Writers: Joe Casey & Brian Holguin
Artists: Ed McGuinness, Jason Martin, Eric Canete, Juan Vlasco & Toby Cypress
Colourists: Digital Chameleon
Letterers: Rich & Saida @ Comicraft
Cover Price: $2.50 per issue
Publisher: DC Wildstorm

You all know Joe Casey right? Currently doing darkly interesting things with old Wildstorm mainstay WILDC.A.T.S and appearing as Grant Morrison's sidekick on the core X-books at Marvel? Well, given his current high profile, it seemed an appropriate time to take a look back at a slightly less well-known Casey project, MR MAJESTIC.

MR MAJESTIC was an odd - and ultimately short lived - little book, ranging from grandiose widescreen superheroics to moments of genuine pathos and comedy, and ending with a fairly surreal finale. Judged purely on the surface details, Majestic could have been dismissed as a mere SUPERMAN clone. How different can another flying super-strong alien with heat vision actually be? Yet somehow it slowly and quietly insinuated itself into my reading habits almost without my noticing (I never even added it to my regular order list, it just seemed to follow me home somehow) and became an essential purchase each month.

On the face of things, it made an unlikely addition to my regular diet of Vertigo heavyweights, PLANETARY, AUTHORITY, a sprinkling of indies and just about anything with the words 'Grant' and 'Morrison' on the cover. Yet here I was, hooked on something written by an X-book writer and someone that I'd never even heard of (Brian Holguin). So, what led me there? Apart from a favourable earlier encounter with Majestic himself (in Alan Moore's 'WILDSTORM SPOTLIGHT' story) it was mainly down to a few paragraphs from Joe Casey tucked away in the back of an issue of THE AUTHORITY. These spoke in a breathlessly excited way of how he'd heard of changes on the way at Wildstorm, and how he desperately wanted to be part of it. How he wanted to write "adventures on a scale barely imaginable". He finished with the killer line, "Remember when heroes could move planets? We do", and I was intrigued enough to be there next month for issue one.

'Majestic could have been dismissed as a mere SUPERMAN clone.' The series opens with a story set largely off Earth. Majestic spends over thirty years precisely rearranging the surrounding planets by just enough to prevent an enormous alien from recognising the Solar System as its intended target. So, he wasn't lying about the large-scale adventures then. But shifting planets? Just how far can you suspend your disbelief? When does Mad Science become Bad Science? Well, if you can Believe A Man Can Fly, this shouldn't be too much more of a leap. Especially when written with such a genuine sense of wonder as comes through in this first issue.

Ed McGuinness and Jason Martin turn in some crisp and clear art (which someone at DC must've liked, as McGuinness next showed up on the SUPERMAN family of books) in a story that spans the decades from the 1960s to the present day. Glimpses of a massive conspiracy to hide Majestic's remodelling of the Solar System are given - some (America's Bicentennial) more plausible than others (Desert Storm) - as further examples that this is a big story.

Issue two, 'Repeating History', tells a poignant and tragic story, still involving its fair share of Mad Science (time distortions, in this case) and a neat little in-joke as a scientist is referred to as having received the "Morrison Grant for Imaginary Physics". Well, it made me laugh anyway. There are also some of the worst stereotypically-dialogued English characters I've ever seen, but it's a minor point.

'Excessive Violence' features a smaller scale story again, with the emphasis more on comedy this time. Majestic is on a "date" with Maxine Manchester ('Ladytron') from the WildC.A.T.S, a scenario with plenty of comic potential, centring on Majestic's lack of familiarity with everyday life on Earth. Turning up dressed in a sensible polo-neck jumper, but still wearing his costume headpiece, is just the start of it. The pair reflect on their time as WildC.A.T.S (with Maxine suggesting that the new team is rather more "Overt" than "Covert", making them "WildO.A.T.S") before a cinema trip to see Charles Bronson in - what else? - MR MAJESTYK.

Having established Majestic as the untouchable outsider, 'Being and Nothingness' comes as a change of direction, as we learn that Majestic arrived on Earth with his son Majestrate. This issue tells us the short and happy life of Majestic Jr, from his rebirth from a Kherubim recording of his personality, to his Self-Sacrifice To Save The Planet death scene. By the way, I'm giving nothing away here that the cover of Majestic kneeling by a grave hasn't already revealed.

'Jailbreak' is possibly my favourite issue of the series. An alien prison ship crashlands on Earth, and kicks off two story threads. As Majestic hunts down and recaptures most of the escapees in the closest the series ever gets to a standard superpowered slugfest, the second thread focuses on the unfortunately named Di'kked. He goes into hiding while assimilating Earth popular culture to facilitate an attempt to take over the world (you knew this was coming right?) with his enormous charisma. Unfortunately, the fact that his cultural savvy has been gleaned almost entirely from bad sitcoms, witless soap operas and adverts means that the speech designed to herald his world conquering attempt comes out as a stream of gibberish - "Bow down before the 100% crunchy goodness that is Di'kked". Being further handicapped by his resemblance to a slightly psychotic version of Yoda, it's hardly surprising that he's dismissed as some kind of a promotional gimmick. Majestic remains blissfully unaware of the whole thing and never even encounters the main villain, which makes a nice change.

'Why 2K?' marks the end of the book's first phase and shows signs of the creative team losing interest in 'standard' superheroics. The main story centres on Desmond the Cybernetic sidekick and his mission to back up the world's computers on the eve of the change of year, featuring the inevitable running gag about the advent of 2000 not being the actual new millennium. This doesn't require Majestic's involvement, so the plot has him otherwise engaged, lured onto the rocks of an asteroid belt by a group of siren-like aliens, the Ultravixens. That is, until he escapes thanks to the faintly offensive cliché of the ultra-powerful females getting a severe attack of girlie incompetence as they all start lusting after Majestic and squabbling among themselves.

'Eric Canete's approach suits the more surreal scenarios.' The final three issues comprise the longer 'Universal Law' story, where Majestic is summoned by a group of God-like beings (the Universals, conveniently enough) to take up his birthright and join them. The Universals make a convincing group of genuinely alien characters, and the contrast with the out-of-his-depth Majestic - who has now successfully adopted Earth culture - is one of the better facets of the story. Eric Canete takes over the art for this story, and his approach suits the more surreal scenarios. His style is very reminiscent of Keith Giffen's TRENCHER. The final issue also features an assist from Toby Cypress. His handful of pages fit in nicely and reminded me of Ted McKeever, especially the recent FAITH miniseries for Vertigo.

But then, it was all over. Given the current Internet-fuelled saturation coverage of any vaguely credible snippet of comic news, it was a novelty to go into the last issue of a book without having been aware for the previous two months that it was operating under a death sentence. I suppose I just wasn't paying attention when it was announced! I suppose the clue was 'Universal Law' being originally solicited as a six issue story (it was even referred to as such by Casey at the time) only for DC to announce that as "a mistake" and that it would only run for three issues.

So, why did Majestic last just those nine issues? The abrupt change in direction with 'Universal Law' couldn't have helped, more due to the sub-Vertigo cosmic posturing rather than the switch to a multi-part story. Maybe the largely unheralded metamorphosis from 'Superman with a higher IQ' stories to the altogether more complex 'Universal Law' was too much for some people? I've seen plenty of on-line comments bemoaning the fact that the last arc "made no sense", but - while it does suffer a little from a surfeit of self-conscious weirdness-for-the-sake-of-it at times - the underlying story is relatively conventional.

The change in artist from the clean traditional style of McGuinness, to the equally impressive (but considerably less mainstream) Eric Canete could have been a factor too. If any of the "I'll buy anything with pretty pictures" crowd had been coaxed into taking a look at Majestic based on the initial style, Canete's more esoteric approach might have been too much.

Most likely, though, it was overlooked by a lot of people who dismissed it as just another Superman-clone book with an untouchably powerful lead character. An understandable misconception, but one that might have been rectified by the type of grass roots word-of-mouth activism that Casey seemed to discount in his 2nd of August 'Crash Comments' column at Fandom.com.

Still, the disappointingly curtailed nature of the run doesn't disguise the fact that this series was a bit of a rarity for recent times. A character in the Superman mould, written with genuine wit and enthusiasm, who was retro and cliché at times, but always kept at least one eye on the future. The first five issues are thoroughly recommended, and you could really do a lot worse than buy the whole run. Now available in a back issue bin near you.

Steve Parker is an IT consultant and an online football columnist.

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