Grant Morrison's Pax Americana, the JFK Assassination, and Comic Book Storytelling

 By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

Multiversity: Pax Americana. Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely

Kennedy's death has been a fascination of the pop culture kind. The actual aesthetics of it make the event all the more iconic. It brings us back to the infamous "back and to the left" scene in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) movie where District Attorney Jim Garrison replays the video of Kennedy's head bursting after the kill shot, over and over again, to an audience gripped by horror. The video came courtesy of Abraham Zapruder, an American manufacturer of women's clothing, and a Democrat, who got to Dealey Plaza early in order to get a good spot to take pictures of Kennedy's motorcade. Kennedy was going to ride through the plaza on his way to the Dallas Trade Mart where he was going to give a speech. Zapruder's video footage is often used to argue the existence of a second or even third gunman at the plaza that day (November 22nd, 1963), possibly located in the Grassy Knoll area (situated at the northwest side of it). It had a very clear view of the motorcade as it turned close to the Book Depository, where the official version has Oswald readying his rifle. But the film also gave us the final images of the assassination. In doing so Abraham Zapruder gave American culture an universal template for political assassinations.

     Zapruder's home movie is basically an incomplete anatomy of the assassination. It gave investigators visual entry into the crime scene, if only in part. It also gave comic book writers, cinematographers, and artists a visual point of reference from which to work from. Artists, writers, and comic book creators usually explore the actual trajectory of the bullets, the ones that end in kill shots in particular, in order to better sell an action or an assassination sequence. This opens up new storytelling possibilities and makes for a sense of authenticity when representing or recreating a political assassination.  President Kennedy's assassination can still be argued as the visual standard for this.

Stracynsky's Sidekick is an example of the
JFK assassination as visual template.

     For example, the angle of the shot that produced Kennedy's fatal head wound, as Zapruder's video shows, suggests not all shots could have come from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building, where it was said Lee Harvey Oswald positioned himself to shoot at the President. Officially, Oswald fired three shots that produced 7 wounds between Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally in addition to the head shot. And one of the bullets missed. That bullet, according to the Warren Report, hit concrete a little farther up the motorcade. This caused the concrete to splinter and hit James Tague, a Dallas car dealer who was standing a few feet east of the eastern edge of the triple underpass railroad bridge. The final shot would come shortly after. And with that, history gave popular culture a spectacular yet problematic set of images to play with.

     Perhaps one of the most recent reimaginings of the Kennedy assassination comes in Grant Morrison's Multiversity: Pax Americana. Illustrated by Frank Quitely, the comic book's opening pages see an American president getting murdered, while on a motorcade, in reverse sequencing. The President is seen to be grabbing a flag with the peace sign over his head, serving more as a bullseye than a symbol of more ideological connotations, while smiling to an unseen crowd. We are immediately reminded of Kennedy here, setting himself up as a reference point for Pax Americana's opening scene. The fact the president is holding a peace flag reminds the reader of Kennedy's 'ultimate diplomat' myth. Kennedy's death, it was quickly concluded, meant peace was off the table (at least in terms of public debate). It was as if Kennedy was peace's last resort, the answer to John Lennon's "Give Peace A Chance" plea. In a twist of historical fate, but mostly because of the Kennedy Administration's own foreign policy decisions, Vietnam started for real shortly after the assassination. There was an air of reinvigorated militarism in Lyndon B. Johnson's White House (the Vice-President who took over Kennedy's administration) and America was slowly being taken farther away from the mythic and utopic ideals of Kennedy's own version of peace (which historians are still unsure as to how it would have looked like).

The shooter is falling from the sky.

     Pax Americana's assassination scene, then, captures this highly problematic set of historic circumstances. The fact the assassination is played backwards here leaves the reader with a sense of historical revision that further adds to the mystery behind the actual shooting. We are shown the dynamics of the president's movements, his reaction to the kill shot first. As the opening panels pull back, we see the President has been shot from above, the bullet entering through the base of his head going straight down, shattering his jaw. It is an inversion of Kennedy's kill shot, where the final bullet (whose trajectory is inferred from Zapruder's home movie) comes from the President's right (some argue from the Grassy Knoll) and blows out the back of his head, leaving a gaping wound. Kennedy's death is bloody, shocking, and definite. So it goes with Pax Americana's American President in the opening scenes.

     The Kennedy assassination parallels do not stop with the head wound or the trajectory of the kill shot. In fact, it is in relation to the kill shot's trajectory that we see what can be best argued as an attempt at historical satire, done in a very subtle way. The shooter, which looks like a rogue superhero, is revealed as falling from the sky while aiming down the scope of a rather large silenced sniper rifle (or high-powered rifle). The shot actually comes from sky. At a simple glance, this can be taken as a ridiculing of the official version of Kennedy's assassination, which explains that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman responsible for 7 bullet wounds between the President and Governor Connally and the final head shot that culminated the killing. It is as if Morrison equates Oswald's sharp shooting skills with that of a superhero falling from the sky while hitting a perfect head shot. Reality's doubt makes for great comic book storytelling.

     The killer is eventually captured and his motives questioned. But we are left in the dark as to the true intentions behind the assassination. Instead, the comic turns inwards and explores the narrative mechanics of a post-Kennedy world trying to recapture lost American counterculture ideals as reimagined by a very problematic group of superheroes. And it is all set up by an opening sequence that invites us to revisit President Kennedy's death down to the last gory detail, even if it is meant as a very subtle critique on the controversies surrounding the death America's 35th president.

    
     It might be easier, more psychologically manageable  to believe that a lone gunman can kill the President of the United States, especially if he is falling from the sky equipped with nothing but a high-powered rifle and a parachute. But there is something oddly spectacular about imagining and reimagining the assassination of an American president. It captures an historic sense of controversy and mystery while reflecting on the death of an utopian dream.  That we automatically resort to Kennedy when thinking of such things speaks to the power of historical memory as a referent for creating fiction, especially when we want to get the violence right.

Camelot in Wonderland: Kennedy, Death, and the Myth of a Better America

By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

      Political assassinations often turn complex and imperfect men into saints. Immediately after the killing, the assassin’s victim is purged of his sins and every form of controversy surrounding his foreign and domestic polices become misunderstood attempts at peace and prosperity. An assassination’s anniversary, then, plunges the public down a rabbit hole of memory that leads to a fantasy land where the victim’s lost vision of the future becomes reality. The nation’s current state of affairs is temporarily accepted as a consequence of the figure’s death, no other type of history weighing in on it. Of course it is all imagination, a wish things were the way the deceased leader wanted them to be: better. This is the case of John F. Kennedy, a man taken from the American public as perhaps the greatest president the country had ever seen.

     As the anniversary of Kennedy’s death approaches, American television churns out its traditional barrage of documentaries that portray America as a fatherless nation come November 22nd, 1963. We are reminded that Kennedy was here to save the world and that he signified the last hope for peace to prosper, anywhere. Post-Kennedy America, so it seems, became a nightmare version of itself, nearly post-apocalyptic in scope. Vietnam, segregation, the counterculture, the sexual revolution, and hippies were all things that could have been avoided had Kennedy lived. And all throughout we are left without much space to question whether his presidency was really destined to become the epitome of democracy, the true example of freedom in the world. To this day, it is thought Kennedy left before he could fix everything. That his unfinished presidency meant the country’s destiny was severed from greatness. But history shows that the Kennedy administration, while fashionable and charismatic, meant business as usual. 

     Before that fateful November day, Kennedy had amassed a considerable amount of criticism that came from all sides of the political spectrum. The Civil Rights movement regarded Kennedy an opportunist keeping desegregation on the sidelines for his second term, when it couldn’t hurt his chances of securing another term. Washington hardliners considered Kennedy’s foreign policy as soft after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and weak when Cuba resurfaced as a potential military target come the missile crisis. The argument was Soviet Russia would never have made Cuba a nuclear site had Kennedy taken it during the invasion.

     Others blamed Kennedy for Vietnam and warned that sending military advisors and economic aid to Southeast Asia would be interpreted as intervention and could land America in a war it could not easily win. Kennedy had agreed with Eisenhower’s labeling of Laos as “the cork in the bottle” in regards to it being the instigator of threat in the region. Kennedy partnered with Diem in South Vietnam and went ahead with a policy of limited military action. But all of that dissipated after Dallas, when either a lone gunman from the Dallas Book Depository or a team of assassins shooting from the Grassy Knoll made John F. Kennedy the fourth President to be assassinated while in office.

     As the nation mourned it also began to forget. Kennedy became an idea that should live on as an example future presidents should aspire to, future generations even. His criticisms faded into visions of an incomplete experiment yielding results on American Freedom being the standard of living worldwide. Vietnam no longer became a war Kennedy began in the early years of his presidency. The fact he kept intervention limited meant Kennedy was really just laying the international framework for diplomacy to take over. Instead Vietnam became Lyndon Johnson’s fault, the Southern Vice President turned President after the assassination (maybe landing the role after he had conspired with the assassins to stage a coup d'état should conspiracy theorists have their way). Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) bases its main argument on this contention. 

     According to the film, the authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers. Stone’s Kennedy, painted as a complete pacifist, wanted to end the war and bring the Cold War to its knees through diplomacy. Assuming war is the organizing principle of American society, a dark government wing set between the military and the White House began to form, to question Kennedy’s commitment to Southeast Asia. Of course, we have to accept war is also the backbone of the country’s economy, the Military-Industrial-Complex Eisenhower warned about. No war meant no economic prosperity and so Kennedy had to be replaced with someone committed to war. Vietnam became the force that pulled the rifle’s trigger. Blame the assassination on war and those who court it. Forget Kennedy escalated intervention in 1962 and approved the Strategic Hamlet Program which involved village internment and the forced relocation of Vietnamese peasantry so Communist insurgents could remain isolated from possible sympathizers. It was only after April 1963 that Kennedy started to voice a desire to extract American forces from Vietnam. He was quoted as saying: “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point.”

     Meanwhile, race relations became another experiment left unfinished. We remember Kennedy signing Executive Order 10925, which required government contractors employ or treat employees equally without regard of race, creed, color or national origin. We forget Martin Luther King, Jr. and his associates (who accused the President of being slow paced with domestic reform) drafted a document that called on Kennedy to enact a sort of Second Emancipation Proclamation that would deal the final blow to segregation, nation-wide, in 1962. Kennedy did not execute that order. The path towards the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended up being a long and violent one and it was ultimately signed by Lyndon Johnson.

     And yet, Kennedy has captured the hearts and minds of the American public, being that he became what hearts and minds ought to be. Annually, we go down the rabbit hole to a place called Camelot, where royalty is synonymous with the Kennedy name and peace is an idea original to it. Where the United States of America can revel in the make-believe that it was once close to reaching perfection, of being the moral weight on which the world could balance. But once down there, we should ask ourselves whether those visions of a near perfect America are given too freely to a man who was so far from it. John F. Kennedy has become a man out of time. Unstuck in it. He became universal, the light we still hope can shine on darker days. 

     Perhaps it is unfair to judge a man with the full weight of history. Kennedy’s legacy is no doubt unquestionable. He most publicly aided the fight for Civil Rights, prevented a nuclear confrontation with Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis, initially approved an overhaul of American immigration policy reuniting many foreign families and dismantling the selection of immigrants based on country of origin, and funded NASA’s space program with the intention of putting a man on the moon (in truth this last one came out of a sense of national prestige after the Soviets wounded it by being the first to fly in space, but still). His accomplishments are admirable and deserve remembrance, but they do not constitute an example of political flawlessness. John F. Kennedy is much more complex than he is permitted to be. A man that knew J. Edgar Hoover was wiretapping Martin Luther King, Jr. based on rocky evidence some of his associates were communist sympathizers. A strategist that contemplated pulling out of Southeast Asia only after the Communists acquired the upper hand over the political fate of the region. A politician that can be accused of postponing Civil Rights reform for fear of losing a re-election. In a sense, Kennedy is the great enigma. A figure, a symbol, that guarded his secrets well by hiding them in plain sight. An American icon that should be remembered for every decision he took as Commander in Chief of the United States, so long as he is remembered as an imperfect man.