Art By: Ivan Reis, Joe Prado
Cover Price: $4.99
Release Date: August 20, 2014
Peeling Back The Layers of Confusion
It's time to take a trip throughout the New 52 Multiverse and to do so we'll being shucking and jiving through the mind of Grant Morrison "The Man of Layers" to do it. Now it seems that's I'm in the minority here because I wasn't a fan of of Morrison's run on Action Comics, but the good news is that my favorite of his issues was dealing with the Superman of Earth-23 and now we're finally back to dealing with him and countless others for this behemoth of a comic. Months ago I would of sworn that this series was never going to happen, but I'm glad I was wrong because I love the Multiverse and hopefully we can peel back those layers to Morrison's mind and come out knowing what the hell we read. Let's check it out.
Explain It!:
Okay I'm going to try my damnedest to go over this comic, but even I feel out of my depth here. Our story begins with a landlady with lice pounding on a door demanding rent. Inside we see that tenant is a comic book fan and is talking online to a friend about a supposedly cursed comic, that he got a preview of from his local comic shop. That's the end of making sense to me in this section of the story. All of a sudden this guy has a pirate chimpanzee sidekick named Stubbs, that tells him that this deserves a better look and that he better transform into his alter ego, that happens to be the last monitor in the Multiverse, Nix Uotan: The Super Judge.
The weird duo enter their dimensional ship and travel to Earth-7, where apparently the strange ideas for the cursed comic came from. You know the whole idea where some parallel worlds are other world's fiction. That whole thing. So the monitor and his pirate chimp travel to this Earth, where it seems all hell has broken out and the only surviving hero of this world is the God, Thunderer. Nix Uotan realizes that whatever has done this to this Earth has actually put the world out of tune with itself, causing the laws of physics and reality to break down. You see it's all held together by vibrations. The worlds of the Multiverse vibrate together and are only separated by different pitches of the vibrations. So this world needs a tuning fork and we find out the villain of this story is some kind of gigantic flying bat eye ball monster that looks like a rejected Pokemon and Nix tells the Thunderer to take his ship and find help and him being a powerful monitor and all that would stay behind with his chimp and fight the good fight and buy him some time until he can return. Before we leave Nix Uotan we see that his plan wasn't very good for him because he touches one of the eyeball bat's minions and it starts to make him sick and apparently this would eventually lead to death, but this monster has the anti-death equation that will keep him alive to suffer. So it looks like we're out of monitors.
Now we'll jump to Earth-23 where we see the Calvin Ellis Superman fighting an alien robot, that the Justice League of this world has deemed to be a probe from a parallel world. The robot activates a machine that the Luthor of that world built to travel to other worlds and the Presidential Superman of Earth-23 disappears. Don't worry, there was nothing sinister in mind with the kidnapping of Superman, it was more of a call to arms as we see Superman reemerge on a kind of hub for the Multiverse. There we see other heroes from around the 52 universes like Captain Carrot, Dino-Cop, Red Racer, Aqua Woman and just a mess of other heroes that have been recruited by Earth-7's Thunderer who made it to this hub to get the help for the last monitor.
So the heroes do what heroes normally would and agree to help Thunderer's Earth and save Nix Uotan. Superman plays some improvised jazz to get the ship going..... No I'm serious remember vibrations and pitches hold the Multiverse together and the monitor ship runs on music. But something goes wrong and our heroes don't make it to their proper destination.
Earth-8 is where our heroes wind up and it seems that this Earth has problems too. No not of the Pokemon variety, but it seems that this world's heroes are dealing with one of their greatest villains obtaining infinite power. Earth-8's a bit of fun because we see what Grant Morrison would do to DC up all of Marvel's heroes. Yeah here it's pretty much every Marvel hero and villain tweaked just a bit and what we get is Lord Havok getting the Omni-Gauntlets, The Genesis Egg and the Lightning-Axe of Wundajin. So yeah he's got a bit of cosmic toys, that Earth-8's heroes really don't want this Doctor Doom knock off to have. So our heroes show up and after defusing a fight and explaining the situation, they team up to take Lord Havok down. Okay so I just want you to know that I don't understand how everything works in this Multiverse yet, but I'll lay down what I see happening and you can make a judgement on what you believe is going down, because the Genesis Egg hatches and out from it comes a deformed Nix Uotan, that seems to have suffered greatly from the evil of Earth-7 and him and his zombified looking pirate chimp seem to have hatched here to destroy Earth-8 as well. You know they're bad because now they're ugly and have word balloons like the bat monster from the beginning. Props to the letterer. If you think back on how the Elongated Man looked when he was a Black Lantern then you can imagine how Nix looks at the end, plus a picture wouldn't hurt, huh?
That's it for this month's Multiversity and I'm well on my way to drooling and answering every question asked to me with, "Huh?" But I'm a bit of an idiot, so that was bound to happen anyway. I just really hope that Morrison doesn't do his normal schtick where he has a far out idea and spreads it throughout his books and never gives the reader a reason why. You know that thing that everyone says is layers and I say is annoying. Okay make sure you're back next month as we dive into the deep end and immerse ourselves in the Multiverse.
Bits and Pieces:
Morrison's always been "Out There" and now that he's actually been given room to do whatever he wants with an entire Multiverse, it's kind of a scary thought. We had some strange meta story telling going on here, but for the most part it seems he's held the crazy back for this first issue. Whether that will continue, I guess we'll just have to wait and see what comes out of the layered mind of Morrison in the upcoming months. Not a bad beginning to this huge story and I'm already jonesing to explore more. Go check it out and get lost in the mind of Grant Morrison and his DC Multiverse.
8/10
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