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I don’t know why I keep reading Grant Morrison’s work when I know I (nearly always) don’t like it, or at least am annoyed by something about it. Maybe because he has so many great concepts that I keep wanting to find something of his I can unapologetically praise?

Well, I found it. Sort of.

I read The Multiversity the other day and didn’t much like it. It’s got all of Morrison’s strengths and flaws, but as usual the flaws (particularly trying to do too much) outnumber the strengths.

However.

There is one brilliant short piece in there that is the best thing of Morrison’s I’ve read.

It’s called Pax Americana (2014), it can (and should, in my opinion) be read as a stand-alone, and it’s a parody of/pastiche of/commentary on Watchmen.

I’m not entirely sure why I like this one so much, compared to nearly everything else I’ve read of Morrison’s. Maybe the Watchmen format forces Morrison to tone down his usual pretensions and attempts at cramming too much in?

Not that the story’s unambitious. It tries to rebut Watchmen in the space of one chapter of that book, all while telling a new conspiracy story and melding the original Charlton Comics characters with their Watchmen doppelgängers. Yet this time Morrison’s able to make it work.

He and his artist, Frank Quitely, use an eight-panel layout in contrast to Watchmen’s nine-panel—eight being a running theme throughout. The story’s about trying to figure out why a hero called Peacemaker, who’s based on the original Charlton Peacemaker as well as Moore’s Comedian but actually acts like Captain America, shot the President, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

To be honest, despite my using the word rebut above, it feels less like a rebuttal to Watchmen and more like a “dialogue,” as one online commenter phrased it, with that book. Morrison for once doesn’t seem to be saying “take that!” to a book he hates, he’s trying to come to terms with it (and, perhaps, with Moore?—if so that didn’t work).

The story deserves (and endorses, in-narrative) multiple readings, and I’m not convinced I’ve yet plumbed all of its arguments. But even on first reading you can understand Just having an emotional and understandable conclusion puts this story above most of its writer’s work.

Also, one small thing is that I actually liked this Capt. Atom more than Dr. Manhattan, whose lengthy monologues drag on too long. Sadly, Blue Beetle (version of Night Owl/Dan) and Nightshade (Silk Specter/Laurie) don’t get much to do, as their Watchmen counterparts were my favorite characters in that book. (I love how they save people even on the verge of the end of the world.) The Question (Rorschach) is extremely Rorschach-y and a lot of (admittedly violent) fun, especially when he’s preaching an absolutist ideology that Morrison shows how little he cares for by hiding the speech bubble behind the Question’s body.

As for the art, I’m not a fan of Quitely’s faces (I’ve seen them before in JLA: Earth 2, also written by Morrison, which is not as good), with tons of wrinkles—everyone’s stressed in his art, even when they’re not. But the motion is good, and there are genuinely brilliant moments that I’m not sure are Quitely’s or Morrison’s: a thirty-two panel grid that actually has a point and isn’t just there to show off, and a lovely conversation in which the panels wrap around a stairwell. Like Watchmen, this is using the underappreciated comic book format to its full advantage.

It’s ironic, perhaps, that my favorite Morrison story so far is a pastiche of a book he dislikes. But the characters, story, and even pretentious symbolism are of a piece here—and it all ends with a punch-in-the-gut, dramatically satisfying ending. Highly recommended.