Spoilers ahoy! For anyone who was thinking of reading Zenith
I think Zenith is one of Morrison's absolute worst!
For one thing, the ending with Prime Minister Peter St. John possessed by the Lloliogor. That's outright nihilism.
And the scene with one of the superheroines turning out to be trans. That's a load of hateful shit from a creator who's rarely been better than ambivalent about the T part of LGBT+.
Yeah, the artwork is nice. It can't redeem the story.
Peter St John wasn’t possessed by the Lloigor. That was the rest of the Cloud 9 survivors.
St John (Michael Heseltine in comics) chose not to side with them. Having the equivalent of the Elder Gods as just being posthumans could have been a bit of a big let down. But it does keep that internal logic of the Zenith universe intact (no teleporting squids here to his credit) and explains their motivations (and why one of them isn't that bright). It also makes it plausible that St John outright beat them. He was the strongest of them, when they were all human, and has developed his powers while they were all away making their plans. That he wasn’t a Lloigor doesn’t mean that he didn’t have plans of his own, but they were to be with humanity.
I did have to get half way through boiling the kettle, thinking through the scope of the series and the main cast, before I recalled Meta Maid.
There’s a bit to unpack there. At face value it’s there as a twist that Meta Maid is trans, and not what Morrison was probably expecting the reader to think. Was the audience supposed to be shocked and a little outraged at such a development? Sort of, but bear with me to the end, as I don’t think it turns out that way, although this is despite Morrison.
Meta Maid is the most proactively sexual character in the book. Having any character expressing their sexuality at all was very unusual. This was a comic originally aimed at kids. Although, like Marvel before them, the audience had grown with the book. Unlike Marvel, a lot of political and social values had been seeded all the way through, to flower nicely at the ages when at least some of the audience could learn from them.
Meta Maid was a pioneer of the pre and post cosmic mission quickie, not seen until Morrison’s protégé Millar (who also wrote a text piece for Zenith) would give the traits to Tony Stark and Natasha Romanov in The Ultimates.
So, you’ve got a character that from the above is defined as a plot twist and whose activity is sexualised. Not good at all.
It isn’t just thrown in there though. Morrison’s theme in that part of the book is to change the reader’s expectations. Meta Maid is trans, and not the expected girl next door heroine from decades of previous comics; Zenith is not the hero, saving absolutely no one while others sacrificed their lives; The heroes’ plan is incorrect, and they nearly destroy everything before pulling it back, with most of them dead. It’s a pyrrhic victory as one of them notes. Meta Maid is not thrown in there, in isolation.
But there being craft in there, isn’t some defence. Morrison’s introduction of Meta Maid to change the romantic expectations of the book’s protagonists didn’t give a whit about trans people. It was focused on the impact and the reaction. It was definitely thoughtless and could be absolutely horrible.
And it does get worse. One character, Miracle Man, is “ashamed” at being with Meta Maid. The second, Zenith, ditches the quickie, but gets someone else to go in his place, in a way that the third character, TNT Tom, is supposed to be in some way unknowingly duped by the encounter. I doubt Morrison gave it any more thought than that. It’s a pretty bleak transphobic picture.
However, good things can come out of the worst painted pictures, despite the writer in this case.
The first character, Miracle Man, was one of the horribly repressed ones from an earlier era of British comics. The second, Zenith, is a complete tool. It’s his defining trait in the book. He’s got a superhuman mind, but will easily wallow in self-interest. His own sexuality lurks in the background of the book, the longer it goes on. His earlier reported dalliances with page 3 models are mainly for image. He is interested enough to be a father in Book 2. Later, he asks St John why he never married, and St John notes that Zenith never married either. I think both know full well that they aren’t human at this point.
At the time of Meta Maid though, Zenith is just a conceited, shallow idiot and as likely to have led that third character off to Meta Maid if he didn’t fancy her, regardless of her history. The third character, TNT Tom, really enjoyed the encounter, and I like to think he and Meta Maid exchange romantic messages across Einstein Rosen bridges between universes.
But the massive plus here is exactly because Morrison was thinking of the impact of the reveal, and was clumsy and thoughtless. With a revela in mind, we get to see a lot of her in the story.
Meta Maid is easily one of the stand out characters in the book. She’s confident in herself, selfless, has upper tier super powers, saves her colleagues from eldritch super-horrors, a pioneer in human relationships in comic books, deals with situations where whole worlds have been lost, and is one of a small group to have saved a whole orrery (a word not used enough) of worlds from an even worse fate. Despite the lack of thought (at best) we’ve ended up with an important character who happens to be trans and is one of the more awesome in the book.
So yeah, thoughtless at best and a transphobic gag at worst, in an attempt to switch reader expectations with no thought for the consequences. But out of that, we’ve a trans character who saves universes, which is how I, and I know others, think of Meta Maid. I know who is towards the top of my call list the next time there’s a Secret Infinite Final Crisis going on.
“Hello, is that Meta Maid?... Hi, it’s thoth Lad from Alternative 247 here…”
And yeah, I agree it's the art that's the stand out now. Alan Moore had already done most of the plot in Captain Britain, while Marv Wolfman had done Crisis and a few decades of sc-fi authors and writers on chaos magic filled in the gaps. Nice to have them all in one place, though, as a primer.
Previous Thread
