As crossover events go, Millennium is mostly ignored, and that seems to be how DC want it. This collection is itself now ancient, with no easily available digital edition. The characters it introduced are footnotes at best, bad jokes at worst, and when its villains showed up again in Brian Bendis' recent Event Leviathan it was to widespread disappointment and bafflement. Hardly surprising that a 1987 comic is little-referenced in 2023, you might say (particularly when the DCU has shed its skin a couple of times since). But it was pretty much forgotten by 1988.
So why did a then-groundbreaking weekly event series, which launched to thunderous hype and strong sales, fail to make any impact? There's an obvious answer: it's rubbish. And, yes, in many ways Millennium is a dismal failure as a comic, and certainly as a crossover event. But those ways are almost all to do with how it was done, not what it was trying to do.
At its heart Millennium is attempting three things, all ambitious and all potentially good. First, on a technical level, it's pioneering the crossover as line-wide takeover: everything stops for a month or two to tell one over-arching story. It's an approach DC used to great effect in the 90s with things like One Million and The Final Night, and still tries now. Second, its hook is a strong one that beckons other titles into the event - someone in every DC supporting cast is a traitor, whether replaced or brainwashed. And third, Millennium has the noble goal of putting a new, ultra-diverse DC team into the marketplace - an idea which feels like it's come around again in the last 10-15 years.
But the execution - ooof. Steve Englehart plotted the event as, he claimed, a 45-part story, crossovers included - doling out important events to all the supporting books to render as they saw fit. I can believe it, since the actual Millennium series is 8 issues in which the heroes are regularly alerted to a terrible threat, rush off to battle it... and then convene the next week with the job done.
I don't think there's ever been a crossover in which so much of the action happens outside the main book, an inversion of the usual problem with tie-ins. For instance, the climactic battle in the Louisiana swamps that ends the first half is split across four titles, none of which make sense on their own even though they sync perfectly, and none of which are Millennium itself. The editorial co-ordination in Millennium is virtuosic, but in the same way a 6-minute drum solo in the middle of a pop song might be. Impressive, but you do wish they hadn't bothered.
This unusual reliance on tie-ins is partly down to the "Manhunter spy" hook, which is a great way to get comics involved in the crossover but runs into a serious issue - the spy makes their move; is beaten (or not, in the case of titles which were set to be cancelled) and that wraps up the title's involvement... except there's still a month of crossover left. Even if you read the tie-ins to get the full story, Millennium is a very front-loaded event - all the excitement is in the initial revelation of Manhunter sleeper agents (some of whom are more impressive than others - nice work getting Lana Lang on board, but Blue Beetle's guy is just one of his existing minor villains). Once those are dealt with the momentum fizzles, and the tie-ins mostly mop up the diminishing Manhunter threat while the main book turns its attention to the Chosen.
Ah yes, the Chosen. Again, there's a nice idea here: the Guardians Of The Universe have picked 10 special humans to 'evolve' and lead mankind into the next millennium - but because they're so distant from Earth, they have zero interest in our current political systems. So two of the candidates they appear to are killed by a mob or paranoid officials, and one is a white supremacist from Apartheid South Africa who is enlightened as to the nature of the cosmos, absolutely hates it, and promptly goes off to become a supervillain.
The remainder are an uncompromisingly diverse crew - a Black British woman, a middle-aged Japanese tech guy, a female Chinese worker, an Aboriginal Australian woman, a gay Peruvian dude, Green Lantern's Pacific Islander pal Tom Kalmaku and, er, Jason Woodrue the Floronic Man (because Englehart couldn't get permission to use Swamp Thing). It's a really bold set of characters, and a book using the richness of their backgrounds and exploring how they interact might have been fascinating.
Millennium is not that book. Englehart's conceptions are exciting, and sometimes that hits on the page - Celia Windward, the British character is introduced with the caption "Birmingham, FASCIST BRITAIN" which is both funny and sums up her healthy distaste for authority. But mostly the actual characters are a collection of caricatures and tropes: Celia has a dreadful phonetic Jamaican accent; Betty the Aboriginal Australian is otherworldly and connected to the dreamtime; our Chinese heroine is dutiful; and so on. Gregorio, the gay member, epitomises the problem - yes, a superhero comic with a gay main character in 1987 is groundbreaking, but awesome though his final design is, his personality is a very broadly drawn and quite ugly stereotype of a self-loathing gay man. I don't think writers should only work from their own lived experience, I know people can write effectively about lives and cultures vastly different from their own... but it's very hard to read Millennium and not think Englehart was way out of his depth with the Chosen. It's a last hurrah for his 70s style - big cosmic underpinnings to a weird, soapy surface foam of action - but it felt odd and clumsy even in 1987, let alone now.
And for a comic whose job it is to introduce us to these new characters, they really have very little to do. They are rescued; they are passive receptacles of the Guardians' "cosmic wisdom" (a whole issue of this!); at the end they transform into superheroes. But they take no active part in the story and we hardly see them interact with each other - a real missed opportunity which unfortunately seals in the sense that these are walking stereotypes, not actual people.
So Millennium is excitingly ambitious but terribly done. And yet... there's a hyperactive, cut-up brio to it that I can't help but like. Englehart's dialogue is like Jack Kirby's in a way - entirely stilted but extremely dynamic, full of little turns of phrase and panels which break off from the main action for an unexpected character beat (he is loving getting a whole DC Universe to play with, that much is obvious). And the art, by the unique team of Joe Staton and Ian Gibson, is full of movement and fun, Staton's vigorous pencils working well with Gibson's more delicate finishes. Millennium is a vibrant, pretty, upbeat comic, especially for a big crossover event. It's a failure on almost every level, artistic and technical, but it's interesting for what it tried to do - DC's Secret Wars II, except with a great deal more heart.