the more ludicrous parts of his father’s legacy. He does not fully revert to that tradition, however, nor does he completely shed his embarrassment at his father’s designs, and the next story finds him using regular arrows once again. The Key storyline suggests that traditions are important, but best handled with a distancing self-consciousness that can acknowledge the past without reconstructing it uncritically.
Perhaps the most direct expression of Morrison’s ambivalent relationship with nostalgia and tradition comes in his first issue when, in order to make way for his restoration of the original membership, he must first wipe the slate clean by hospitalizing the previous Justice League and destroying their satellite headquarters. The most prominent detail mentioned in Morrison’s narration, a synecdoche for the loss of the satellite and a metonymy for the abolition of the Justice League it housed, is the explosion of the trophy room and the expulsion of its mementos into the void: “Fantastic debris spills into the darkness; spirit jars, a giant hourglass, deadly playing cards, all the trophies of countless, forgotten adventures, emptied into a well of endless ink” (1.17). Significantly, these trophies commemorate the adventures of the original Justice League of America, such as the giant hourglasses that confined several members on the cover of Justice League of America 26 (1964)—adventures that the narration specifies were already “forgotten” even before the explosion scattered them into space. Their fate serves as a wry commentary on the DC Comics of the mid-nineties, which (prior to Morrison’s JLA) sought to ignore, rewrite, or erase the company’s Silver Age traditions in the interests of modernizing their characters and competing with Marvel and Image.[2] Viewed in this context, Morrison’s metaphor for the depths of space is equally telling: the trophies vanish into a “well of endless ink,” their memories figuratively diluted or blotted out by the same medium (typically India ink) that delineates every shape on the comics page. The comics of the eighties and nineties have already annihilated the Justice League’s history; Morrison simply makes the destruction official so he can begin again. His narration expresses a palpable regret at the loss of these stories, yet his plotting positions such losses as a necessary prelude to his own resuscitation of the Justice League and his reintroduction—with an ironic, self-conscious twist—of venerable Silver Age characters and conventions.
Despite its emphasis on action and spectacle, JLA is more complex than it first seems, a widescreen comic that rejects the exuberantly authoritarian ideology of later widescreen comics and a retro comic that opens with the destruction of its own past. Highly skeptical of the ideological implications of both of these movements, JLA attempts to rejuvenate the superhero genre through self-conscious attention to its traditions, updating some and ignoring or altering others to suit Morrison’s politics as well as his aesthetics. Contrary to his revisionist predecessors, his retro peers, and his widescreen successors, Morrison attempts to write a politically progressive superhero comic by prescribing a limited role for superheroes and holding humanity responsible for its own fate. Though its narrative scope and its focus on iconic characters were much imitated, Morrison’s JLA is not much like its successors—not even Morrison’s next projects.
[1] Just one month after this story ended, Marvel Comics published a similar storyline in The Avengers 57-58 (1968), cementing it as a standard plotline for superhero teams.
[2] As just one example, of the seven original members of the Justice League of America, two (Green Lantern and the Flash) had been killed and replaced, one (Aquaman) had a hand amputated, and three others (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) had their memberships retroactively erased from continuity.
Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics is out this week from the University Press of Mississippi.
(This is a preview from my new book Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics. It has been reformatted slightly for the web. Part two of the preview is available here; the full table of contents is here.)
JLA (1996-2000) transformed Morrison from a Vertigo writer with a cult following into one of the most successful creators in superhero comics. At the time the series was Morrison’s highest-profile work in American comics, giving him access to DC Comics’ most popular characters and, through them, to a new audience of superhero readers. JLA reunited Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, the Flash, Aquaman, and the Martian Manhunter, the original line-up of the Justice League of America, but its focus was not purely retrospective; with Morrison’s inventive storylines and Howard Porter’s kinetic, hyperactive art, well-suited to readers raised on Marvel and Image comics, the series was poised to appeal to new and old readers alike. Despite its cast of tightly controlled corporate properties and its position at the center of the shared DC Comics continuity, JLA attempts to revitalize the superhero genre by aligning it with egalitarian rather than authoritarian politics and pursuing novelty over nostalgia. The end result was a comic that thrived in a direct market dominated by superhero titles even as it challenged the superhero genre to outgrow its past practices.
Although they occupied very different positions in the comics market, JLA bears many similarities to The Invisibles. The two series were written contemporaneously, ending within a month of each other in March and April of 2000. Each series represents, albeit from slightly different angles, Morrison’s efforts at remaking popular genres. Much as The Invisibles preserves the core semantics of the superhero genre beneath its spy, science fiction, and conspiracy elements, JLA adapts superhero conventions to dramatize concepts far outside the genre’s usual concerns. The series filters The Invisibles’ ideas about linguistic determinism through the archetypes of fantasy and science fiction, including a pair of primitive demons who reshape reality by manipulating symbolic icons (JLA 7), angels who view the world as a holy text they can rewrite at will (JLA 6), and an android who struggles to achieve free will even though her programmers have omitted the word “freedom” from her vocabulary (JLA 5). Both series draw on a common mythology: the JLA battles two different evil stars or “anti-suns,” paralleling the eclipsed sun that presides over the finale of “The Invisible Kingdom” and tying into a larger Morrison cosmology that extends back to the sinister Black Sun in Zenith. The Flash describes his “speed field” as a world of “Silver, morphing hyper-dimensional gels” (3.6), recalling the magic mirror, and Green Lantern compares an odyssey across space and time to an alien abduction (12.2), echoing Morrison’s Kathmandu experience.
Jason Tondro has shown how JLA’s “Rock of Ages” storyline and volume three of The Invisibles both restage Arthurian legends of the quest for the Holy Grail. These stories also build up to apocalyptic events that transpire on December 22, 2012, although The Invisibles imagines that eschaton as a mass elevation of consciousness whereas JLA depicts a more literal Ragnarok provoked by the tyrant god Darkseid.[1] The JLA and Darkseid battle for possession of the Worlogog, a mystical artifact that reflects all of space and time in a holographic scale model, and it is JLA, not The Invisibles, that features Morrison’s most concise description of holographic structure when Superman explains that “Each fragment of a hologram contains all the information of the whole but on a smaller scale” (10.11). The more accessible and commercially successful JLA not only raises many of the same ideas as The Invisibles, it provides a useful gloss on its difficult contemporary and on Morrison’s work in general.
The series would establish a more contentious relationship with other superhero comics, including its peers and successors in the retro and widescreen movements. JLA advertises its break from its contemporaries in the first storyline, which takes aim at the increasingly common plot of superheroes abandoning their reactive posture and taking proactive steps to change the world, even to the point of becoming dictators and using their unmatched power to rule humanity. Peter Coogan observes that this is a characteristic plot of the revisionist era (216) and cites several examples: Moore’s Miracleman and Watchmen, Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, and Mark Gruenwald and Bob Hall’s Squadron Supreme (1985-86). This plot also surfaces in the nostalgic Kingdom Come before it becomes one of the signal features of The Authority. As superhero comics have become more aware of the ideological implications of their “might makes right” philosophy, they have shown increasing attention to these fascistic tendencies, whether to criticize them or arguably, in the case of the later widescreen comics, to indulge in them.
Aaron Taylor sees these tendencies in Morrison’s JLA as well; noting that the trade paperback collecting the first storyline is titled JLA: New World Order, he states “the title of the comic takes on an ominous tone” and asks “Will [the JLA’s] ‘New World Order’ emulate the supremacist and interventionist policies of certain government administrations?” (347). The title may offer ample opportunity for such readings but it provides scant evidence to support them, as it was devised specifically for the trade paperback and does not appear anywhere in the storyline’s original, periodical publication. New World Order is not wholly inappropriate to the stories it collects, however, as Morrison’s introductory arc does center on a group of super-beings who propose to reshape the planet with their interventionist policies and who eventually attempt an outright takeover of the world—but these are the antagonists, not the heroes.
The Hyperclan are an advance guard for a Martian invasion force who mask their true mission by posing as superheroes and promising to save the world, whether by greening the Sahara desert or executing supervillains on live television. They serve as philosophical foils for the JLA, demonstrating the dangers of authoritarian superheroics, and the storyline ends with Morrison’s unambiguous declaration that the supremacist and interventionist policies of the Hyperclan are neither morally defensible nor terribly effective. Most of the aliens’ actions are aimed at dominating the human race, either by manipulation or conquest; their one act of charity turns out to be superficial and transient as the fertilized Sahara reverts to desert by the final issue. The heroes of the JLA seize this failure as an opportunity to disavow the Hyperclan’s agenda of proactive intervention in human affairs and to define their own mission by contrast:
Superman: The Hyperclan’s garden of Eden, crumbling to dust. They said they would fix the world. It doesn’t work that way.
Wonder Woman: Then where does that leave us? Are we doing too much or too little? When does intervention become domination?
Superman: I can only tell you what I believe, Diana: humankind has to be allowed to climb to its own destiny. We can’t carry them there. (4.19)
Superman takes the Peter St. John position that humanity must be allowed to develop on its own, free from superhuman interference—superheroes are only there “To catch them if they fall” (4.19). The Hyperclan, on the other hand, are as deceptive and domineering as the Horus program. Like Zenith before it, JLA redefines the superhero genre’s maintenance of the societal status quo as a protection of self-determination and a refusal to interfere with and subjugate weaker peoples; Morrison turns the genre’s potential conservatism into a progressive repudiation of the use of force to impose political agendas. His comics place the responsibility for social change on the average citizen, not the superhero.
The finale of the first storyline puts this philosophy into action when the JLA, unable to stop the Martian invasion, can only encourage humanity to save itself. The JLA alerts the world that the Martians are vulnerable to fire and the people of Earth act on this information to subdue the invading force on their own. While Morrison and Porter convey this collective action through the risible shorthand of a crowd igniting matches and cigarette lighters—a scene more suggestive of the encore at a rock concert than a desperate insurgency (4.16)—they nevertheless show humanity taking charge of its own fate, with the superheroes simply acting as guides and guardians. Morrison repeats this plot device again at the end of his tenure on the series, when the JLA turns the entire population of Earth into superhumans to resist destruction by Mageddon, the aforementioned “primordial annihilator” (36.5). The newly empowered human race takes to the skies to rescue Superman and repel Mageddon, briefly reversing the usual formula and showing once again that humanity can assume responsibility for itself (JLA 41).
Morrison’s JLA considers the very questions Taylor and other critics of the superhero genre raise, rewriting genre conventions to reconcile them with Morrison’s progressive politics. Interventionist superheroes such as the Hyperclan and the Ultramarines (JLA 24-26 and JLA Classified 1-3) are invariably antagonists, and opportunities to criticize the proactive, tyrannical heroes who would dominate later widescreen comics such as The Authority.[2] The one time the JLA attempts to enact a large-scale social change—in the graphic novel JLA: Earth 2 (2000), where they try to liberate an alternate Earth run by criminals—they discover they can no longer distinguish between their humanitarian intervention and the imposition of a new, unwelcome political system (57), and their mission ends in failure. While Geoff Klock claims that this refusal to exercise their power makes the JLA “conservative” in contrast to the “radical” Authority (137), his comments confuse the maintenance of genre conventions with political conservatism—and overlook the many ways Morrison’s JLA also insists the superhero genre has to move beyond its past and its traditions.
Tomorrow: T.O. Morrow and the good old days.
[1] Ironically, Darkseid promises his captive subjects “Freedom from self” (14.2), an offer not so far removed from the Invisibles’ promotion of the MeMePlex a few years later. Darkseid is simply exploiting people’s fear and uncertainty to make their subjugation appear more palatable; his “Anti-Life Equation” annihilates their personalities and places them under his control rather than liberating them into a plenitude of selves. Nevertheless, in a perverse demonstration of Morrison’s ongoing union of opposites—and a sign of just how much his and his characters’ philosophies would change over the course of The Invisibles—the ultimate freedom fighters share a goal, or at least a slogan, with the god of fascism.
[2] In JLA Classified 1-3 (2004-05), Morrison models the Ultramarines on Mark Millar’s Ultimates (Brady, “Grant Morrison’s Big-Time Return”) and uses their failures to castigate the both the authoritarian superheroes of the widescreen movement and George W. Bush’s policy of preemptive war.
My new book, Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics, comes out this week. I'll be running a short excerpt over the next couple of days, but to kick things off I thought I'd preview the table of contents and the section headings.
Introduction: A Union of Opposites
Working methods
Magic words, magic pictures
Worlds within worlds
Alternating currents
Chapter 1: Ground Level
Zenith: Reign of the superbrats
Dare: The contradictions of protest
The New Adventures of Hitler and St. Swithin’s Day: Angry young men
Zenith Phase IV: The Horus paradox
Chapter 2: The World’s Strangest Heroes
Animal Man: Beyond metafiction
Arkham Asylum: Why so serious?
Doom Patrol: Missing faces and replacement heads
Embodied authorities, imaginary terrors
The hilarity of influence
Chapter 3: The Invisible Kingdom
Sebastian O and The Mystery Play: Dandies, messiahs, assassins
The Invisibles: Permanent revolution
Holographic timespace
The decentered text
Secret identities
Kill overload
The language of the angels
Romantic utopias
Resistance is useless
Chapter 4: Widescreen
Flex Mentallo: When worlds collide
JLA: Fanfare for the common man
Marvel Boy and Fantastic Four 1234: Marvel nights
New X-Men: Survival of the fittest
Mutation and difference
The terror of the ideal
Shadowplay
Chapter 5: Free Agents
The Filth: Status: Q
Enjoy your micro-sepsis
In the world of Greg Feely
Seaguy: Beyond the end of the world
Vimanarama: Bollywood Kirby
We3: The vocabularies of control
Chapter 6: A Time of Harvest
Cryptic connections
Dirty realism
Eternal superteens
Civilizations in decline
Absolute meaning
Chapter 7: Work for Hire
All Star Superman: History under glass
Secular mythologies
Ending the never-ending battle
Batman: The many lives of the Batman
Final Crisis: Contaminating self-consciousness
Afterword: Morrison, Incorporated
Tomorrow: New world order, same old heroes.
Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics will be published this December by the University Press of Mississippi.
From the catalog:
One of the most eclectic and distinctive writers currently working in comics, Grant Morrison (b. 1960) brings the auteurist sensibility of alternative comics and graphic novels to the popular genres--superhero, science fiction, and fantasy--that dominate the American and British comics industries. His comics range from bestsellers featuring the most universally recognized superhero franchises (All-Star Superman, New X-Men, Batman) to more independent, creator-owned work (The Invisibles, The Filth, We3) that defies any generic classification.
In Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics, author Marc Singer examines how Morrison uses this fusion of styles to intervene in the major political, aesthetic, and intellectual challenges of our time. His comics blur the boundaries between fantasy and realism, mixing autobiographical representation and cultural critique with heroic adventure. They offer self-reflexive appraisals of their own genres while they experiment with the formal elements of comics. Perhaps most ambitiously, they challenge contemporary theories of language and meaning, seeking to develop new modes of expression grounded in comics' capacity for visual narrative and the fantasy genres' ability to make figurative meanings literal.
More to come in the months ahead...
Or, "The Life Trap."
Spoilers for Final Crisis #7, by Grant Morrison and Doug Mahnke
Grant Morrison loves endings. He's so careful to give each hero his or her bit of business--to make everybody part of the grand finale--that his more sprawling stories pile climax upon climax until they threaten to collapse under their own weight. "World War III," the conclusion of his run on JLA and a precursor to Final Crisis, just barely manages to keep its endings in balance, juggling last-second arrivals and heroic sacrifices and superhuman cavalries, dancing on the edge of complete incoherence so every reader's favorite character can get their due.
In one comic book with a finite set of characters, Morrison managed to pull it off. Against the canvas of a multiverse of worlds that contain effectively infinite reflections of every single DC character, Morrison has too many options, too many stars, and far, far too many endings.
Plenty of the criticisms leveled at Final Crisis have little to nothing to do with the comic itself: snarled schedules, bungled lead-ins, missed opportunities, the ravages of event fatigue. All legitimate concerns (particularly for retailers), but all more or less irrelevant to the quality of the work itself. The problems of Countdown and Death of the New Gods and Batman RIP may be important to understanding Final Crisis the marketing event but they have nothing to do with Final Crisis the story, and thank goodness, because the story has enough problems on its own. Just look at the endings jammed into the final issue:
The Flashes destroy Darkseid with his own Omega beams (an ending that, as Jog says, gets interrupted by a panel of Aquaman wrapping up a plot that hasn't previously appeared anywhere in Final Crisis). This is Darkseid's first defeat this issue (second overall, counting Batman's bullet last issue). Black Canary has rescued Green Arrow from the Justifiers--off-panel between issues--while the Ray forms the protective Metron sigil over the entire planet. Neat idea, one with no apparent effect on the rest of the plot. Nor does Morrison indicate how or even if Canary and Ollie and the other evacuees survive the satellite that's burning up on reentry--the satellite turns up as good as new later in the issue, but the evacuees are nowhere to be seen. Checkmate's Black Gambit fails and shunts a bunch of people off to Kamandi's future (now one of DC's multiple Earths). This apparently splits up the Super Young Team, who, after getting a nice build-up in the early issues, never do much of anything. But at least they appear on-panel! Mister Miracle, after getting a huge build-up in the early issues that built on his huge build-up in Seven Soldiers, once again manages to accomplish absolutely nothing that matters to the main plot. He doesn't even show up in this issue, with the Question merely mentioning him once. Well, technically, mentioning his Motherboxxx once. Hawkman and Hawkgirl destroy the malfunctioning Lord Eye, sacrificing themselves and bringing to a noble end a subplot that began in two panels last issue. Overman is reunited with his apparently dead cousin, concluding a subplot from one of the tie-ins that received little attention in the main series. Luthor completes his face turn by siding with Superman--except the actual moment of his turn is once again occluded by a cutaway, this time to Frankenstein. That "meeting" with Wonder Woman is a cute joke, but it blots out the culmination of a subplot that had been simmering since the first issue. Wonder Woman breaks her possession by Bernadeth--no indication how, we just see her crushing that tusked mask--and chains the disembodied Darkseid, presumably, but not explicitly, purging him from all the possessed humans. This is Darkseid's second defeat this issue, third overall. Darkseid continues to expand anyway, possessing/becoming everyone and everything in the universe (multiverse?) except for one final watchtower. Doesn't look like Wonder Woman chained him all that well. William Moulton Marston would be disappointed! The disembodied/universal Darkseid penetrates the Watchtower and Superman destroys him in two panels through the power of super-singing. This is Darkseid's third defeat this issue, fourth overall. Then Mandrakk appears for the first time in Final Crisis proper to wrap up a plotline that should have already been wrapped up in Superman Beyond 3D. Superman activates the Miracle Machine and uses it to summon Captain Marvel, who was already on his way anyway with an army of alternate-universe Supermen. The Supermen destroy Mandrakk's servant Ultraman while singing a line from Hair. Monitor Nix Uotan shows up and turns a couple of animals into Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, and the Pax Dei show up, and Uotan summons the new Forever People, who are probably the Super Young Team, which I guess makes Uotan the new Infinite Man, except it doesn't really matter because they all just stand around and watch while the Supermen of Many Worlds burn Mandrakk and the Green Lanterns drive a spike through him. Nix Uotan tells Ultraman's burning corpse that "No one %$%$ with the judge of all evil," which would be scary as shit if the judge of all evil had actually done anything. The superheroes unfreeze the entire human race, which they just froze a couple of pages earlier, because Earth is all better now and apparently balloon sales are way up. The superheroes and Green Lanterns tow the multiple Earths back into position. This requires all the risk and effort of cleaning up after a disastrous party, and conveys about as much excitement. Apokolips is reborn as New Genesis and the dead New Gods of New Genesis reappear looking exactly as they did before they died, meaning that not a damn thing has changed. The Monitors are all absorbed into the Overvoid (or supercontext? Morrison's list of self-quotations grows to include the finale of The Invisibles) and Nix Uotan wakes up in the same mortal body he woke up in back in issue #1. See item 12. We see what happened to Anthro, and what happened to the rocket the Watchtower launched, and what happened to Batman. This one is rather elegant and, even at a mere two pages, not at all rushed, unlike most of the endings above, which are checked off like so many items on a shopping list.
Those final two pages excepted, every one of the endings is unsatisfying on some level, whether it's Barry Allen's unnecessary return (what does he do that Wally West couldn't do on his own?) or Morrison's decision to build the final issue around a set of characters who have been mostly if not entirely absent from the series thus far. Every element is either incomplete or superfluous; a few manage to be both.
A tabulation of everything that goes wrong in this issue would be as disjoint and frustrating as Final Crisis itself, but one example might crystallize many of its problems. Wedged into three panels, the arrival of the angels of the Pax Dei at the final battle--their first and only appearance in the whole crossover--seems, like so many of the series' narrative convolutions, curiously unmotivated. Doing nothing more than floating around and watching other heroes triumph, the angels of God manage to be slightly less significant than the Zoo Crew. Those wacky animals are also nothing more than witnesses, but I suppose they make some sort of metatextual point about a kinder, gentler DC accepting the odder corners of its rich, weird history--a point that superhero comics have only been making for the past twelve or thirteen years, Morrison's superhero comics for the last twenty.
On second thought, maybe this is a point in the Pax Dei's favor. They have the good grace to symbolize nothing, I hope, being a repeat of only a single story Morrison told back in 2000--"World War III" in fact, where their climactic appearance actually had causes and consequences. Final Crisis is too busy to supply either one.
One of the more common defenses or praises of Morrison's style--one I've made myself many times in reference to other comics--is that he provides readers with just enough information that we can fill in the blanks ourselves, implying more stories than he could ever fit on the page. That implication is in evidence here, too. Final Crisis #7 opens with a genius move, cutting away from last issue's cliffhangers to a brief interlude in an alternate universe where most if not all of DC's prominent heroes are black and Superman just happens to be the President of the United States. It's a great scene, one that captures the current mood of optimism and renewed hope in the face of great adversity. It also implies a longstanding (if previously nonexistent) publication history for these characters, through the simple detail of a reversed color scheme.
President Superman's chest emblem is the same yellow-on-red pattern that Morrison gave to Sunshine Superman, the Afro-sporting hero of a retro-sixties parallel Earth whose first and only prior appearance was back in Animal Man #23. For most of the issue I thought this was supposed to be Sunshine Superman, until the original pops up in the cavalry of Supermen. But that doesn't matter, because in those couple of pages Morrison gives us everything we need to imagine President Superman's fictional history (a quick reference to Vathlo Island, Bronze Age home of all the black Kryptonians) and his publication history. This really could be the Sunshine Superman, shorn of his theatrical Boomer politics of personal affect, given a Hart Schaffner Marx suit and a pragmatic competence that could propel him into the White House.
You see what I'm doing here, right?--and let's drop any pretense that I'm not the one doing it--turning the purely hypothetical transformation of Sunshine Superman into President Superman into a repudiation of the Baby Boomer politics of cultural confrontation and the Boomer politicians who played them to such personal gain and national or international ruin. The generational shift maps perfectly onto the two versions of Sunshine Superman but its presence in this comic is my invention, folks. It's not in Final Crisis at all. Yet every detail that enables this invention, sparks this act of fan fiction, is right there on the page, right down to President Superman's polite, confident assurance that he actually does know what gravitons are and his interest in diplomacy. The contrast with his political predecessor couldn't be clearer; the contrast with his previous self is equally telling. The scene shows Morrison at his best, scattering a handful of perfectly-chosen details that can imply a whole world, a whole history, a whole politics, a whole story.
And as soon as President Superman is dragged into the morass of Final Crisis, it disappears. The overabundant endings that trip on each other's lines and jostle each other out of frame, the abandonment of old characters and sudden introduction of new villains and new premises in the final issue of a seven-part series--this isn't implying stories, it's summarizing them.
When it comes to writing these longstanding, corporate-owned, functionally immortal characters, what happens at the end isn't nearly as important as how we get there. The endings are more or less predetermined: Superman wins. Batman wins. The good guys always win. All that matters is how we reach that predetermined end, how we are surprised and scared and delighted along the way, and that's exactly what Morrison's summative supercompressions have begun to exclude. That beautiful first page is a starting point, one that can imply two twinned histories but can also set up a whole world of characters and launch them out into new stories. The cascading anticlimaxes of the rest of the issue are nothing more than a series of brutally abbreviated endpoints, bypassing the pleasure of arrival, cutting out the last places for invention and emotional investment.
And for reader participation, too--for meaningful participation that asks us to think about theme and ethics and setting and future stories instead of asking us to imagine Black Canary and Green Arrow off that burning space station, imagine roles for Barry Allen and the Super Young Team and the Pax Dei and Captain Carrot and His Fucking Zoo Crew that actually amount to something, imagine a pair of stories in which Darkseid's corruption and Mandrakk's hunger were separated and allowed to grow to their own natural lengths and endings. Instead of being asked to clear the desk and clean the gutters, fill in the many loose ends and prune off all the superfluous ones. Instead of being asked to edit Morrison's story for him.
I know many Morrison fans will say--already are saying--this elliptical style is part of Morrison's technique, part of his charm. And they're right, to a point, although mounting any such defense of Final Crisis overlooks the difference between asking readers to ponder an idea or imagine a world or forge an emotional connection, and asking them to clean up a mess.
At the end of Final Crisis #6, Darkseid zaps Batman with the Omega Sanction--"the death that is life!"--apparently destroying him. But we know this will come undone: all that matters is how. The end of Final Crisis #7 reveals how with a beautiful economy, and even if it is a quote of Jack Kirby's Forever People it's still a relief. Because the suspicion, for me as I'm sure for many Morrison fans, was that Morrison was going to quote his own Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle instead and consign Batman to the Life Trap, dooming him to live an endless cycle of miserable reincarnations, a dharmic version of Hell.
Which he'd just escaped from, in a sense, in "Last Rites," a Batman tie-in that linked Final Crisis up to the inconclusive ending of Batman RIP. (After the narrative pile-up of Final Crisis, a little inconclusivity is looking a lot more appealing now.) Having just seen Batman snap out of not one but two versions of his life story in the last couple of months, I didn't think I could stand watching him bounce in and out of yet another set of repetitions. His torment would have too closely matched my own.
The last two pages of Final Crisis sidestep that trap rather neatly, but the damage had already been done. Final Crisis cribs liberally from Morrison's "Rock of Ages," "World War III," The Invisibles, Flex Mentallo, Seven Soldiers, Animal Man, and a couple others I'm probably forgetting. Morrison's use of Kirby's characters promised some element of interpretation and reinvigoration, even if those new designs never quite materialized and the Fifth World seems no different from the Fourth, but he simply repeats his own prior work. It's a cut-and-paste job that doesn't culminate his favorite themes so much as exhaust them.
It's no secret to anyone who's been reading this blog for a while that Grant Morrison is one of the last writers keeping me interested in monthly comics--and absolutely the last one keeping me interested in writing a comics blog. Three years ago (good lord), Jog offered a persuasive evaluation of why Morrison holds such broad appeal for comics bloggers (although I suspect that appeal is notably less broad at this particular moment). Blogging thrives on the periodic, the recurring, the ongoing, and Morrison has supplied a steady stream of material for as long as there has been a comics blogosphere. But more than that, Jog observed that Morrison straddled the cultures of the comic book and the graphic novel. I would go farther, a lot farther; sometimes it seems like Morrison is the last master of the monthly comic book in an age when all of his peers are padding it out for the trade paperback. Certainly it's not an overstatement to say that Morrison has mastered the pacing and structure of the monthly serial comic and the narrative bounties of the shared continuity. Now, after Final Crisis, I have to acknowledge my nagging fears that he's also become trapped by them.
At his best, Morrison writes comics that exploit the serial format while still reading as well or better in collected editions--less trade paperbacks than sprawling, multivolume graphic novels. This isn't some distant golden age I'm describing; Morrison hit the jackpot just last fall. Lately, though, with Batman and especially with Final Crisis he seems to have become more interested in the monthly superhero comic as a final narrative format, a neverending story whose installments are not even vaguely self-sufficient, individually or collectively, and the continuity-bound superhero crossover as something still less self-sufficient than that. Final Crisis is so determined to read as a network of interconnecting series that it not only resists collection, it resists any expectations of a whole and relatively self-contained narrative. It cannot tell a complete story in 225 pages without fracturing across a half-dozen tie-ins; it cannot even be so kind as to have Superman re-enter the story from the same spin-off he exited it for.
All this could be forgiven if the series added up to something more than a sheaf of character designs and continuity notes for a story that gets outlined rather than told. My favorite tie-in was probably the Final Crisis Sketchbook, a behind-the-scenes guide filled with Morrison's lightly comedic reinventions of the New Gods and pointlessly detailed, utterly perfect histories of Japanese superheroes. Most of these characters would barely appear in the crossover. Some never would. Only now is it clear: that sketchbook was Final Crisis in its purest form.
It's been over three months since I posted anything here. I meant to, honest, especially after the election. Christy and I worked hard for that one, canvassing in Virginia almost every weekend from Labor Day to Election Day. At the time it seemed like each trip supplied a new reason for confidence--like the first Saturday after the Republicans' smug, spiteful convention, when the line of Obama volunteers spilled out of the office and down the block--but I never got around to writing them up. I wish I had now, not for the blog but for my own personal record.
I realized a while ago that there was no point to blogging about politics on my schedule. If blogging is ideally a daily activity then political blogging is an hourly one, and I could never devote that kind of time to it--especially not last fall, when my time was better spent knocking on doors in Fairfax County. By the time I was done knocking the polls were closed, and anything I could have said about the election was said more powerfully by the crowds crying in Grant Park and dancing in front of the White House.
So politics was out; well, we'll always have comics. One of the nicer things about comics blogging is that you don't really have to do it every day; as long as Tom or Dirk links to your post, it doesn't matter how badly you've let your readership atrophy. But that can be a trap, too. Comics blogs offer a guaranteed (if tiny) audience and absolutely no standards other than the ones you and your chosen peers set for yourselves. Not exactly a recipe for great writing, which makes the great writing it has produced that much more remarkable. But once you fall out of the habit for a while it begins to look a bit too cozy, a bit too comfortable.
The problem is not the subject matter, even when a subject disappoints as deeply as Final Crisis does, severing that last tether to the weekly conversation. The problem is the medium itself. If blogging is daily it is also ephemeral, yet the ephemera cling to life with embarrassing persistence; even the best-kept archives reek with the overripe tang of long-forgotten controversies that never mattered in the first place. (Paul O'Brien thinks comics are boring! Micah Ian Wright lied to me! How could CrossGen fail?) Not long after I started this blog I made an effort, haltingly at first, to purge it of such ephemera, to write only pieces I thought I could be proud of later. I'm still proud of many of them, but the consequence was a blog that rarely updated and still took more effort than a blog should take.
Some folks are able to turn their blogs into part of their professional development or, better yet, make blogging a profession unto itself. More power to them. Writing this blog has been incredibly valuable, as a laboratory for developing ideas and as a motivation to push my style in directions it otherwise wouldn't have taken. But after a while it's time to apply all that work to formats and venues that aren't measured chiefly by their frequency. No matter how much time and energy I sank into it, blogging has always been a hobby for me. Time spent blogging is time not spent writing for some other format that demands better work and offers something more durable in return.
I doubt this will be the end of this site--there will always be some work of exceptional quality or exceptional frustration to tempt me back--but it will be the end of it as a blog. (This only makes official an ending that really started last spring, with the conclusion of the other serial narrative that kept me posting.) There will be updates as other projects come into print, some possibly as early as the end of the year. Some will take a lot longer; I've decided to bite the bullet and write that Morrison book that's been pushing itself into blog form for the last five years.
I'm looking forward to Seaguy 2; I'm looking forward even more to Grant's temporary break from comics and the newer, more self-contained, more original works that I hope will follow.
In the meantime? We'll always have the President.
All Star Superman vol. 2, by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and Jamie Grant
"As a matter of fact, I had the whole thing paced out to end pretty much exactly like this, Lex."
For someone who used to complain about his inability to end a story, Grant Morrison is awfully proud of this one. And rightly so; All Star Superman is unusually well-structured for Morrison's works, and exceptionally well-structured by any standard, so much so that having Superman brag about it doesn't seem too unseemly. Everything has been planned down to the last detail, even the previously unsuspected clue Superman mentions in the next word balloon, set up all the way back in issue #2. This is one of Morrison's most meticulously plotted works and one of his best endings (especially if Cole Odell is right). While the finale pulls all the pieces together, though, the entire series has been structured with equal care. Now that the whole design is apparent it's clear that the second half is especially important, a coherent work of its own expressing ideas that extend well beyond the modest concerns of most supehero comics.
The first half of All Star Superman is mostly a tour of Superman's cast of characters, showcasing Morrison's takes on Lois and Jimmy and Luthor and the Smallville crowd. If the series had stayed at this pitch it would have been nothing more than an unusually well-crafted example of the "commercial strip-mining" approach, which Morrison once described as "creators playing it safe by cherry-picking and re-packaging all the best and most popular elements of an already successful feature."
Instead, the second half brings the focus back to the title character, assembles the stories into a unified narrative, and builds to a climax as thematically fraught as it is tightly plotted. Issue #7 marks the new beginning with several references to the first half of the series (opening with another dangerous Leo Quintum expedition, showing the missing technician from #4, releasing the baby sun-eater, and so on). A series that has already synthesized the best elements of every period in Superman's history is now including itself in the synthesis--as if the first half of the series were a separate work already fit for quotation and memorialization.
And a series that has already confronted Superman with several alternate versions of himself (the scoundrels Samson and Atlas, the Black-K induced evil Superman, the Supermen from the future) kicks into high gear. It's difficult to remember this in retrospect, but Morrison didn't really hammer home the alternate Supermen in his first couple of issues, and Luthor represents a different kind of reflection in the prison story. With the second half of All Star, however, every single issue features a copy--and sometimes, in the case of poor Zibarro, a copy of a copy as well. This is more than just Prismatic Age brand proliferation, though (or rather, it's one of the best "Prismatic" works because it achieves more than mere brand proliferation). Each of these distorted funhouse images, from the comedic-horrific inversions of Bizarro to the Kryptonian chauvinism of Bar-El to the nightmare scenario of a man with Superman's powers and Luthor's character, serves to burnish the original by comparison--even the best of them, Superman's Kandorian cousin Van-Zee, is too physically unimposing and ineffective to match the template. But a couple of them go much farther, speaking directly to the series' core themes of the power of ideas and hope for the future.
I wasn't a big fan of issue #9, the Kryptonian astronauts, when it was first released, seeing it as little more than a reworking of the Mon-El story. But reading it against the rest of the series, especially its immediate successor, reveals it as an important turning point. Bar-El and Lila accuse Superman of dragging his feet when it comes to freeing the citizens of Kandor, telling him he lacks drive and ambition. By issue's end Superman concedes the point, saying "Perhaps I could have done more"; the next issue he's rushing to settle his affairs, including the Kandorians. Similarly, Lila's comment that Superman "could have laid the foundation stones of tomorrow" leads into his gift to Leo Quintum and Lois Lane--the DNA sequences and superpower serums that will most likely generate his successors, as hinted on the series' final page. His bequest of the future answers Lila's challenge without duplicating her haughty Kryptonian cultural imperialism. The tenth issue is justly regarded as one of the series' highest points, but the ninth sets it into motion.
The grand finale in issues #11 and 12 opens with yet another set of call-backs, this time marking the end of the series and beginning the summation of its ideas. The first five pages of #11 contain visual or textual reminders of every prior issue; the next scene takes us inside one of Luthor's lairs, littered with costumes and weapons that indicate his own history is every bit as palimpsestic as Superman's. (Which, of course, it is. You can imagine these pages being outtakes from another comic--call it All Star Luthor--that just happened to intersect with this one.) These nods to comics tradition, and to All Star Superman's own prior nods to that tradition, aren't the important part, just structural markers that the end is here and the important stuff is about to begin.
The second half of the series highlights Superman's capacity to inspire people, even (especially) as a purely fictional character. It's the only power he has in our benighted world, and Morrison believes it's the most important one he's got. In fact, he says that if Superman did not exist, we would have to invent him (simply returning a favor, since Superman thoughtfully created us back in issue #10, March 2008; mark your calendars). That's why the finale pits him against an antagonist who disputes the very idea that fictions and abstractions can hold real power, as seen in this exchange from issue #12:
WHITE: The truth sent you to the chair, Luthor!
LUTHOR: Is that right, Mister White? Funny, I don't see the truth anywhere around, do you? I mean, what color is it? Can I touch it?
Luthor mocks White's dedication to abstract principle, confronting him with the truth's immateriality, because he's a materialist to the extreme. He says the priest at his execution "stinks of the irrational" and his niece proclaims "This is Science Year Zero!"--next I suppose they'll be rewriting the calendar. This scorn for idealism confirms Luthor's stature as the series archvillain, especially since a hallucinatory Jor-El (himself part of "the field of living, fluid consciousness") has just told his son he has given us humans "an ideal to aspire to, embodied [our] highest aspirations."
After viewing the world through Superman's eyes, though, Luthor gets with the All Star program. He realizes "The fundamental forces are yoked by a single thought"--apparently the entire universe is "thought-controlled!" His enlightenment and defeat aren't just the typical final-act reversals; they enact the triumph of the ideal over the material. Or, as Superman tells Luthor (while laying him out with a decidedly material, decidedly anticlimactic, decidedly satisfying punch) "Brain beats brawn every time!" In grand superhero tradition, Morrison stages a conflict of ideas and resolves it through the physical embodiments of his characters... which itself happens to be a perfect illustration of their ability to embody our ideals.
But tragically, perfectly, the story doesn't end there. Superman converts to pure "solar radio-consciousness," pure information, pure idea, yet he still manages to save us all one last time. He ends the series presiding serenely over Metropolis and Earth, maintaining the sun that keeps them alive, duplicating his earlier custodianship of Kandor on a much larger scale. And he ends it as a purely ideal being inspiring others to do better, duplicating his relationship to us poor souls down here on Earth-Q, where he's never been anything else. Trust Morrison to end All Star Superman with one more radical variation of scale, one more blurring of fiction and reality--but trust him also to apply these familiar games to a new theme, one perfectly matched to his character, about the power of ideas; the power of inspiration; the power of hope.
All Star Superman #12, by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and Jamie Grant
A beautiful symmetry is at work in All Star Superman. The sixth issue showed a young Clark Kent learning the limitations of his powers when he failed to save his adoptive father. The twelfth and final one opens with Kal-El learning about the other side of mortality from his birth father as Jor-El guides him through a postmortem fantasy and confronts him with an important choice. Both halves of this series are punctuated with lessons from the fathers that Superman, for all his powers, can never rescue, and reassurances that he still lived up to their expectations anyway.
That's not the only elegant pattern on display in this issue as Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely pull out all the storytelling techniques at their command, investing meaning in processes as mechanical and automatic as the turning of a page. Jor-El's injunction that Superman can linger in his fantasy world or "Turn and face down evil one last time" is followed by both a page turn and the face of evil, Lex Luthor, ordering the Daily Planet staffers to make their own life-or-death decision.
And if you've been reading these reviews for any length of time, you've probably already guessed that another heavily freighted page transition sets up one of my favorite bits in the issue--hell, the series. Immediately after Jor-El tells his son that Superman has inspired humanity's highest aspirations and embodied our best qualities, what should we see but Steve Lombard frantically performing CPR on Clark Kent, calling him "buddy" and apologizing for all those pranks. Lombard has usually been the butt of the joke in this series, just as God and Cary Bates intended, a preening he-man whose overcompensating hypermasculinity always falls short next to Superman's real deal. But this time Morrison grants some genuine heroism to the blowhard ex-jock as we see him working fearlessly to save the nerd he's tormented. Superman's in all of us--even Steve Lombard.
In the world of Superman, the better All Star world Superman's inspired, everybody does the right thing in the end (except Luthor, of course). This issue all of the little guys get their chance to make a stand, from Perry White's defense of the truth to Jimmy Olsen's timely turn as costumer. Does Jimmy know he's covering for Superman when he trots out the line about the disguise? And does Luthor figure out the big secret, the one that eluded him in issue five, on the next page, only to lose it when his super-enhanced intellect runs out? The issue moves so quickly that Morrison can only hint at these developments, planting just enough information for us to make the leap and then moving on to the next surprise. Even Superman gets to play the role of the plucky underdog, concocting a delightful quasi-scientific trick to beat his artificially empowered archenemy at his own game.
Because it's a Morrison comic there are also the references, fleeting and supple, to Supermen past: the scarlet fevers and fire falls of Silver Age Krypton, the crystal canyons of the Salkind movies, the fantasy life of "For the Man Who Has Everything," various deaths of Superman from the sixties to the nineties, Morrison's own DC One Million, and a flight of balloons that recalls the end of Miracleman's "Golden Age." They're all executed without rancor, just a patient sense of obligation that suits the book and its subject. Morrison's not trying to banish or one-up anybody, only to sum up all of his predecessors in a single compelling vision of the character.
Jamie Grant contributes an unusually vivid palette of bright primary and secondary colors, and Quitely is up to his usual high standard whether he's giving us a gorgeous x-ray panel or a stop-motion view of a truck in collision (both of which call back to his finest work in We3). The series' final image--I won't spoil it--is a beautiful piece of graphic design, as much a question as an answer and one that leaves me clamoring for a sequel we may never see.
Morrison and Quitely have accomplished something that many comics creators and fans thought impossible: they've found a way to tell stories about Superman that feel fresh and energetic after seventy years of the neverending battle. Yes, they amplify the menaces, but that's just the window-dressing--and they avoid the woefully common misstep of writing Superman down, casting the world's greatest superhero as an incompetent or a fascist to make their own jobs easier. The physical challenges are never a problem for the man of tomorrow, even at Quitely's cinemascoped best. The emotional challenges--to atone with his fathers, to be with the woman he loves, to confront his own mortality, to inspire our compassion and courage and hope--those are the tough battles, those are what really matter, and Morrison knows it. His real coup is not just making Superman interesting again, but showing us why it matters that we still come up with new stories about him. Because even if he were perfect, we can always be better.
It's a fitting end to All Star Superman. Even if the comic got a little flabby in the middle with the Bizarros and the astronauts (a story that actually reads much better after you've read the next one, but that's a post I'll probably never write)... well, all it had to do was stand up straight, unslump its shoulders, take off its glasses and show us the taut story that was always waiting within.
This issue is a masterpiece.
...Aren't they all?
All-Star Superman #10, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
Gorgeous cover, isn't it? And given Grant Morrison's customary interest in radical variations of scale (if this were a Wire post, I would've titled it with a certain Van-Zee quote), it comes very close to being a literal representation of this issue, where Superman plays God (in a good way!) with not one but two pocket worlds.
The interior is even better. The image of Superman's face smiling beneficently over Kandor (you can see a sample here) is one of Quitely's finest, especially the way he breaks it over two panels--as if we have to pan up to see it all, as if it's too big to take it all in at once. The kind, patient expression sums up Morrison and Quitely's take on Superman at least as well as the cloud cover that opened the series.
That's only one reason why All-Star Superman was much-anticipated and sorely missed after a long drought. I'm with Jog, more or less--I loved the Zibarro issue (pretty much the best Fourth of July comic ever), but the follow-up with the Kryptonian astronauts didn't seem to bring anything new to its well-worn story. And I say this as someone who deeply appreciated that Morrison finally gave us the Steve Lombard stumblebum routine I'd been begging for. It's been nearly nine months since this series was firing on all cylinders, and even longer since it devoted significant attention to the story of Superman's mortality, but this latest issue returns to the plotline that gave the early ones so much of their melancholy appeal.
Among the other features that make this issue so rewarding are the patterns of allusion--and the multiple levels of allusion--that run throughout it. There's this series' standard palimpsest of Superman history, condensing and combining the most interesting elements from seventy years of comics. We get Superman writing his last will and testament on a slab of metal, Leo Quintum in a Flamebird costume, Luthor biding his time in prison, even a reworking of that story where Superman shoots a little Superman out of his hand that so captivated Morrison (note that Van-Zee, leader of the Superman Emergency Squad, is by tradition an exact double for his cousin Kal-El). We get Superman rushing, with a little help from his friends, to complete his unfinished business and expose a secret to the world (prematurely?), both of which come straight from "The Last Days of Superman." But it's not all Silver Age nostalgia; properly speaking, it's not nostalgia at all.
That's most visible in the Kandorian council, which makes a nice visual metaphor for this series' signature move. Their clothing ranges from classic Silver Age headbands and emblems to an ornate Byrne-like headdress to Quitely's own hypermodernist designs. The council is tasked with preserving the last remnants of Kryptonian culture, and their appearance encapsulates just about all of it, much as All-Star Superman tries to preserve all the different eras of Superman--but not under glass, where it can only grow old and die. This is a living history.
Then you have all the references to Morrison's own work. You've got the infant universe of Qwewq, where our own planet dwells--only this time it's created by Superman, as one of his twelve super-labors. (I would love that gimmick a lot more if Morrison gave us a scorecard--it's impossible to tell what the labors are!) You've got the radical variations in scale from The Filth. You've got several other callbacks to Morrison's run on JLA, from ominous rumblings about Solaris to a Superman who tells Lex Luthor "I know there's good in you" to maybe, just maybe, a reference to that JSA crossover where Green Lantern artificially accelerated time on that microscopic civilization that was built on top of the Spectre.
I'm not so sure about that last one--I think Morrison is really just playing around with that old idea that if the history of planet Earth were fit into a single day, all of human civilization would unfold in its final second. A tad more cerebral than the JLA plot, but they both stem from his interest in narrative compressions of time and space. And boy, do I love Morrison's endpoint for his pocket history of the human race--something that speaks to why he thinks this comic is important in the first place, why All-Star Superman and superheroes in general are, for Morrison, a lot more than just a paycheck.
Finally, because Morrison is Morrison--or because I am me?--I see we have a surprising number of references to Alan Moore. Watchmen references abound, with a godlike hero who creates life at the culmination of his ascension and plants a city of delicate spires in the soil of Mars, in the shadow of Olympus Mons. I'll charitably assume the Nietzsche quote originates with Nietzsche, but it does happen to be the same line that opened Miracleman. An obvious place to go if you're looking to give the superhero a (spurious) historical pedigree, sure, but Moore got there first.
There's no overlooking the parallels with "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" though--not when we meet a messenger from an idyllic future, who shows up in a transparent bubble, no less, and who isn't supposed to share information with Superman but manages to provide a hint about an upcoming menace. It's the Legion of Super-Heroes cameo updated for the age of text messaging. And it calls attention to all the ways the larger plot structure of All-Star Superman as a whole--a grand tour of all the elements of the Superman myth, in the face of his impending death--owes a little something to Moore's big, serious, heartfelt, slobbery kiss of a Superman story from twenty-three years ago.
But it's gentle references this time, knowing winks to the reader. No commentary or anxiety, as befits this most serene of series. Just another nod to the past as this comic walks, square jaw held bravely up, into the future.
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