Multiversity: Pax Americana

Wow.

Since Multiversity: Pax Americana is a story about characters seeing the future, I’ll open with a prophecy. For decades to come, any discussion of the literary power of the comic book genre must include Pax Americana. It is already, on the day of its publication, required reading for serious comic book fans. It parallels, subsumes, and exceeds its obvious predecessor, Watchmen, as an exploration of science, science fiction, and literary devices used to allow a story in the genre to discuss the genre itself. It is the most intricate thing Grant Morrison has ever written, and for fans who enjoy his intricate works, it is possibly the best. Frank Quitely’s impeccable art matches the brilliance of the narration. Fans will enjoy it on many levels, but no one will explore its levels deeply without having their mind blown. And someone’s mind being blown is how it begins, and ends. Because its ending is its beginning.

This story operates on so many interrelated levels, it is difficult to write about it in a linear fashion. I’ll begin by making general observations on a few of its different levels, then move deeper into the details.

Overviews:

Narrative structure: While the story seems to be written backwards, with the scenes coming in reverse chronological order from 2015 back to 1974, it is really written as a time loop, like Final Crisis and the Sheeda of Seven Soldiers. Like the Ouroboros symbol in Batman,Inc., the story’s logic turns back on itself. When the plot is followed carefully, one sees that it ends on a cliffhanger, or rather “middles” on a cliffhanger, because there is no chronological beginning or end to the time-looped story, and the details entailing the cliffhanger are revealed over many pages, not in particular at the end.

Relationship to other works:

Pax Americana uses the same Charlton Comics characters that inspired Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Its plot shares many elements of Watchmen’s plot, including a hero who performs a villainous deed in order to achieve – he believes – a greater good. It shares many common themes with Watchmen, including the ironic doubling of words and images to link pairs of scenes, the relationship between American politics and superheroes, a dystopic future, physics as a metaphor, visual imagery as a metaphor for the plot, and has many scenes and images that echo scenes and images in Watchmen.

It is, of course, a chapter in Multiversity, and while its connections to the larger story are sparing, the source of the larger problem here on Earth-4 is an attack from the outside, delivered by comic books, in particular the haunted Ultra Comics, and what will happen after the assassination of President Harley is left pending, and on that hinges whether the ultimate threat succeeds or is defeated. Because of that, it adopts a tone entirely different from that of Watchmen, which is entirely dark (see my review here). Pax Americana gives hope that the villainy will be defeated, perhaps in the Multiversityfinale.

Math and Physics:

A Möbius strip is a strip (easily made of paper) with the ends twisted before being rejoined, so that it loops back on itself and has only one side. [IMAGE] This visible symbol parallels the time loop in Pax Americana and this loop is also seen in the shape of the symbols “8” and “∞” (infinity), which are repeated multiple times, both as symbols and as visual features which occur coincidentally. They are produced at times by an “S” or question mark (the symbol of The Question) being overlaid, or by sheer coincidence, such as a blood spatter in the air. 8s and infinity symbols are visually similar and confused/converted from the one to the other by simple rotation. Thus, the 8 in “Algorithm 8” and the eight-panel design of Pax Americana’s pages are references to loops, neverending, unto infinity.

Uranium-235 is the isotope of uranium that can be used to create self-sustaining nuclear fission reactions, as in a nuclear reactor or an atomic bomb.

Time, which we observe to have a direction in the scale of everyday experience, has no direction on the scale of subatomic particles. Almost every event that takes place on subatomic scales can happen just as easily in reverse as forwards: For example, a photon can hit an atom, disappearing as its energy moves one of the atom’s electron into a higher energy level, or an electron in a high energy level can drop down into a lower level and emit a photon. The processes are exactly opposite of one another. However, in everyday life, there is no reversibility: Spilled coffee does not jump out of a carpet, move upwards, and jump into a cup.

Dr. Manhattan in Watchmenand Captain Atom in Pax Americanaboth possess the superpower of bridging the gap between the everyday, time-directed world, and the subatomic, time-reversible world. Therefore, they see the past and future equally clearly, and become players in a game where past and future affect each other, whereas in the physics of the real world, the future cannot affect the past.

The Roman god Janus had one face looking backwards into time and one face looking forwards into the future, and symbolizes this ability of the physics-based characters and whoever possesses Algorithm 8.

Physics and philosophy have long grappled with the question of whether the future is determined predictably by the past. Newton’s laws of motion inspired the notion of a Clockwork Universe, one in which the state of the present, plus the inviolable rules of physics, make the future uniquely determined as those rules crank away on the state of the world. However, modern physics undermined that worldview, indicating that time is relative to the observer and that some processes are truly random and unpredictable. Watchmen makes much of this revolutionary discovery, and how it affects the worldview of Dr. Manhattan’s watchmaker father, among others. It shatters his world both literally and figuratively.

A profoundly important contrast with Watchmen is this: In Pax Americana, the people who discover Algorithm 8 see that physics discovery reversed. They find out, in contrast to earlier understanding, that the future ispredictable, and once they see that, several of the characters begin playing a deeper game, trying to control the future and committing horrible crimes in the belief that they know exactly how this will play out in the long run.

The Plot

The Pax Americanastory goes like this:

In 1974, the superhero Yellowjacket, who is a comic book writer in his real identity of Vince Harley, goes out for patrol, and it accidentally shot fatally by his son when he returns.

The antagonists in the story are represented by the Vice President, Nightshade’s father, and Sergeant Lane, who is seen carrying out their dirty work at several points in time. He is undoubtedly under the influence of the Gentry, who also influence Captain Atom through haunted comic books. Captain Atom is given an incorrect belief in a plan that seems to be for the greater good, but will actually perpetuate the Gentry’s evil plan to eliminate superheroes from this world.

When a young future President Harley is mourning for his father, he is visited by Captain Atom, who has been infected in the future by Ultra Comics. Captain Atom tells him of a way to control the future using a Möbius Strip (the door has one side and opens both ways). Thus, the future President Harley is the dupe of Captain Atom, who via Ultra Comics is the dupe of the Gentry. From this point on, the young Harley carries out a plan to make himself the President of a profoundly secure and powerful America, with unparalled popular support. His plan runs decades into the future and includes his rise to the Presidency, his eventual assassination, to win absolute public support, and his resurrection from the dead via the physics-based powers of Captain Atom.

His plan involves the use of superheroes as government agents, but they are set up as patsies to take a fall. President Harley has asked the Peacemaker to assassinate him in order to allow his own resurrection and unprecedented popularity. This mirrors Ozymandius’ plan in Watchmen to use a tragic, public event to control public opinion for the greater good. When the Peacemaker’s lover/confidante Nora O’Rourke, who has a super mind, discovers Algorithm 8 and can see into the future, Sergeant Lane murders her to prevent her from interfering with the Gentry’s plan. He knew all along that he would have to do this, and that he would do it right after her discovery. The Question and Blue Beetle are also investigating these events. Blue Beetle is unable to see the big picture. The Question is starting to solve the mystery, but may be one step behind.

The plot also involves the destruction of Captain Atom by injecting a black hole into him, so that his ability to see the future will not derail the plan. However, Captain Atom has already seen into the future and knows that the plan to kill him will fail. He knows that he can reconstitute himself. The conspirators, however, kill the scientists who carried out Captain Atom’s murder, to prevent them from revealing the plan.

The Peacemaker believes that killing President Harley is the right thing to do because it will galvanize the public into accepting a better future. President Harley is confident that he will be able to survive the assassination, despite its graphically depicted completion, because Captain Atom is able to reassemble a dead dog.

However, these events were set into place by the Gentry, who intend it to bring down the world of Earth-4 and its superheroes. Morrison’s larger point is that darker comics have that effect, ruining the worlds they portray, which was precisely Alan Moore’s intention in Watchmen. But Morrison holds out hope that events after Harley’s assassination will reconstitute a world of heroes worth reading about.

The Details

November 2015:

Like The Watchmen, the cover is actually the first panel of the story. The peace flag is set on fire by the shot that kills the President. This is the first of several times that symbols of peace (the dove being another) are destroyed violently. The fact that the Peacemaker shoots the peace symbol is ironic. However, he intends for this event to create a greater peace.

Like The Watchmen, a blood trail runs over a circular symbol. There, the smiley face; here, the Presidential Seal. In both, it symbolizes the way violence destroys the more benevolent world that came before.

The President being shot in the head while riding in an open car obviously refers to the actual assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The anticipated public support that this will generate parallels the record-setting margin of victory of Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s successor, in the 1964 election.

Reversal and reflection are mentioned several times, in words and in images, beginning with the investigators saying that they watched the film of the assassination backwards and forward. This itself mirrors the way the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination was scrutinized, including frontward and backward viewing in the film JFK.

The title of the story, “In Which We Burn,” refers to a patriotic British film, “In Which We Serve,” about World War Two. Peacemaker believes that he’s serving a greater good, but he is being duped. The Gentry’s plan is to destroy superheroes by duping Peacemaker into committing this act.

One of the dead superheroes from the past is Merryman, whom Morrison showed in Limbo in Superman Beyond. Captain Atom is still missing due to his attempted murder, which will fail. Captain Atom will return soon, but we don’t see this happen.

Nightshade is the daughter of the Vice President, who has become President. Eight and reflection are both mentioned. The Vice President says that there is a need to return to the values of the past.

“A leap of faith” is mentioned and we see The Question leap instead of riding in Blue Beetle’s vehicle. He is trying to sideline Blue Beetle and carry out his investigation alone because he doesn’t think Blue Beetle will cooperate with him. This is reminiscent of Owlman and Rorschach in Watchmen. “Get a grip” is said right before the Question’s machine grips Blue Beetle’s flying craft.

The Question has nearly figured out the entire plan, from the murdered scientists and the death of the Yellowjacket onwards, and is telling us most of the plot before we see it happen.

The Question asks who controls the board, the soldier or the hunchback? This is an apparent reference to The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which two different characters are framed for carrying out the crimes of others. In this case, the Peacemaker seems to have killed the President, but the Question has already worked out that someone else was behind it. This echoes conspiracy theories concerning the Kennedy assassination, although here we see that the conspiracy is real.

The two-page spread intertwines three scenes together. The Peacemaker and Nora O’Rourke discuss Algorithm 8. He knows that when she works it out, she would know his plan and want to stop him, so he knows all along that he’ll have to kill her. She is murdered with the bust of Janus, the two-faced man, who symbolizes the past/future theme. We see the conversations that precede her discovery, his murder of her, and the Question’s investigations. Thus, this scene looks forwards and backwards in time, just as Janus symbolizes. The conspirator has super strength thanks to an exoskeleton. This mirrors Rorschach’s realization that whoever killed the Comedian had to have had unnatural levels of strength.

January 2015:

Captain Atom is assassinated by the use of a black hole when he is participating in a physics experiment. A massless time-symmetrical boson must be a photon or graviton, but in any case indicates the physics-based ability to see forwards in time. He has already seen “the door” that entails vision of the future and past at once, and he will go back in time to the Seventies to tell a young Harley to put this plan into place. But Captain Atom, reading Ultra Comics, is tainted by the Gentry, and is unwittingly carrying out evil.

As in Watchmen, the scientists who help carry out the villain’s plan are themselves killed, so they can’t reveal the plan. Their killer is Sergeant Lane, recognizable by his suit and metal left hand, who represents the greater evil of the Gentry, and even proclaims himself to have crawled out of the gates of Hell. The reversible nature of time is referred to by him in denunciations of both science and religion, as he alludes to the beginning of time in the theological conception with “Let there be light,” the looped – as opposed to linear – time of the story with “can’t get it straight,” and the beginning of the Universe and ends of their lives in a gunshot as “the Big Bang.”

2014:

A scene in a nursing home mirrors one early in Watchmen, with the younger female superhero visiting her mother. Their conversation drops some plot details. The daughter is teleported away, at her request, by Captain Atom. An accidental coffee spill turns an S into an infinity symbol, and the reversibility of time is alluded to with, “The view is the same in both directions.” A black circle is a visual metaphor for the black hole discussed in this scene which is used, later, to try to kill Captain Atom.

We find out that Peacemaker is carrying out a plan that President Harley has let him in on, but his lover, Nora O’Rourke, is independently working on the discovery of Algorithm 8, which will make her a threat and require her later murder.

Their home is symbolic of the future replacing the past, a Bauhaus building in the ruins of a castle. Their conversation includes a flash-forward to Sergeant Lane beating up Peacemaker after his assassination of the President. An “8” appears as a blood splatter in the sky as a dove, a symbol of peace, is killed.

The Question is investigating the case, killing a dirty cop and finding out about Sergeant Lane and the Vice President’s roles. As Rorschach allowed a criminal to amputate his own hand in Watchmen, the Question gives this man the means to commit suicide with a gun. The Question outlines a color-coded theory of society with eight stages. He calls the dirty cop yellow, a play on the color theory and on cowardice.

2008:

Sergeant Lane has the trust of superheroes who are brought on as government agents under President Harley. Peacemaker suggests that their group be called the Justice League of America, indicating that those characters exist in comic books in Earth-4.

President Harley unveils the superheroes publicly as the guarantors of an American peace, Pax Americana, as Captain Atom telekinetically builds three towers where the World Trade Center fell.

2007?

Captain Atom is visited by then-Governor Harley. Captain Atom is recovering from something called the U-235 Incident, which is a sly reference to the explosive isotope of uranium as well as the actual Cold War U2 incident.

His attention, diluted by drugs, moves into the past and future, so he accidentally calls the Governor President, already knowing that he will one day hold that office. Lacking sympathy on a human level, he kills his own dog out of curiosity. He resurrects the dog, leaving one dead version and one live one, a reference to the thought experiment in quantum mechanics known as Schrödinger’s Cat. Governor Harley uses comic books to tell Captain Atom about Algorithm 8, in a time loop, because Captain Atom will carry this information back into the past to give it to a 23-year-old Harley. Captain Atom tells Harley that they’ll try to kill him and fail, so the Gentry will not actually neutralize him as they plan to. President Harley appears to have a plan that will actually counter the Gentry’s plan, and it’s hinted throughout the issue that he and Captain Atom will prevail over them. The conversation has many references to reflection, moving forward, and backwards, and the bridge is reflected in water, making a half circle into a full circle, symbolic of the past-future duality of Algorithm 8.

2005:

An assassination attempt on President Bush is thwarted by Peacemaker. The drink Manhattan is mentioned as a reference to Dr. Manhattan. The use of an actual real-world President symbolizes the interplay between real and fictional worlds and how superheroes replace the real world in their own fictional worlds. This transition from one world to another is encapsulated by the scene’s final line, “Your world has come to an end today.”

Flashforward:

A scene back in 2015 what would be the opposite end of that process, with Sergeant Lane celebrating the end of superheroes as he interrogates Peacemaker. But Peacemaker believes that he will prevail and save the world from him, suggesting that Captain Atom will reconstitute himself, retroactively save the President, and reaffirm superheroes in the eyes of the world. A quick flashback shows Peacemaker telling Nora about the President’s plan.

Earlier:

The Question and Blue Beetle are investigating crimes. The Question is already working on the big mystery and Blue Beetle does not follow the Question’s reasoning nor approve of his draconian punishment of evildoers. This foreshadows the Question eventually sidelining Blue Beetle and working on the case alone.

The Question’s black-and-white morality is seen via his two lines about black and white that he considers writing on his calling card.

1980s:

We see future-President Harley receiving from Captain Atom the message that Governor Harley gave him decades later.

1974:

We see Harley accidentally kill his father, the Yellowjacket. Blood spatters onto the feather of their pet doves, bloodying the symbol of peace. A news broadcast mentions the corruption of the Nixon era and a speech by President Kennedy, outlining the good/evil at stake in this story. In the final panel, Harley holds up his father’s domino mask, which twists into an “8”, which is the name of the algorithm at the center of the plot.

Summary:

This issue is a masterpiece. For better and worse, it does not easily yield to a single quick reading. A few hours’ scrutiny is rewarded amply, and future effort is sure to produce even deeper insights. Is Harley a good man in a battle between good and evil, or is he corrupt? Will Captain Atom arrive to team up with the Question and save the day? Does Morrison successfully override the cynicism of Watchmenand write a new classic in the genre? We’ll find out in the finale of Multiversity and as readers and other writers react to these issues in the months and years to come.

Retro Review: Watchmen

If a single work were to be selected to illustrate the merits of illustrated superhero fiction as a medium that has yielded great art, Alan Moore's Watchmen is arguably the best choice. Published by DC, the story features original characters adapted from the Charlton Comics roster purchased by DC in 1983, although the themes and style completely overwhelm the particulars or history of the characters.

Moore was, by his own account, impressed by the direction of The Dark Knight Returns in providing a finale for a world of superheroes. Other stories Moore wrote for DC in this era ended other heroes and worlds: The death of Abin Sur portrayed as a brilliantly conceived murder, Krypton portrayed as a society in decay rather than a futuristic paradise, Mr. Mxyzptlk as a homicidal sorceror, Superman's career ending with the hero voicing Moore's criticism of the character as a concept. His planned, but never unpublished, Twilight of the Superheroes would have shown an end to DC's heroes as a battle between ruling houses, Game of Thrones style, some decades hence. In all of these stories, Moore did not merely end the lives or careers of the heroes, but he first demolishes the qualities that made then children's favorites. Superman called himself "over-rated and too wrapped up in himself" on the final page of Moore's Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow? Watchmen adopts this approach with a set of superheroes in some other world, breaking down their heroic qualities before leading to a finale in which each of them is dead or permanently taken off the stage. This treatment was, if not fully original, still quite unlike what readers were accustomed to in 1986, and many scenes come to the reader as a revelation – surprising, shocking, and often suggesting a higher truth, more realistic than the nice and neat comics of old.

Watchmen, like many Moore works, and unlike almost all superhero comics that came before it, adopts the stylistic devices of good literature to the extent that many highly-regarded novels do. He refers to political, cultural, and scientific realities of the real world. He finds fine moments for one part of his story to refer to another. While intersplicing two narratives, he often creates correspondences that work in two ways at once, often one of them grim. For example, as someone pushing an elevator button says "Ground floor comin' up," we see Edward Blake begin a deadly fall to the ground. A page later, as Blake's fall continues in slow motion, an unrelated line of dialogue contains the phrase "drop out of sight." The juxtaposition of darkly ironic double meanings with mundane exposition is illustrative of Moore's entire approach: Everything light has a darker side.

The central and most wonderful example of this is an extended metaphor that is so deep and compelling that any novelist could envy it: The notion of a broken watch, which functions on several levels at once:

• There is a literal broken watch, which the father of Jon Osterman was about to repair when he decided that his occupation had been made obsolete by nuclear science.

• There is a world that is philosophically deterministic, Newton's clockwork universe, which was destroyed by Einstein's work.

• There is the conventional perception of sequential time, which is broken by Dr. Manhattan's unusual perception of time out of sequence.

• There is a standard linear narration in comic books which is broken by Moore's highly nonlinear narration.

• A second watch, in Jon Osterman's hand when he is accidentally caught in an atomic test chamber, is broken and left to record the same instant forever after.

• There is the world of the Watchmen superheroes, brought to a definitive end by the events Moore depicts.

• There is the world of conventional superhero comics, exemplary people living in cyclical patterns, facing new villains each month without real consequence, broken by Moore's work which shows them rise, prove to be corrupted, and fall over five decades.

On each of these levels, there is a symbol of time, a "watch," which is broken, literally or figuratively. In word and in image, Moore repeatedly relates these different "broken watches" to one another. It's just the type of sophistication that students are asked to notice and record in graded essays, and in part, Watchmen serves to elevate the medium from light entertainment to an art form.

Central to all of these broken watches are the Watchmen themselves. Some of their behavior, particularly in having complicated sex lives, is simply more adult than comics previously portrayed. But we also see the superheroes fail, morally and otherwise. One hero goofs up and is shot. Others grow old and fat. Another is a delusional sadist who avidly kills in the line of duty. Worse still, another rapes and kills for his own selfish purposes. The only one with true superpowers is rendered almost completely inhuman and devoid of compassion. The remaining hero adopts, from the perspective of traditional superhero comics, the vanity and Machiavellian means of a villain, and may have succeeded in killing millions as a means to an end only to fail in his purpose anyway.

Like The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen uses the real threat of nuclear war as a compelling backdrop for a superhero story. Like DKR, the awesome superhero on the American side tips the balance of power in NATO's favor, but not enough to neutralize the Soviet threat. Both stories show Republican presidents remaining in power decades beyond what current term limits allow. And both stories describe a Cold War threat which subsided in the real world a few years after the stories were published, making the plot a bit less compelling for later readers than for those who read them in the Eighties.

It's art, and it's powerful. It's compelling, eminently re-readable, and was eventually adapted into a successful and critically-acclaimed film. Compare it to any other work in comics, and in at least one way if not many (Dave Gibbons' art, extremely good if not revolutionary, among them) Watchmenis a superior work.

And yet: As in all of those Eighties stories in which Moore destroys a superhero, their values, or their world, we see no indication that Moore actually likes superheroes. He may, in fact, hate them. And while that's a respectable opinion as a matter of taste (Perhaps Andrew Lloyd Webber hates superheroes? Perhaps William Shakespeare would have?) it makes Watchmen into a bitter paradox, a work that is perhaps the best of its genre, whose primary message is that its genre is inherently flawed and not worth reading. Moore himself quit the genre, before he was able to publish his intriguing plans to kill off the DC Universe, in certainly fine and artistic fashion, as he did the world of the Watchmen. I have read Watchmen many times, and I will read it many more, but the experience is somewhat spoiled by the bitterness Moore brings to the topic. One wonders why he would bother creating a work in a genre he so dislikes, and that's obviously a conclusion he soon thereafter reached.

To similar effect, one wonders whom he is trying to persuade, and of what. We see that superheroes would probably not interact well with the society of the real world, but whoever thought that they would? We see that superheroes bestowed with real adult complexity make poor characters for childrens' stories, but whoever thought otherwise? Seen as a polemic, Watchmen is an argument against several viewpoints that nobody ever held. Despite its great merits, Watchmen has all the warmth of an angry old shut-in yelling at kids to stop playing on his lawn; in fact, for them to stop playing even away from his lawn, for that matter.

Watchmen changed comics, and is certainly a true work of art. In my view, its greatest legacy is to have paved the way to other works of considerable complexity (more so than the comics of the Seventies, if not matching that of Moore) by writers who are actually fond of superheroes and let that love show in their work.

Action #17

With next month’s Action#18, Grant Morrison’s run on Superman will come to an end, wrapping up the extended story that redefined DC’s flagship character.

Defining and redefining Superman has been a quagmire for DC over the last 15 years. This was true only three years ago when I expounded on the topic in my review of Geoff Johns’ Superman: Secret Origin #1. That series redefined Superman’s past in a way that summed up changes which had been in progress since Infinite Crisis. It was only to serve as the status quo for two years before being discarded for another, total, reboot. And in fact since then, we have also seen another heavily-sold out-of-continuity Superman origin in J. Michael Straczynski’s Earth Oneversion of Superman, and a fleeting glimpse of a Superman who dies young in DC’s current Earth 2 title. If that’s not confusing enough for fans, the “2” and the “One” in those titles do not serve as part of a sequence, and they are piled on top of earlier Earth Ones and Twos (or 1s and 2s). The nomenclature alone produces vertigo if not nausea. Yet another out-of-continuity story called DC Universe Online (but it was not online) showed yet another Superman for 52 issues.

A new Superman in Grant Morrison’s hands had been long-anticipated. Morrison wrote Superman as part of his Justice League run starting in 1997, and shortly thereafter was part of a pitch called Superman 2000 which did not come to pass. In 2005, Morrison began a 12-issue run on All Star Superman, a fantastically popular mini-siries taking place in its own continuity, which in many ways was a prequel for the Superman we finally saw as part of the 2011 DCnUthat is the main continuity of DC’s stories, for now.

With this series at the pause between the penult and ultimate issues, it stands as a single body of work which does not fail to reflect plotlines we’ve seen in all of those other Superman redefinitions mentioned above, a quilted kaleidoscope of stories and storylines which are rehashes of stores we had just seen. Brainiac double-crossing Luthor? Seen it in Online. General Lane directing a US Army plot against Superman and Superman’s tight association with the Legion of Super Heroes? Seen those in Secret Originand other Geoff Johns stories in then-current continuity. Clark Kent beginning his journalistic career as a poor young man in the slums? Seen it in Earth One. Yet, it is hard to fault Morrison for reworking those almost-current stories: If he avoided every storyline in those several retreads, he would have had to write a story by negation, leaving holes in Superman’s DCnU history just to spite those other works. Morrison did not choose that path, and so we have a maxi-series from Morrison that looks like a blend of half a dozen other recent works.

And that includes Morrison’s own. Morrison’s Action employs elements from his All Star Superman title, including a key role for characters from Mxyzptlk’s Fifth Dimension, which provides the key villain in Action. Morrison has also used the Fifth Dimension in his JLA run and with his use of Bat-Mite in Batman.

Structurally, the run strongly resembles Morrison’s runs on Batman. In Morrison's first run on Batman, in issues #655–681, the hero faces a single dominant threat whose plot is at first hidden, from both the hero and the reader, surfacing in a series of smaller threats, calculated to test the hero without toppling him, before culminating in a final showdown between Doctor Hurt and Batman in Batman R.I.P. Morrison's Action run has a parallel structure, with the Little Man, who appears in the very first panel, proving to be the ultimate victim who confronts Superman directly only in the final issues. Both Doctor Hurt and Vyndktvx make pretensions to be the Devil, using the word "deal" like it's going out of style. Vyndktvx is often drawn three-faced, like Satan in Dante's Inferno. However, while the Batman story was fundamentally the story of a single plot by Doctor Hurt calculated to topple Batman, the Actionstory is a series of Superman adventures primarily featuring independent menaces, a few of whom Vyndktvx recruits for a single assault. Both stories are spread widely over time. Both wrap the events of much older stories into their telling. Both villains have identities held out as a mystery. Ultimately, The Little Man seen in the very first panel of Action #1 is given a complete backstory in terms of Fifth Dimension intrigue. There is no longer mystery regarding who he is, but we await the ending of a climactic battle, which began to crescendo in the final pages of Action #14.

The references to past Superman stories, both prominent and obscure, are more numerous than I will attempt to catalog here. Characters originating in Superman stories from every era from the Thirties through the Nineties have appeared in passing and in the foreground. I will mention, instead of the smaller facets, three larger stories that have impacted the narrative here in a very central way.

At the end of the pre-COIE era, two stories were published the same month wrapping up the pre-Byrne Superman. Both of these stories, on the surface unrelated, depicted a suddenly evil Mr. Mxyzptlk as the villain. By far the more famous of the two, Alan Moore's Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow? also had the structure of a larger villain (Mxyzptlk) throwing secondary menaces (as great as Luthor and Brainiac) at Superman before the hero and villain took each other down in a battle that undid them both, in different ways. A less well-known story by Steve Gerber in DC Comics Presents #97 showed a Mxyzptlk who had been punished by his own kind and who merged with the Phantom Zone and its villains before attacking Superman one last time. In this story, Mxyzptlk achieves a tactical and strategic victory, apparently poisoning the Earth with kryptonite (with the added horror of Argo City's dead bodies showering out of the sky), then leaving a defeated Superman behind in what was, technically, the last moments we saw of the pre-Byrne continuity. Morrison has based his run, thematically, where pre-Crisis continuity ended, with a new Fifth Dimensional villain posing the ultimate threat to Superman, so that Mxyzptlk's inherently benevolent nature can be preserved for future stories. By utilizing the same thematic menace as that of Moore's story, Morrison may be giving Superman a chance to face that threat that ended "him" before, and overcome it, just as he is with the Doomsday threat from yet another continuity. It will be interesting to see if the final issue makes more explicit reference to WHTTMOT?

A subsequent work, mending the pre- and post- Crisis worlds from the other side of the divide, Keith Giffen's run on the Legion of Superheroes dealt with the gaping hole in continuity that the LSH had been inspired by Superboy, but in the Byrne run, there had never been a Superboy. We promptly saw the emergence of another "Earth", the Pocket Universe, which led to Byrne's Superman going through a spiritual ordeal after killing that Universe's Phantom Zone villains. More germane to the present run, Giffen rebooted the LSH not once but several times in rapid succession, with the Legionnaires deliberately rebooting their own timeline to undo histories where one of their villains had triumphed as the undisputed master of the 30th Century. The Time Trapper, Mordru, and Glorith all have the capacity to become dictators of the Legion's universe, and so they reboot the universe until they create a timeline where a "Balance of Powers" leaves a free universe in which the LSH battles these villains, neutralizing them. In Action #17, Morrison seems to utilize the very same idea when the Legionnaires plan to "wipe out [their] entire history" and thus save Superman's life as well as "stop the rise of Universo." Morrison puts the LSH here in the same predicament they faced in Giffen's multiple timelines; this is, incidentally, a device he also used in his JLA story Rock of Ages where heroes overcome a despot villain's rule not by defeating him per se but by rebooting the timeline so that the victory by Darkseid never happened.

Another story serving as the template for this one is Morrison's own Final Crisis and its related crossover, Superman Beyond. The title page of Action #17, like the last page of Action #16, shows the Super-Doomsday creature poised to kill Superman just as the first page of Superman Beyond shows a flash-forward to the fateful battle between Superman and Mandrakk. Like the Bane Batman from Batman #664-665, it shows a meld of the hero with the Nineties villain who broke him. The creature incorporates elements of Mandrakk, the Nineties Doomsday with the armor Superman of Superman Beyond, the evil Superman from Morrison's Animal Man, and more generally every anti-Superman we've seen over the decades. Picking up the theme of Final Crisis as a story about story, the Super-Doomsday creature refers to itself as a "franchise", in a fourth-wall reference to itself as an alternate character that strives to defeat the DCnU Superman. It is a "thought" that we first saw in Action #9, where the Lois Lane of its parallel universe defines to it as the product of selling out, of a Superman "brand" designed by experts to have "maximum cross-spectrum, wide-platform appeal, a violent, troubled, faceless anti-hero... a global marketing icon." It sounds like Morrison has a very specific villain in mind, something that Warner Brothers might be creating and incorporating into video games right now.

In every aspect of this run, we see a Morrison trademark: postmodernism rendered in the terms of the comic genre. In his Batman run, Morrison delivered unconventional narratives that were explained in the story with Batman-appropriate devices such as hallucinogens and brainwashing. Here, as in JLA, All Star Superman and Superman Beyond, Morrison accomplishes the same postmodernist storytelling through Superman-appropriate devices such as time travel and multiple dimensions. The reader's experience, either way, is one of unreliable narration and dramatic irony. The vehicle for creating this is specific to the hero, and ties in with a heritage from past decades when postmodernism was not the aim.

As with Final Crisis and Batman: RIP, the jump-cuts in narration may detract from many readers' enjoyment. In what now makes four consecutive issues, we have seen a cliffhanger with the first two simply put aside as the story picks up in the next issue. As the structure is so heavily borrowed from other Morrison stories, and the conventional payoffs blunted by his sleight of hand, the story is not likely to be remembered as a fan favorite nor as one of his milestones. What is most admirable here is that he worked his tricks, in many ways familiar and well-worn, in ways so specific to this particular character.

On two other levels, the story works assiduously and brilliantly to serve red meat to the fans: It does, after all, reboot Superman in ways that many fans yearned for. It overturns many aspects of the past continuity that overstayed their welcome. Perhaps to greater effect, it shows Morrison's gift for the flourish, the moment of perfection. When miniaturized Luthor looks out of shrunken Metropolis and sees Superman's symbol looming outside the jar, to the call "Look, up in the sky!" Morrison shows Superman winning every way at once. Inasmuch as Morrison has shown that he will let threads drop (or hang), we see Clark's vow to his father to wage a battle for justice.

In what is the final cliffhanger of Morrison's run, just as Super-Doomsday is about to kill Superman, Luthor arrives, saying "Nobody kills Superman but Lex Luthor!" If this seems familiar, it is not an accident. The very first monthly issue of John Byrne's run, in Superman Vol. 2 #1, ends with Metallo about to kill Superman when Metallo is suddenly teleported away. This is explained in #2 when Luthor says, "Of course I stopped you, Metallo. The killing of Superman is a pleasure reserved for myself."

The Morrison run in Action will have a lasting impact. It will serve as the definition of Superman's origin for untold years to come. And it is such an intricate story, it will be a work worth studying. It remains to be seen how much, in conventional terms as a comic, it will be enjoyed. While it is certain that Superman will, with help, triumph over Vyndktvx and Super-Doomsday, it is less clear that Morrison will triumph unconditionally over the commercial Superman that Super-Doomsday represents.