6/11 The Multiversity annotations Pt 5
Part Five
LIBRARY artefact #029
PAX AMERICANA #1
While I think the original idea of updating the Watchmen aesthetic to a Greg Rucka super espionage thriller framework was a sound one and could have produced a great take on the Charlton material, by the time I realised I was doing The Multiversity all by myself, and that each issue would be done in a different style, I’d become more interested in tackling Watchmen’s legacy on a more formal level; the conceit of doing the Charlton characters as a political thriller with an eye on Watchmen’s elaborate narrative and formal gymnastics gave me an opportunity to do a formally flamboyant comic book that could say everything I wanted to say about America, post-Watchmen superheroes, and indeed the entire American masked man genre and its psychological roots in 48 pages.
Pax Americana quickly became everyone’s favourite issue of The Multiversity series. Its naked deployment of comic book tricks openly invited close analysis while simultaneously condemning it!
The cover, which depicts a burning peace flag trades on a similar collision of opposites as Watchmen’s bloody smiley face. Where much of Watchmen’s image system unfolded from Peacemaker analogue the Comedian’s yellow smiley pin, so too does ours derive from peacemaker’s peace symbols.
The eight panels reflect the 8-fold structure of The Multiversity - 8 titles, eight musical harmonics, and the obvious next step after Seven Soldiers!
Importantly, the panels were intended to hint at the reiterating gone outlines of the WTC twin towers, brought down by terrorists on September 11, 2001.
Where Watchmen’s 9-panel grid spoke of stability, the Osiris Aeon pyramid of power with its foundations in the labour of the masses, where the 9-panel grid anchored a reliably metronomic rhythm, Pax Americana’s post-9/11-page layout seems almost uncomfortably flimsy, liable to collapse, a subliminal source of ongoing anxiety and tension as we wait for the narrative structure and everything that supports it to fall.
11 is also the number of Daath, the Qabalistic Abyss.
The reverse assassination sequence that opens the story was necessary to set up the backwards flowing chains of cause and effect in the story. We also wanted to start with a narrative bang and flourish.
The twisted peace flag with the bullet hole, prefigures the story’s end and begins a chain of repeated ‘8’ motifs, which include the infinity sign or sideways ‘8’ on the assassinated President Harley’s ring.
Note the altered Presidential Seal where the traditional hawk is replaced by a dove of peace, the imagery already predicting the end of the book and the beginning of the story.
As Eden and Nightshade cross the space on page 5, they make a huge X – a crossing out of the peace dove on the floor. The ‘X’ motif repeats, cross-referring with remarks about buried treasure, suggesting ‘x marks the spot’ and finally ‘kiss off’ – where the ‘x’ is a kiss (also the way I ended my X-Men run).
All of the scenes with Nightshade make a point of featuring her shadow.
The three spots of blood represent Nicholas Roerich's Banner of Peace. We see this motif repeated in the two eyeholes and one bullet hole in the domino mask at the end. The Roerich design is seen again in the PAX Institute on Pages 12/13 and 18/19. It also forms the ground plan form the three towers on page 24.
Roerich himself is a fascinating character and worth researching. He is even mentioned by H.P. Lovecraft in "At the Mountains of Madness".
The page 6 sequence with Eden and Nightshade descending the stair contains another barely-hidden figure 8 – while the cross-referring of image and text here is dense and almost parodic.
As the Edens walk through a transparent glass prison of nostalgic artefacts in display cases – he talks about illusions, ghosts, the superheroic dreams of children sold back to adults.
Behind Eden is the armour of Blue Beetle foe The Red Knight. The gloves and holsters in foreground belong to the Fiery Icer (the ‘firm hand’ Eden mentions undercut by these dangling empty gloves).
The green cloak belongs to the Hooded One, while the white cloak with spherical helmet is the costume of The Ghost and the jester hat belonged to the character known only as Punch (of Punch and Jewelee fame). The exoskeletal iron arms were used by the villain appropriately named Iron Arms – and also by the mysterious killer on pages 12 and 13.
The words ‘Pax Muse’ can be seen in reverse – a reference to Nightshade as the sole female member of the group?
What happened to America’s supermen? Did they ever recover from Watchmen’s assassin strike?
A leap of faith – that takes us back a few days back in time to meet the Question and Blue Beetle, former friends turned bitter opponents.
‘The Soldier and the Hunchback’, the Answer and the Question, a reference to the straight-backed ‘!’ and the bent ‘?’ is the title of a 1909 essay by occultist Aleister Crowley.
Ads on the station wall show the perfume FUTUREBOMB by Nightshade, a hydrogen-powered car and a promotional poster for BLACK AND WHITE WORLD, the opinion show presented by the Question’s alter-ego Vic Sage (more on that later…).
As someone who practised martial arts for many years in the ‘90s, I like to choreograph the fights in my comics quite carefully – comic book fights always have big punches and impact shots, but they rarely ever show how these expert superhuman fighters would block and match one another’s moves in an actual bout.
I like to make a point of figuring out exactly how a fight might play out and here we see the combatants almost evenly matched before the feral, streetwise Question gains the advantage.
The Captain Atom/Manhattan scene condenses ideas I’d expressed before, including in my ‘history of superheroes’ book Supergods, about the relationship of comic book 3-D spacetime to our own 4-D spacetime (I was amused a few months back to see a prominent gossip columnist attempt to claim these ideas as his own)
Our Allen Adam takes the name of the first iteration of the original Charlton Captain Atom by Joe Gill and Steve Ditko, first published in Space Adventures #33, March 1960. The original Captain Atom was a scientist whose body is disintegrated after he’s trapped in a rocket using an experimental propulsion system. He reconfigures himself and wears a suit of ‘dilustel’ to absorb the radiation his super-powered body now emits.
When DC acquired the character, he became Nathaniel Adam, an Air Force pilot and wrongly condemned man used to test the durability of an alien spacecraft by sealing him inside and setting off an atom bomb under the vessel!
The blue ‘dilustel’ radiation absorbing suit we have him wear is a visual reference to Atom’s Watchmen counterpart Doctor Manhattan, with the hydrogen symbol bind on his brow a direct borrowing from Manhattan (on pages 23 and 24, we see the more conventionally superheroic red and yellow livery that identified Captain Atom’s original Steve Ditko costume).
The three-page Captain Atom sequence also presents several different takes on cosmology, from Atom’s higher dimensional take to the traditional Big Bang and beyond.
The four scientists in the control room overseeing Atom’s experiment are intended to represent the 4 Evangelists, as well as the four fundamental forces of nature The Strong Nuclear Force, the Weak Nuclear force, Electromagnetism and Gravity.
McDougall on the left is drawn to resemble an EAGLE. TARPEY looks like a BULL. GREGORY is a MAN. LYONS on the right looks like a LION!
Their names come from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake where the archangels appear in various guises under these names.
Captain Atom is seated in the Tevatron particle accelerator outside Batavia, Illinois, chosen for its techno-mandala-esque beauty. On our own world of Earth-33, the accelerator was shut down in 2011, but on Earth-4 it's still operational.
‘Porti Belli’ here is intended to mean ‘Gates of War’ – the ‘Janus Gates’ referred to later – which were closed in Ancient Rome after a war.
Janus is the god that sees both directions in linear time simultaneously, past and future, just as Captain Atom sees time as a single landscape.
The man with the solid steel hand is Sarge Steel, created by Pat Masulli in 1964. He kills the scientists in reverse order of the appearance of the fundamental forces after the Big Bang -
In the following sequence with Nightshade Eve Eden and her mother, we contrast the singular, explosive and ejaculatory masculinity of the previous page’s Big Bang cosmology with the mother/daughter idea of budding universes in a multiverse
TO BE CONTINUED….