Issue Description

Broken and beaten from the recent encounters with the Lizard King and the Joker, Aztek is forced to return to the place where he was raised and trained--the secret base of the Brotherhood of Quetzalcoatl. There he encounters Raptor, the woman chosen by the Brotherhood to be his mate!

Aztek is on the operation table, as Julia Frostick and the doctors of the Q Foundation try to patch him up. Julia is brought into the Q Foundation, assigned to watch over Aztek. While Aztek is on the operating table, the Q-Foundation begin training his replacement, Aztek’s second-in-command, by having her going through some tests in the armor. Aztek comes out of surgery fine, and resumes his use of the Aztek armor.

Aztek returns to Vanity City, where he finds a new high-quality apartment supplied to him by one of the Q-Foundation’s benefactors: Lexcorp. He turns on the news, and finds four villains have hostages held at the Vanity City Wax Museum. Aztek goes into action. However, we find out that the four villains (Awol, Bloodhound, Deathgrip, and Tattoo) are being paid by Lexcorp to act as supervillains. The hostage situation is a ruse orchestrated by Lex Luthor in order to make Aztek look more like a hero. Aztek plays his unwitting role well, and takes out the villains without any bloodshed.

Julia meets with her fiancé, and does not understand what has happened since her departure. Now, all the records of the original Curt Falconer are gone, replaced with files proving Uno is really Curt Falconer. Her fiancé, the person who originally put her on the part of discovering Aztek’s secret identity, does not remember Curt Falconer being Aztek. In fact, he no longer believes Curt could actually be Aztek. We find Luthor is behind the falsified records, as he and the Q Foundation are moving forward as planned.

Aztek: The Ultimate Man (1996)

Publisher

DC Comics

Volume Description

Aztek: The Ultimate Man was the brainchild of writers Mark Millar and Grant Morrison and artist N. Steven Harris. The ongoing series was designed to debut a new hero of the DC universe. The series followed the anti-hero Aztek; a hero whose big picture mission meant he took unusual solutions to solving the small problems. Aztek: The Ultimate Man featured an unusual city, unusual villains, and the supporting cast of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.
 
Throughout its run, Aztek: The Ultimate Man had counted Millar and Morrison as its writers, and Harris and Keith Champagne as its artists. Famous DC cover artist Steve Lightle lent his pen to the majority of covers of the series.
 
While Aztek: The Ultimate Man was a critical success (it was rated one of the top 10 books of 1996 by Wizard Magazine), it was not a commercial one, and Aztek: The Ultimate Man was cancelled after ten issues. With its cancellation imminent, Aztek creator Morrison brought Aztek into one of the other comics he penned at the time: JLA. The final issue of Aztek has the titular hero joining the Justice League.
 
Over the years, we would never go back to get a glimpse of Vanity City, and Aztek would eventually die at the end of Grant Morrison’s run on JLA, in issue #41. 
  Collections and Reprints The entire series is collected in the JLA Presents: Aztek: The Ultimate Man trade paperback (2008)

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