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alibi_shopA lot of odd things that happened in US mainstream comics in the '90s and late '80s would've been less surprising to people who'd been reading British comics about ten years earlier. The anthology magazines Warrior and 2000 AD produced heaps of wild SF/fantasy stories, some of which later got reprinted or continued in the US (Judge Dredd, Marvelman/Miracleman, V for Vendetta), but most of which never caught on over here due to being too stylistically different or too violent or too British for the time. These comics didn't look at all like what mainstream US publishers were putting out, nor like the glossy stuff that Heavy Metal was importing from Europe in the '80s; the art was mostly black and white, sometimes fantastically detailed and sometimes energetically amateurish, and the stories were a blend of SF and B-movie tropes from the last few decades with the attitude dialed up to 11.
The UK had done standard superhero comics too, a little, but they'd rarely taken off: the biggest success, Marvelman (originally a straight ripoff of Captain Marvel/Shazam), had faded away for 20 years before returning as Alan Moore's dark grown-up version in Warrior; Marvel Comics (no relation) tried in the '70s and '80s to promote some British characters, without much luck. But even if writers there weren't doing much of that kind of thing, they had read a lot of it and had ideas about it, as DC found out when it took a chance on Alan Moore for Swamp Thing; after he'd done well with that, they gave Swamp Thing editor Karen Berger a free hand to hire a bunch of other weirdos she'd noticed overseas. Grant Morrison, age 28, was one of those—mostly because of a single series they had recently started at 2000 AD, their first ongoing series in fact, with an inexperienced artist who was finding his way just as Morrison was.
Zenith: Phase One, in 2000 AD #535-550 (1987)
Zenith: Phase Two, in 2000 AD #589-606 (1988)
Zenith: Phase Three, in 2000 AD #626-670 (1989-1990)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Steve Yeowell
Zenith is an uneasy mix of ideas without much in common except a desire to be awesome. It's trying to do the type of grim ultra-violent revisionist superhero material that Moore had done with his Marvelman revival in Warrior five years earlier—and when I say "the type of", I mean that at times it reads like a straight-up remake of Marvelman; to save space, from here on I'll write (IMMA) whenever "it's Marvelman again". Alongside the usual science-fictional trappings of that type of story there are gestures toward epic horror-fantasy, with some cosmic demon villains borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft (at a time when that wasn't yet as popular as it is now). And it's also—at least for a little while—a cheerfully goofy satire where the title character is an ultra-'80s pop-star idiot, the last known superhero after a previous generation of heroes retired or disappeared, who's totally unqualified to save the world. That part came from Brendan McCarthy, who (as he tells it) contributed the idea and some character designs but then got fed up with Morrison and left the project for Steve Yeowell to draw. If you look at McCarthy's sketches in the reprint collections, you can see the more antic direction that the story might have taken... but as it is, the idea of Zenith being a celebrity wastrel is more or less forgotten about except for him saying snotty things every so often.
our guy looks like this a fair amount of the time In the first volume you can see Morrison trying their hand credibly at various kinds of genre effects and action scenes, while also leaning pretty hard on homage and cliché. The title dude isn't particularly interesting or funny past the basic joke of his celebrity status and his look; there's some mystery about his origin and his parents, but that's a dead end. There's a lot of standard superhero fight scene stuff with the usual WHUDD, THRAKK, etc. which (to my eye at least) isn't a great fit for dense black-and-white art with crowded page layouts. The idea that superheroes were in fact designed just to give the cosmic demons a sturdy enough body to possess is enjoyably perverse, but in practice it means that we get a lot of scenes of a big bulky Nazi devil dude, who looks boring and has a costume that requires Yeowell to draw swastikas all the damn time, gruesomely destroying people (IMMA) and talking like a standard satanic tough guy. And the big confrontation basically gets resolved by revealing that Zenith seemed like he wasn't very powerful but actually he is very powerful. Yeowell's art for all of this is basically up to the task, but his figures are often awkward and it seems like he's trying to do kind of an Alan Davis style, which isn't well suited to his skills (or to the wackier aspects of the material; the design for Zenith in particular looks great in McCarthy's sketches, all lanky and cartoony with his absurdly big jacket and hair, but not so much when Yeowell draws the same costume on a basically normal person).
one of the more familiar things that happen But some more promising stuff shows through here and there. Whenever Yeowell gets to break away from semi-realistic rendering and do wilder things like the hippie-Dr.-Strange visuals for the '60s hero Mandala, or the point of view of an interdimensional monster, or the occasional bit where he tries stripping a panel down to just a few lines and shadows, you can see the beginnings of his mature style; and when Morrison isn't trying so hard to move the plot along or to gross you out with Nazi demon stuff, they sometimes come out with lyrical narration that may be in a very familiar style (IMMA) but is still kind of lovely, like when two heroes are practicing their powers together by making thunderclouds ("I drew down the lightning and the whole cloud lit up suddenly from within, becoming a vast ghostly lantern of charmed air and water vapour"). There are little flashes of darker satire, like when an old World War Two veteran runs into swastika-man, mistakes him for a local boy, and tells him fascists aren't so bad if they're at least British. And I was surprised to find that the character Morrison seems most at home with in this section, in terms of making him a complicated and genuinely funny person, is the grown-up version of Mandala who's got a haircut and a suit and is now a Tory politician; for Morrison that's probably nearly as bad as being a Lovecraftian cosmic demon, but they use enough emotional imagination to make the character more than a satirical genre prop.
one of the less familiar things that happen It's definitely improved a bit by the end of the first book, but the jump in quality between the first and second books is still startling; I've rarely seen a comic improve so fast. Some of the same problems exist: Zenith himself is still a dud, the punching-people-through-walls scenes are pretty generic, and ultimately the plot doesn't amount to much except that Zenith finally finds out who his parents were (it doesn't really matter), and convinces a guy not to blow up London. But that stuff isn't in the foreground so much. Yeowell's art is at a whole other level now that he's figured out how to simplify his rendering, and Morrison is now more interested in things like setting up a bunch of parallel worlds in order to make up a whole lot of other superheroes who were too far out for the original setting, and giving Yeowell much odder and more unsettling stuff to draw—like Mandala floating up in the clouds in his business suit (IMMA) while he waits to be annihilated by missiles, or a giant robot with a drooling semi-conscious human head hidden inside it, or a tripped-out baby demigod transforming itself into everything in the universe. Doom Patrol a short while later would provide a chance to play like that full-time. Also, when the coolest-looking gang of parallel-world superheroes shows up, they're... an anarchist collective (called Black Flag of course) who say things like "Ayers Rock is geomantically active" and "an Einstein-Rosen bridge, psychically generated", and who will take the time to give Buddhist-ish/New Age last rites to you if you're horribly dying; there'll be more of that spirit in The Invisibles, though it's only briefly in this.
the cool kids finally arrive Things get more hectic and plot-driven, and yet more boring, in book three as Morrison brings back the cosmic demons and abandons everything in the series that was at all on a personal scale: now it's all about the fate of multiple universes, and we're constantly meeting dozens of random new superheroes we don't know anything about, so that finding out that they're dead or insane or possessed doesn't have the impact that it's probably meant to—nor does hearing over and over again about all the massive atrocities that have happened to one world after another. (Summarizing atrocities is something Morrison clearly finds interesting, and they've gotten pretty good at it by this point, trying out different kinds of horror apocalypse imagery that's only briefly seen but memorably described. But unlike the most obvious influence for this (IMMA), where it was a brief spasm of horror that vividly established just how bad things could get, here they establish that early on and then keep on riffing on it, in case we weren't yet sufficiently scared of the ultimate evil.) It's hard to tell if Morrison has just gotten tired of the story, or is now trying out their genre chops in the realm of Marvel/DC-style mega-crossover events—maybe in some mad experiment to see whether such events could still work if their whole cast of thousands was made up on the spot*—or both. The title hero is still a dud (although Yeowell is now drawing him in a Brendan McCarthy style, which is fun), very similar dramatic things happen again and again, and I find myself tuning out a lot. On the craft level of writing and art on a sentence-by-sentence and panel-by-panel basis, it keeps getting more and more assured, the style is distinct and confident, but it's not really about anything but the style and the constant acceleration.
I'd like to think that Morrison realized they'd taken this kind of wheel-spinning escalation of overstuffed Armageddons as far as they could and got it out of their system, but from what I've heard about Final Crisis they did continue to make a living at it now and then. Still, over the next decade or so they moved on to some pretty different things, and while ultimately I don't like Zenith much beyond the visuals, it did work as a scratch-pad for getting down some ideas and preoccupations that they would make more of elsewhere.
Next: Morrison gives Yeowell somewhat quieter things to draw in Sebastian O
The UK had done standard superhero comics too, a little, but they'd rarely taken off: the biggest success, Marvelman (originally a straight ripoff of Captain Marvel/Shazam), had faded away for 20 years before returning as Alan Moore's dark grown-up version in Warrior; Marvel Comics (no relation) tried in the '70s and '80s to promote some British characters, without much luck. But even if writers there weren't doing much of that kind of thing, they had read a lot of it and had ideas about it, as DC found out when it took a chance on Alan Moore for Swamp Thing; after he'd done well with that, they gave Swamp Thing editor Karen Berger a free hand to hire a bunch of other weirdos she'd noticed overseas. Grant Morrison, age 28, was one of those—mostly because of a single series they had recently started at 2000 AD, their first ongoing series in fact, with an inexperienced artist who was finding his way just as Morrison was.
Zenith: Phase One, in 2000 AD #535-550 (1987)
Zenith: Phase Two, in 2000 AD #589-606 (1988)
Zenith: Phase Three, in 2000 AD #626-670 (1989-1990)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Steve Yeowell
Zenith is an uneasy mix of ideas without much in common except a desire to be awesome. It's trying to do the type of grim ultra-violent revisionist superhero material that Moore had done with his Marvelman revival in Warrior five years earlier—and when I say "the type of", I mean that at times it reads like a straight-up remake of Marvelman; to save space, from here on I'll write (IMMA) whenever "it's Marvelman again". Alongside the usual science-fictional trappings of that type of story there are gestures toward epic horror-fantasy, with some cosmic demon villains borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft (at a time when that wasn't yet as popular as it is now). And it's also—at least for a little while—a cheerfully goofy satire where the title character is an ultra-'80s pop-star idiot, the last known superhero after a previous generation of heroes retired or disappeared, who's totally unqualified to save the world. That part came from Brendan McCarthy, who (as he tells it) contributed the idea and some character designs but then got fed up with Morrison and left the project for Steve Yeowell to draw. If you look at McCarthy's sketches in the reprint collections, you can see the more antic direction that the story might have taken... but as it is, the idea of Zenith being a celebrity wastrel is more or less forgotten about except for him saying snotty things every so often.
our guy looks like this a fair amount of the time In the first volume you can see Morrison trying their hand credibly at various kinds of genre effects and action scenes, while also leaning pretty hard on homage and cliché. The title dude isn't particularly interesting or funny past the basic joke of his celebrity status and his look; there's some mystery about his origin and his parents, but that's a dead end. There's a lot of standard superhero fight scene stuff with the usual WHUDD, THRAKK, etc. which (to my eye at least) isn't a great fit for dense black-and-white art with crowded page layouts. The idea that superheroes were in fact designed just to give the cosmic demons a sturdy enough body to possess is enjoyably perverse, but in practice it means that we get a lot of scenes of a big bulky Nazi devil dude, who looks boring and has a costume that requires Yeowell to draw swastikas all the damn time, gruesomely destroying people (IMMA) and talking like a standard satanic tough guy. And the big confrontation basically gets resolved by revealing that Zenith seemed like he wasn't very powerful but actually he is very powerful. Yeowell's art for all of this is basically up to the task, but his figures are often awkward and it seems like he's trying to do kind of an Alan Davis style, which isn't well suited to his skills (or to the wackier aspects of the material; the design for Zenith in particular looks great in McCarthy's sketches, all lanky and cartoony with his absurdly big jacket and hair, but not so much when Yeowell draws the same costume on a basically normal person). one of the more familiar things that happen But some more promising stuff shows through here and there. Whenever Yeowell gets to break away from semi-realistic rendering and do wilder things like the hippie-Dr.-Strange visuals for the '60s hero Mandala, or the point of view of an interdimensional monster, or the occasional bit where he tries stripping a panel down to just a few lines and shadows, you can see the beginnings of his mature style; and when Morrison isn't trying so hard to move the plot along or to gross you out with Nazi demon stuff, they sometimes come out with lyrical narration that may be in a very familiar style (IMMA) but is still kind of lovely, like when two heroes are practicing their powers together by making thunderclouds ("I drew down the lightning and the whole cloud lit up suddenly from within, becoming a vast ghostly lantern of charmed air and water vapour"). There are little flashes of darker satire, like when an old World War Two veteran runs into swastika-man, mistakes him for a local boy, and tells him fascists aren't so bad if they're at least British. And I was surprised to find that the character Morrison seems most at home with in this section, in terms of making him a complicated and genuinely funny person, is the grown-up version of Mandala who's got a haircut and a suit and is now a Tory politician; for Morrison that's probably nearly as bad as being a Lovecraftian cosmic demon, but they use enough emotional imagination to make the character more than a satirical genre prop. one of the less familiar things that happen It's definitely improved a bit by the end of the first book, but the jump in quality between the first and second books is still startling; I've rarely seen a comic improve so fast. Some of the same problems exist: Zenith himself is still a dud, the punching-people-through-walls scenes are pretty generic, and ultimately the plot doesn't amount to much except that Zenith finally finds out who his parents were (it doesn't really matter), and convinces a guy not to blow up London. But that stuff isn't in the foreground so much. Yeowell's art is at a whole other level now that he's figured out how to simplify his rendering, and Morrison is now more interested in things like setting up a bunch of parallel worlds in order to make up a whole lot of other superheroes who were too far out for the original setting, and giving Yeowell much odder and more unsettling stuff to draw—like Mandala floating up in the clouds in his business suit (IMMA) while he waits to be annihilated by missiles, or a giant robot with a drooling semi-conscious human head hidden inside it, or a tripped-out baby demigod transforming itself into everything in the universe. Doom Patrol a short while later would provide a chance to play like that full-time. Also, when the coolest-looking gang of parallel-world superheroes shows up, they're... an anarchist collective (called Black Flag of course) who say things like "Ayers Rock is geomantically active" and "an Einstein-Rosen bridge, psychically generated", and who will take the time to give Buddhist-ish/New Age last rites to you if you're horribly dying; there'll be more of that spirit in The Invisibles, though it's only briefly in this. the cool kids finally arrive Things get more hectic and plot-driven, and yet more boring, in book three as Morrison brings back the cosmic demons and abandons everything in the series that was at all on a personal scale: now it's all about the fate of multiple universes, and we're constantly meeting dozens of random new superheroes we don't know anything about, so that finding out that they're dead or insane or possessed doesn't have the impact that it's probably meant to—nor does hearing over and over again about all the massive atrocities that have happened to one world after another. (Summarizing atrocities is something Morrison clearly finds interesting, and they've gotten pretty good at it by this point, trying out different kinds of horror apocalypse imagery that's only briefly seen but memorably described. But unlike the most obvious influence for this (IMMA), where it was a brief spasm of horror that vividly established just how bad things could get, here they establish that early on and then keep on riffing on it, in case we weren't yet sufficiently scared of the ultimate evil.) It's hard to tell if Morrison has just gotten tired of the story, or is now trying out their genre chops in the realm of Marvel/DC-style mega-crossover events—maybe in some mad experiment to see whether such events could still work if their whole cast of thousands was made up on the spot*—or both. The title hero is still a dud (although Yeowell is now drawing him in a Brendan McCarthy style, which is fun), very similar dramatic things happen again and again, and I find myself tuning out a lot. On the craft level of writing and art on a sentence-by-sentence and panel-by-panel basis, it keeps getting more and more assured, the style is distinct and confident, but it's not really about anything but the style and the constant acceleration.I'd like to think that Morrison realized they'd taken this kind of wheel-spinning escalation of overstuffed Armageddons as far as they could and got it out of their system, but from what I've heard about Final Crisis they did continue to make a living at it now and then. Still, over the next decade or so they moved on to some pretty different things, and while ultimately I don't like Zenith much beyond the visuals, it did work as a scratch-pad for getting down some ideas and preoccupations that they would make more of elsewhere.
Next: Morrison gives Yeowell somewhat quieter things to draw in Sebastian O
update
2020-06-20 02:23 (UTC)