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Grant Morrison And Frank Quitely's Pax Americana From DC Comics

Published Fri, 17 Sep 2010 06:00:21 -0500

Last updated Fri, 17 Sep 2010 13:50:03 -0500

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's book as part of the ten issue Multiversity series next year, will be entitled Pax Americana, as the Charlton/Watchmenesque characters we saw in Final Crisis get their own book. Morrison told UK newstand magazine Comic Heroes that;

We thought it would be appropriate to re-think and update the kind of in-your-face self-relecting narrative techniques used by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and to apply them to a whole new story which asks 'what if Watchmen had been conceived now, in the contemporary political landscape and with the Charlton characters themselves, rather than analogues?

So the cover hs a close-up on a burning peace flag and a Delmore Schwartz quote – 'Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn' – and it all blossoms from there.

You might be able to predict Moore's reaction to this news, but Morrison also goes to contradict Moore's allegations of creative bankruptcy at DC, recycling and reinterpreting his ideas, stating that's the very nature of superhero books.

They're designed to be told over and over again. If you were an Aboriginal kid or a tribal shaman, that's what you'd do, you'd participate in the recycling of old stories, the 'revamping' of characters and scenarios, the explaining away of plot holes. Some to the job with more skill than others, but if you work with Marvel, DC or other companies' pulp fiction characters, you're basically repainting pictures of the ancestors on cave walls.

Of only Marvel or DC would take that on as a slogan. Marvel Comics – basically repainting pictures of the ancestors on cave walls since 1961.

As for Moore's allegations of no decent mainstream comics for twenty-odd years, he refutes that naming Enigma, Rogan Gosh, Sandman and his own Flex Mentallo and All Star Superman as being non-inspired by Watchmen

There's plenty more in the interview with Stephen Jewell. The Comic Heroes magazine also has an editorial by me and a piece about digital comics I wrote too. Blimey, they must be desperate! Find it on British newstands right now, where some helpful souls may have stacked it in between SFX and CLiNT.

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