Blog 2.0

"We were just sitting around talking, about how they've done the zero issues, and what's the most ludicrous thing you could think of in the other direction. Issue one million was the answer. I suggested it as a crossover and it just grew out of the idea of what would be these titles' millionth issues, and what year it would all take place in?"

Grant Morrison, describing the origin of DC One Million.

(from Writers on Comics Scriptwriting, 1999)

DC One Million hit an unsuspecting world in September 1998, when every single DC comic set in the DC Universe became involved in a huge crossover where we got to see what each title, and indeed the DCU itself, would look like in a million months from that time.  It was a five week month, during which every DCU title jumped forward to the year 85,265AD.  I've been meaning to look at this series as part of my JLA thread, which in turn is part of a look at most of Morrison's entire body of work.  However, thanks to a pointer from one of the contributers to the JLA thread, verified by some of my own research, I discovered that Morrison had a hand in virtually every issue that came out in that month.

Grant again:

"Oh yeah, that was the biggest work I've ever done, because basically I plotted everything that month, every single comic except for Hitman.  With that I just said, 'Garth, take the piss', that was my plot. The rest of it was quite detailed. The Batman stuff, the Superman stuff was really detailed. I plotted something like sixty-four comics that month and wrote five of them. It was big. That took a few months. I was working non-stop."

(NB:  Morrison is exagerating here, not that he has to.  Plotting around 35 comics to be ready in a single month and tying them all together is no mean feat itself.)

Having discovered that the mind-boggling architecture of the entire event and much of the plotting of each issue was down to the Mad Scotsman, I decided that I would have to go as deep into these comics as I could.  All the more so, because such a fan-pleasing, original and ambitious crossover appears to have gotten very little coverage on the comics internet.  I guess it is just too sprawling, and multi-faceted to be looked at as a complete body of work. Another mark against it is the hugely variable range of styles and indeed quality across the DC One Million titles.  Virtually every DC writer and artist from Morrison's JLA period were involved, with varying degrees of commitment and engagement.  The DC One Million titles range from perhaps my favourite single issue of any comic (Martian Manhunter 1,000,000), to perhaps one of the worst, most insulting comics I've ever read (Azrael 1,000,000).  So we get a fascinating, slightly off-centre snapshot of DC's entire superhero line and the talent then at the company, which I hope inspires some comment from nostalgic fanboys in the replies below.

There is a huge amount of material to get through, so these may be some of the longest blogs ever posted here.  Rather than just seeing a wall of text, I hope that the obliging reader will instead see these blog entries as mini-magazines with different sections to be read seperately.

The comics themselves might have appeared as random issues with a 853rd Century connection to the readers of the time, very few of whom would have bought into all the comics that month.  The central story, contained in DC One Million #1-4, Morrison's JLA 1,000,000 and  a few other key issues, was collected as JLA: One Million and it makes for a pretty good read.  However, many of the other issues can be grouped together into several strands that weave together into a larger story and many other issues are interesting standalones, or even, as is the case with Creeper, Chase, and Young Heroes in Love, were in effect the final issues of their respective series. 

So in each of these blog entries, I'll be picking out the themes and meanings of Morrison's work in my usual fashion, with particular emphasis on the 5 comics he scripted.  I also hope to highlight the complexity of the inter-related story strands, all of which Morrison was involved with to some extent or another.  Finally, I'm hoping to celebrate to some extent the DC comics of the late 20th Century, an area of superhero comics close to my heart.

DC One Million #1

We open ‘on the third day’ when Plastic Man and Zauriel rush back to the Watchtower monitor room to find that Vandal Savage has just nuclear bombed Montevideo.  This turns out to be the day when the JLA take up the offer from their 853rd century counterparts, the Justice Legion 'A', to travel to the future to take part in various challenges in front of huge crowds to celebrate the original Superman’s return from the sun in the far future.

The rest of the comic is a countdown to this moment.  DC One Million has a huge cast and a lot of story elements in play, in two time periods, and Morrison sets them all up in this 40 page comic.  The comic is quite dense and hardly a frame is wasted.  Character moments also push forward the plot or get across the dramatic tone that Morrison is going for.  As the icons talk about visiting the far flung future, their nervousness and excitement communicates to the reader what a big deal it is.  Even Batman is tempted to go.  That these heroes in particular, who have experienced so much weirdness, should be nervous about the future-shock they might experience in the world of Justice Legion A, goes a long way in setting up the awe and wonder of the 853^rdcentury.

Another thing that Morrison does to get across how special this event must be, is to establish within the story how difficult it was to arrange for the two teams to swap places.  The story emphasises that they can only do it for a brief period of time.  Superhero comics do suffer when jumps between realities or from one time period to another are presented as boringly regular and everyday events.

A conversation between two Golden Age heroes tells us that this is a flowering of what they begun.  Ted Knight, the first Starman can’t contain his excitement in a phone call to the Golden Age Flash:

“That dream we had.  That stupid idea when we were young that we could make things better...  It all comes true, Jay”.

It highlights the simple optimism and can-do spirit of the first generation of superheroes and perhaps, what superheroes are ultimately ‘for’!

As ‘our’ JLA prepare to leave, we get an exciting plot strand of the Titans as they were then - Arsenal, Aqualad, Jessie Quick - and Supergirl getting in way over their heads when they try to stop Vandal Savage buying some nuclear-armed Rocket Red armoured suits.  They actually end up in the suits and unconscious as Savage prepares to launch them as weapons in his drive to conquer the Earth.

The Titans are well cast in this role, as they are between books at this stage, but are still well-known to the readers.  (All readers except me in 1998, I suppose.  I really was the newbie reader that Morrison was writing towards at this time.  That I found his comics so welcoming at that stage probably speaks towards the success, then and now of this incarnation of the League.)

Leaving aside the plotting of the awe-inspiring mega-events in two time periods, the comic is peppered with lots of little details of the sort that make reading a Morrison comic a pleasure.  To give just two examples of his handle on the characters and his ability, in only a word or two, to show what makes them tick:

“Snnt!”  - Flash’s sniggering reaction to the news that Green Lantern’s Challenge Arena will be in a spaceship orbiting Uranus.

“Holy God!” - Plastic Man’s reaction to seeing the damage done to Montevideo by the first of Vandal Savage’s nuclear missiles.  Not only does the phrase subtly hint at Eel O’Brian’s Irish-American background, adding a bit of texture, but it’s one of the few panels in the whole series where the pliable prankster isn’t joking.

There is another little fleeting phrase that betrays the depth of thought Morrison puts into his best work.  The book ends with a glimpse of the Vandal Savage of the far future toasting the success of his plans with Solaris.  We get our first taste of the continuous babble of Headnet, the information-broadcasting system that links all the citizens of the far future.

One of the lines is: “Instant cosmos accessing your neurons wherever the Super-Sun shines...”

The future Starman has already explained to us the perhaps central aspect of life in the 853^rdCentury:

“Our entire culture organises itself around the processing of Information:  a gigantic network of star-computers link the entire galaxy, allowing us to trade new ideas with distant systems.”

In literary and figurative language, the sun’s light often stands for understanding and knowledge.  As used by us in phrases like 'The light dawned on him".  In a kind of alchemical, magickal way, Morrison is making the figurative real in his future world, where the stars are giant computers, processing information and broadcasting it to all.  In a way he is transforming the powerful figurative language of symbols, which we all use every day, into superheroic picture-poetry.  Suns that have become giant super-computers are exactly the kind of thing that some would use to accuse Morrison of wilful “weirdness for weirdness’ sake”.  I’d contend that there is deep systematic thought that goes into many of the ideas that confound those who only look for surface values in their comics.  This transmogrification of the conceptual and the literary into the literally real and visually represented is something playful and smart, that lends itself especially well to superhero comics.

DC One Million #1 is a fine opening chapter to the crossover, communicating the wonder and awe of what is about to happen in the 853^rd Century while establishing a large cast and an array of dazzling new concepts.  All while building up the storyline of Vandal Savage’s greatest push for world domination in 1998.

The rest of DC One Million - Week One

To help guide you through the many issues released under the DC One Million banner, I'll be including these panels from the backmatter for each issue, showing what was released each week.  The incredible thing is how, in the case of issues that weren't standalone, the events in subsequent week's issues follow on from the previously released issues.  The logistics and planning that went into this crossover must have been immense.  In the case of the major strands that run through several comics, I thought it would make for easier comprehension of the storylines if I presented them as a group, rather than divide them up over the different weeks.  It'll be up to you to notice where a comic is in the list for that week's releases, or where it is from a different week.  Well, I mentioned that the architecture of this crossover was complex!

Action Comics 1,000,000 – We'll cover this issue in a Superman strand in a later blog entry.

Shadow of the Bat 1,000,000 – “Neverending Story”.  This is a good origin of Batman 1m, framed by a story of the future Batman trying to get to the 20th Century Batcave to begin addressing the crisis.  Alan Grant supplies a tight script that owes something to the great European revenge westerns which he would seem to be a big fan of. 

Nightwing 1,000,000 – This is basically a long conversation between Nightwing and Batman 1m.  It's a fun bridge in the longer arc of Batman 1m stuck in the 20th Century, but it doesn’t have the good classical structure like Shadow.

Scott McDaniel’s art has element of ‘cartooning’, which is as good a point as any to remark that fashions have changed in comics in the last 15 years.

Green Lantern 1,000,000 – 'Star-Crossed'.  This Ron Marz/Brian Hitch collaboration gets across the pathos of Kyle Raynor being the only Green Lantern, subtly pointing out that his line doesn’t continue into the 853rd Century, whereas the rest of the major heroes have proud legacies.  This theme is presented in a very subtle ‘Morrisonian’ way, rather than hitting the reader over the head with it.  Subtle as it is, there is some payoff of this by the end of the series.

The scene-setting double page spread is very Alan Davis-esque, with wonderful artwork that leaves us in no doubt that we are dealing with a weird and wondrous alien culture.  As it should do!

Young Justice 'Just ice, cubed.' 

“Current Location: Pluto.  Current Time: Wednesday in the 853^rdCentury.” 

David's opening text-box betrays his iconoclastic and tongue-in-cheek approach to the material.  The future versions of Young Justice tell each other stories about their 20th Century counterparts, each more ludicrously ill-informed than the last. Superboy 1m's story parodies Doomsday.  Robin the Toy Wonder’s story conflates Final Night, No Man’s Land, Earthquake, Zero Hour and Knightfall, all told in a Batman, The Animated Series style.

This is a very fun issue, even though its clear David isn't taking it too seriously (perhaps because of this!)  It would have been a distraction for David anyway, as this was only the third or so issue of his Young Justice series to be published.

One of the few obvious discrepancies amongst all these tie-ins occurs here.  This story announces it takes place after Superboy 1m visits the Arctic in Superboy 1,000,000, but that story refers to the events here as if they were in the past. 

Perhaps its a minor time-anomaly caused by Hourman’s messing with Deep Time? 

Yeah, that’s it...

That this is practically the only major mix-up between so many comics, written by so many writers, many of which are connected directly to the others in terms of cause and effect, speaks well of Morrison’s overall architecture.

******************************

The Mercury Strand.

Finally we come to the first of our sections looking at comics which make up an inter-related strand.  Only two comics in this strand, both set on Mercury, and both featuring men in red suits with lightning flashes emblazoned on their chests.

Power of Shazam 1,000,000. 

This is a complex, disturbing story.  It's extremely downbeat, as the citizens of Mercury are shown as a thoughtless lot, avaricious for the currency of information, addicted to the babble of headnet, into Kingdom Come-style pointless super-powered fights. A lot happens here, new characters and their society are well drawn in a few pages and then developed and worked into a single story.

Morrison’s hand is evident in the mysteriousness of Shazam’s long slumber and Shazam’s base ‘the Rock of Eternity' being hidden away in a tesseract deep within the machinery of Mercury - the Information hub of the Solar System.  Shazam keeps being compared to the Flash in this story and mistaken for him, and we get hints in this story of Flash’s concurrent adventure, which wouldn’t appear until week 4.  This prefigures their team-up in Flash 1,000,000. 

This thematic association with the Flash prefigures how Morrison links them in his recent writing as bearers of the Mercury/Hermes Flash symbol of inspiration, and avatars of communication and the ‘magic’ of language and information. (Remember that Captain Marvel activates his powers by a Magic Word!)  In Supergods Morrison points out that the second Flash kicked off the Silver Age, and was there when the hugely significant contact with the Golden Age/Earth One was made.  He also notes that the star of the hugely popular and imaginative Captain Marvel comics, which outsold Superman's own comics for a time, also bore the flash symbol of lightning/inspiration descending from the heavens to the Earth.

So the Flash and what he and his Lightning iconography symbolise have great significance in Morrison’s ‘cosmology’ and in this story he is ‘bundling’ the two Lightning-emblazoned heroes that embody the forces of Hermes/Mercury together with the actual planet named Mercury and its 853^rd century role as the hub of information to the whole Solar System.  Again its a kind of poetry in pictures that would be impossible to do in other media.  There is a lot of this bundling and compressing of symbolic roles in Final Crisis, where several characters appearing in the same issue embody similar forces, so it’s interesting to realise that he was doing it in this phase of his career as well.  In the plot of The Power of Shazam 1,000,000, he addresses the dark side of the mercurial forces symbolised by the lightning.

At first I thought that this comic wouldn’t get MY glowing review, as it is so downbeat and paints the citizens of this corner of Morrison’s supposed Utopia as extremely cruel and petty.  The forces of creativity, communication and inspiration that Morrison normally speaks so highly of elsewhere manifest themselves here in the disturbing characteristics and behaviour of the citizens of Mercury.

They are addicted to information and the acquiring of it at all costs, thoughtlessly killing Sutra, the enterprising mother of the hero of the story, whilst stampeding over her in their rush for new experiences and information to acquire and sell.

However, thanks to the conceptual meat of Morrison's plotting and the excellent realisation of Morrison's ideas by Ordway and his collaborators, I eventually developed a higher opinion of this entry in the crossover.

Flash 1,000,000– “Fast Forward”  (Mark Waid and Michael Jan Friedman)

This wraps up some of the themes of the Power of Shazam issue, and seems at first glance to be a well-put-together but unexceptional superhero tale.  'Our' Flash has to save the world of Mercury one million months hence from the depradations of Commander Cold and Heatwave.  A closer look, however shows why Mark Waid is such a consummate professional and a wonderful collaborator with Morrison.  Waid subsumes his story to the broader DC One Million project.  Each issue of these DC One Million comics has an introductory page which summarises the set-up of the series and introduces the reader to a future world which they haven't seen before.

I'm presuming Waid wrote the intro page to Flash 1,000,000, but whoever did added a line which gives some context to the behaviour of the citizens of Mercury in the earlier Shazam book.  It describes “the fast-living culture of rabid info-junkies”.  So Waid (or whoever) gives the reprehensible behaviour of the ‘Mercurians’ some context and explanation, which the earlier story didn't present so explicitly.  The page also points out that Mercury is the connecting point between the brain-sun and the rest of the planets.  So now the name, location and all the mythology of Mercury/Hermes and the Lightning of inspiration/thought/communication are all compressed and presented as a superhero comicbook.

Another thing this issue does is take the time to elaborate on the nature of the poverty suffered by Sutra and Tanist, the main protagonists of The Power of Shazam 1,000,000.  Yes, they have all the basics for living, but they are still marginalised and cut off from the true wealth of this society.  Waid's contribution is one of the few comics I read that really felt like the writer concerned had studied the comics that his would tie directly into.  He seems to be developing the bare ideas Morrison puts forward in the Shazamcomic and making them more presentable and understandable to the general reader.   Perhaps the fact that his issue would come out in week 4 allowed Waid the tiny bit of extra time to do this with his script.

Although this looks like a straightforward confontation between the heroes and two bad guys, a comparison with the other DC One Million comics featuring the adventures of 'our' JLA in the future shows that Waid avoided the trap that the other comics all fell into. Each of them ended up inadvertantly using the same basic plot more or less, as the Green Lantern comic described above, where the hero had to deal with their contest going dangerously haywire and then find a way to get to Jupiter to meet the rest of the JLA there.  This repetition of the same plot makes the DC One Million comics featuring the main JLA stars pretty much the least interesting of all the One Million comics.  Waid wasn't 'Flashy', if you'll excuse the pun, but he put a lot of thought into his work and provided satisfying comics as a result.

I'm reminded of some notes Waid added to one of the trade collections of 52.  He said that he was the perfect choice to script the Ralph Dibney sections of 52 because they chronicle the adventures of a man of science and rationality who has to deal with the mystical and the bizarre encroaching on his life.  Waid declared that this was a great fictional parallel to his own relationship to Morrison.

Waid and Morrison were a great team.  In their rejected proposal for Superman 2000, Waid was specified as the one who would make Morrison's far-out ideas work and keep the feet of the series on the ground.  I can only agree with that assessment of their dynamic.  DC should have made more use of the productive synergy that seemed to flow from their obvious respect for each other's different methods and styles.

That's it for DC One Million, week 1.  I hope you can join me for the next installment of this look back to the future.

454-120313

[Part of our Grant Morrison Reading Project]

Welcome to the second part of my week-by-week look at DC One Million, the JLA mega-crossover from September 1998.  Part 1 can be found here.  Let's jump straight into the Morrison-penned 2nd issue of the central mini-series.

DC One Million #2

There’s a subtext that the future is almost lost thanks to the JLA’s hubris in accepting the honours the 853^rd Century wants to bestow on them. I was surprised, or maybe more like disappointed, when I first read DC One Million, that Batman didn’t want to visit the 853^rd Century to be honoured along with his JLA team-mates. I’ve seen writers argue that comics should give the readers what they need, not what they want, and that’s true here. Batman was actually right. Their duty was to stay where they were needed. The visit to the 853^rd century as proposed seems very short, but it is still too long to be away from their stations, and too ‘far away’ to risk not coming back again.

Of course, if they all declined, there would be no story, but at least we have one good man – possibly the best of them – showing us what the truly responsible attitude would be, and how heroes are often defined by the sacrifices they make.

The Atom refers to how the trip to the future was actually a huge risk that they are now paying for, when he says they need Superman and the Green Lantern and the JLA to cope with the current crisis facing the Earth. Going forward from this, the remaining JLA concern themselves with getting their teammates back from the future, as the first step in addressing the seemingly insurmountable twin problems of the Hourman Virus and Vandal Savage’s bid for world supremacy.

In the Lunar Watchtower, the ragtag remnant of the League, Steel, Zauriel, Huntress, Plastic Man and Big Barda, debate whether or not to try to get to Earth immediately or develop a strategy in the Watchtower. They realise that it’s up to them to save the Earth. They are confused as they aren’t sure what elements of the crisis are caused by Vandal Savage, and what by the Hourman virus.

(Regarding the fog of war, future speedster John Fox also assumes that his time-travel gauntlets were stolen recently as part of Solaris’ plan, but when we get around to reading Chronos 1,000,000, we’ll find out different...)

The Atom hooks up with Oracle and shrinks down to study the Hourman Virus in her bloodstream.

“I don’t usually get this far on a first date”, he quips.

Back in the ‘ground zero’ of Montevideo, some 20th Century superheroes have started fighting with Justice Legion A.  Morrison uses minor ‘science-based’ heroes Firestorm and Ray to make a few points about how many contemporary writers were missing opportunities to make their comics more entertaining and even educational, and less dependent on repetitive punch-em-ups.

It takes J’onn to remind everyone that at the site of a tragedy such as this, they have more dignified and urgent things to be doing than conducting the standard ‘heroes meet and fight’ manoeuvres.

Morrison is having his cake and eating it here, as he’s just had them do just that!

J’onn has an important central role to play in 1998, which is counterpointed by how marginal he seems to those celebrating the JLA in the 853^rd Century. There is some pathos in how both he and Green Lantern are sidelined by that far-future time, especially considering how much we discover that J’onn will sacrifice for the people of Earth in the years between.

The Martian Manhunter was obviously highly regarded by the creators during Morrison’s JLA period, but this is perhaps the storyline where they managed to put that respect and affection into the story, and we see why they talked him up so much in the interviews as the moral centre and heart of the team.

The sense of events spiralling out of control on a grand scale is conveyed with scenes of the military and the President discussing the situation, followed by a scene at Vanishing Point where some 90s Linear Men start to panic about how things are going crazy.

General Eiling mentions the Ultramarines he has on standby in the first scene and the Linear Men refer to Gog’s cross-time killings of Superman in Faces of Evil: Gog and indeed they also refer to The Kingdom, the series to which Gogwas apparently a prequel. Just when everything is getting chaotic might seem like a strange point to signpost upcoming storylines, but it does add to the feeling of bedlam.

Reading these pointers to upcoming storylines featuring General “Shaggy Man” Eiling, the Ultramarines, and the Kingdom, they combine to form a reassuring message that we are in the hands of creators who have worked things through, and that this story, complex as it is, is being built as part of an even grander well-conceived architecture stretching over several years. This is very different to the seat of the pants, chopping and changing that has become DC's modus operandi in recent years. That much, at least was better then...

This is the moment that Vandal Savage reveals his hand. We find that Vandal has started putting the members of the Titans group we saw last issue into the Rocket Red warsuits and firing them as remote-controlled nuclear bombs. In fact, the suit that exploded in Montevideo contained Garth/Aqualad/whatever he was called at this juncture. As in sieges and wars of medieval times, Vandal is using the lives of people beloved of his enemies as psychological warfare. Morrison isn’t just using Vandal as a bad man who has been around a long time, but working the experiences, attitudes and tactics that such a man would have acquired during his life into his scenes.

This is top-flight superheroic action-adventure.

***************************************

The Batman in the Future strand

“This is so far from my world. More than years. More than miles”

Batman 1,000,000 ‘Peril Within the Prison Planet’ Moench and Guichet/Buscema

Despite declining the honour of being feted in the far future, Batman was ambushed by his 853^rd Century counterpart and his ‘soul’ sent forward to inhabit a body in the 853^rd Century. The members of Justice Legion A are not without presumptuous hubris themselves.

As one of the tie-ins showing the adventures of ‘our’ JLA headliners in the year 852,571, this one has pretty much the same plot as the others. The hero is first talked through their ‘challenge’, then manages to get halfway through it when everything goes crazy and their lives are seriously endangered. Then they overcome the obstacles and realise at the end of the comic that they have to reach the Justice Legion A HQ on Jupiter to hook up with their teammates and save the day.

This Batman comic is much the same. It follows a very linear A to B plot as Batman makes his way through the futuristic versions of his rogues gallery imprisoned on Pluto to reach the Batcave where he can access a Boom-suit to take him to Jupiter. The main difference is that his journey isn’t over yet. The Bat-family suite of titles in 1998 was quite extensive and they have been divided up into two strands. One group of Batbooks follow Bruce’s attempts to reach Jupiter in the 853^rd Century, whereas the other follows the adventures of his Justice Legion A counterpart in the 20^th Century.

Perhaps not a lot happens in this comic, but there is plenty of dialogue and the world of Batman 1m is fleshed out well, with plenty of texture added to the background of Morrison’s story. Morrison has developed the idea of Batman representing Hades, God of the Underworld in his modern pantheon by casting the future Batman as the sole jailor of the cold, dark prison planet Pluto. The cleverest twist on the Batman mythos that Morrison has added is the relationship of Robin the Toy Wonder to his Batman.

There’s feeling and sadness and comicbook fun in this scenario. Only in a superhero comic could an adult scarred by such a severe trauma be accompanied on their adventures by something with the persona of their own childhood, pre-traumatised self. Writers of heavy ‘literature’ would struggle to show how the young victim never leaves the adult survivor, but in comicbooks, both personalities can just drive around in a crazy-cool flying car, having a conversation together.

Viewed from a distance, the plotting of the whole saga is quite careful and controlled. Alan Grant’s script for Shadow of the Bat, in Week One, showed us the origin of Batman 1m intercut with his adventures in 1998. It worked very well as a story-based insight into his psyche and what had made him what he is. However, it says nothing about the bittersweet ‘saving grace’ that Batman 1m was granted, in being accompanied by a robot with the persona of his innocent, younger self programmed into it. The revelations are being measured out week by week. The hand of a single guiding architect on all of the tie-ins becomes more and more evident as we go through this event.

Morrison’s notes are all very well. The origins of Batman 1m and his Toy Wonder add up to a very clever twist on the Batman myth, which also comments tellingly on the whole mythos. The childhood persona of Batman wouldn’t be as well used in a story until Neil Gaiman’s Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader in 2009. Whatever about how great these concepts are, Alan Grant and Doug Moench (and as we shall see, Chuck Dixon), each do excellent work in translating those notes into stories. Alan Grant’s is a more self-contained revenge tale. As is clear from so many of his Judge Dredd stories, Grant would seem to be a big fan of Spaghetti Westerns, and his Batman 1m story is very like a revenge western in that mode. Moench’s linear narrative is less self-contained, but is a fun segment of Bruce’s journey as we accompany him on one portion of his long quest to get off Pluto.

‘Our’ Batman in the 853^rd Century can be followed in Catwoman 1,000,000 and then Robin 1,000,000, before Bruce finally gets to Justice Legion A HQ in DC One Million#3 (in week 4).

Catwoman 1,000,000 Devin Grayson and Jim Ballent (week 4)

I was looking forward to reading this comic as I find Devin Grayson’s personal story of how she became a DC writer a fascinating one, and I was hoping for an opportunity to talk about her work through this DC One Million tie-in. Alas, her input here seems to be quite minimal as she only seems to have supplied the dialogue after Ballent had plotted and drawn the comic, Marvel style. Even then her work is twice removed, as Ballent would have been working from Morrison’s plot notes in the first place.

As for Ballent, I have heard his name mentioned in despatches but my knowledge of his work doesn't extend past his fondness for drawing bowling-ball breasted women. Catwoman 1m’s physique doesn’t diverge from his usual depiction of the female form.

Of course, an artist of Ballent’s school has to be up to the difficult (but, it seems, necessary) task of posing the female body so that her boobs and her butt are both on display. In Catwoman1,000,000, however, Ballent goes the extra mile for Morrison’s project and gives us a single frame where the same woman is showing T&A in 3 of the 4 poses in the frame. You go, Jim!

Catwoman 1m has to get through the computer defences to allow Batman access to the Boom Suit which will take him to Justice Legion A’s HQ on Jupiter. This being an age when information is the most valuable currency, Batman 1m’s burglar foe is a hacker who can break into any programme and steal data.

The linear plot involves the old trope where what we know of as programming firewalls and virus protection are manifested as robots and sealed doors that Catwoman has to get past. Morrison would return to this story set-up with issue 8 of Batman Inc (Vol 1) where Oracle is the master hacker.

What’s amusing is that the terminology for 853^rd Century programming and hacking dated after just 15 years never mind 83,000 years later, with lines like the following - 

‘As quiet as a headnet chatroom lobby’

‘Password accepted. Next screen’

‘a 404 wasteland’

One of Grayson’s non-superhero projects was a mini-series called ‘User’, about a young woman who became obsessed with a computer role-playing fantasy life, so perhaps Grayson was a good choice to write the computer hacker version of Catwoman.  Grayson and Mark Waid were an item around this time, so perhaps Morrison knew a little about her, and plotted this issue towards her interests to some extent.

Robin 1,000,000 (week 4) Chuck Dixon, Staz Johnson and Stan Woch.

This is the final chapter of the ‘Bruce Wayne in the 853^rdCentury’ strand, before he joins his teammates for the rest of the adventure.

Like the others the plot simply involves Batman getting a little closer to the means for getting off Pluto and on his way to Jupiter, the headquarters of Justice Legion A, and in this one he eventually makes it off the planet.

This is a fine little comic. There are some nice lines in it, such as the “More than years. More than miles” realisation which occurs to Bruce here. Batman is also told that “The light of billions more stars reach us than in your day” in a surprising little revelation when he leaves Pluto’s solid ice atmosphere.  Points like this make the science fiction seem more real, and this particular point highlights the themes of optimism and hope that run through the whole crossover.

Doug Moench, Alan Grant and Chuck Dixon are all to be praised how they manage to handle the fresh new concepts while still fitting them into well-crafted stories, full of meaningful character moments. As we shall see in the Legionnaires / Legion of Superheroes issues, a bunch of cool and weird Morrison ideas thrown into a comic do not always a great story make, if you don’t have something in there that engages the heart too.

Robin 1,000,000 is an especially good spotlight on the title character. The Toy Wonder might be Morrison’s single cleverest idea in the whole series. It really illuminates the relationship between Batman and Robin, and cleverly makes what is just figurative – that Robin is the younger, innocent form of Batman - into something that is literally real, and dramatised in front of us.

The little guy makes the ultimate sacrifice for Batman here and gets a rather heart-tugging death scene.

“Dying? Diagnostics gone to black -- Time for a new model --“

“-- Going now -- Back to the headnet.. “

Awww!  Poor little guy!

(I will have more to say on Robin faith in a net-enabled eternal life in my next installment.)

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The Rest of Week 2

(I'll be looking at Man of Steel, Starman, Green Arrow and Legionnaires in future posts.)

Impulse 1,000,000 William Messner – Loebs & Craig Rousseau

"Desperate Times -- A Million"

In this comic, John Fox, the Flash of the Future, teams up with Impulse to stop the Rocket Red suit manned by Jessie Quick from hitting its target.

The comic hits the right plot beats, and the time spent with the characters is pleasant enough, probably helped by the fact that we are in the hands of the regular creative team of the time, and Waid had done such good work establishing the great Flash family set-up and supporting cast which Impulse benefits from.

Reading it as part of a complete readthrough of DC One Million, however, much of the content of this comic is redundant. There is a lot of space given over to explaining the back-story to this issue – essentially all the important plot elements of DC One Million of the first two weeks. Of course, this is to bring regular readers of Impulse, who haven’t bought into the important issues of the crossover up to –ahem – speed. All the background info does highlight what a strange beast DC One Millionis.

Morrison would go on to sell Seven Soldiers of Victory as a modular story that could be read in a number of ways. A reader could follow a particular character or characters as 4-issue arcs, or they could read the issues ‘chronologically’ so that the issues starring the seperate characters are interspliced with each other.

The fact is, however, that Seven Soldiers of Victory adds up to a self-contained story, that sooner or later a reader has to read as a single work for it to all add up and make sense. DC One Million, however, is a truly modular story, that was designed to be enjoyed whether the reader read every issue, or just a handful of them. Possibly a reader might only read Impulse, and still get their DC One Million story’. At the other end of the scale however, there must have been very few readers who bought all the issues of the crossover. It would have cost an outlay of around US$80 at 1998 prices, and involved the reader taking a punt on a huge array of creative teams and comic series that they would already have an opinion on.

(As for seeing a complete 'Absolute' edition of it now, I'd imagine that the cheif obstacle is that the permissions and royalty rates for each and every creative team involved would have to be negotiated, and perhaps the lawyers and administrative costs of that are prohibitive.)

Whereas SSoV was meant to be collected eventually as an artistically complete ‘whole’, DC One Million looks meant to be experienced differently by each and every reader who buys into some or all of it. As many of the issues were, like Impulse 1,000,000, presented as another monthly adventure in a longer series, then the crossover opens out at various points to include whole series, as with Impulse and Starman.

For myself, I only bought the Morrison-penned issues and a handful of other comics that I’d been buying anyway. What I read then was a hyper-compressed JLA story that affected me in two notable ways. First it gave me the same thrill that superhero comics gave me when I was 10, which is quite an achievement. Secondly, it was one of a handful of reading experiences around the late 90s that made me realise that Superman is actually a hugely interesting and worthwhile character with more to his personality and his potential, than just the big dumb boy-scout that The Dark Knight Returnshad painted him as.

Reading DC One Million now (and rereading it over and over for these blog posts), it is a huge, baggy epic that contains so many different storytelling styles and tones, and curious side stories. I also see more clearly the single unifying hand behind it all in some very complex plotting that hit its beats week on week, to tell one long complex story that in one month ‘contained’ the entire DCU of its time.

The bagginess, profusion of styles and untidiness is very Morrison, as is the deceptively well-hidden deeper structure and the ‘fractal’ effect of containing everything about the DCU, including just about all its creative staff, in one story told over one month’s output.

Azrael 1,000,000 Denny O’Neill/Vincent Giarrano

I mentioned last week that this was one of the worst, most insulting comics that I’ve ever read. Perhaps I shouldn’t take it so seriously. It’s clear that the rightly esteemed and venerable Denny O’Neill didn’t take it his contribution to DC One Million at all seriously.

We begin with the reconvened Order of St Dumas bestowing a powerful costume and wings on a blonde, long-haired muscle-brain type much beloved of 90s fanboys. The comedy turns on how stupid this champion of justice turns out to be, but that leaves us wondering how he was picked for the role in the first place.

I guess O’Neill is having fun with what certain Hollywood scriptwriters found to be the central comedic thrust of the Green Lantern mythos. If you give all that power to some guy, what happens if he turns out to be a klutz?

Thus Azrael 1m travels through space and time, trailing chaos and needless death in his wake. At one point he almost gets the original Azrael killed by Two-Face, and then kills a Frixit, which a group of Thanagarian Hawkmen were watching over until it wakes up from its centuries-long sleep. Usually the Frixit goes on a cosmic destruction spree, but just sometimes, if it happens to be a Bodlean Frixit, its awakening hastens an age of enlightenment and harmony. Guess which one Azrael discovers this one was after he kills it?

Finally he gets a lesson on the nature of evil from his Mentor Sister Dumas, whose cod-profundity betrays O’Neill’s hippy Sixties roots.

The more I read this stupid comic about a stupid lunkhead the more it makes me smile. Sometimes comics are just dumb, preposterous stuff that passes 10 minutes of your time.

Denny O’Neill wrote some of the most interesting and ambitious comics DC had produced in the previous few decades, and his stewardship of the Batman titles in the Eighties was assured and consistent, even if some of the directions they took might be frowned on in hindsight.

As O’Neill was such a senior DC figure, it’s hard not to see this Azrael 1,000,000 as a thumbing of the nose at Morrison’s whole project. It just feels so tossed off and dismissive of what DC One Million was about. This sense that I get of O'Neill's lack of engagement, verging on contempt for the project, is all the stranger when we consider that O'Neill was the senior editor of the whole Bat-line at this time and the other Batman comics lock into the overall story pretty well.  Thematically, Azrael 1,000,000 rips right through the central thesis of the whole project: that we can trust people endowed with great power to act for the greater good, and with a degree of responsibility and restraint commensurate with their power.  Admittedly real-life would seem to indicate that those with power tend to be motivated by the heedless self-absorption shown by Azrael here, but still...

I’m only guessing that O’Neill diverged from Morrison’s plot (and probably ignored it completely) to write this comic. It’s hard to imagine Morrison pegging O’Neill, the regular writer of Azrael, from the outset, as the guy to write a comedy issue. It’s a pity O’Neill didn’t give it his best shot, as some great creators were able to harness Morrison’s far-out ideas to their own strengths to put some very fine comics on the shelves in September 1998.

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That's it for Part Two.  Thanks for reading along.  Hope you can join us for Week 3, where the epic events on Earth, 1998 head towards a resolution.