Armageddon 2001 # 1-2 (DC Comics, 1991) [COMICS]

 Armageddon 2001 is a famous DC Comics crossover not because of its merits (good or bad) but because of the how the company handled it.  As most fans of the era will know, the whole premise of the 1991 series was that a hero named Waverider travelled back in time from 2001 to the then-present to warn super heroes (sequentially, in each book, of course) that one of their number would become a despotic tyrant named Monarch in a decade’s time.  The crossover lasted almost six months in real time, launched and concluded with a 64-page special. 

The driving force of the entire crossover is the attempt to figure out who becomes Monarch and stop them before it’s too late.  What made the crossover notorious is that, due to some clues in early issues, readers put together a pretty solid theory that made the fan press: it was Captain Atom!  When DC saw the theory and, knowing it was absolutely correct, they panicked.  Thinking that if everyone knew who done it in a whodunnit the crossover would flop, they changed, mid-stream, who it was!  Instead of Captain Atom (a character with truly astounding cosmic-level powers that one could imagine defeating most of earth’s heroes) it became Hawk (a third-tier character who was one half of a duo and could mostly just jump around and punch low-level threats).  In other words, it was a desperate attempt to “salvage” the crossover, and resulted in clues and character motivations that no longer really made sense. 

The general takeaway, which I think is right, is that it’s okay if clever fans put the pieces together to figure out where a story is going—they can still have a great deal of fun along the way along with the satisfaction of seeing themselves proved correct at the end, whereas no one will really be satisfied by a resolution that seems to come out of nowhere because it was a last-minute, knee-jerk switch.  Writing a true whodunnit-type mystery is hard, and it’s better that it’s a little too easy to identify the culprit than that the reader feels they’ve been treated unfairly all along.

Anyway!  This post covers the two specials that bookended the crossover.

Issue # 1 has a great cover, with the tagline: “Ten years from now the world will survive.  These heroes won’t.”  As a child, Matthew Ryder was saved from an earthquake by a super hero, but he never knew which one.  In the year 2001, an unknown super hero betrayed all the others and killed them!  Now, in 2030, Matthew Ryder lives in a world ruled by the fascist Monarch, and even Ryder’s own daughter is a member of the authoritarian government.  Learning that time-travel has just been discovered, Ryder sneaks into the facility and (through some trickery) manages to get sent back in time, though the process transforms him into Waverider (because he’s riding the waves of time!) with the super power of being able to touch someone and see their future.  It’s a classic, compelling story and an excellent start to the crossover.  It also gives a natural reason why Waverider needs to visit each character’s book, because by touching them he can see whether or not they’re the one who becomes Monarch.  The artwork isn’t stellar, but reading this 30 years later, I really enjoyed the story.

Issue # 2 has “At last! The shocking identity of Monarch revealed!” on the cover.  It seems that Captain Atom’s future is to see his children and grandchildren murdered by street gangs, their bodies sent by the “police” to the town dump in a world that has slid into anarchy and degradation.  Enraged and perhaps a little insane with grief, he destroys entire city blocks!  I wonder if this was the core of DC’s original plan, because it’s easy to see just a step further that future Captain Atom decides he has to intervene to set the world on the right course, and thus becomes Monarch.  But instead, back in the present, Monarch arrives from the future and abducts Hawk and Dove.  Monarch kills Dove to force Hawk to become him in a completely unpersuasive story twist (that is, I can see why Hawk would hate Monarch, but why would Hawk then decide to take over the world?).  Anyway, Monarch lures all the world’s heroes into a huge battle where he plans to detonate a neutron bomb to kill them, but Captain Atom absorbs the blast and is sent way back in time to the era of the dinosaurs! (a story told in some subsequent limited series).  The only nice bit is that it’s revealed the hero who pulled a young Matthew Ryder out of the rubble was . . . Waverider!  Nice.