The binary relationships are set and blurred many times over in this novel: superheros decentralize into the collective, super villains fight to retain their Hegelian dialectical relationships with superhero counterparts, thus calling into question their defining motives, the worldly threat (the anti-monitor's desire to condense all reality into a single anti-matter universe, his own) not only ties indirectly to the comic book reader's identity but underscores a weird sort of "negation of the negation." Insert dramatic music and postmodern irony here.
He is the Anti-monitor and he wants to destroy everything. In this particular story, the main baddy is the Monitor's twin brother, established at the beginning of the Universe's creation yet set in an anti-matter sphere. One could very easily interpret this character as a stand in for the avid comic book reader, only taller. He watches every superhero on every planet and collects data on them (and I gather at one point he was selling this data to villains for cash). The Monitor is a character who has functioned throughout the ages as a sort of uber-voyeur/arms dealer.
Awesome name, mostly because it drives an entire dialectical plot towards (strangely) Hegelian concepts. You follow "superhero-ness" as it fights against the evil. The existence of this heterogeneity of superheros, some with other worldly powers, some without even that distinction, causes the reader to follow their collective abstraction, since none have the page space to truly stand out.
After 100 or so pages of this, the effect was to totally destabilize all notions of centralized, unique "superheros." I encountered pages and pages of characters I just had to assume meant something to other people. I am not well versed in comics, however, so the effect of reading this book was kind of amazing. Originally intended as a sort of business move for DC Comics, who had by that time created so many different versions of characters on so many different Earths (for example, Earth 1, Earth 2, Earth 3, Earth X, Earth Prime, etc) that their DC Universe had become unwieldy, this comic was supposed to tidy things up and reset everything into one, congruent universe setting. "Explain that to me, Harbinger! What happened to my life? I am flesh and blood.
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