Superman & The Authority #1

 

It feels like we’ve been here before, but where is “here”? Grant Morrison’s “Superman & The Authority” is an Elseworlds made of Elseworlds, with several worlds placed into a blender. It’s a world where the Justice Society – sans Superman or Batman – served during World War Two, but Superman is around early in his career to meet President Kennedy… that feels a lot like Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier. Superman’s previous go-arounds in this continuity with Manchester Black are possibly much like the ones we saw in Joe Kelly’s issues of Action Comics. Superman tapping Manchester Black to serve on his team is a notion that Kelly entertained, briefly, in 2006’s “Superman, This Is Your Life.” A Superman who has long since retired to the [Ant]arctic, facing unsolvable problems, and wearing black in his shield, is how Kingdom Come begins. And heroes haunted by their failure to prevent the assassination of a President is the premise of Morrison’s The Multiversity: Pax Americana, riffing hard on Alan Moore’s Watchmen. With winks and nods, Morrison tells us that we’re visiting a world a little like all of these but exactly like none of them.

From the start, and befitting the titular characters, Morrison hits us with rapid-fire alternation between optimism and pessimism. The first panel shows the last leaves falling off a tree and a caption that informs us that John F. Kennedy is about to die, while the doomed President speaks of “tomorrow dawning.” Superman asks if Kennedy will need his protection in Dallas. We know that the answer is yes, but Kennedy says “No.” All of Kennedy’s words in 1963 speak of a bright future and limitless potential, but his imminent assassination is just the first of things to go wrong. While JFK’s sunny aspirations give us detailed exposition of the superheroes’ history in this Elseworlds, a few other details check off how this world is and isn’t like the real world of 1963, with the objective of sending astronauts to Mars rather than the Moon before the end of the Sixties, and an ominous reference to ending all wars – a hope that never works out in the real world, and didn’t in this world, either.

Then the framing of the panels tells us that this is the history of this world as seen in newsreels, or – as Manchester Black wakes up – Black’s dream of history, a dream that ends as he is awoken by a police raid that overcomes his considerable abilities.

Morrison has long maintained that Superman is most interesting when he’s strong, which makes one of this issue’s surprises the fact that Superman is now – apparently – physically weak, an unexplained (and misleading?) exact 180° from Kingdom Come. But this Superman is morally as strong as ever we’ve seen, with an optimism that pays off when he is – apparently – able to win the acidic Manchester Black over to his side in a moment of super crisis. I slather on the “apparently”s because I see possible deception everywhere, and in the one panel where we see Superman while Black is unconscious, the hero lands dramatically – and seemingly powerfully, but the artwork keeps that intriguingly ambiguous, with a mighty fist joining his feet in a three-point landing that could project either power or (by Superman standards) weakness.

When Black awakens, he gets the pitch: Superman needs his help. There’s a war, but first there’s a battle. Superman needs Black’s help in a larger sense, a strategic sense, and Black isn’t prone to agree, but first there’s an imminent, urgent and arguably worse crisis with a massive breakout of Phantom Zone robots due to occur in minutes. Again, it feels like possible deception: Superman’s Pollyannaish recruitment speech to Black served only to alienate him, as Superman must have anticipated. The imminent Phantom Zone breakout, on the other hand, was an urgent crisis in which Superman and Black inarguably faced a mutual enemy, and gave Black no time to think the matter through. Black needed either to accept Superman’s pitch, or to reject it and in so doing possibly risk his own life, should the Phantom Zone escapees ravage the entire planet after they’d beaten Superman. And it seems a bit of a coincidence that this singular existential threat would arise “exactly twelve minutes” after Black awakens. So I wouldn’t be surprised if we are to learn that Superman manipulated the situation and showed a bit of deviousness on his own part. In any event, even if the timing were coincidental (and existential threats to the DCU have a way of showing up at least daily if not hourly), the outcome is the same – after Black contemplates, with the minutes that he has left, whether or not he and the Phantom Zone prisoners are on the same side, he chooses to back Superman and, with a savvy nod to the Silver Age, he tries to defeat the escapees with a Kryptonian Thought Beast. Guess when those first appeared in publication: 1963, a year that is brought up over and over again in this issue. Did Morrison choose that 1963 reference knowingly? I don’t know.

I’m also not sure if it was on purpose, when Superman first mentions that year in the present, that Morrison curiously quotes every note of a line from the Eighties Dream Academy song, “Life in a Northern Town”: “In Winter 1963, it felt like the world would freeze, with John F. Kennedy and the Beatles.” This refers to a notoriously severe wave of winter cold that hit the UK in early 1963, when the native Scotland of Morrison, just then turning three years old, had subzero (Fahrenheit!) temperatures. So much is coming together here that ties Morrison’s biography with this story that we should pay careful attention to the author’s place in the story – presumably on a symbolic level. The story features an acerbic, sarcastic, cynical Brit coming face to face with the symbol of American idealism and power. The story begins in the early 1960s. After decades in which things go variously well and poorly, there is a time of reckoning in which the Brit decides just how much he believes in the god-hero of American superheroes, and we can ask, perhaps thumbing through the autobiographical pages of Supergods just how much this story is about where Morrison’s viewpoints, and possibly the world’s current geopolitical status are now in 2021. Perhaps it's Morrison and not Manchester Black who's referencing "Amazing Grace" in asking whether or not Superman can "save a wretch like me."

The plot itself, on the surface, is brimming over with pregnant details and mini-mysteries presented by the shadowy villain who not revealed in the story, but the solicits promise us that he is the Ultra-Humanite, a choice which takes us back to the absolute origin of DC supervillains, and moreover hints at another one-and-done Elseworlds series with an ampersand in its title, Superman & Batman: Generations. All of the little expository details slipping from the dialogue of Superman, Black, and the Ultra-Humanite set the stage wonderfully, as Morrison has done in his Batman run, Action run, 52, and elsewhere, mixing details that are respectively from canon and contrary to canon, freeing the author to tease us with hints, then go back on those teases later, or confirm them as they see fit. Perhaps kryptonite in this reality is nothing like it is in any reality that we’ve seen before. Or perhaps it’s exactly the same. Perhaps Superman really is losing his powers, or perhaps it’s all a big ruse and, like in Kingdom Come, he’s stronger than ever. We just don’t know, but we have to consider both – all – possibilities, which is wonderful.

The title hides one such alternate possibility, which is likely rife with meaning. While Manchester Black was the leader, in Joe Kelly’s DC stories, of a group called The Elite, it was based on Wildstorm Comics’ The Authority; here, Morrison uses the inspiration’s name for, presumably, the version of the group in this reality. But why? Maybe the answer is a superficial “just because” but it makes the title say something that we ought to listen to with common nouns instead of proper nouns: The story is about Superman and the authority (small “a”) that he has. Whether he really has lost his powers or is only pretending to do so, this story clearly brings into question whether or not Superman has authority (small “a”) that comes from his qualities as a leader, as an inspiration, and not simply whether or not Earth’s yellow sun has charged his muscles with incredible power. And that promises a much more interesting story than a title that promises us meditations about Superman and the elite (small “e”).