Grant Morrison has for many years been writing comic books which exhibit a certain intellectual flair. Pax Americana (a serialized comic released November 2014 by DC Comics) does not depart from this, and indeed invokes many themes Morrison has visited in other works, notably Animal-man and The Invisibles. Some of the themes are common to Morrison’s British peers. One can easily imagine Morrison and English writer Warren Ellis sitting in a pub in the late 1990s, discussing how reality would look to a person existing in a comic book (the “stacked two dimensional planes existing in three dimensional space” of Ellis’ Planetary #4, published by Wildstorm Comics in June 1999, compared to Captain Atom’s address to the reader in Pax Americana: “The characters remain unaware of my scrutiny, but their thoughts are transparent, weightless in little clouds. This is how a 2-dimensional continuum looks to you. Imagine how your 3-D word appears to me” ). Morrison has thrown in the conundrum of the story rolling out in a non-linear way, rendering the comic both compellingly enigmatic and vastly inaccessible. And the shadow of that other great Brit of comic books, Alan Moore, is entirely evident in Pax Americana in its ongoing homage to Moore’s seminal 1987 work, Watchmen.
