What, you thought a comic that reteamed Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely to tell a tale using Charlton Comics characters to create a modern day response to “Watchmen” wouldn’t make pick of the week? What universe do you live in?
Written by Grant Morrison
Illustrated by Frank Quitely
Brace yourselves for the next exciting chapter of THE MULTIVERSITY as the acclaimed ALL-STAR SUPERMAN team of writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely investigate the conspiracy on Earth-4, home of Pax Americana! Told backwards through an experimental storytelling technique that reveals new mysteries with each turn of the page, PAX AMERICANA stars The Question, Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, Nightshade and Peacemaker like you’ve never seen them before! As the assassination of the U.S. president leads to political intrigue, interpersonal drama and astro-physical wonder, the truth behind the crime and those involved will blow your mind! What confidential conversation between the president and Captain Atom could reveal everything? How far will The Question take his hunt for the truth before he hurts his former friends – or himself? And who is the steel-handed bogeyman operating in the shadows?Discover all this and more in this exciting stand-alone issue which also acts as chapter four of the MULTIVERSITY storyline. Join us, if your dare, for THE MULTIVERSITY!
If you were to force me, gun to my head, to pick my favourite team of comic creators, I think I would have to go with Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Not just because of the fact that they’re both Scottish creators at the top of their game in an industry that’s still very America-centric, though I do get a sense of nationalistic pride from that, but because what their books have accomplished in terms of using comic books as a storytelling medium is, I would say, unparalleled. With works like “WE3” showing time as a three-dimensional occurrence on a two-dimensional plane and “Flex Mentallo” blurring the borders between reality to the point where there might as well be no concept of it to begin with to “All-Star Superman” creating the largest impacts in the smallest moments in a story, the two are creators I love and creators that bring out the best in each other.
That’s why the idea of them teaming up for “The Multiversity: Pax Americana” #1 was such a huge moment for me. Now, I’m going to be rather up front with you here: for my money, this is the best issue of “The Multiversity” so far by a wide margin and it will be very, very hard to top this. I would even put it down as a very easy issue of the year contender. Hell, this might be the comic of the decade. The story itself is a stand alone tale of the heroes of Earth-4, the Pax Americana themselves based on the characters from Charlton Comics that served as an inspiration for the characters of “Watchmen”, and the investigation into the assassination of the President of the United States. If that seems fairly simple to you for a comic written by Grant Morrison, then don’t worry. There are more than a few tricks up the old dog’s sleeves yet.
If there’s one theme that’s readily apparent to be central to the story of “The Multiversity,” it’s duality. In the first issue, “House Of Heroes”, it was a duality between fiction and reality; in the second issue, “Conquerors Of The Counter-World”, it was the duality between two parallel universes themselves; in the third issue, “The Just”, it was the duality of identity specifically pertaining to being a superhero. In this issue, Morrison and Quitely explore the duality of time in what is easily the densest and most ambitious issue of “The Multiversity” yet.
Grant Morrison is a writer who continually strives to get the best work possible from the artists he works with. Perhaps that’s because he started as an artist as well as a writer and he knows exactly what artist to work with to get the best out of the story he wants to tell and he pushes them to push their own boundaries as artist, but the point is that he gets results. And what that result is, is some career-best work by Frank Quitely. Quitely has experimented with how to show time happening on a comic book page before with Morrison in “We3”, but what the pair have accomplished here is nothing short of groundbreaking. From the silent opening pages, detailing the assassination of the U.S. president in reverse, of which the cover is essentially the first panel, to a two-page spread consisting of 32 panels covering three distinct series of events in the same room at three different times, all still telling the same story, and you have a comic which, if the Eisner’s had a best cinematography equivalent award, would win every time. It is staggering how beautifully put together this comic is.
Continued belowAnd that’s just the surface level stuff like Quitely’s masterful page layouts and use of the 8-panel grid to create a rhythm to the pages that doesn’t seem to exist in any other comic I’ve ever read. It doesn’t even mention that each scene of this comic is told in reverse order, making the front cover both the first and the last panel of the book. It doesn’t cover the fact that Quitely’s pencils have only gotten better over time as his Dudley D. Watkins meets Moebius style of artwork is honed to a perfect showcase of the fantastical reality in comics. Hell, it doesn’t touch the fact that Nathan Fairbairn is perhaps the best colourist to ever touch Quitely’s work, bringing a life and depth to the lines that few others have managed in his career. I could go on and on and on ad nauseam about how gorgeous and well constructed this comic book is, but that would only serve to give you a glimpse at the masterclass on display in this issue. Even if you don’t care about “The Multiversity” itself or Grant Morrison’s writing or even DC comics at all, you owe it to yourself to read this issue just for the artwork as I want it to go down in history simply for the craft in the storytelling.
While Frank Quitely’s artwork is very clearly genius and it’s easy to see that from the moment you open the pages of the issue, Morrison’s writing here is much more insidiously genius. As I said, the story of this issue is told in reverse with each scene taking place before the preceding scene as it explores the series of events leading up to the opening scene and allowing the pieces of the mystery at the heart of the book to fall into place until a rather shocking ending just takes your breath away and forces you to flip back to the front and want to read it all over again. And then you’ll want to read it a third time, this time in reverse order as you see each scene from the earliest to the latest building on each other to create a masterful look at the existence of superheroes. This is the kind of book, like “All-Star Superman”, where re-reading the issue only serves to uncover even more in the dense narrative that Morrison has created here. What makes it so impressive here, though, is that while “All-Star Superman” had twelve issue to contain that narrative, Morrison and Quitely achieve and even dense effect here in just one.
Ok, I feel like I now have to address an elephant in the room before I wrap this up: yes, this is essentially Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s version of “Watchmen”. Even Morrison himself acknowledged it, describing it as “[what] if Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had pitched the Watchmen now?”. While I was wary about how that idea would take shape, whether it could fall flat on it’s face and just feel like Morrison trying to do a bad copy of Moore, the result is actually far from it. By using the actual Charlton characters as opposed to Moore and Gibbons’ facsimiles, the connection to “Watchmen” feels more spiritual and thematic than anything and by setting it in the modern day the themes touched on in Morrison’s work feel complimentary to Moore’s, just filtered through a 21st century lens, as opposed to coming off as a rip off. The effect that has is like seeing the works of Shakespeare adapted to other time periods and settings. Like, sure, it might be a story about a cartoon lion and his dead dad, but it still speaks to the universal themes present in the original work.
Overall, this issue blew me away. I was already a fan of Grant Morrison and of Frank Quitely, but what they have achieved in this issue is startling in its beauty and grace as a showcase in two masters of the craft breaking a medium down to its core elements and doing something with it that few have dared to do. It’s an experiment that has paid off in spades, creating a dense and artistic yet still incredibly enjoyable comic book that I can scarcely believe actually exists. Everyone involved in the creation of this comic book, from Morrison and Quitely themselves to Nathan Fairbairn bringing life to the pages to the folks at DC Comics who actually took a risk for once and let it pay off, deserves commendation for this work.It is gorgeous, groundbreaking, insightful, and, most of all, it’s one hell of a good comic book.
Final Verdict: 9.9 – I am so close to giving this a full 10/10, but the only thing keeping me back is the lingering sadness that this is only one issue and not a full series of this story.
