If your mum and dad fuck you up, you have to kill them, of course. At least, you have to kill your dad. What you do with your mum, we’d rather not think about.

For all Morrison’s protestations, we know that he has felt a desperate need to compete with Alan Moore, and that Moore has felt no such need to compete with him in turn.

This is rather unfair, in many ways, as the two men’s skills are very different, and this can be seen nowhere more than in Pax Americana, which even though it very deliberately tries to ape Moore’s style (specifically Watchmen, but also Promethea) manages to remind me of nothing so much as Best Man Fall, the twelfth issue of The Invisibles, which like this begins with a death and tells the story of a life out of chronological order.

Moore’s original pitch for Watchmen∴ …I just made a typo, and the typo was “∴”, the symbol seen throughout Pax Americana, and for which I didn’t even know there was a keyboard shortcut in LyX, the word processor I’m using for this. So in the spirit of embracing mistakes, of synchronicity, of serialised narrative, I’ll drop that thread for now — I’m sure I’ll come back to it — and examine that symbol instead.

The symbol can mean many things. One of them is “therefore” — that’s why LyX has a shortcut for it, because LyX is primarily intended for writing mathematical papers. Anything following the symbol, in this meaning, is something that follows logically from it. Premise is followed by conclusion, proposition is followed by lemma.

But it has another meaning, too. In the teachings of Aleister Crowley — a figure who turns up in Moore’s work a lot, but who is also a background presence in the story of Pax Americana, his essay The Soldier and the Hunchback being to this version of the Question what Ayn Rand’s writings are to Ditko’s original — the ∴ means both abbreviation (in the name of his organisation the A∴A∴, the symbols showed that the organisation’s full name was the Argenteum Astrum), and that the organisation using the symbol possesses the secret Mason Word, the key bit of occult knowledge that is hidden from most people, and without which the world (in Crowley’s view) doesn’t make sense.

We’ve seen Crowley turn up in passing before, of course — we’ve seen the magic word “Abrahadabra” used, rather than the more normal “Abracadabra”. The difference is that the h in Crowley’s version symbolises Horus, the conquering child. Crowley believed that we were leaving the Aeon of Osiris, the father, and entering the Aeon of Horus, the time when the world would be ruled by “the crowned and conquering child”, a spirit of youth destroying the old orthodoxies.

One gets the impression that Morrison sees himself as the crowned and conquering Horus destroying the old father Mooresiris. Even though the two are almost the same age, and Morrison is keen to mention at every opportunity that he started working in comics before Moore, they are of different countercultural generations. Moore is a hippie, and his work has much of the hippie about it — grandiose, intricate, heavy, complex works. Morrison, on the other hand, came up in the era of punk, and his best work has much of the energy of punk — three-minute blasts of pop, based around well-worn formulae but with an energy and rebellious intelligence.

The problem is that Morrison seems to think of himself as the Mozart to Moore’s Salieri, but Moore actually is as good as his reputation, and got there first. Morrison will always be second-place, and this casts a shadow over all his work. It’s not helped by the fact that Moore got out of writing corporate comics early, while Morrison’s best work is done for DC and working with their characters. To continue the hippie/punk analogy, Moore is Robert Wyatt, ploughing his own furrow and releasing ever more abstruse music through tiny indie labels to great critical acclaim, while Morrison is John Lydon, a middle-aged man trapped in a punk persona, selling butter in commercials. Ever have the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Except that’s not fair, either. Lydon did the butter commercials so he would be able to fund recording and releasing a new album by his band Public Image Limited, because no record labels would take them on, and he wanted to make new, original, music again, not just carry on touring with the Sex Pistols doing nostalgia shows. And in the same way, Morrison’s corporate work allows his more individual work to be produced (Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye was published as a condition of him working on 52). But more than that, Morrison’s corporate work allows him to use twentieth-century icons to tell his stories, in the way Moore uses the icons of an earlier age in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. A work like All-Star Superman simply would not work with analogues or substitutes — it needs to be about Superman, and Lois Lane, and Lex Luthor.

At any other time, Morrison would be regarded as the greatest writer working in comics. The fact that there is another person with a claim to that title, who works in the same areas, who got there first, and who might be better than him is possibly the single most important thing to keep in mind when reading his work.

Pax Americana
starts and ends with a father being murdered. At the start, the symbolic father, the President. At the end, an actual father. Both shot through the head, giving them Doctor Manhattan’s third-eye symbol, and turning their two eyes into a ∴. Pax Americana is also about reflections, much as Watchmen was, and the whole story tries to critique Watchmen, even from the very start, which has the Peacemaker committing a murder, when Moore’s original pitch for Watchmen, when it was to use these characters, was called “Who Killed The Peacemaker?”

The whole thing is designed to show that Morrison could do Watchmen just as well, and that even if he couldn’t Watchmen wasn’t something that was worth doing anyway. And what’s left is something that only works, that only makes sense, with Watchmen having a canonical status. It’s a work that can never be read by anyone who doesn’t already know Watchmen, just as singing “no Beatles, Elvis, or Rolling Stones” only works if your audience know who those people are. Morrison can try to smash the idol that is Moore, but all he does is produce a work that reinforces Moore’s status.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.

[Over a ten-day period I will be posting my long piece on Multiversity. Those who want it in one piece can buy the whole thing as an epub from Smashwords right now for $1, on Kindle (US) and (UK), and my Patreons get it for free. Buy it and see if YOU are one of the lucky ones whose ereader will render “∴” correctly!]

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