In 2005, I got a nice email from a university journal asking for a review for a forthcoming edition on comics. I wrote a review, and it was officially accepted into the journal and all that. I never heard anything further after that, and now have learned in 2008 that it was never actually published. (Does that happen often?) (Is there an emoticon for a sigh and shrug?)
So, without further ado, the review I wrote on DC One Million.
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Morrison, Grant (writer), Val Semeiks (penciller), Prentiss Rollins (inker), Carla Feeny (colorist), John Costanza (letterer), et al. DC One Million (Trade Paperback Collection of DC One Million 1-4, Green Lantern 1,000,000, Starman 1,000,000, JLA 1,000,000, Resurrection Man 1,000,000, and Superman: Man of Tomorrow 1,000,000). New York: DC Comics, Inc. 1999. ISBN: 1-56389-525-0.
Near the end of DC One Million, Superman is preparing to leave the year 85,271 to return to his home in “our time.” He tells his descendant, the Superman of the 853rd century, that he’d rather defer a meeting with the future’s Superman Prime, who happens to be himself, now millennia old. As “our” Superman takes his leave of the future and its Supermen, his descendant says, “There’s only one Superman” (201).
This exchange, amazing yet reasonable in context, is a testament to the ability of superhero comics as a genre to contain the fantastic and situate it as part of everyday physics, but is also a by-product of the emergent complexity of Superman as a character and icon. At the moment you read this, Superman, created in 1938, is nearly seventy years old; and, Superman is, as always, a young professional in Metropolis. Umberto Eco posited that Superman was a mythological figure, outside of time, and a figure of romance, subject to the vicissitudes of causality, at once. This paradox can be stated in more material terms: Superman participates each month in ongoing dramatic adventures, and Superman carries stable cultural meanings as a symbol within contemporary global capitalism. As a character and brand at once, his ontology is in perpetual conflict, his world a battleground between contradictory impulses to both novelty and stasis.
We can complicate this world still further by noticing that Superman and Batman coexist in the same imagined space. Their mutually troubled chronotopes engage in persistent serial dialogue with one another, and with those of Wonder Woman and all the other heroes published by DC Comics, Inc. Their shared fiction is a conglomeration of marketable properties which presents itself in the form of a large-scale serial narrative. This structure, referred to by its owners, producers-for-hire, and audience as the DC Universe, must maintain enough dynamism to keep its readers buying periodicals, while at the same time maintaining loyalty to its real purpose: a stable for licensable cross-media intellectual property.
The mechanisms of this balancing act are too manifold and intricate to discuss completely here. They include practices of willful selective causality, fragmentation, and oneiric history, with names like “retroactive continuity,” “Elseworlds,” and, importantly here, “alternate futures.” The fiction of the DC Universe cannot have a “real” future or endpoint: an ending, in this ecology, is not a resolution of patterns of action and conflict, but rather the foreclosing of market potential. Instead of an ending, the universe generates speculative futures, “imaginary” projections ahead in time, that allow the parameters or conflicts of the universe at the present moment to play out. These speculative futures allow progress in the narrative without the bother of actual change: they allow the reader a resolution that the “real” fiction will never be allowed to provide.
One such alternate future is presented in DC One Million, a “crossover event” taken on by several of DC’s serials in 1998. One Million takes as its premise the fact that the various comics published by DC, if allowed to continue, will reach their one millionth issues sometime around 85,271. Through the convention of time travel, the DC heroes of that time – the Justice Legion A, consisting of implausibly direct descendants of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and other familiar heroes – are able to travel to 1998, and our Justice League of America is given the opportunity to change places with them. A concurrent plot generated by the immortal villain Vandal Savage and the “tyrant sun” Solaris leads to a conflict across the eons, which keeps all the DC heroes busy for a couple of months.
One Million is partially a discrete story and partially a corporate directive: a coordinated event involving the work of dozens of DC’s artists and writers for hire, but with core concepts created by Grant Morrison, who with Val Semeiks and Prentiss Rollins generated the four-issue miniseries in which the main story events occur. Morrison’s work stands out for considering the DC Universe’s structure from a critical perspective (Craft 142), and in One Million he presents a vision of the future that, as an extrapolation, highlights the unspoken paradoxes of the DC Universe as an ecology for intellectual property more than it does the rules of cause and effect that ostensibly govern the universe as a serial fiction. One of the members of the Justice League asks logically, “What are the chances of an identical JLA arising hundreds of centuries from now?” (7); the degree of similarity between this future of the DC Universe and its present seems a stretch even within the loose reality of superheroes, and yet, given the real rules of the DC Universe – Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman must maintain the iconicity, the brand equity, that makes them viable in a market – it makes perfect sense that, within the parameters of this corporate fiction, the year 85,271 will bring us more of the same Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.
By then placing our icons in direct dialogue with their bizarre and yet entirely contiguous far-flung future, Morrison brings the ironies of “alternate futures” in this system to light – not only to the audience but, in typical Morrison fashion, to the characters themselves. Morrison often brings to superheroes a level of awareness of their own fictionality, and when Batman protests, “I’m trying hard to find my free will in all of this (201),” or Aquaman asks, “Is this the real future or another of those possible futures?” (34-36), they seem as much jaded about the practices of their fiction as flummoxed by the existential challenges of time travel.
As Morrison spins futures, presents and pasts in simultaneity and lends characters a sneaking suspicion of their own status as fictions and products, he takes advantage of the fact that this fiction is constructed in comics, a semiotic system that, in its juxtaposition of image and text, reveals the contingency of both, and allows an impressive range of representational play. At the end of One Million, our ageless Superman Prime has embedded the past within the future, recreating the Krypton of his birth within a tesseract, a fold in space that presents itself to the world of the 853rd century as a flat window to somewhere else – a window very much like a comics panel. As Superman steps into the panel of the past while the heroes of the future watch, he turns and winks. In the transition, a layer is collapsed, and we are dramatically placed at the same point of perspective as the audience of the future: we gaze into the tesseract/panel, and inhabit a moment of complexity and ambiguity where past, present, and future dramatically coexist. Later, in a retelling of the moment, Green Lantern muses, “Some things you can’t put into words, man” (204).
Works Cited
Craft, Jason. “Fiction Networks: The Emergence of Proprietary, Persistent, Large-Scale Popular Fictions.” Diss. University of Texas at Austin, 2004.
Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” The Role of the Reader. 1962. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. 107-24.
