Half of them are now dead, and the three left alive have all lost their powers.īut two of the dead supers had a son, and that boy - Robert McDowell - is the 19-year-old pop star Zenith in the fateful year 1987. As I said, short chapters means this has to move fast.) Fast forward two generations: there were a bunch of British superheroes in the ’60s, who broke free from government control, called themselves Cloud Nine, and eventually broke up. (No spoilers: we see the not-dead Masterman by the end of the prologue in the modern day.
Phase One quickly introduces us to what we need to know, with a prologue of this world’s end of WWII: the Nazi superhero Masterman is about to kill the English superhero Maximan in Berlin when he’s temporarily stymied by a nuclear bomb that levels the city. but that’s over very quickly (no room for Hamlet-esque equivocation in five-page chapters), and he’s flying around and punching monsters almost immediately. (We may all know different in another twenty years, but we’ll need to think up a new derogatory nickname for yet another generation first.) Zenith isn’t really that much of a slacker he does hesitate initially to jump into the big superhero plot of Phase One. Zenith supposedly is a slacker superhero, and these stories are old enough that Generation X (my generation) was the one filled with young lazy layabouts who couldn’t be bothered to work - whereas now we know that really describes millennials, who have the bad grace to be young now, when so many of us are sadly no longer so.
(Not that Morrison was lacking in either of those.) All the stories were written by Grant Morrison, at that point the current snotty Young Turk of British Comics, and drawn by Steve Yeowell, who had no such easy hook to be hung on and so had to get by on hard work and talent.
His stories originally ran in the UK comics magazine 2000 AD, in weekly installments between 19, which explains the five-page-chapters issue. That sounds like damning with faint praise, and there’s an aspect of that - those short chapters put Morrison and Yeowell’s work in a straitjacket that they can never get free from, denying them all but the most absolutely necessary splash pages and forcing every installment to move forward quickly and efficiently - but it’s still an impressive achievement, and a pretty good revisionist superhero in general. Zenith is quite likely the best possible revisionist superhero comic series told in five-page chapters.
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