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Brand Inheritors – A Look At Multiversity: The Just

By Nas Hoosen

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The latest issue of The Multiversity: The Just is out and that means it's time again to take Grant Morrison to task for his lurid acts as a writer of superhero comics. Depending on your reading of Multiversity so far, it's either Morrison's attempt to criticize superhero comics publishers or to poke fun at his critics in fandom. It might be neither but this is a comics rumor site so I find it's best we stick with the salacious sounding options. **Spoilers follow.

Up front, The Just is probably the single issue of this mega-meta series I was least looking forward to. I love the idea of a story that follows up the generational aspect of the DC Universe from the 90s – I don't think I've read a comic featuring Kyle Rayner since the New 52 reboot so there's that. It's just the "superheroes as celebrities" concept that had me apprehensive.

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Former Morrison collaborator Mark Millar has played that particular number so often over the last decade that it's sometimes difficult to remember the concept of celebrity super-people was popular as far back as the 1960s, in the pages of Fantastic Four. Morrison's Zenith is likely the source of the concept's modern popularity but on the surface, The Just even sounds like Millar's recent Jupiter's Legacy. In the end though there's something to be said for approach.

Among other things covered this issue, Morrison uses celebrity as shorthand to explore the relationship between the heroic ideals of early superheroes and the more fallible inheritors of the "superhero" brand. The story's title, #earthme, recalls endless commentary about how the current generation of Millennials is self-obsessed. The characters certainly live up to that analysis.

In the opening pages, Sasha Norman's idea of living up to her namesake as Sister Miracle involves an "ultimate escape" from a techno-virus that's crawling around inside her bloodstream.

Morrison has used the concept of viral ideas in many stories but here it suggests that the real threats faced by heroes on a world without enemies comes from within. It's not an uncommon take on utopia, but this also plays well with Morrison's view on morality within superhero universes. In superhero comics, evil is a vital and inherent component of existence. Villains are motivated by their own negative conceptions of themselves, fuelling their egos and spurring them toward absolute victory. Except that in a universe where good guys are hyper-aware superhumans, that sort of self-serious single-mindedness pretty much ensures failure.

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You may remember that it was strongly implied last issue that this story will play out as a comedy. That means the hulking Gentry super-structure we saw stalking the cosmic causeways of The Bleed in Chapter One is going to be about as effective at winning as Morrison's version of petty, arrogant Lex Luthor.

This issue features its own Luthor, who works as well as her father does as a stand-in for most human beings in real life. In the old days superhero celebrities like the Fantastic Four reflected the way real life celebrities seemed to exist as pure iconography in film or photography. Today it's far easier for everyone to enjoy some semblance of "celebrity" by way of social media. Almost everyone in The Just is introduced by captions that explain whose friend or ex they are, providing a less in-your-face suggestion of a flip through a social network. Alexis Luthor is Damian Wayne's girlfriend and this story's main antagonist, but she's also a pawn of The Gentry, much like Vandal Savage was last issue, and much like villains in Morrison's stories often are.

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On Earth-16, almost everyone is trying to "ascend" to the rank of superhero while grappling with their vapid, self-involved nature. Depressed Megamorpho pauses before committing suicide to inquire if she's the first superhero to ever do so. They can't help it. They live on an entire Earth that reflects self-obsession, but it doesn't make it an any less damning portrayal of the egoic urges of most human beings.

Even characters Morrison might usually hesitate to depict as anything other than paragons of heroism, like Superman and Batman, suffer for their inability to see past themselves. At one point Batman actually says that the world needs a supervillain like his mother or grandfather around, and Superman seems a little too excited about the "Super Mystery" of Megamorpho's death.

These characters, with an army of robots that protects them from crises and their desperate re-enactments of old victories, is more reminiscent of certain members of the superhero comics audience than any superheroes. Kyle Rayner, a character designed to reflect the everyman qualities that a reader might relate to, appears desperately in need of a cathartic super-conflict, and even bystanders reflect the ironic boredom of people's real world responses to action-adventure stories. Batman craves the conflict of an action-adventure story in the same scene he decides that an actual cosmic invasion was boring after all.

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Some of this is the work of the haunted comic these characters are reading, which we learn more about this issue. Kyle's outburst about nobody dying, and Offspring's denial over his girlfriend's death (he assures himself she'll be back) are at least partly the result of reading Ultra Comics. Both characters reflect the apathy or anger of at least some superhero comics fans, emphatically demanding that no character should die but also being completely unmoved by their deaths when they occur. At one point in the story, Offspring excitedly tells Kyle that he should really check out the latest Major Comics crossover, a story that literally has the word "genocide" in the title.

And then there's the chunk of this issue that's dedicated to characters irritably debating the value and role of comics in our world, much as we do. Kyle Rayner marvels at the artwork but asks if anyone still actually reads them. Lexi Luthor asks Batman if he thinks they qualify as art, referring to them as "photo-fics" and echoing the fan use of the term "graphic novel" to make the medium sound more sophisticated. Batman's assertion that her interest in comics is "a hipster thing" is reminiscent of the kind of gatekeeping that some fans use when discussing newer fans who come to comics from the worlds of movies, video games and other media.

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Following last issue's conclusion, in which a hero's decision to kill his enemy summoned an apocalyptic dark god to the scene of the crime, this one features Alexis Luthor and Jakeem Thunder (whose "so cool" magic word sits well with this universe) take control of an army of Superman robots and lay waste to a city. In a world where characters have inherited their ideals, names and outfits from a generation of iconic heroes, I couldn't help but seeing the seizure of Superman's effigy to destroy a city as reminiscent of Man of Steel.

This book continues to explore Morrison's familiar take on the relationship between readers and the superhero comics we claim to love. In the past he'd shown how our reading comics slowly draws superheroes into our world, but here we see how we're also being drawn into theirs, shaping new iterations of the characters that reflect our obsession with darkness and degradation. There's a negative feedback loop created between Ultra Comics and its readers, a means perhaps of taking us to the peak of superhero comics' recent obsession with genocide, death and destruction so that we become burned out on those ideas. Or at the very least learn to laugh at them a little.

Nas Hoosen is the co-founder of Another-Day, South Africa's Least Favorite Website About All Its Favorite Things. Sometimes he still has 'Nam style flashbacks to his time spent working the counter at the local comic shop.


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Hannah Means ShannonAbout Hannah Means Shannon

Editor-in-Chief at Bleeding Cool. Independent comics scholar and former English Professor. Writing books on magic in the works of Alan Moore and the early works of Neil Gaiman.
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