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Underground > Comic Books >

Zenith Phase IV Sucks -- And Here's Why

  
  

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17:29 / 15.09.04
Well, it's been a while since i read Zenith, but having just finished my first full read through of Morrison's JLA, I think you have to be a little careful with saying that the horrible Lloigor world is unnecessary.
While I understand that Lovecraft and other authors may well have done the 'unspeakable indescribable' horror well, I don't think taht many comics writers have ever done it as well as Morrison. In a way, we are a bit spoiled as _we_ can all point to the Outer Church, Orqwith, Mageddon and plenty of other 'on the edge of reason' situations that Grant has done, but I would be surprised if may other comics readers had come across anything like them elsewhere. This one is certainly his bleakest, and avoids the usual fire and brimstone trappings that tend to crop up when ultimate horror is mentioned.
Just a thought. Now, I have to find out if I still have them all.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
21:29 / 15.09.04
Yes. Certainly few people can flog an idea like Morrison. well, you know, apart from Ellis.

Tell you what. Why not read Zenith again, then read *this thread*, then come back to us.
 
 
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21:45 / 15.09.04
Already had read the whole thread, and was intrigued. Thank you yet again Haus (I'm rather surprised it wasn't Flyboy for once) for setting me right that the odd throwaway comment should not be tolerated.
My point was that from memory I have recalled that the world presented in Phase IV was one for which I can't recall a close analogue in any previous comic work (even if others have done something similar in fiction). While we may have been spoiled by his use of such worlds in other works since, it was quite shocking at the time, and I feel that Yeowell's spare atrwork added to the alienation.
I am still waiting to re-read before I posted on my own thoughts on the whole recursive Chimera business.
Until then, I think it's a reasonable defence of Grant's work on Phase IV to point out that (possibly Doom Patrol aside, I'm not clear on the timings) our perceptions of his handling of the empty world may have been coloured by his later and better treatments. Sound fair?
 
 
miss wonderstarr
22:28 / 15.09.04
here's a very close analogue to Morrison/Yeowell's apocalypse:

Too big to include as an image... compare this to the Lloigor warping Earth before they finally take off into the Solar System.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
07:50 / 16.09.04
Already had read the whole thread, and was intrigued. Thank you yet again Haus (I'm rather surprised it wasn't Flyboy for once) for setting me right that the odd throwaway comment should not be tolerated.
I was objecting not to the throwaway nature of the post, but to its incorrectness.

i) What you said was:

I think you have to be a little careful with saying that the horrible Lloigor world is unnecessary.

Did anyone *say* that? I certainly didn't. I said that it was better as something feared than portrayed:

And despite some nice creepiness - the people with hands for heads (Rock of Ages, anyone?) the horrible world the Lloigor create was better when we didn't see it.

More broadly, I said that I wasn't sure that this entire Phase 4 was entirely necessary, and that I would have preferred a longer, black and white Phase 4 based on more character dynamics. However, Grant Morrison was into his dayglo phase by then, and 2000AD was into its colour phase, so perhaps it was unavoidable...

We seem largely to agree on Steve Yeowell's art, but I'm not so sure Morrison should get extra credit for recycling his ideas, or indeed for originating the idea, since there are all sorts of precedents, both without comics (kovacs above, Bosch pretty much passim, inspiring a Kevin McCarthy(?) story in "The Dice Man") and within - most obviously, the Jaspers-warped world in Alans Moore and Davies' "Captain Britain" and the superheroes battling on a physical and allegorical level in the ruins of London portrayed by Moore and Totleben in "Miracleman"...
 
 
miss wonderstarr
08:11 / 16.09.04
I would have preferred a longer, black and white Phase 4 based on more character dynamics.

I agree entirely. I get the distinct sense both Yeowell and Morrison were rushing this though, and weren't fully invested in it.

Might be interesting to work out what else Morrison, at least, was writing at the time, to see if there's any context for this -- whether he was clearly more engaged in something that to him was more novel and allowed him more freedom than Part IV of a tale that was already pretty-solidly structured so that he was only filling out the framework he'd sketched in the previous Phases. His foreshadowing is so good, with hindsight, that he wrote himself into a corner for this finale.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
12:55 / 16.09.04
I finished reading the excellent The Way We Live Now, an assessment of mid-90s England by senior cultural studies fellow Richard "Uses of Literacy" Hoggart today, and a quotation near the end stood out for me in the context of Zenith Phase IV.

It's from Herbert Read, whom I confess I don't know, predicting a possible future for the country (from a 1965 perspective):

"It will be a gay world. There will be lights everywhere except in the hearts of men and the fall of the last civilisation will not be heard above the incessant din." (from Atrophied Muscles and Empty Art).

Hoggart comments that we are too-easily led by "not leaders with visions of high destiny, but cheerful chums with low horizons."

He wrote that in the mid-90s, and like Morrison's vision of StJohn as Blair's puppet-master (occupying him as a Lloigor does a metahuman?) it seems prescient in terms of New Labour's approach.

What these two comments, from Read and Hoggart, made me consider is that zzzzenith.com is canon, in spirit if not in precise tone and continuity, and that what it shows is the end of the world in a way that's far more horrific and nightmarish than anything in Phase IV, because of its very proximity and plausibility.

I don't have zzzzenith.com in front of me, but the world it depicts is one of reality TV taken to exploitative extremes, of tabloid scandal, mawkish sob stories, tacky celebrity sex, Millennium Dome empty heritage, puppet politicians... the reduction of anything meaningful to cheap sensation, the emptying of history, the flattening of culture and society.

When they visit the Dome, I believe we see Dr Beat and White Heat, Zenith's parents, turned into some kind of mock-up with dummies. This is the millennial tawdrification of history, of heritage... the way we contain and shrink grand projects and struggle into caricatures and waxworks. In F. Jameson's terms, this is a prime example of the way postmodernism can only deal with our past as a museum of costumes and masks.

It's a powerful image because White Heat and Dr Beat represent 3 themes:

- Zenith's personal history, which during the 4-Phase story he sought for, trying to ground himself, and recovered only through photographs and simulacra (the robot of his dad, clone of his mum) before it was cut away from him, leaving him without a solid sense of his own heritage (his parents were "bad guys", possibly Lloigor in Cambridge's terms.) Finding out who his parents were was Zenith's only motivation through Phases I and II -- maybe that's why he seems to lose any impulse and become more lethargic than ever from Phase III. By the end, he only realises he's killed his dad, fucked his mum (or fakes/simulations thereof) and doesn't know who they are at all... he doesn't even know if he's really got a son. Now he's left with waxworks he barely seems to glance at.

- the metahuman Plan, a classic grand narrative of enlightenment in their terms, a huge-scale project to change and improve the world through science.

- by extension the other narratives of struggle associated with 1968, which is when the plan was formed (entirely intentional that GM chose that date, I'm sure); black civil rights, feminism, student protest, the youth movements of that period.

All these aspects of history have wound up being contained and made ridiculous as dressed-up figures in a dome.

The end of zzzzenith.com tells us that the Chimeraverse pyramid, split with a laser as some kind of Marconi exhibit I believe, has led to a group called the Singing Universes that stays at #1 in the charts forever.

It's bitter, broad parody from Morrison but I think he really means this, rather than just throwing the episode in as a bit of fun. This is his more accurate apocalypse... sameness, flatness, image and front. A lack of any purpose, any personal or political history... and the same prospect ahead of us for ever.

[I hope my refs. to zzzzenith.com aren't incorrect -- I would think I've got it basically right even if details are missed?]
 
 
Bed Head
02:36 / 17.09.04
(Coming to this thread *very* late, so apologies if I'm miles behind everyone else. Will do homework)

Ok. So, re: the proposal that Phase IV sucks. Given my fondness for gimmicky narrative devices, I actually think it’s a rather clever trick to have Payne narrating Phase IV, backwards. Every other episode, up to episode 13, he spends trying to imagine what happened, in an effort to understand it. But the way he perceives the narrative, perceives himself in relation to the narrative, changes as he gets younger. I dunno, maybe I’m easily impressed, but I remember thinking how fucking clever it was, his being middle-aged when he is remembering the way human society was suddenly, unexpectedly, effortlessly superseded, how he recalls the rejection by Shockwave and Blaze when he’s in his early 20s; the big dumb superhero vs supervillain fight coincides with his spotty adolescence, he becomes a small child as the world turns into a terrifying, bewildering nightmare.

And I really like Yeowell’s art. I think you’re all being a little harsh. Although he’s probably never going to do anything as majestic as Phase III ever again, I think I like the fact that he’s kept on changing his style rather than ever getting stale, and I’ll take the shitty colour panels if that means I also get such wonderful colour panels as are in the prologue. The strengths, when they come, easily outweigh the weaknesses. Besides which, his work totally pisses all over anything else in the same progs as Phase IV appeared in. I see a shift in style, not a decline in ability. And I’ve got no problem with the way the fights or the pay-offs are presented, it totally seemed to fit the way the story is told: back to front, once-removed, in a parallel universe, by someone who is disorientated, regressing, and who doesn’t ever quite understand, and the story is all the more scary for it. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Phase IV objectively knocks the straightforward storytelling of Phase I into a cocked hat. Is it possible there might be the ‘Star Wars’ effect happening here, where your expectations are disappointed in part because you’re grown-ups by the time Phase IV came out? Because, sit I and IV next to each other and then tell me which sucks.


When you say fake or sock-puppet heroes, it’s *a* real Zenith and PSJ in the parallel universe, isn’t it? Fully real as far as they’re concerned. The Zenith doesn’t ever know he’s a copy, the PSJ might know where he is, but he’s independent, he still tries to fight. They feel the hopelessness of their situation, their death is quite real, and they’re absolutely right to be properly scared when Ruby-Fox-as-horrible-monster comes to get them. Dudes, I was.


Zzzenith.com as canon. Are you sure, K? - I haven't actually read it, you understand, but the way you describe the story, you make Zzzzenith.com sound possibly like Morrison's own Jerry Cornelius: less important in the context of an ongoing ‘canon’ (and really, why the fuck would he still be tinkering with canon bollocks?) than as establishing Z as his own 'spirit of the times' character that he can keep updating every decade or so, that we can ooh and aaah at his writerly observations on contemporary society. Possibly. But that sounds like a much more Morrison thing to do, somehow, than to try and keep a story arc going. In which case, yeah, the history of the Zenith character, and how the concept ages, would be part of the critique.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
07:16 / 17.09.04
I accept most of the above points as valid and interesting, even if some of them certainly didn't strike me as immediately true when reading Phase IV -- yes Phase I is a little uninspired in its telling, but I think it's an old story revitalised by the details, character and dialogue. Suggesting that Phase IV feels or looks flat because it's set in a messed-up pocket universe is a fine excuse but still feels like an excuse.

But as for zzzzenith.com as canon, I didn't really mean in the strict Batman sense. I meant, more, that rather than it being a throwaway [imagine the GRANT speaking here] "och 2K has thrown some cash at me tae dae a comedy strip", like an Inside Tharg's Head piss-around, I feel this final tour of the Zenith-verse is a logical extension of what we see at the end of Phase IV. It shows what would happen with StJohn being in power -- what a reduced world of fake thrills and shallow understanding that would be for its citizens -- and in that sense I think it could be seen both as continuing where the "serious" Phase left off, and making a serious comment about Britain's nightmarish future/present day.
 
  

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