Uzumeri x Godel #7: Sucks To Your Ass-Tek (Aztek: The Ultimate Man 1-10)
Godel: Welcome back to our continuing coverage of Grant Morrison’s DC Universe project! Set the wayback machine for 1996 and the debut of a promising ongoing series, Aztek: The Ultimate Man, cowritten by Morrison with Mark Millar, with art throughout by N. Steven Harris (pencils), Keith Champagne (inks) and Mike Danza (colors). Unfortunately, it was cancelled due to low sales and disappeared from the shelves with #10. But we won’t let that stop us!
Uzumeri: This is, I’m pretty sure, the second-to-last time Morrison will EVER get a book cancelled on him. Before this was Skrull Kill Krew and later on comes Marvel Boy.
Godel: Which is actually a kind of similar comic! New guy in town, hazily-defined powers… Aztek veers closer to being a traditional superhero, rather than a walking sci-fi concept, but it sort of straddles the gap.
Uzumeri: It’s the story of Uno, who’s spent his whole life training in the Andes to become the Ultimate Man.
He shows up in the city of Vanity to fight the evil Shadow God who’s prophesied to rise there; the rest of the book shows him as the superhero Aztek, a fish out of water with absolutely no idea how to operate in modern society. There’s a great scene, for instance, with his first time at a restaurant; he doesn’t get the idea of a ‘menu’ and wonders how he’s supposed to eat seventy-five courses.
He comes into conflict with a number of DCU supervillains and makes his name, and starts to become suspicious of the Q Foundation, the group of warrior monks that trained him, but who also (he learns) killed his father. Because he fell in love with a (cue Guess Who riff) AMERICAN WO-MAAAAAAAAN!
The first thing that struck me on the reread was how… nuts-and-bolts this book is. In comparison to a lot of Morrison’s stuff at the time – Doom Patrol, Flex Mentallo, and the early Invisibles, this is a very down-to-Earth book, and I suspect that’s the influence of one Mark Millar. The superhero registration form at the end of the third issue, for example, was an incredibly Millaresque touch – exposing the banality of super-bureaucracy.
Godel: I usually skim over backmatter stuff like that, but I really liked it here. Things like the book review, they work to situate superheroes in a plausible (but slightly over-the-top) real world, and also to fill in some background about Vanity that would be a real slog if done in word balloons.
And like you said, the nuts-and-bolts storytelling is solid enough: new guy in town meets his supporting cast, fights a parade of guest villains to establish himself, and gradually MYSTERIES DEVELOP. Unfortunately we don’t get the resolution of any of those because of the book getting cancelled, but you can’t blame the writers for that really.
Uzumeri: Well, Morrison and Millar really go for somewhat self-contained stories that build on each other, rather than vague clues that never go anywhere. I mean, there ARE vague clues that end up being dropped, but Synth and Mindy Falconer, the Batman and the Joker arc, the Lizard King, the fight with Amazo – these are all essentially self-contained stories that I really enjoyed.
Godel: I do agree about the nice done-in-one quality of this, as with Animal Man. Any given issue has a lot going on in it, and most tell a complete story. Good bang for your buck. This wasn’t Millar and Morrison’s first time writing together, right?
Uzumeri: Nope, they’d done Skrull Kill Krew at Marvel, as well as a bunch of work over at 2000AD that I’ve never had the pleasure of reading. They did “Big Dave” together, which was apparently the most controversial strip ever run in 2000AD. Wikipedia sez:
Big Dave first appeared in prog 842 in his first story which featured Saddam Hussein trying to take over the world and turn everyone into “poofs” with the aid of some scary aliens. Big Dave, “the hardest man in Manchester”, manages to stop Saddam’s plan with the help of Terry Waite.
If this story was controversial then the next story surpassed it. It featured the British Royal Family as robots plus Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson as a pair of horny drunks. The story ends with Dave in bed with both royals.
A third had Dave leading a minibus full of disabled children to the football world cup final where they defeat a German team managed by Adolf Hitler.
Godel: Well, that sounds like a charmer! I do wish a little more of that rambunctious energy had made it into Aztek. I guess the closest we get is the really annoying guy at the hospital that’s always making lame innuendos or whatever.
I also see that M&M had done a Judge Dredd story together, which makes sense given that this guy Bloodtype in issue #1 has a good bit of Dredd in him.
Uzumeri: Aztek is, without question, the least straight-out MEAN of their collaborations. Big Dave and Skrull Kill Krew were both over-the-top satires featuring caricatures of characters that were designed to be offensive. Aztek is downright optimistic in comparison.
Godel: To be honest, I felt like something was missing throughout this book, and maybe that’s it. Vanity is supposed to be just the scummiest, crummiest place in the world to live, but it really doesn’t feel like it. I’d happily move there from Gotham, although I’d probably stay put if I was in Metropolis. Transmetropolitan, which also debuted around this time, seems a lot more comfortable conveying urban decadence and degeneracy.
Uzumeri: Transmetropolitan also had the freedom that came with being a Vertigo title, not to mention having the beautifully hideous Darick Robertson on art duties. Harris is … well, I can kind of see why I haven’t heard his name since Aztek.
Godel: That’s the elephant in the room for me on this book: the art’s bad. Not spectacularly bad, just mediocre throughout. He tries to give the book a mood and some style, which I appreciate, but the faces are weird, the poses are often wooden, and there’s a serious lack of clarity in the fights. Not to beat up on the guy – this was his first (only?) ongoing, and he’s moved on enough that he doesn’t even include Aztek on his website. But I would almost prefer the art from the free comics you’d get with a Pizza Hut kids’ combo, which would be garish and badly-inked but usually at least clear.
Uzumeri: Yeah, you can tell they really wanted to make Vanity this Cthulhuesque nightmare, an M. C. Escher city where absolutely nothing makes sense and it’s all designed to be this labyrinth. This is really highlighted at that scene where the doctor dude gives Aztek an A-Z pocket map that he carries with him – even though he’s lived there for years – since the place is just that weird.
Godel: Yeah, I liked that A-Z thing, cause at first it’s like, why the hell would he just have that guide right there in his pocket, but you gather that it’s that kind of city. It’s subtle.
Uzumeri: It’s Arkham City, really, in both the Batman-lore and Lovecraft senses of Arkham. A Frazer Irving or JH Williams III would do a LOVELY job with the city. Grant, if you’re reading this, maybe Bruce can go on a trip to Vanity in Incorporated?
Godel: Also, there’s this idea that the city was planned according to some ritualistic agenda, which is a clear extension of the idea from Gothic about architectural form having specific mystical properties. Of course, Harris never shows us what the city looks like in plan, which sort of undermines the idea.
Uzumeri: In retrospect, you know who this book really kind of feels like it was pitched for? Sienkiewicz. That’s clearly what everyone involved is going for, too, right down to Champagne’s scratchy inking, a style he certainly doesn’t have now.
But it just comes off as a less clear Howard Porter. Which is not good.
The “sexy temptress” character.
Godel: Yeah, between this and Gothic you can really see an alternate history of 90s comics that was indebted to Sienkiewicz, Miller, and Mazzucchelli much moreso than to Lee and Liefeld.
I think it’s a big problem for Aztek because there are some kind of thin and off-putting things about the character and his story, which you’d get away with if the art was not only clearer but just generally better-looking. Marvel Boy is a good counterexample – that’s a series where you don’t necessarily like the protagonist that much, or even fully understand everything he says or does, but the art keeps you along for the ride.
Uzumeri: There are concepts described here which could have looked so cool, but just don’t work, like, the four-dimensional power source bringing the costume out of the helmet. Or that scene with the Lizard King where he burns out trying to use the helmet without whatever zen koan keeps the previous holders busy.
Godel: That actually looked cool, I thought, but it reminds me of a big problem I have with Aztek as a character: is he supposed to be the 19-year-old naif lost in the ways of the world, or the grizzled warrior with the inherited memories of all previous wearers of the helmet? Because in that scene he basically lets Lizard King fry himself by putting on the helmet, which he only warns him about after dude’s put it on. And he’s all like “oh god i tried to warn you,” and it just seems…dickish. Like Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka: “Wait… Stop.. Don’t.”
Uzumeri: Super half-hearted, absolutely.
Godel: Which I think might be intentional. They do set that up, with the contrast between the scene at the restaurant where he’s like “Everything’s great! Everything matters!” and then when some bystanders get killed by somebody he’s like “Fortunately, there were no serious casualties. …Well, none who mattered.”
So they lay the groundwork for a story about that conflict, but the art is so wooden I just don’t get attached enough to care. I really couldn’t even describe what Aztek’s face looks like. Certainly not a nineteen-year-old.
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Uzumeri: Aztek looks …. look, let’s say it: he looks white as hell in this comic, and in no way like someone who grew up in the Andes, or whose dad was named Emilio.
Godel: Is he from the Andes? Why the Aztec theme then?
Uzumeri: He says he’s from the Andes, but the papers started calling him “Aztek,” so he was stuck.
Godel: Except that Quetzalcoatl is an Aztec god, so…
Uzumeri: I mean, the Andes are in South America, is it really that far off?
Godel: …
Uzumeri: Yes, it is.
Godel: I mean, I’m willing to give the writers the benefit of the doubt and say that it’s on purpose. Clearly the Q Foundation aren’t all that they claim to be, and there’s something else afoot.
Uzumeri: Totally – plus, the Q Foundation switches names every once in a while and has something to do with the American financial elite, considering they asked Thomas Wayne for help and ended up getting bankrolled by Lex Luthor instead. Which is, I mean, that’s a pretty raw deal.
Godel: Yeah, you sort of want to see this awesome Elseworlds where Thomas Wayne goes in on the deal, and young Bruce gets tapped to wear the helmet.
Uzumeri: I can’t imagine Thomas would ever throw his son to the wolves like that, but yeah, it’s certainly an interesting idea. I do love Morrison’s Thomas Wayne, though, just this bulky superdad who deals with all kinds of weird shit in his spare time.
Godel: Yeah, you imagine his calendar for the day being like “3:00-3:15 – meet with Q Foundation re: Aztec apocalypse prophecy. 3:15-3:45 – Phone call with Pres. Nixon on Cambodia? 3:45-4:00 – brandy with Alfred.” It was cool to see Thomas Wayne again after Gothic… there’s definitely a sustained project of making Batman the son of not just any billionaire.
Uzumeri: Exactly! There’s this tendency at times to portray the DC Universe as a place where nothing really wacky started going on until Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman hit the scene, but that really isn’t the case at all, and it’s something Morrison really uses in a LOT of his work, but especially this with the entire fucked-up origin story of Vanity and the Vanes, which really only ever gets discussed in that one backup article.
Godel: I assume that was intended to come back in later. And you’re right – Morrison here is definitely getting to pull out weird Golden and Silver Age material mainly for its fun factor. Some of the walk-ons here are actual real characters, others are just invented characters with histories that suggest they’ve been around forever, like Death Doll supposedly being the new, Vertigo-esque version of an old, Statue-of-Liberty-themed heroine. And when I say “Vertigo-esque,” I mean that she looks like Ragged Robin from Invisibles.
Of course, this is a co-written book so I can’t just say it’s Morrison doing it. Actually, reading this made me realize how much Millar and Morrison have in common – for example this preoccupation with the superhero as a public figure, dealing with PR, being defined by their media coverage, etc. Obviously that was all over Animal Man and New X-Men has a little of it… but it’s also a big Millar theme, from his Fantastic Four to Ultimate X-Men and obviously Ultimates.
Uzumeri: I’ve read this tendency described as the inversion of what Alan Moore did, and I kind of buy that. Instead of taking the superheroes and bringing them down to our level, Morrison – and sometimes Millar – bring up OUR issues to the level of the superheroes. If that makes any sense.
Godel: Hmmm. You brought that up when we were looking at Animal Man, and I do think it obtains here, but there is some nuance there that I’d like to unpack.
On the one hand we’re talking about injecting the superhero world with “real” things, which I think has generally been a winning strategy for the industry in the last decade – Ultimates, Civil War, and a lot of other big-tier Marvel books (yeah, I’m a Marvel guy!) worked because they made the superhero world feel more like ours, and not in a way that attacks the superhero concept (a la Moore). There’s just the pleasure of recognition, going, “Oh yeah, that would totally happen if there were actually superheroes, people would sue them for this and that” etc. And you get to tell stories people haven’t read before.
But on the other hand, and I think this is the more interesting idea, you get a full embrace of the escapism that superheroes have always represented (and which, again, others would critique). Morrison, I think, wants the audience to enter the world of the superhero, to get that feeling of freedom and imaginal license, and maybe even hang onto it after the comic is over. The whole sense of wonder and possibility, you know?
Uzumeri: The thing is, there’s a line between introducing all of these real-world aspects in a way that breaks the superhero world and doing it in a way that informs or enriches it. I think that Morrison, more than most writers, is able to straddle that line. One thing we still haven’t gotten to in terms of Morrison’s writing is his “everything is possible” stuff. That really starts up over in Flex Mentallo, bubbles through JLA and explodes in Seven Soldiers.
Godel: I think there’s hints of it even going back to Psycho-Pirate – which was a narrow critique of the limitations placed on the DCU post-Crisis, but stemmed I think from a kid-in-a-candy-store impulse to go nuts and do it all. I could imagine that being part of the desire to do superhero comics, even before he would have put it that way.
Uzumeri: Yeah, that’s very true. It’s weird that it took him so long to get there, especially when it was his stated intent, but there’s still pieces of that in Aztek, especially in the final issue where he goes up against Amazo and has his Justice League induction. Maybe that was the intent; this is less a coming-of-age story than it is an apotheosis. Or maybe, in the DC Universe, coming-of-age and apotheosis mean the same thing.
Godel: It’s really hard to say, honestly – I mean the Amazo thing seems very much like it was conjured up once they realized the title was ending, and realized they could save Aztek by shunting him over into JLA, which Morrison had recently started up.
Uzumeri: It’s weird though, since they even mention his JLA membership before that entire affair.
Godel: C’mon, I doubt the pre-cancellation plot outline involved him fighting Amazo in a story framed by little sequences of Martian Manhunter and company trapped in the Watchtower.
Uzumeri: Especially since I doubt he even knew JLA was in the cards at the start. I wonder at what point he started turning the car around and going in a different direction — was the Lex Luthor stuff part of his initial pitch, for instance, or was it formulated to facilitate his inclusion in the DC Universe with the book’s cancellation?
Godel: The Luthor thing does feel like part of the ongoing Q Foundation story, though. I guess it could have been some new, Vanity-specific businessman, maybe the Vane guy which would have made a lot of sense.
Uzumeri: Yeah, but I guess Millarson had been taking pains before this anyways — for instance, the Batman/Joker two-parter, which I thought was the highlight of the series.
Godel: That was a really good story. I wasn’t quite sold on Joker’s Troll-doll hair, but I liked the idea of throwing these characters together, especially since the Joker’s totally random methodology is a good challenge for Aztek, the novice who thinks the world makes sense and its problems can be solved.
It’s basically a cop buddy story, Batman is the veteran who’s dealt with this kind of thing before, and Aztek’s the rookie. It makes a nice complement to the Green Lantern story, where they’re both rookies, relatively, even though Aztek is impressed by GL’s credentials. As an aside, I like how all the guest stars in this book give Aztek different things to do – they seem like they’re randomly picked out of a hat, but each one yields a different kind of story/relationship.
Uzumeri: It’s striking how much this Joker foresages the Nolan version – he even gets captured here as part of his plan, same as in The Dark Knight. Morrison has such a well-defined handle on the Joker character, more than basically any other writer in comics, a lot of whom are just riffing on the Animated Series take.
OK, so the art does have its moments.
Godel: Confession: the Animated Series take is basically the archetypal Joker for me. Like, I know that it’s in turn a riff on other Jokers, presumably some Cesar Romero in there, etc., but Mark Hamill is the Joker I know the best. Mind you, the Joker here is way more interesting to read, and I like the Trickster God angle since a while ago we were discussing that, vis-a-vis Loki, but…
Uzumeri: For me, the archetypal Joker, visually at least, is still that huge Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez face they’d use on all the merchandising.
Godel: Oh yeah, the long-face Joker with the turned-up hair – agreed, that’s pretty iconic too.
Uzumeri: I also am kind of down on TAS Joker because I have come to hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE Harley fucking Quinn.
Godel: Harley Quinn totally works on the show, but I gather that she’s been horrendously overexposed since A) becoming a fan icon, cosplay standby, etc. and B) actually getting into the comics. But I’ve never actually read any of those comics.
Uzumeri: I mean, at some point Paul Dini went from excellent to totally self-indulgent about his pet characters.
For Morrison, as mentioned here, the Joker goes through stages. Going straight-up Burroughs cut-up was great, because it really highlighted what is, to me, the crux of Morrison’s Joker: all of the randomness comes from a method.
Godel: Yeah, and Batman is the guy who’s able to make a kind of weird sense of that method.
Uzumeri: That’s the game. Figure out what the Joker’s pattern is, since the reason is always the same: he wants to laugh. Later on in Morrison’s meta-arc, the Joker accuses Batman of having apophenia – the disorder where you think you see (nonexistent) patterns – and it’s amazing how well-realized that idea is throughout every Batman/Joker story he’s ever told right back to this.
Godel: To quote Pi, “There’s nothing there!” Actually….man, no wonder Aronofsky was attached to Batman at one point.
Uzumeri: There’s a very concrete idea of how these two characters interrelate at work here, and it’s one that’s different from the masturbatory crap back in Arkham Asylum. That was all about how Batman’s as crazy as the Joker, but not this: the difference here is that Batman is the only person who looks for the pattern. There is no “why,” but you can still figure things out if you suss out the Burroughs cut-up game.
Godel: Of course, since it’s Aztek’s book, he’s the one that figures it out this time around, but they manage to convey a sense that Batman would have figured it out but is kind of letting the new guy show what he can do.
Uzumeri: What’s interesting is that everyone is sort of naturally drawn towards Aztek and his perceived goodness. Mostly due to his naivete. It makes a lot more sense when you discover that much of what happened to the guy was engineered by Lex Luthor to give himself a loyal mole in the superhuman community.
Godel: Which is when the series really starts to get in gear, honestly. Unfortunately, it’s right after the cancellation got announced. But my favorite issues of this were the last few, as things start getting unsettling and weird. Luthor arranges a new cover identity for Aztek, and everybody’s been brainwashed to forget that he got unmasked before. Meanwhile Aztek is so freaked out by it that he just goes on a video game and soda pop bender holed up in his new luxury penthouse, not saving anybody or doing anything.
Uzumeri: It’s symptomatic of a problem a lot of ’90s books had, which was that the writing team would sit down with this totally badass three- or four-year plan with all of these cascading mysteries…and no built-in “out” in the event that, you know, the book got cancelled. James Robinson’s Starman reaching 80 issues was the lucky one.
And I feel like Morrison and Millar had enough ideas here to go at least 30-40 issues, but they didn’t anticipate cancellation – which seems like the kind of thing you’d anticipate when launching a completely new title.
Godel: True, but I think they’re doing a good job here by keeping the done-in-ones strong and the guest stars heavy-hitters. I might have my issues with the comic, but they did their best to make it a success. Of course, the market in general was doing really weird things at this time, and it’s always going to be risky to launch an ongoing with a brand-new character, cold. I’m actually trying to think of anything that’s launched that way in the last twenty years and been successful. Runaways?
Uzumeri: Thunderbolts, too.
Godel: Thunderbolts is actually an interesting comparison, because, like Aztek, its core concept is a “things aren’t as they seem” gimmick. But you find that out in issue #1 of Thunderbolts, whereas it builds slowly in Aztek. I can imagine word of mouth being tough for this book – how do you summarize the Big Idea quick enough to get someone to check it out?
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Uzumeri: DC was also at a strong disadvantage in the market as a whole – I’m sure we’ll get corrected in the comments for this, but what were DC’s big ’90s sales successes past Death of Superman and Knightfall (and before JLA)?
Godel: To be fair, those were both, what, three-year stories running across three or four books each, right? Counting the followup material? So that’s not so bad.
Uzumeri: Oh, and I forgot Kingdom Come, which was a big deal. But really, in 1996, it was the X-Men’s world and everyone else was just living in it.
Godel: Totally. Today you can make the top ten with sales of 60,000, but in 1996, Uncanny and Unadjectived X-Men were each hitting ~200,000 an issue, and basically all the other monthly X-books (Wolverine, Generation X, X-Man, X-Factor, X-Force, and Cable) were at or above 100,000. They could even get those kinds of number out of the _annual_s.
Which is amazing in a way, because it wasn’t exactly a golden era for the x-books. The big event in ’96 was Onslaught! But you still saw X-Men comics on the magazine shelves at the supermarket for chrissakes.
Uzumeri: And keep in mind these are Diamond numbers – they don’t even include newsstand sales at all. It was a different world.
Aztek #1 came out in June 1996, nestled on the Diamond charts between Bone #25 and Impulse #16. By issue four, Aztek was selling less than reprints of Sandman.
Godel: From there it seems to stay pretty steadily at 15K, which would be cancellation numbers even in today’s shrunken market.
So this had to be a real disappointment. It’s a shame, too. The art aside, you’d think the clever (sometimes too-clever) writing would have netted this at least a decent-sized audience. It’s very 90’s – wry, cliche-deflating, and so on.
Uzumeri: This is a book I would have mourned the loss of, no question. There was lots of interesting stuff going on. The Q Foundation stuff, the super-groupie… but we never got to see any of that for real. At least the Q Foundation story isn’t done yet – we’ll get resolution to that in JLA. But Aztek is kind of a tease; it seemed to me like Morrison and Millar were just getting to their most interesting ideas.
Godel: Yeah, god, that one montage in the last issue is totally a “GUESS YOU FEEL LIKE A JERK NOW FOR NOT BUYING THIS COMIC” move.
(Click for the full-size image.)
Uzumeri: “IF YOU HADN’T CANCELLED US, YOU’D BE READING THIS, BITCHES!” I’ve seen the letter column from the last issue before…hang on.
Oh, yeah, this is great. Picture two piles of money…
Godel: Oh man.
Uzumeri: One pile is all the money that the comics shops and newsstands have collected for one issue of a comic book. The other pile is the money that must be paid to the writer, penciller, inker, letterer, colorist, separation house, printer, distributor and overhead. When the second pile is consistently bigger than the first pile, we can no longer publish the comic.
Godel: Thanks, Doctor Economics!
Uzumeri: There’s more: [Your letter] is unfair. DC took a risk putting something different out there. It was a critical and artistic success but not a financial one. We tried. Now you’re upset, so you’re not going to buy any more new titles from DC. Well, that sure encourages us to take more chances.
Godel: That is hilariously bitchy, but I guess I sort of understand where they’re coming from.
Uzumeri: Except that only the people who bought the comic would read it, so it just comes off like that scene where Gob gets shanked in Arrested Development while a dude shouts “WHITE POWER!”
Marketing these comics is our job, and I think we do a pretty good job of it most of the time. I’m not telling you to do our jobs for us, but if every AZTEK reader got one other person to pick it up for a few issues, the book wouldn’t have been cancelled.
Godel: Preaching to the choir, for sure. No wonder letter columns went out of style for a while there.
Uzumeri: Actually, the present-day DC titles have all cut two pages of story and replaced them with a letter column – that’s how they moved their entire line down to $2.99.
Godel: I hope they get the guy from Atzek answering all the letters, which I imagine would all ask, “What happened to the two pages of comics?” Picture two piles of money… you cretin.
Uzumeri: That’s pretty much how Ian Sattler used to answer these questions before they shunted him off to Collected Editions, after his public declaration that DC wasn’t racist because they have lots of blue- and green-skinned characters. Apparently not realizing the hilarious irony in contrast with one of DC’s most famous comic panels ever.
Godel: Anyway, the cut-short ending makes Aztek kind of hard to review, in terms of recommending or not recommending people buy the trade. Because clearly it’s an incomplete story, badly drawn, about a character I don’t like. And yet… I actually enjoyed every issue of this. It’s an interesting comic. I loved all the stuff with fake criminals-for-hire, playing up to the role of supervillains while basically just yawning and collecting a paycheck. It’s fun.
Uzumeri: I wish Morrison and Millar’s friendship had lasted long enough for further collaborations. Thankfully, we’ll get to see them again on Flash, at which time I’ll fill you in on the rumors surrounding their creative “breakup.”
Godel: Intriguing! But next up in Project: Morrison is, of course, the early issues of JLA. I’m excited – I’ve read and enjoyed that one before (as I suspect a lot of our readers have) but not through the Morrison study lens. So this’ll be interesting.
Uzumeri: Yeah,I imagine you’ll find a lot more connective tissue than you had before. It’s been several years since I first read the run, too.
Godel: But before we get to all that – – NEXT WEEK we have the long-foreshadowed DARK PHOENIX SAGA over in X-Men. What more do you want???
