Quarter Bin #24 "Aztek"

One of the more intriguing elements of Grant Morrison’s backstory is his involvement with the career of Mark Millar. Today it’s a moot subject, and there is no longer any kind of relationship, but as early as fifteen years ago, they were working under the same roof and in fact working very closely together, whether on THE FLASH or collaborating on an experimental superhero in the pages of AZTEK: THE ULTIMATE MAN.

Millar has become one of the cornerstone creators at Marvel while Morrison has been a DC man since departing NEW X-MEN (or, when Xorn was still known, and as an alternate version of Magneto). Millar’s best-known DC work is SUPERMAN: RED SUN, though he also wrote for Vertigo. Aside from Brian Michael Bendis, however, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better-established “architect” at the House of Ideas. He is also responsible for WANTED and KICK-ASS, among other projects, and for a time represented the next generation of comic book visionaries, no doubt a prospect that appealed to him, since that’s a role Morrison held before him and retains to this day, long after days he was supposed to pass the baton to Millar.

Well, they’ll always have Aztek. A hero who later claimed his payoff in Morrison’s JLA storyline “World War Three,” the erstwhile Ultimate Man was an attempt to create a modern hero, one who was trained into the role and given a clear purpose. His series ran from 1996-97, a mere ten issues, victim to low readership, another new character who failed to stick (and has yet to be resurrected in the new millennium, much less the “New 52”). I’m afraid I’m a part of his misfortunes, since I read the first few issues, but for some reason abruptly stopped, even though I’d thoroughly enjoyed what I’d seen. I can’t account for that decision now, but as I’ve repeatedly stated in the Quarter Bin column, one of the great joys of being a comics reader is that the past is always a part of the present, back issues being an obsessive hobby that rivals new releases for the modern fan.

I was cataloguing my comics, actually, when I finally got around to prompting myself to read more AZTEK. DC released a trade collection of the series, but once again I had other priorities, even though I was happy to see that it had not been entirely forgotten. The actual impetus was the letters column of an issue I had gotten back in the day, referencing an appearance by the Joker, which was said to be definitive. Knowing as I knew at that point how important Grant Morrison writing the Joker actually is, I felt I had to read it for myself. I made a trip to Escape Velocity in Colorado Springs and found a pretty good selection of the series, and that’s where the following comes from:

AZTEK: THE ULTIMATE MAN #3 (DC)
From October 1996:

This issue is probably an important one for fans to have read at the time, since it illustrates perhaps better than preceding installments how much thought Morrison and Millar put into their concept, which embraced not only the central hero and the peculiar city of Vanity, but an idea of the hero-and-villain community that went well beyond convention. The thing I’d originally admired about AZTEK was that it felt like the future Mark Waid had envisioned in KINGDOM COME, where heroes become more violent and less calculating. That thought is expanded in this issue, as Morrison and Millar shape the backstory for the figure Aztek previously defeated, a crazy mix of hero and villain, where it’s revealed that he was once a very clear-cut, actually stereotypical hero with a partner, who had her share of tragedy even before Aztek appeared, and so her mourning process, which is in itself unique to AZTEK, becomes a further mark of distinction for the series, even before we’ve properly delved into the central character’s own particulars. In hindsight, the creators are attempting an incredibly ambitious thing here, all the more for starting with a totally new hero. That is recipe for disaster.

AZTEK: THE ULTIMATE MAN #4 (DC)
From November 1996:

Let’s skip this one, because even I thought it didn’t help the series find an audience, like it was Morrison and Millar trying a little too hard to drag Vertigo into DC proper.

AZTEK: THE ULTIMATE MAN #5 (DC)
From December 1996:

Here’s another key issue, since it expands on Aztek’s origins, by introducing an inadvertent rival in the Lizard King, a predecessor in the line of warriors developed by the Q Society who believes he can replace our hero as the Ultimate Man. What he fails to realize is that Aztek is the culmination of the project, and therefore the only one who can fit the bill (until we learn that, like Luke Skywalker, there is another, who later briefly appears in Morrison’s JLA). The whole concept of Aztek hinges on the legend of Quetzalcoatl, a name grade school scholars may recall from the annals of Spanish exploration in the New World, and is perhaps a little more elaborate, or outside the realm of typical comic book storytelling, so that Morrison himself later simplifies everything to “Lex Luthor” in JLA.

AZTEK: THE ULTIMATE MAN #6 (DC)
From January 1997:

Here at last in the Joker issue. I guess I was a little surprised that the story is actually pretty tame, more subdued, less madcap than I had been expecting, maybe not exactly what DC readers were getting at that point (perhaps appropriately enough, the character had been neutered since his “Death in the Family” heyday to a shadow of himself, a joke in “Knightfall”); I mean, it’s pretty lunatic, but not exactly the psychological portrait in ARKHAM ASYLUM (the first decade of the new millennium is responsible, we must then assume, for a lot more of what we think about the Joker than we might previously have expected). Batman, for the record, does make an appearance.

AZTEK: THE ULTIMATE MAN #10 (DC)
From May 1997:

The finale, featuring Amazo and his creator Professor Ivo, locked in a complicated dance, is basically Aztek’s induction into the Justice League, which was probably intended from the start, but is kind of a letdown for anyone who might have expected closure within the character’s own book, even if it came to a premature end. (The letters column features a particularly insightful rant about readers failing to live up to their end of the bargain that is perhaps more noteworthy than anything in the rest of AZTEK; if you’re interested to know what it says, consider that your personal incentive to track down some of these back issues.) Even in the age of the “New 52,” it’s hard to see DC rolling the dice with another series like this, which tries to reinvent just about everything about traditional superhero comics, and that’s something of a shame. The fact that Morrison went back to the drawing board, reinvested himself in some of the more basic tropes, and that Millar has been trying to cater directly to a moviegoer’s perspective, can’t be a coincidence (or maybe it is and I just like to read too much into things; for the record, it’s a fun hobby all in itself!), after an experiment like this, a kind of spectacular failure. They both came away from AZTEK with a distinct perspective of where to go next, should they ever try again. In a way, it’s not hard to see how they couldn’t work together again.