Mageddon
2 years ago - Mageddon's return is predicted by Metron, a manifestation of the end of all creation. The All-Father of New Genesis requests that Orion & Big Barda go to Earth and join the Watchtower to help fortify them against the coming apocalypse.
1 year ago - Mageddon's influence is manifested through Lex Luthor, who assembles a new Injustice Gang to attack the Watchtower. Zauriel returns to heaven to demand assistance against its coming. When they reveal their intention to remake creation, he chooses to stand with Earth, sacrificing his existance to rally an army of angels to hold back its influence. The 5th Shadowpact is cast drawing Mageddon into our physical reality where he can be effected. New Watchtower member Uno recognizes him as the prophesied God of destruction Tezcatlipoca, going in Mageddon to trigger the teleportation of the floating city Superbia, sacrificing himself in the process. Mageddon's planetary signals are repurposed through Superbia by Michael Holt, Buddy Baker & Scott Free, using Bruno Mannheim's boomtube network to temporarily empower everyone on the planet to join the attack on Mageddon, along with the Justice League, Justice Society, Outsiders, Teen Titans, Doom Patrol, Global Guardians, Freedom Fighters, Elite, Great Ten, The Kingdom, Big Science Action and many other heroes across the planet. In the final battle, the Spectre manifests, holding off Mageddon long enough for Clark Kent to find and remove it's heart.
As we go through all the Justice League baddies, and run again and again into the late 90s JLA series and Grant Morrison's fantastic redesign of most of their villains, it was always going to lead us to the ultimate evil of the series; Mageddon. We've been making references to this event in their history for some time, and the stories of lots of characters and teams have big changes that come as as result. Wildly, this event is SO big that it can actually fully support almost any sort of craziness we decide to add to it.
Mageddon's Comic HistoryAny well-plotted run on any particular comic should have a singular mysterious plotline slowly building up in the background, and Grant Morrison's 1996 JLA run was no exception. The looming threat was referenced all the way back when the team was formed in Mark Waid's A Midsummer 's Nightmare. Morrison started making references to some sort of pending threat as early as issue #15 in the genre-definingly good Rock of Ages storyline, and slowly adding references to it across the entire run, having several New Gods join the League specifically in preperation to the pending threat. Eventually by issue #36 we were introduced to a weapon forged by the denizens of Wonderworld, Gods that predated the New Gods, confined to a gravity sink in the outer curve of spacetime for 15 billion years. I'm just going to quote directly here;
"The Anti-Sun, the Primordial Annihilator. In the language of New Genesis, it's name is Mageddon.... Once activated it cannot be stopped. It brings war and ruin. It's creeping taint first surfaces in those with a predisposition toward evil. Then, as it comes closer, all the soldiers of chaos beset the forces of order. Finally the Mageddon warhead manifests in the heavens. Brother murders brother. The stars die. And in the end, the universe lies strewn with ten billion corpses. We face the Doomsday Machine!" |
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This story arc was the first time we really saw Grant Morrison lean hard into a giant apocalypse storyline involving the entire DC catalog, and while they did go on to do several more stories like this, I actually maintain that this is by far the best example we ever got of one of this giant world-spanning Crisis stories. Perhaps that's because while it seemed to expand to every possible narrative corner of the whole world, it was actually contained just to this one comic. It wasn't a massive crossover that canceled series and rebooted continuity, It didn't even involve the multiverse. Despite, or perhaps BECAUSE of this this was one of the most satisfying giant whole-world apocalypse stories DC has ever given us.
Of course, the heroes saved the day in the end, but there were some really crazy stakes in this giant battle, and not everyone made it out alive. Personally, I think this is the model that should be followed for this type of story forever. |
Our Mageddon StoryWe're absolutely using the giant battle of Mageddon in our storyline. In fact, not only are we using it, but it's about as close as out timeline is going to get to a 'Crisis'. One reader described this as "The Avengers Endgame Portals Fight" of our timeline.
We're actually changing very little about this story, which is honestly kind of insane, since it has so many moving parts. The involvement of Lex Luthor and the Injustice Gang, the roles played by Aztek and by Zauriel, even the giant swing-for-the-fence idea of temporarily empowering all the humans on Earth to join the fight (which actually used some of the language we'd later see Morrison use in the climax of their All-Star Superman series) We are making a few basic shifts in the bones of the story just to make it click into our timeline a little cleaner. One new wrinkle we're adding is the involvement of the Shadowpact, a team built around the casting of one major spell that is necessary to save the world, which this definitely qualifies for. We want the specific act of empowering all the people on planet to actually only be possible because they are reverse engineering Mageddon's technology, because we clearly don't want that to be possible again outside this story. We're also going to subtly change Aztek's contribution. In the comic, he basically just believes that he failed, right up until he maganages to make his way into Mageddon and explode just to buy Superman a second. We're going to actually give him a larger role to play, bringing about the Wonderworld floating city Superbia, which will become the new headquarters of the Global Guardians. Finally, if there's going to be a time when the Spectre manifests to help save the world, then this pretty much has to be it. |
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