Scanning My Collection: Armageddon: 2001 #1

The first crossover event I ever heard of was Secret Wars II and as we’ve been discovering that one doesn’t live to the hype. The first one I ever read, however, is Armageddon 2001, consisting of two bracing issues and all of the annuals of 1991. To me this is how a company-wide crossover event should be done, in the annuals. If people want to follow the whole thing they buy the annuals. By setting a crossover event in the annuals, the regular titles are free to continue their storylines without interruption or being forced to add elements of the event that might derail intended stories. This allows a title to flourish on their own and lets the characters and the writer (or writers) find an audience. Alternately, they follow the event, see this character and want to know more about him or her or them and will pick up the regular comic. Plus annuals are more expensive so following the event means more money for the comic company without ruining things for the writers of the main title or some extra tie-in that will end up having nothing to do with the story and takes resources away from better potential projects.

For this review we’ll look at the opening chapter of the event. The next seven DC Monday “Yesterday’s” Comic articles will focus on the only tie-in annuals I have been able to pick up, and then a second Scanning My Collection installment will look at the final issue and the event overall. For now, though, we start with the first issue.

Add 10 years and it describes the New 52.

Armageddon 2001#1

DC Comics (1991)

The story opens with a swirl of images, not actual events, but it will soon form into the origin of a new DC character. I’ll jump around a bit since time means nothing anymore to our new hero. As a boy, Matthew Ryder was saved by a superhero. He doesn’t know who rescued him from where the debris had trapped him or what caused it. Was it an earthquake? Bombing? All he knows is that his eyes didn’t adjust to the light long enough to see who rescued him.

This will come up again in issue #2.

However, in the year 2001 the day of heroes was undone, betrayed by one of their own who ended all superheroes and took on a new identity, Monarch! Nobody knows which hero it was. He’s kept his previous life hidden, remaking the world in his image. Cut to Matthew’s time period, 2030. We know that because Matthew doubles as the narrator, stopping so often to remind us about what year it is and Monarch’s rule you’d think this could be separated into separate, rather short issues.

Matthew Ryder is a researcher for…Monarch’s something or other I guess. His wife used to be part of Econo-Corps, and I have no idea what that is but their son wants to follow in her footsteps. His daughter, however, is a Peacekeeper, Monarch’s replacement for the police in the fascist world he’s brought forth. Specifically she’s a “preemptive”, charged with taking in potential sources of alternate thought, like the old disk man Matthew gets old floppy disks from that secretly contain files on various superheroes. When her group goes after him Matthew happens to be in the same subway, getting in trouble for saving a little girl from their own bullets.

All this time Matthew has been hearing about time travel experiments, but because he thinks for himself and speaks his mind he is deemed unreliable for the project. However, every person who volunteered to test the machine faded into the timestream and vanished. Convinced this may be his key to make the world a better place, Matthew forces an audience with Monarch himself, the best way he knows to get his attention.

Remember, kids, arson solves everything!

Give Matthew credit. He knows burning the dictator’s spy statue will get his attention. Monarch takes Matthew to his satellite base (my guess would be an old JLA Satellite HQ), trying to figure out his game. Matthew says the fact that he is so strong-willed, an aberration those days, is what makes him the perfect subject for the experiment. Monarch tells Matthew that even though his present is secured he’s worried about the past, which is why he’s creating time travel. This shouldn’t be a surprise. This is the DC universe. Even post-Crisis time traveling practically has an agency at this point.

Matthew is hooked up to a machine that allows Monarch to fight him in his head. He shows the former hero that he wants to protect his family. What he doesn’t know is that his version of protecting his family is different from Monarch’s. Monarch thinks Matthew wouldn’t want to change the timeline in order to keep his family both existing and his family. Matthew’s version is creating a world they should be living in, where his daughter isn’t a cold cog of the system and the world isn’t living under Monarch’s tyranny.

Matthew is put into the machine and sent into the timestream, merging with it, forming a new being…Waverider, a being of pure time energy. His mission: find the hero who will become Monarch and one way or another stop him from ever being. He learns his powers, the ability to change his form and to read the timelines past and future of anyone he touches. After testing it on an unstable cop killer, Waverider begins his crusade.

Nowadays it seems every superhero has to be born from some tragic event, a push for vengeance either in his or her origin or some point in his or her career. Waverider was inspired by the heroes, most notably the unknown one who saved his life as a boy. I definitely prefer that origin, one born of inspiration, instead of tragedy only because the latter is done to death. Everyone wants to write Batman so they turn whatever they’re writing into Batman. And even then it’s not the right Batman, the broody loner who is only part of a team by force. I have nothing against the tragic origin but the inspired origin or the conscience origin (it’s just the right thing to do) are being tossed aside and here we see it in action. I miss it.

The story itself is a good one, a hero turning rogue. What would make a hero go wrong, if anything? Some heroes would have multiple possibilities thanks to having multiple titles to have annuals for, but they were heroes such a part of the superhero community, like Superman and Batman, that they have the potential to have more than one path to their life. This would lead to numerous stories based on various conditions and events that happened. I wish I had all the Armageddon tie-ins. I don’t even have the first Superman story, just the other two, and I’m not sure they’re in proper order. We’ll find out together over the next few weeks during the Monday DC reviews, and then return to Scanning My Collection to see where the final chapter went right…and where it went horribly wrong!