While Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan is famous for perceiving time all at once, Grant Morrison’s version of the character takes things one step further. The Captain Atom of The Multiversity: Pax Americana sees time like a literal comic book, but this isn’t just a superpower – it’s how the comic great suggest humans could actually understand reality.
Released in 2014, Pax Americana was the fourth issue of The Multiversity, Grant Morrison’s ultimate statement on DC Comics. With each issue taking place in a different Earth in the DC Multiverse, Pax Americana takes place on Earth-4, the home of Charlton Comics heroes like the Question, Captain Atom and Blue Beetle. Famously, these Charlton characters were originally going to be the main characters in Watchmen, and Morrison capitalizes on that connection in Pax Americana, using the comic as a way to analyze that famous work.
Recently, Morrison has been annotating The Multiversity via their Substack newsletter Xanaduum. In the annotations for Pax Americana, Morrison discusses the Earth-4 version of Captain Atom, which goes back to the source to reinterpret the original Charlton version. Doctor Manhattan became the stand-in for Captain Atom when it was decided not to feature the original Charlton heroes in Watchmen, and Morrison and artist Frank Quitely bring the character full-circle by making the Earth-4 version of Allen Adam more like Manhattan. Perhaps most interestingly, Morrison and Quitely reframe Doctor Manhattan’s quantum perception of time into Allen Adam perceiving time as if he were reading a comic book. Morrison writes, “The Captain Atom/Manhattan scene condenses ideas I’d expressed before, including in my ‘history of superheroes’ book Supergods, about the relationship of comic book 3-D space-time to our own 4-D space-time.”
Grant Morrison Thinks You’re Being Watched…
The Earth-4 Captain Atom demonstrates how he perceives time by flipping through the pages of a comic book, able to go to any point in the “story” while the characters remain unaware of their fate. “This is how a 2-dimensional continuum looks to you,” Adam says while reading an issue of The Multiversity, “Imagine how your 3-D world appears to me.” Interestingly, the background behind Adam as he says this is broken into grid-like comic panels, while Adam himself is separate in the foreground – further highlighting the character’s existence outside of space-time as we perceive it. It’s a brilliant way to depict Adam’s near godlike powers, and a clever way on Morrison and Quitely’s part to comment on Watchmen’s strict, nine-panel grid formalism.
As Morrison indeed explains in Supergods, readers are all as powerful as this Earth-4 Captain Atom every time they pick up a comic book. The ability to go back and re-read scenes or skip ahead to the end gives the reader tremendous control of how they experience time, and provides a model of higher beings experiencing a ‘lower’ reality that doesn’t necessarily stop with the reader, who could theoretically be regarded in the same way from a higher dimensional plane. It’s a trippy concept – the kind that’s the trademark of Morrison’s challenging work, which has been alleged as the inspiration behind works such as The Matrix.
In parodying Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, Grant Morrison shares their trippy philosophy of fiction as a lower layer on a dimensional ladder, with the godlike Captain Atom mirroring the reader’s experience, and possibly that of other ‘readers’ ascending up through unseen dimensions.
