El: LWiA 4.2: Aztek the Ultimate Man (Patreon)

Later in the chapter, and knocked off because it was the easiest section remaining.

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Morrison and Millar also teamed for the ten-issue Aztek: The Ultimate Man for DC. Unlike Skrull Kill Krew this was a straightforward superhero book focused on establishing a new character. Morrison described it as coming because they and Millar wanted “to get ourselves back into the DC Universe. We wanted to do something and we wanted it to be fun too.” Although, of course, their notion of fun was what it was—in this case the notion that “we'd set up this guy who was the brightest, happiest, youngest guy and then just fuck him up.” And this is more or less where Aztek #1 begins, with the title character in his gleaming new armor jumping off a building just before he realizes that “I’d never tested the wing units in a built-up urban area.” (It’s fine, though.)

But—unusually for the debut issue of a new character’s series—Aztek #1 quickly proves as interested in introducing its setting as it is in its title character. Indeed, before the issue even introduces him there’s a three page scene focusing on the villains. This scene ends with someone being asked what he knows about Vanity. “Not much,” he answers. “It’s got a bad reputation. It’s not a nice place. That’s what I’ve heard.” His interlocutor chuckles. “‘Not a nice place.’ That’s quite right. Vanity is not a nice place. It’s not a nice place at all.” This final bit of menace is narrated over a couple panels zooming out at the city’s skyline—a strangely ominous thing, with oddly expressionist architecture and a sickly green light pouring from all the windows. Only after this bit of setting the scene does the comic offer the obligatory splash page of its hero and scene about flying, and even this keeps the focus heavily on the city, with the issue’s title being “A Town Called Vanity” and Aztek’s opening monologue quickly notes that “the city smells and feels like a patient dying on a sick bed.” 

The nature of Vanity’s malaise is one of many things that never get made clear before Aztek was cancelled. Aztek has been sent there because Vanity is the prohpecized location of the return of Tezcatlipoca. As Aztek was the chosen and trained champion of Quetzalcoatl. (Morrison notes that they were “reading a lot of stuff on Aztec and Mayan culture for The Invisibles. That bled over into the creation of the Aztek character”) But the dark nature of the city goes beyond that, seemingly into its very architecture, which is full of suggestively named buildings like Urthona Tower, and which a text piece in the third issue suggests was built by a deranged occultist. 

The notion of an urban bad seed also serves to offer some justification for Morrison and Millar’s edgelording antics, which are still on full display even in their nominally fun superhero book. The first issue sees a small-time supervillain, The Piper (introduced in a first page splash panel looking like a schlub as someone off-panel declares, “You look ridiculous, Piper”) blackmailed into committing a bank job. There he’s confronted by Bloodtype, Vanity’s existing superhero protector, who’s a Punisher pastiche (terrible catchphrase, “what’s your bloodtype?”, to be asked shortly before he shoots people). The Piper is beaten brutally and then gunned down, at which point Aztek confronts Bloodtype, subduing him just in time for him to be killed by a bomb. Meanwhile the second issue sees Piper’s daughter—who’d been kidnapped to ensure his compliance—turn out to be a villain in her own right aiming to be Vanity’s newest crime boss, only to be gunned down by her supervillain boyfriend Synth, whose powers and intelligence change daily, after he becomes an idiot at the stroke of midnight. 

The comic largely continues in this vein, along with the obligatory smattering of guest spots—Green Lantern in issue #2, a two-issue story in which the Joker attacks Vanity, complete with Batman team-up, and an arc in which Lex Luthor effectively buys out the Q-Society, the group of South American warrior monks who trained Aztek. Throughout the main tonal engine of the book is the contrast between Aztek, who, as Morrison suggested, is a square-jawed ultimate Boy Scout type who does things like spend thirty-six hours searching for an old lady’s lost pet lizard and the perverse horror of the setting whereby, when he gets the lizard home to her, she’s slit her wrists in the bathtub in despair. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book failed to do much business; the first issue debuted with slightly lower sakes than the twenty-fifth installment of Jeff Smith’s indie darling Bone, and fell quickly from there, slipping out of the top hundred for the month by its third issue; even the Batman guest spot in issue 7 couldn’t juice sales, getting outsold by a reprint of Sandman #7. DC pulled the plug not long after, leaving whatever plans Morrison and Millar had to further develop their “do horrible things to a good guy” idea abandoned. Morrison groused later that “we had this whole thing. It was going to be like a superhero version of The Prisoner. And then they cancelled it,” blaming the cancellation, rather improbably, on the idea that DC “didn’t want me on too many books” and not on the fact that the book was among DC’s worst sellers. Morrison was, in any case, peeved enough to have the series end on a cliffhanger of Aztek joining the JLA, which Morrison had just taken over writing, allowing them to eventually resolve the lingering plot threads.