In an alternate timeline, a 1944 newsreel updates the British public on World War II, reporting an Allied march on Berlin led by Great Britain’s very own superhero: the marvelous Maximan.
Like Captain America, Maximan is a patriotic super-soldier who wears his country’s flag on his chest: a chest that, like Superman’s, is shown to be bulletproof and able to bench-press tanks. The announcer boasts that the British champion is “sure to be more than a match” for his German counterpart, the Nazi ubermensch Masterman. The newsreel ends with an echo of a slogan used by World War I propagandists in the Britain of our own timeline: “by the looks of things, it could all be over by Christmas…”
That is how a legendary comics writer began the story of his breakthrough work.
Grant Morrison’s Zenith was a comic strip published from 1987 until 1992 in the science-fiction comic magazine 2000 AD: the same publication that in 1977 debuted the famous dystopian cop character Judge Dredd.
The Berlin Horror
On the second page of the first “episode” of Zenith (in 2000 AD #535, published August 1987), we see that the newsreel announcer’s optimism was horrifically misplaced. Four days before Christmas, Maximan is in Berlin, lying prostrate at the feet of Masterman. As the broken hero struggles to utter a final prayer (Psalm 23:4 from the King James Bible), the Axis supervillain, whose chest is emblazoned with a swastika and a lightning bolt, lifts him up by the neck and mocks his faith:
Is that a prayer I hear, Englander? Save your breath. No-one is listening. There’s no-one up there.
Yet, as page three reveals, an American pilot is “up there” in the skies over Berlin getting ready to drop a nuclear bomb right on Masterman’s blonde crew-cut.
On page four, Masterman hints that his true nature is even darker and more uncanny than it seems, telling his fallen foe:
No power on earth can stop us now. Your little planet belongs to us, to the many-angled ones.
“What a-are you?” Maximan asks in horror. Masterman shushes him and is about to deliver the killing blow when both super-humans are nuked along with the German capital. The page-five splash depicts a mushroom cloud billowing over Berlin.
The sixth and final page of the story cuts to the same city 42 years later. By the late eighties, Berlin has been rebuilt but remains haunted by spectres from its past. Two conspirators—a medical man named Dreisch and a dourly-dressed madame called Fraulein Haas—enter a basement together. The doctor is apalled by the stench in the room, which Fraulein Haas explains as follows:
Yes, that’s the way our masters smell when they manifest themselves on this plane. Not exactly Chanel No. 5, I admit.
We then see that the secret cell is decked out for Nazi occult rituals. A giant swastika is draped on the wall and there is a statue of what looks like a demon from an H.P. Lovecraft story. Most shockingly of all, lying in state in a cryogenic coffin is what appears to be the body of Masterman himself. The episode ends with Fraulein Hass ordering the doctor to “wake him up!”
Grant the Great
The title that Grant Morrison gave his inaugural episode of Zenith is “Ground Zero.” It is a fitting name for at least three reasons.
First, the story’s main setting literally becomes the center of a nuclear blast radius.
Second, the events of the prologue have repurcussions that reverberate throughout all the rest of the series.
And third, “Ground Zero” was ground zero for Grant Morrison’s explosive career as a superstar comics creator. He had been writing (and drawing) comics since childhood, and had already been a professional comics writer for years by the time he wrote “Ground Zero” at age 27. But it was Zenith that got him noticed and hired by DC Comics where he first revolutionized the genre with groundbreaking work on titles like Animal Man, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Doom Patrol, JLA, and All-Star Superman. The road to these zeniths began with Zenith, and Zenith began at “Ground: Zero.”
One more synchronicity is that the care, craft, and creativity with which Morrison constructed even this little six-page prologue printed without color was itself “prologue” to the artistry he has poured into his ouevre ever since. That artistry has been an inspiration to me since I first discovered his work on JLA while attending college in the late 90s.
Writing has since become my vocation, although I write almost exclusively non-fiction essays, whereas Morrison is predominantly a fiction comics writer. (That being said, I cannot recommend highly enough Morrison’s non-fiction masterpiece Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human.) Nonetheless, Morrison is the writer I endlessly re-read and strive to emulate more than any other: the master wordsmith I look up to most as a model. For the written word, in my esteem, Grant Morrison is at the peak, the summit, the zenith.
(Two other writers who do approach Morrison’s level of influence on my writing are “the two Wills”: the historian Will Durant and the late, great libertarian journalist Will Grigg.)
For my next Superhero Studies post, I plan to retell the next episode of Zenith, in which Morrison introduces us to the series’s eponymous protagonist. As you will see, just as Grant Morrison is not your typical comics writer, Zenith is not your typical superhero.