Everyone knows about Alan Moore’s superhero epics like Watchmen and Batman: The Killing Joke, but one near-forgotten story from 1997 was recently listed by none other than Grant Morrison as one of their favorite obscure comics by the writer with the most impressive beard in comics history.
When answering reader questions in their newsletter Xanaduum, Morrison noted the story “The Big Chill” as one of their favorite Moore stories. Appearing in 1997’s Wildstorm Spotlight #1, the story featured the Wildstorm hero Majestic at the end of the universe.
Coming from the creative team of Moore, Carlos D’Anda, Richard Friend, Olyptics, and Mike Heisler, the story is about the literal end of everything, with Majestic and a few other immortals surviving as the universe approaches absolute zero and needing to find a way to survive this final apocalypse.
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“The Big Chill” Is Alan Moore’s Little-Seen Masterpiece
Also known as Mr. Majestic, the Wildstorm hero was a thinly-veiled Superman copycat who first appeared in 1994’s Wild C.A.T.s #11 by H.K. Proger and Jim Lee. The alien warlord Majestros hails from the planet Kera, a veteran of the Kherubim/Daemonite war that formed the basis of the original WildC.A.T.s series. “The Big Chill” takes place millennia after all of that, as an aged Majestic finds himself one of only a handful of beings who have survived the universe approaching entropy. Faced with the ultimate death of the universe, Majestic leads a handful of survivors out into the frozen universe to find some way to carry on.
After he loses his companions, Majestic is then confronted by his old teammate Hadrian, also known as Spartan from the original WildC.A.T.s team. The android Hadrian has evolved into a godlike being and explains to Majestic that, since the universe is approaching absolute zero, it’s now become superconductive. Using Majestic’s energy combined with his own, Hadrian explains that even the weakest impulse will be shot across eternity in an instant — all it will take is a single thought to restart everything. Majestic thinks, “There really should be light,” and thus, a new universe is born.
Majestic Faces the End of Everything in “The Big Chill”
It’s an amazing one-shot coming from Moore, who many consider to be the comics’ greatest writer, and Morrison is keen to sing its praises. “Superman defeats nihilism!” Morrison writes, “Moore’s solution to the end of all existence at the Heat Death of the Universe, where Majestic exploits the properties of superconductivity at absolute zero to restart the Cosmos, is sublime.” Moore certainly paints an evocative picture of the end of the universe in his descriptions, whether it’s black holes healing up into “colossal scabs of lightless baryonic matter” or nebulae “contracted by the cold into snowballs barely larger than a solar system.”
Morrison is so taken with the story that the writer once considered “remixing” it as an official Superman story. “I entertained the idea of doing an expanded remix of The Big Chill as the Superman perennial adventure it deserved to be,” Morrison writes in their newsletter, hoping for it to be drawn by a superstar artist like Jim Lee or Alex Ross. Morrison shares that the “fire of enthusiasm soon faded,” and they eventually abandoned the idea after producing a handful of notes and thumbnails for the proposed story. Although Grant Morrison’s story never came out, Alan Moore’s Majestic story is one of the famed writer’s best little-read comics.
