Berlin, 1987. In a secret chamber, a German physician checks the pulse of an unconscious Nazi super-soldier he just revived.
That is how Grant Morrison began episode 2 of his breakthrough comic series Zenith, which was released in the comics anthology magazine 2000 AD (publication date: August 29, 1987) and can be found in the Zenith: Phase One collected edition. I have also written essays here in Superhero Studies about the prologue and episode 1 of Zenith.
The doctor, named Driesch, identifies the slumbering superhuman as the “twin” of “Masterman.” We met the original Masterman when he was incinerated by an atom bomb in the prologue set during World War II. As Morrison wrote in his autobiographical book Supergods:
The elaborate alternate history of Zenith was constructed around the idea that the Americans had dropped the first atom bomb on Berlin, not Hiroshima, in order to kill a fascist superhuman engineered and empowered by the Nazis as a living weapon to win the war against the Allies. This backstory, with its grubby roots in popular Nazi occult lore, eugenics, and the CIA’s clandestine LSD research program, had Lovecraftian monsters teaching the Nazis how to turn humans into superhuman vessels—ostensibly supersoldiers but in reality to be used as bodies for higher-dimensional entities whose mere presence caused fatal hypertension and hemorrhaging in ordinary flesh-and-blood men and women.
The Lovecraft Connection
The “Lovecraftian monsters” reflect the influence on Morrison of H.P. Lovecraft (1890 – 1937), the renowned author of cosmic horror fiction. “Higher-dimensional entities” featured prominently in Lovecraft’s “mythos.” For example, in The Call of Cthulhu (written in 1926 and published in 1928), Lovecraft described the dwelling place of the short story’s eponymous monster (his most famous brainspawn) as being composed of:
…vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.
Lovecraft reconceived “monsters,” “demons,” and “gods” as non-Euclidean, extradimensional aliens, thus inventing his own distinctive genre called “cosmicism” that blended horror, fantasy, and science fiction.
With this in mind, we can better understand why, in the prologue, Masterman referred to his kind as “the Many-Angled Ones” and why, in episode one, Driesch’s co-conspirator Fräulein Haas spoke of “the way our masters smell when they manifest themselves on this plane.”
“One of them visited here recently,” she told Driesch. “It took me six days to recover from its presence.”
In the foreground of the panel in which Haas said that, we saw a figurine representing one of the Many-Angled Ones. The idol’s tentacled head and bat-like wings recall a statue of Cthulhu depicted in Call and described by Lovecraft as:
…a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.
The Ritual of the Nine Angles
Back to episode 2. Driesch is anxious to leave before the “dark god comes down from overspace,” but Haas tells him that it is too late for that:
…the crystal tetrahedron is vibrating at the correct frequency. The Ritual of the Nine Angles has begun!
Haas instructs Dreisch to join her in the magic circle she has ritually inscribed on the floor.
“Can you feel the pressure between your eyes?” she asks. “In your ears…”
Haas exults and Driesch is mortified as one of the dark gods uses lamp smoke to manifest an image on the earthly plane. The Many-Angled One appears as a chaotic cloud of eyes and mouths—a pure manifestation of raw, ravenous hunger—before coalescing into a more coherent, cephalopoidal face.
Haas welcomes the apparation on behalf of “the Order of the Black Sun” which eagerly awaits “the Endless Night.” She recognizes the Many-Angled One as the same one that possessed the original Masterman.
But for some reason, the dark god is delaying. Its new body is ready, but it is postponing possession. Haas hypothesizes that the deity demands a sacrifice. So she betrays Driesch by shoving him out of the protective circle, allowing the entity to enter him. The medical man’s mortal frame cannot contain the demon’s extra dimensions, so he suffers “the fatal hypertension and hemorrhaging” mentioned above by Morrison and bursts like a water balloon, thus earning the episode its title of “Blow Up”.
The dark god then takes up residence in its superhuman vessel where it awakens refreshed, having sated itself on a soul. Indeed, the entity possessing Masterman identifies itself to Haas as “Iok Sotot, Eater of Souls.” This is another name for “Yog-Sothoth”: a creation of H.P. Lovecraft himself, first mentioned in his The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (written in 1927 and first published in 1941).
The story ends with Iok Sotot/Masterman ripping a photograph of Zenith in half and resolving to “visit London” so as to pave the way for the return of his fellow dark gods.
But, as I will discuss in my next post, before meeting our series star, the soul-eating supervillain will first pay a call to Ruby Fox (aka “Voltage”) in the third episode of Zenith, titled “Shock Treatment.”