2/8 The Multiversity Annotations Pt 10

LIBRARY artefact #042

Vying with The Just as my personal favourite of the Multiversity books, this was my attempt to do what I can only describe as nihilistic cosmic!

If Society was pulp and The Just was ‘90s via The Hills. If Pax was Moore, and Mastermen was Millar, Ultra Comics started with the idea of creating a contemporary take on the formative Marvel comics I discovered aged 14, after a lifetime’s dedication to DC.

I was the perfect age for the books of Marvel’s ‘cosmic’ era in the early to mid-‘70s -  Starlin’s Captain Marvel and Warlock, Engelhart and Brunner’s Dr. Strange, Steve Gerber’s Defenders and Howard the Duck, Don McGregor on Black Panther and Killraven – and they remain probably my biggest influences as a comics writer, after Len Wein, John Broome, and Jack Kirby.

I love working with artist Doug Mahnke, and together we’ve created some of my all-time favourite stories -  this one, the Frankenstein series and especially Superman Beyond. His work here is exemplary, and he was able to keep up with and improve upon my wildest ideas.

The cosmic books of the ‘70s were written and drawn by a younger, second generation of Marvel creators, many emerging from the ‘60s ‘youthquake’ - college kids, acidheads, ‘longhairs’, young and firing on all cylinders. They took their comics very seriously, as vehicles for political, cultural, and philosophical musings, and along with UK contemporary Bryan Talbot, they greatly influenced those of us, especially the British writers and artists, who would form the next wave.

The comic that started me down the Marvel path was Jim Starlin’s seminal Captain Marvel #29 June 1974 – featuring a game-changing story entitled Metamorphosis, which rewired my impressionable young brain and gave me a new vision of what was possible in superhero comics.

So to Ultra Comics, set on Earth-33 of the Multiverse. Originally Earth-Prime, Earth-33 was ‘our’ world, or at least a reasonable facsimile.

Earth-Prime first appeared in quirky ‘60s stories where we’d read about the Flash travelling to Earth-Prime to meet editor Julie Schwartz and writer Gardner Fox in drawings of the actual DC offices. Or in mad adventures where writers Cary Bates and Martin Pasko travelled from our own world to Earth-1, causing a deranged Bates to become a costumed villain while Pasko must stop his former friend and colleague’s rampage!

Those stories, which destabilized the boundaries between what was real and what might be (maybe Julie Schwartz actually did have a Cosmic Treadmill in his office, gifted to him by the Flash) gave me the foundation for my entire approach to superhero comics; the anthropological approach as I’ve often referred to it, where we of ‘Earth-Prime’ embrace and immerse ourselves in the weird wild rules of the very real, evolving, paper 2-D continuum of DC Universe, rather than deriding their implausibility and subjecting the charming customs and dress codes of the super-people to the grim imperatives and limitations of our own world (the missionary position!).

Like most convenient binaries, the anthropologist/missionary paradigm offers an overly simplistic division, suggesting heroes and villains, but its broad applications allowed me to explore a different path from many of my contemporaries who were intent on bringing ‘realism’ to superhero stories.

Instead, my American superhero work became an exploration of a geography – both physical, as an ongoing paper continuum we can hold in our hands, and conceptual, in the form of the ever-shifting DC universe with its cities, countries and planets.

So it was with Animal Man where I interacted with the characters, or Seven Soldiers where characters interacted directly with readers, on to Ultra Comics, the final application of those explorations into the DC universe, where the comic and the audience combine to become our real world’s first bona fide superhero! A superhero made of ink and paper and staples but a ‘real’ superhuman being nonetheless. One we can touch and interact with and most importantly become.

I wanted this to quote the classic Flash cover, issue #163 from 1966,  that is to me an ur-image and to suggest a contemporary style magazine feel. As usual, Rian Hughes came through with this arch, ‘Hoxton’ influenced design.

I was influenced here by Stan Lee’s narration in his very first Spider-Man story with Steve Ditko, (Amazing Fantasy #15, 1962) where Lee addresses the readers directly, using caption boxes to create a confidante and pal reading the comic along with us. This was a technique that seemed ripe for updating and reconsidering.

To update it, I read extensively on ‘pre-suasion’ sales techniques to create the Man’s speech at the beginning and the opening commercial presentation of the concept.

The lead character here ‘is’ literally Ultra Comics in a buddy team-up with his readers. The physical comic book you hold in your hands is the hero! This is the only way a real superhero can appear in our world – on a flat page or screen.

What makes Ultra Comics different is the way the comic interacts with the individual reader. By reading the book, we become part of a network of minds across time and space, readers in other times and places concentrating their attention on these words and images.

Ultra Comics allows its readers to become a real superhero in the real world – a living part of a time-and-space-spanning Multi-Mind!

And we get to fight a terrifying Lovecraftian hyper-villain from another, fictional universe!

He is a self-aware comic book, so his actual body is made of paper and the flesh he co-opts when we read him. Within the pages of his form, he is represented as a classic white, blonde blue-eyed Nordic ‘lightning’ superhero – of the kind critiqued in Mastermen. In truth, he’s an aspect of Marvelman, the first superhero I encountered at the age of 3, along with self-awareness, the Beatles ‘She Loves You’, (a song the whole world needs to listen to more closely to as an upbeat anthem for the Aeon of Ma’at and Sophia and the death of the DadGod – you burned down the world, Boy but still She loves you… apologize to her…yeah, yeah, yeah), and Dr. Who. Marvelman, who became the poster boy for what we could do to children’s characters to make them relevant and meaningful again to adults, all the way to the MCU.

The words ‘NOT A HOAX! NOT A DREAM! NOT AN IMAGINARY STORY!’ were often used on Silver Age Superman covers as a guarantee that the story we were being told was a ‘real’ story of the canonical character, not a ‘pretend’ one where, for instance, Superman marries Jimmy Olsen and their thought-child grows up to be Mr. Myxzptlk, or Lana Lang time travels to Krypton and becomes Superman’s wet nurse/Torquasm-vo instructrix/'mom’…

I was very pleased with the one-panel summations of the ‘Ages’ of comics here – Gold, Silver, Dark and Modern as Ultra Comics is programmed with consensus superhero history, recapitulating my schema from Flex Mentallo and Supergods.

For the Golden Age, Ultra Comics is punching out the petty crook who shot Thomas and Martha Wayne in front of their son, Bruce! His costume is a little more wrinkled, stretched and utilitarian, and his dialogue is simplistic and to the point  - ‘TAKE THAT, BUSTER!’ The voice of the working Joe striking back against corruption and graft. The simple, sock ‘em, backstreet vigilante justice of the earliest superheroes, or ‘mystery men’ as they were back then. Foiling crime on the mean streets. This is childhood’s moral straightforwardness. We know who the goodies and baddies are.

The Silver Age is represented as dawning polymorphous sexuality; space, planets, and the threatening, exciting influx of alien ideas. ‘I’LL SAVE YOU!’ Ultra Comics’ 12-year-old white knight desire is simply to rescue the ridiculously nubile mini-skirted girl next door from the queer wriggling tentacles of the distorted masses. Menacing grown-ups with strange desires have infested picket fence reality. This is pre-pubescent dawning sexuality.

The Dark Age image combines several classic motifs from the ‘70s/’80s and early ‘90s – the dead sidekick in urban ruins, the atom bomb, the hero exposed, made culpable, ‘realistic’. ‘WHY?’ He screams. This is teenage angst.

For the Modern Age, we went with ultraviolence and self-awareness as its defining characteristics. Animal Man’s wonderstruck, 4^th wall breaking ‘I CAN SEE YOU!’ from Animal Man #18 has become Ultra Comics’s snarling accusatory ‘WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?’ as we catch him punching through a villain’s ribcage, in blood-spattered Geoff Johns style. This is jaded adulthood. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods…’

Ultra Comics’ ‘ultragem’ which harnesses ‘THE ACCUMULATED POWER OF THOUSANDS OF MINDS – IN DIFFERENT TIMES AND PLACES— AN UNFORESEEN ASSEMBLAGE OF NETWORKED MULTIPLE MINDS COMBINED IN ONE SINGLE, SUPER-POWERED FORM!’ calls back to Adam Warlock’s ‘soul gem’ also embedded in his forehead, and further into my teenage reading to Dorian Hawmoon’s Black Jewel from Michael Moorcock’s books. Made of ‘IMAGINATION IN SOLID CRYSTAL FORM’ the Ultragem provides the interface ‘WHERE YOU AND ULTRA COMICS BECOME ONE LIVING ORGANISM.’

Ultra Comics, ‘AN IDEA SO POWERFUL IT THINKS IT’S ALIVE.’

The voice changes as Ultra Comics is sent on his mission, becoming a Stan Lee-inflected call to action…

‘GET READY TO TURN THAT PAGE! ACTIVATE ULTRA COMICS DEBUT ADVENTURE! A NAKEDLY ALLEGORICAL TALE WE JUST HADDA CALL… OUT OF HIS BOX!’

Out of his box meaning ‘just created’. Also set free from the confining comic panel or box. Also ‘crazy’.  

Ultra makes good use of the 1^st person monologue captions he’s been given!

‘70s comics often used the full range of narrative voices – from the omniscient 3^rd person via the direct-to-character 2^nd person to the 1^st person internal stream of consciousness.

The urgent 2^nd person approach was used a lot by writer Roy Thomas speaking to the superhero, often by name, as if guiding his characters or providing support – although from what source the character might hear these extradimensional directions, we never find out!

‘Think, Man With The Multi Mind, think!’ is typical of those urgent imperatives and pays homage to Roy the Boy Thomas and great lines such as these from Avengers #93, during Ant Man’s microscopic voyage into the Vision’s android body, where Thomas harangues Ant Man as if he’s one of his students!

‘Yes, Henry Pym – talk to yourself – let biological charts and data race thru your trained mind like wildfire-- For therein lies the only true superiority of the educated man – that he analyses – dissects -- probes – reconstructs –‘

Round about now, I’d expect to insist you probably wouldn’t find lines like those in a comic nowadays but how would I know? I haven’t read any!

Moving on as Ultra Comics attracts captions filled with vague ‘70s profundities – the use of the word ‘myriad’ deserving of an essay all to itself.

‘…FOR FARAWAY – YET CLOSE AT HAND –‘ comes from my memory of a graffito on a filthy wall on the rail line near London, Euston that used to read ‘FARAWAY IS CLOSE AT HAND IN IMAGES OF ELSEWHERE’. As a teenager I thought this immensely, incoherently profound until I realised it was just a lyrical description of television.

Ultra Comics flies through the ruin of DC comics office at 666(!) Broadway. We can see the infamous life-size Clark Kent figurine they had in the waiting area.

The man on the giant billboard is Ultra-Man, Gary Concord Snr. (created by Don Shelby, alias of Jon L. Blummer, All-American Comics #8, November 1939). He was a 20^th century scientist determined, as most of us are, to end war. Following an ‘accident’ of the kind that can happen all too easily about the house, he wound up in suspended animation, only to wake in the year 2174 with superhuman powers. He became the ‘High Moderator’ of the United States of North America, hence this Big Brother-ish poster. More on him later.

The horrifically transformed Justice League is a wry askance glance at the New 52: Future’s End series, which featured diseased and deformed cyborg versions of DC heroes (ideal for MacFarlane Toys!). This idea of corrupted, grotesque horror varieties of positive, optimistic characters was also a feature of Swamp Thing’s ‘The Rot’ storyline running around the same time so it felt like a zeitgeist thing, which I found oddly amusing – ‘Hee hee, we’re infected now too! Hee hee hee…’

These characters were described thusly in the script:

BETTERMAN - a Superman type character in a cape.

MOONMAN – a Batman-style Dark Avenger.

UNDERWOMAN – self-explanatory.

FLUCKER – like the Flash crossed with Atom – a superspeed hummingbird man.

FACTORY – an Iron Man/Steel type armoured machine man.

SNOW-WOMAN – like the early Jack Kirby version of Iceman of the X-Men, but female, dripping, sickening.

GOG - 10-feet tall like Giant Man but steroidal, overdeveloped, and top heavy like a Kevin O’Neill character.

Gibbering, they repeat comic book pulp cliches, ‘THIS ENDS NOW!’ and ‘NOT ON MY WATCH!’ to show how run down and degraded they are from the source of the idea’s original energy.

The Neighborhood Guard is a Jack Kirbyesque kid gang (‘IT’S THE YEAR WHATEVER-AND-5! YOU’RE FACE TO FACE WITH – THE NEIGHBORHOOD GUARD!’) led by a throwaway reinvention of Golden Age DC character Little Boy Blue (created, along with his gang of Blue Boys by Bill Finger and Jon L. Blummer for Sensation Comics #1) and Red Hood, based on Little Red Riding Hood but using the classic DC comics alias originally used by the Joker, then by Jason Todd. 

I’d done a more considered remake of Boy Blue to appear in Seven Soldiers #1 where he was kind of Hispanic Spider-man with a ghost motif, a cosmic horn, and the power to alter his density.

Rebborizon (which some readers interpreted as a future twist on the surname ‘Morrison’, go figure…) was the tyrant villain in the 1930s Ultra-Man stories.  His daughter Leandra became Concord’s wife before Rebborizon fridged her so he could then perish at Concord Snr.’s hands. His creepy, locust like ‘dronedroids’ seen here are Doug’s invention.

The various Ultras in this hastily assembled allegorical reality are:

GARY CONCORD JNR. the son of the original Ultra-Man and Leandra, daughter of the evil Rebborizon, picked up the mantle after his father died of natural causes in 2239

TOR THE TIME TYRANT was a warlord and Ultra-Man foe. EPOCH LORD OF TIME is the Justice League antagonist introduced as simply the Lord of Time by Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky in Justice League of America #10 March 1962. He was given the name Epoch in the ‘90s by my editor Dan Raspler when I brought the character back for JLA/WildCATs and fleshed him out a bit. Epoch doesn’t add much – he could have been called Bert the Lord of Time, and we’d still have got the message.

ULTRAA - AKA JACK GREY from JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #153 (1978) was created by Gerry Conway and George Tuska. He’s the secret hero of Earth-Prime, our own world as it appears in the DC multiverse structure. Realising our world could not handle the presence of a superhero, he decanted to Earth-1, which is seething with superheroes!

As part of his armoury, this character did actually have an Apathy Ray! We can only presume he bought it from a catalogue of comic book super-weapons that includes the Indifference Engine, the Lance of Irrelevance and the Pointless Pistol.

It may may seem less than formidable but imagine its power over armies! Nations! Perhaps it was over-zealous application of the Apathy Ray that led to the steady dilution of the character, until at last, he gave up on being a hero and decided to live out his days as a blonde white dude among an Australian Aboriginal tribe (hence the indigenous guy with the goggles and toolkit here).

A second iteration of this Ultraa appeared in Justice League Quarterly #13 in 1993, as a muscular, masculine and entitled alien from the planet Almerac. More on him shortly…

In the mid-‘60s, looking old-fashioned in the face of Marvel’s unstoppable rise, DC comics went through an awkward and ungainly mid-life moment when they tried to appeal to the hipper Marvel crowd with an assortment of ‘offbeat’ ‘freaky’ superheroes made to appeal to the gigantic Boomer demographic of ‘way out’ college kids!

One of the most endearing of these oddball creations was Ultra, the Multi-Alien, created for Mystery in Space #103 in late 1965 by Dave Wood and Lee Elias and designed as an almost perfect representation of the kind of super-character a small child would invent. Made of four different aliens combined into one collage body, each quarter came equipped with a different alien power!

His upper left side was a bald blue humanoid. His right was green furred. His right leg belonged to a bird and his left was made of lightning!

Ultra Comics’ name was an anagram formed from the first letters of the four planets Ulla, Laroo, Trago and Raagan, so I created a rough language around those basic syllables.

We see a pile of skulls under a spill of colorful comics. This reminder of a grisly reality beneath the fantastic outward show may remind us of Mastermen.

The people of this cannibalized fallen world are themselves cannibals! Super-cannibals, in fact!

The narrative breaks down nervously, the confident authorial voice giving way to confusion and uncertainty. Where am I? What is this? What’s happening to me? The caption voices suffer moments of self-awareness and fear – clutching at straws of cliché – ‘the super-slugfest of this or any other century – ‘

‘Weirdness for weirdness’ sake’ is a criticism that has often aimed at my own work over many years. It’s a phrase I find lazy and borderline meaningless.

I’ve yet to read ‘it’s weirdness for story’s sake’ or ‘for effect’s sake’ or ‘for fuck’s sake’…

The biased jury of real-world human monsters makes me laugh every time – they are top row L to R – Hitler, Catherine the Great, Nero, and bottom row – Darkseid, Pol Pot, Gilles De Rais, and Elizabeth Bathory!

With a roll call of trumped-up charges and Judge Satan himself presiding, Ultra has scant hope of a fair trial from this gallery of fiends!

Ultra Comics starts to break down into these fragmented pieces of half story as the comic has a cognitive breakdown – the confident beginnings of the story seem distant and disconnected from the immersive narrative disintegration that’s occurring.

We were supposed to see here cut-up fragments of critique as well but the effect added a little too much going on. The original text went like this…

“The superhero, who once existed to protect the weak and oppressed, and then the status quo, and briefly the alternative, now engages in repetitive ordeals to test his fictional integrity and assert his continued significance in a world increasingly without meaning.”

The text consumed in the queasy fragmenting of memories – dementia – a loss of narrative – huge primal fears looming up as here in the form of REX (‘King’) ULTRAA, an ‘ultimate’ version of the character’s Ultraa of Almerac iteration, consort of mighty space queen Maxima who once had a thing for Superman.

Ultraa folds the Box like a Rubik’s Cube, revealing it to be yet another form of the Transmatter Cube we’ve seen throughout Multiversity (that ‘door’ everyone is knocking on) connecting parallel worlds. The Box being how a flat comic panel might unpack into next dimension up.

Everything you never were come to punish you. Monstrous masculinity versus the broken wounded Ultra Comics. Ultra Comics wins using brain quite literally against brawn.

When Red Hood uses her spear to blind Intellectron’s giant eye, it is a deliberate reference to the famous ‘injury to the eye motif’ that used to appear in Comic Book Price Guides as a specific collector niche.

Ultra Comics restores his power by returning to the past of page 1 – creating the inciting incident that dragged us into this morass of collapsing identity and flaking narrative – where his youth is restored.

The time travel here doesn’t work causally – there’s no real reason why the trip from the back of the comic to the front should restore Ultra Comics youth, except he’s at ‘the beginning’ of his story, himself, therefore youthful!

The (corporate white) Man on the next page who explains it all to us dismisses it as a dream, of course, but who can trust him?

Who can trust the (white male) scientists – the ‘Memesmiths’ who built Ultra Comics?...

Ultra Comics is saved and restored by the cannibal kids’ demand for a happy ending, which they get at Ultra Comics’ expense.

When he points at us, he’s laying out the truth – the great clever critical eye of Intellectron’s is our eye!

By entering the text to attack the hero, however, Intellectron makes himself vulnerable to criticism! I had fun creating the kind of internet critique that tends to be lobbed my way! The smart arsed alchemical symbolism seen as nothing more than a ‘5-DIMENSIONAL evil egg! LOL!!!!’

Intellectron is now trapped in the comic, like a fly on sticky paper but even within those limits he can still do damage. He can still hurt Ultra Comics and more importantly still reach through the Multi-Mind into Earth-Prime!

The life-affirming psychic hygiene narrative becomes a capitulation to cosmic horror! Intellectron hits back with some sobering truth to power, i.e. readers and critics.

Ultra Comics is itself a component in the Oblivion Machine! Every comic you read. Every movie you watch is the Oblivion Machine. The Oblivion Machine eats up your days, your hours, and years, binge-watching fake scripted lives as your own possibilities are squandered.

‘ABSORBED IN ITS PICTURE SHOWS YU GROW OLD.’

Oh, Christ!

Maybe it’s time to close the book! But we’ve come so far!

If we stay with Ultra Comics until the very end, the full inoculation, the heroic vision he represented seems powerless to prevent our infection. The only medicine available for this particular ailment is, of course, the concluding chapter of the Multiversity series!

We left Ultra’s final word balloon empty, so that readers could add anything they chose to alter the meaning of the conclusion.

The last few panels attempt to hint at how the subjective experience of electrical activity in the brain ceasing during the five minutes after breath death. Not splashy heroic comic book death – just ultimate loneliness and the last frantic grasps of extinguished neurons at the last flaring scraps of meaning before oblivion closes in - a clammy inescapable no exit surrender to hard reality –

Oh, Christ!!

Intellectron is making us think about the impending moment of our actual deaths in order to distract us and ride that sobering existential train of thought into our universe via our heads!

Oh, Christ thrice!!!

Another reading has Intellectron effectively trapped in the figurative flypaper of the comic’s pages and it is Intellectron’s death that is being described. Death of the Critic. Death of the Author. Death of the Gaze. The monster is contained now where we can observe him. He thinks he’s looking at us… and the feedback starts…

The comic ends, Ultra Comics himself ends, and the Multi-Mind link is broken when the reader closes the cover like a coffin and locks him into the last page.

Except Ultra Comics Lives! Every time you go back for a re-read, he will live again. There are those of you who will read these notes and decide to check out the comic again as a result. You too will join the Multi-Mind!

Ultra Comics is reborn to go through it all again every time you dare to a re-read – if you do return to his story, he will seem to change each time, as you yourself grow older and wiser.

Talk about being ahead of your time when everyone’s still discussing 9-panel grids…

I imagined this as an ongoing series – Ultra Comics himself says ‘LOOKS LIKE MY CREATORS THOUGHT OF EVERYTHING. SEEMS THEY HAVE THE POWER TO SEND ME WHEREVER I’M NEEDED.’ – with that as the elevator pitch. He could be sent anywhere, anywhen, to deal with anything!

YOU ARE EXPERIENCING A POTENTIAL H(ostile) I(ndependent) T(houghtform) IINFECTION!

REPORT TO A QUARANTINE ZONE IMMEDIATELY!

QUIT XANADUUM NOW!