All-Star Superman 8
From Barbelith
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Panel 2: "Le-Roj. His twisted behavior has made him king of all bizarros. At least until the All-Night falls - when he'll be called upon to make the SUPREME SACRIFICE for his people."
The kingly Bizarro Jor-El is named, with typically serendipitous Morrison-brilliance, "Le-Roj" which is not so much a letter's distance as a 'teenth' of a letter's distance from "Le Roi" (Leroy!), French for "The King." It'll prove important that Le-Roj is both the king and a bizarro Jor-El as his function becomes clear later in the issue.
The "Supreme Sacrifice" here seems to make the king another "Hanged Man" or Christ/Osiris type, to-having-Horus-archetypes-kill-off-whom Grant has devoted much of his comics oeuvre (c.f. "Weapon Twelve must Die!" - Fantomex). Christ/Osiris, the Hanged man, the dying god, is the type of pessimistic self-sacrifice made irrelevant by Horus' careless and victorious play. Grieving for the coming apocalpyse just scares everyone out of doing anything - having fun with it, on the other hand -
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Panel 4: Superman tells Zibarro "I know you think of yourself as a flaw, an imperfection. But you're something more, Zibarro. You're proof that Bizarro-home is getting SMARTER."
In this issue, Grant retells the same theory about his own alien contact which he told in The Invisibles. His actual experience as he remembers it was being taken outside of time by flowing silver beings and being shown one of their infants incubating inside time (which is the only place things can grow). Animal Man has a similar (well, visually similar) experience to Grant's in Morrison-penned pages of the series 52, where he is taken into a higher space by aliens showing him this rippling silver entity in which his entire universe and all times within it are reflected (there's actually a (formally) similar scene in this issue of All-star Supes where Quintum is displaying a blue/silverlight cubeworld simulacrum to Lois). In Grant's abduction experience, the baby alien is our fallen world, trying to grow smarter, to wake up and become self-aware as one being, one organism, growing toward the benevolent Magickal Apocalypse that is all which Grant can imagine might rescue our world from (or at least happily distract it from) the unstoppably imminent political/environmental apocalypses which loom in most of his work (from the future hell-on-earth glimpsed by Sir Miles to promised man-mutant war which drives Weapon Twelve batty (note twelve = Trump 12, Osiris/The Hanged Man) in X-Men to the nuclear fears which motivate Flex Mentallo's shadowy villain) but which the Supercontext (despite the pessimism of sanctimonious Osirians) blessedly makes irrelevant.
In the "Black Science" arc of The Invisibles, this silvery creature is an alien God trapped in its creation, trying to escape and wake itself up. In the Invisibles the characters aren't watching from outside but also trapped in the world trying to help it escape to its supercontext home. That's what happens in Issue 8 of All-Star Superman. The Godlike alien in this issue is Superman, who's never seemed as alien in our world, or as godlike compared to it, as he refreshingly appears here in Bizarroworld. Bizarroworld is our horrible and ugly world that doesn't quite know it's one organism; and suffering in the ugliness is Zibarro, i.e. Grant Morrison, aching in isolated, misunderstood, and (except-by-him) tragically-underappreciated genius! Superman, i.e. God, tells Zibarro, i.e. Grant, that his intelligence and nobility are proof that our world is saved, that it is getting smarter. Morrison proves this by redelivering God to his proper higher plane, led to the decision by a process of selfish dithering. Thus, God promises to come back for him.
Contrasting with the final panels of The Invisibles, Bizarroworld's apocalypse is not a whited-out all night party but more like what Dane and Sir Miles both see in the human future: something actually screamingly horrible. As with Paris' "soon-to-be picturesque ruins," the All-night is nasty, it's inescapably coming, and it will swallow up the bodies all its people in the predicted cataclysm. What's kinda depressing here is Grant's downgraded hope for the apocalypse that it might take a few cycles of civilization and apocalypse for the world to wake up 'enough.' Perhaps Grant is echoing a Crowleyan prediction that the bright aeon of Horus, which must at any rate replace the dumber and darker aeon of Osiris, may nonetheless begin not with immediate enlightenment under Horus' playful aspect 'Hoor-Pa-Kraat,' but rather with a horrific age of chaos under Horus' brutal aspect of 'Ra-Hoor-Khuit!'
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Panels 3-4: "No say does am spar-strangled shroud hang limply under land of no free and us home cowardlee!"
Le-Roj makes his Osiris-sacrifice, singing a dark, ugly perversion of the Star-Spangled banner. Although the Bizarros may hear this as the American national anthem sung right, to the reader Le-Roj is singing a dark song about an unfree world in which everyone should give up hope. It's not only depressing and incapacitating but depressingly and incapacitatingly Leftist-political in the dire Osirus mode. We see Superman almost collapsing under the sheer weight of those word balloons before selfish-but-nevertheless-aesthetic Zibarro saves him. Horus is the selfish, unsacrificing and apolitical successor to morose Osiris-Christ: the playful child-god who destroys in order to create, greedy and imaginative enough to find solutions without trying.
This is not only an Osiris-Horus conflict. As (1) Le-Roj's "twisted behavior has made him king" of all the Bizarros who don't understand poor Zibarro, as 2) this twisted behavior (as we witness it) consists of producing idiotic plans for Superman (his first announcement in the story) and singing a grimly-and-grittily mangled "Spar-Strangled Shroud" anthem, and as (3) Le-Roj (being a Jor-El duplicate) is superman-ish Zibarro's natural progenitor and his rejected mentor ("He always encouraged me to be a great idiot"), El-Roj is assuredly Morrison's nemesis, envy, and all-around anxiety-of-influence, Eighties Alan Moore (not to be confused with present-day Alan Moore, except perhaps, interminably, by Grant himself). Eighties Alan Moore initiated the grim-and-gritty 80's comics style with his depressing Leftist paean to the coming Armageddon, Watchmen, a darkness that even seeped into Moore's celebrated Superman yarn, "For The Man Who Has Everything," where a grim-and-gritty Jor-El has survived to old age ("How grotesque!") and is leading the Kryptonian Fifth Column.
What Morrison is telling us is that grim-and-gritty IS OSIRIS! The ugly Eighties comics style on which Morrison so ardently (if embarrasingly) fixates is at bottom the despairing and ultimately destructive lefty response to WWIII which riddles 'Watchmen' and the minds of the dumber characters in Flex Mentallo: the inevitable future which, when worshipped/fetishized by liberals, becomes the "Outer Church" which marshalls them. What Morrison doesn't see, and can't of course show us, is that in magickal war, it's always 'Present-Day' Moore escaping blithely on the rocket from whatever comics universe righteous Morrison is left trapped in. But even 'El-Roj' helps free Superman in this issue, partly redeemed as he wishes him well: and Morrison's trying to be "the child god who destroys in order to create," so maybe his magickal-contest/snit with Moore is cool and productive. Seriously.
In the penultimate issue of The Invisibles, Dane walks through the world's hell-on-earth future, a vision of which once drove Osiris-stand-in Sir Miles from youthful beatnik to aging reacionary - but Dane is an avatar of Horus and finds that "around the very next corner, an interesting thing happens ... Infinite novelty, self-knowledge, eternal freedom - and ultimate DISPERSAL of the archons of chaos". Dane's predecessor 'John-a-dreams' puts it this way: "When fear is all there is, there is no fear. Eternal pain is no longer pain. When we remember them and recognize them for what they are, they cease to enslave us." It's unclear whether this is "the Supercontext" as a simple philosophical context in which everything bad happens but it's somehow all right? Something like what King Mob calls "Zen for 'I can't be bothered.'" in Invisibles Vol. II. Or something transcending that because it's magically experienced and not just dissected intellectually by shmucks like the present author.
As The Invisibles and, say, Promethea attempt to show, if enough of us practiced "Zen for 'I can't be bothered," our destructive playfulness the face of a dark future might unfreeze enough of us out of petrified terrified denial - up Route 32 to let imagination and/or the superheroes do their job - that the coming apocalypse might not even happen. Magicians like Crowley and Hine seem to reserve some of their worst venom for the politically-conscientious, as Morrison does for earlier versions of his career rivals. Maybe the place of the activist is not to dramatize the problem, but to dance in the face of it as joyously as he can.
