Zenith: Phase Three (1989/Collected 2014): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Steve Yeowell and others; character design by Brendan McCarthy: And now the 1989 show, in which Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell take the piss out of every Crisis and Secret War and Company-wide Crossover Event ever seen in the mainstream superhero comics of DC and Marvel.
Phase Three is at once almost howlingly funny in its take on crossovers -- for the most part, all the heroes from different realities spend most of their time confused about what they're doing, who they're fighting, and who they're fighting with. And artist Steve Yeowell abets the foggy satire of super-hero armageddons with his sketchiest, sparsest, most evocative and suggestive artwork yet.
The Many-Angled Ones, the Great Old Ones, the Lloigor, have launched a major assault on all the alternative realities of Earth. Only a mighty army of superheroes can stop them! Super-jerk Zenith and super-conservative Peter St. John get drafted for the battle because of course they do. But nothing is really as it seems, and by the end of things, the true enemies of the universe will stand revealed. Or will they? Yes, they will. Maybe.
Morrison and Yeowell do a tremendous job here of juggling meta-commentary, satire, and abject horror. The Lloigor are truly horrible, and they're depicted in ways that almost certainly intentionally recall Kid Miracleman's devastation of London in Alan Moore's Miracleman. But they're also horribly comical and, frankly, not that bright. It all holds together as a satiric epic of horror right up to the bombastic climax, the terrible revelation, and the sudden reversal.
Throughout, Zenith remains his familiar unpleasant self, contrasting the various heroes who take this sort of thing seriously, or who've experienced actual tragedy. A certain number of minor characters are either old British comics characters or homages to same, but knowing who they are isn't integral to enjoying the book. Highly recommended.
Zenith: Phase Four (1990, 1992, 2000/Collected 2014): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Steve Yeowell and others; character design by Brendan McCarthy: And so, after the revelations in Zenith: Phase Three about the origins of the Many-Angled Ones and their plans for Earth, we come to the end.
Can telepathic Conservative super-knob Peter St. John and self-absorbed super-pop-star Zenith save the world from a host of nigh-omnipotent alien gods? Or will the Sun turn black and all of creation fall?
Narrated for large stretches by the aging British creator of the British superhero program, Zenith: Phase Four alternates between dystopian horror and flashes of satire as embodied in the eponymous Zenith. Peter St. John has his own plans for humanity, but they apparently don't involve killing everybody. Not so the Many-Angled Ones, Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. Neither so the rest of Earth's super-heroes, who have a plan of their own that doesn't involve the survival of non-super-heroic humanity.
The result is a superhero comic book that trades in cosmic horror and bits of absurd humour on the way to its denouement. There's still enough mystery left at the end to fuel a Phase Five, but that doesn't seem to be in the offing. A coda from the year 2000, eight years after Phase Four ended, is a rare mis-step from writer Grant Morrison, a sour piece that can be ignored given its meta-commentary on the series as a whole.
But otherwise, Phase Four is a triumph of revisionist superheroics and weird visionary horror. There's a damned city at the end of things that's quite a triumph of horrific imaginings. And there's Zenith, too self-absorbed to rule the world, and Peter St. John, whose plans remain mysterious right up to the end. And as the creator of the superheroes muses, superheroes in the real world -- or any idealized concept -- becomes horrors almost beyond imagining. Most of the time. Highly recommended.
Zenith: Phase One (1987/Collected 2014): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Steve Yeowell and others; character design by Brendan McCarthy: Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell's revisionist, satiric, epic superhero narrative started in the pages of England's 2000 AD comics magazine in 1987. In a way, it brings to a close the first decade of the revisionist superhero epic that began with Alan Moore's Marvelman/Miracleman and V for Vendetta and crested commercially and influentially with Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen (1986-87) and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (1986).
This first 'Phase' introduces us to the British superhero Zenith, a self-absorbed pop star and celebrity with a vast array of super-powers, few of them tapped. He looks like Morrissey in a super-hero suit and acts like Justin Bieber. He's also the world's only practicing super-hero in 1987, all the others having vanished or mysteriously lost their powers decades earlier.
Pretty soon, though, Zenith will actually have to act in some sort of superheroic fashion. The Many-Angled Ones, Lovecraftian alien-gods from outside Earth's space-time, are coming. They tried to manifest themselves on Earth's plane of existence during World War Two. Now, thanks to the on-going efforts of the Nazi Cult of the Black Sun, one of them is back -- and it's inhabiting the body of a Nazi superhuman known as Masterman.
These aren't simply Lovecraftian homages, either. These are Iot Sotok (ie. Yog-Sothoth) and Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep and many others. They seem to be the real deal. And who better to fight super-gods than supermen?
Well, Zenith really only fights when he's forced to. And he will be forced to. Along the way, secrets will be revealed, a nefarious plan by the superhumans of the 1960's alluded to, and alliances made between Zenith and super-telepath Peter St. John. St. John was once the groovy hippy super-hero Mandala. Now he's the buttoned-down Conservative superhero in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet. Ha! But St. John has his own plans, and none of them involve bowing to hyper-dimensional sadists.
Phase One is the Zenith volume that hews most closely to the relatively serious superheroic revisionism of earlier books, especially Moore and company's Miracleman and V for Vendetta. But Morrison's puckish, punkish sensibilities leak through, especially in the often annoying, non-altruistic character of Zenith. Steve Yeowell's art evolves over the course of the volume, beginning with strong resemblances to Brian Bolland and ending as something more like his mature, more expressionistic style. Highly recommended.
Zenith: Phase Two (1988/Collected 2014): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Steve Yeowell and others; character design by Brendan McCarthy: Phase Two of Zenith takes us on a tour of pre-fab superhero Zenith's past and assorted nefarious but still mysterious plans for the future as hatched by various bodies. A nuclear threat to London by a bored British billionaire is the most normal thing going on here.
This is really a bridge volume, one that fills in blanks and fleshes out major characters. Conservative super-telepath Peter St. John certainly gets the most development -- he may be terrible, but his first-person thoughts suggest that he isn't super-terrible. Zenith, meanwhile, remains a knob who nonetheless must save everything again, almost despite himself. Steve Yeowell's art, always clean, continues to move towards a new sparseness. Recommended.
