Morrison keeps up the pace and his protagonist stumbles from one situation into another, while the possessed Masterman sets all the dominos in place for his master plan. This doesn’t mean that Zenith gets it easy. The mad ideas are still there, but serve the characters more than the story. This is an early work by Scottish writer Grant Morrison, and even though a lot of themes that he would come back to in later series are present in Zenith, it’s all a bit more confined in this case. Before Masterman barges into his cocooned reality, he hasn’t even been in a fight, using his powers mainly to show off. Zenith’s self-centered behaviour reflects this perfectly: he is the epitome of the self-absorbed pop star, but just happens to have superpowers. In the aftermath of two world wars, a failing superhero initiative that gave up their government-sponsored roots to become hippies, an economic recession and a corrupt government intent on keeping the working classes down, what else is there to do but to party and escape from the real world? His main concerns, though, are how to steer clear of it all and how to preserve his pretty face for all those photo shoots he has planned.īesides Zenith‘s idea-driven story, Morrison’s tale of egotism and late 1980s politics reflects a particular zeitgeist that is a major part of the tale’s appeal. However, Masterman has risen from the ashes as the vehicle for the Many-Angled Ones (Lovecraftian other-dimensional invaders), and Zenith is the only one left to pick up the fight. Their only descendant, Zenith, is now a teenage pop star whose ego is only surpassed by his hunger for women, drugs, alcohol and fame. More then forty years later, a generation of 1960s superheroes have either died or faded from view.

Zenith: Phase One has just hit the market, and covers the rise of its eponymous hero through exposition and a major flashback: in 1945 Berlin, British hero Maximan battles the German super soldier Masterman until both men are destroyed by an atomic bomb. That volume is now being chopped up into four separate hardcovers for the general audience. Originally published in 2000 AD between 19, Zenith had never been collected in its entirety until last year, when 2000 AD released a limited-edition hardback of the serialised stories. Nomber_key:000723Īfter languishing in copyright limbo, Grant Morrison’s breakthrough work finally sees the light of day again in a beautiful hardcover edition, with Steve Yeowell’s linework as crisp as ever.

A unicorn named sparkle a picture book