Grant Morrison S/D

OK, that's enough rambling on like a mad nutter. But anyway, I don't think that anything he does is bollocks at all, even though some parts of his work (like feeling sorry for dead cats) are perhaps less symbolically significant than others. There's a doctoral thesis in there somewhere for whoever wants to be the first Grant Morrison scholar in Cultural Studies, I tell you.

"All I want is the answer to one simple question before I run screaming back to the BUGHOUSE: Is this REAL or isn't it?"

I think there's a tension about Grant's use of "magick" that shows up in his work repeatedly. Not just in the statement quoted above, but in characters like the rock star in Flex Mentallo, and of course Feely/Slade in The Filth as well as the convergence that Grant claims happened between writing The Invisibles (and writing himself into it as an idealized character) and the events that happened in his real life at the same time. The question is whether "magick" is real or whether it's shite, and I'm willing to bet that, using the tripartite thing, it's neither-- it's really a use of A. Moore's "idea space" from Promethea, i.e., memetics, i.e. as the Chief puts it when confronted with The Book with No Title, "It might help to consider the Zen KOAN, 'First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.'" So of course, it's both real as well as unreal, as Jane puts it to Cliff two pages before the page in DP #21 with the quotes given above- it works functionally, but to think it works because of some "magickal" power or essence is dumb essentialism, so no, it's not real also. Stuff like this plus the "Buddhismo" bad interpretation of Buddhism from The Filth and the similarly wrong one-toothed masturbating Buddha of pleasure thing from The Invisibles makes me think that Grant is on to something deep and he knows it, too.

OK, sorry to bother you guys with all this, but I thought it and felt like I had to write it out for someone to read if they cared. And now I'm late for my movie, so I've got to go. If anyone else here has thoughts on all this, I'd like to read them.

okay some questions:

(1) I don't have flex mentallo. is this really his best thing ever? Same with Zenith.

(2) are they going to collect the remaining doom patrol issues?

(3) what do you guys think of this whole magic thing? Although it's interesting (like that interview where GM says he could beat up Alan Moore in a magic war), I can't always take its BSy, DISINFO tone that seriously. But for a lot of people, that's what they seem to like best.

(4) People who hate GM--why? I had an hr long discussion (i.e. "argument") with my comic shop owner about this and it seemed like the exact things he hated about GM (discursiveness, wackiness, fucking around with conventions) were the things I liked. My impression is that people who don't like GM are precisely the people who are "real" comic book fans--conservative continuity hounds who rightly note that GM is screwing up his continuity facts and doing his best not to repeat the satisfyingly boring old Darkseid-takes-over-earth story. I told my sister (who read the Kubert/Lobdell X-men out of a crush on Gambit) about Morrisson's Xmen (Beast as Beast from Beauty in the Beast; Beast as gay; etc.) and she said "Those people who loved X-Men before must hate this." Am I wrong?

(5) GM seems like he's in this intermediate tier--famous and obscure in all the wrong places. Fanboys like X men and JLA (I think Rock of the Ages is the best paced superhero comic I've ever read) but don't really know about the Invisibles, but neither the snobby I-only-read-comics-I've-heard-about-in-the-new-yorker crowd or the Sandman franchise Gaiman fanclub really know about his work either. Gaiman once said in an interview that GM would be as famous as him (and invisibles as well read as Sandman) if only the invisibles had been collected earlier. He predicted that once it was in book form, there'd be a Sandman-like GM worshipping. But this hasn't happened, as far as I know. Is it because Sandman caters to pre-existing niche crowds (like goths)? Or because Sandman has sweet life-affirming stories, fairy tales about love and death, and Invisibles has the giant floating afterlife head of John Lennon, Archon conquerors in 2012, and Russian anarchist buddhas? And The Filth isn't exactly the kind of comic you take home to your mom. It's possible that Sandman is a richer, more flawless work, but Invisibles is way more relentlessly interesting, intense, and challenging. what do you think?

Flex is interesting in that it presages JLA and The Filth with the final issue with the invisible superheroes that have gone fictional/memetic in order to protect humanity. I guess it's also a loving tribute to reading superhero comics during the Silver Age when one could feel that superheroes were a force that existed to protect normal folks and the peaceful mundanity of their everyday lives. That's a theme that comes up in Morrison just as much as the radical utopian stuff does, it seems (maybe part and parcel of the whole superhero concept, but not necessarily--look at the earliest Superman stuff for radical superheroism in action): The Doom Patrol, The Invisibles (arguably?), The Hand all have this function of protecting the prosaic from incursions of the irrational (it took me a while to get the pun of "anti-person"-- anti-persons are always megalomaniacs trying to rock the boat 44r0nHz-style, they're anti-people-in-general). I dunno, I guess if you go through the personal transformation advocated in the end of Flex, you've done what Morrison's trying to prompt you to do through The Invisibles, so maybe Flex is the best thing he's ever done 'cause he gets where he's going in only 4 issues?

(2)Dunno, since all the subsequent issues have Flex Mentallo in them I thought it had the same problem with DC wimping out over the Charles Atlas plagarism that collecting the mini-series does.

(3)I dunno how seriously Grant takes it! Look at the end of The Filth, which is really ambiguous over how seriously we're supposed to take Greg/Ned's adventures into magick-shiteland a la the ending of Videodrome. Then there's the "Pop Magick" thing, where he goes on about how being a magician is all about pretending to be the person that you really want to be, and how picking fictional characters as your personal deities is probably the best choice (like Alan Moore worshipping whatever Roman fraud he claims to worship). And his "I got abducted by aliens who told me the secret of the universe because I went off to get abducted by aliens" thing. I guess, to the extent that I'm not agnostic about it, that I just see it as memes/Joseph Campbell-style symbollogy, and I don't sweat the fact that I'm not up on the hidden meanings of all the Crowley-derived magick stuff that Morrison and Moore are up on. I don't think that literal "magic powers" are what Morrison's aiming for his readership to attain, that rather it's really a rejection of dogmatism and rigid belief structures that he's after. The pretensions of the "magickal workings" crowd actually annoy me-- I think that stuff's outdated and can be too much like wish-fulfillment fantasies. I don't really think that the universe is so cuddly that you can get anything you want from it if you just ask for it hard enough-- I think that way lies madness, and that Morrison explores this somewhat in The Filth, with its potentially psychotic protagonist. (And hey, look at the last issue of Doom Patrol, where Grant seems to argue that, yes, literal belief in this stuff is crackers, but that letting "reality" kill your soul isn't a viable option either.)

(4)No, I agree. I think they hate him because he's got his own personality and he's working on his own themes all the time. He's not into producing soap-opera product to feed these people's addictions-- he's trying to subvert those very habits in them by introducing his material to these people, and they pick up on that and hate him for it. They don't want to be challenged by this shit-- they treat comic books as comfort food, and find some sort of solace in the way that they can master the "facts" of the material and construct order out of comic-book flotsam in a way that they can't do in their real lives. Polar opposite of Morrison's intentions-- he seems to want to use this fictional material to inform his (and others') real lives, not try to make the fictional into some sort of reality that can be lived in as an escape (although he shows nostalgia for this type of escapism in Flex among other places, the point of that series is to move beyond this as a person).

(5) Yeah, I think The Sandman is way more middlebrow and unchallenging, comfort food style, than The Invisibles. The personification of death is the cuddliest character in the series, for crying out loud. And at the same time, it's a lot less slapdash than Invisibles, reads better, has better production values and better art. The Invisibles reads like somewhere along the way Morrison ripped up the original plan that he'd made for the series and just started cramming that material in where he could, meanwhile recycling good bits of dialogue from his earlier series (the "stop a conversation stone dead" thing, among others), and getting very seat-of-the-pants in his writing style, which started annoying me in a serious way during Volume 2 and led me to literally throw away the last two series worth of comics after I'd bought them (sort of a mistake-- I should look at the last series again sometime). I think that Sandman was built to last as a literary enterprise, whereas The Invisibles was just written to explore and disseminate some of the material Morrison was working on/up to at that point (the "secret of the universe" shaman thing that I alluded to in an earlier post and that is also found in Flex) and is ultimately disposable in a way that Sandman is not (supposedly touching on great truths in a mythopoetic way also, but in a more classical fashion). The Invisibles is also more of a explicitly personal work than The Sandman (at least I think it is-- as far as I know Gaiman didn't write himself into his comic directly as a character, etc.) so it's harder for it to find a mass audience, sort of like Burroughs compared to Kerouac (who, yeah, writes semi-autobiographically in On the Road, but writes about the mythology of the open road, etc., easy stuff for Americans to sympathize with compared to Burroughs's personal issues with homosexuality, drug addiction metaphors, paranoid fantasies about social control, con men, etc.)

People don't like Grant Morrison because while he takes comics as seriously as they do he doesn't take the characters as seriously. A lot of his stuff is as openly sentimental as the biggest superhero soap but the sentiment comes from his and your relationship to the material, not from the character interactions themselves. GM's characters tend to be *very* broad, New X-Men is probably the time he's tried hardest to 'do' characterisation and even then it basically falls to bits halfway through the run.

He doesn't have the serious following of a Gaiman because he can tell superhero stories very well indeed and loves doing it: people who distrust superheroes don't like that. Maybe an Iain Banks/Iain M Banks rebranding would have helped, who knows.

A lot of his stuff is as openly sentimental as the biggest superhero soap but the sentiment comes from his and your relationship to the material, not from the character interactions themselves.

Do you mean that it's broader 'heroes are brilliant stuff' rather than overly emotional characters? JLA seemed like a collection of superhero firefighters at times (Green Lantern excepted)

New X-Men is probably the time he's tried hardest to 'do' characterisation and even then it basically falls to bits halfway through the run.

Doom Patrol is down this end of his range as well, and I think it work brilliantly (or I think that I think this - hurry up with the reprints, Vertigo!). Cliff and Jane anyway, if falls away a bit after from that (mostly for plot reasons).

The JLA thing - the big sentimental moments in that are huge saves-the-day widescreen stuff, which yes is a third category of sentimentality but still isn't really much to do with character interaction.

morrison's 'position': does he cultivate it? can you ever imagine him actually escaping it?

i don't really read for characterisation (or at least i certainly don't read comics for characterisation) so when i actually find a character interesting often as not it is a broad type (e.g. i find morrison's version of the beast GRATE but anna karenina a bore)

I can think of maybe Peter David, DeMatteis, BK Vaughn, Bendis, Alan Grant...

Okay, that's quite a few, but still...

I don't think GM is bad at characterization, I just think that (1) it doesn't interest him and (2) comics are a serial medium so characterization doesn't work the same way as in a film or novel. So (1) his interest is clearly in creating action movies of ideas and probably plots and thinks this way too. (Are there enough ideas-per-page, etc.?) If ideas = intellectual, then there is a way that characterization is anti-intellectual, in that it requires plodding plot construction. In this way, GM is similar to Kafka, Borges, and Murakami, in that he's less interested in the literary homework and more in just getting right to the metaphysical candy. (2) The problem with serial comics (I might be plagiarizing this from a hellblazer forum) is that the protagonist is really a shared convention, so you can't really change him that much w/o abandoning the conventions of the series. In this sense, GM does great characterization, but it's a serial (or comics) specific form of characterization, where charactization means people being always themselves: the people are all unchangeable icons. In that sense, his Batman, Lex Luthor, Jean, Cyclops, Wolverine, white queen, etc., for example, seem to perfectly embody their archetypal selves. But they never change and we never really know their interior life. Since superheroes are so uncomplicated in the first place, I'm pretty happy with this Silver Age version of charactization; I think when people don't do this (like some of the people you mentioned, such as peter david) characterization just ends up meaning mundane stories filled with unfunny jokes. GM's way seems more like mythology: we don't know the characters aside from what they do in the story, but we have a pretty good idea of what kinds of things they would and wouldn't do.

That said, there's usually the obligatory "John Constantine goes to the bar or confronts his dead father" issue and GM hasn't written anything like that as far as I know. I think the problem is that his emphasis on ideas makes him a sort of shallow writer, in the sense that he doesn't ever give his characters texture or subtext. Usually, I love that, b/c the stories end up sleek and graceful. But it can make his characters too generic (king mob and fantomex).

(Thanks for the great posts--especially chris!)

If I'm restating something from before, forgive me (esp. Ken, as this might be what he's getting at), but GM's knack for characterization seems to be his ability to get at charcter details while (or by) painting in these broad archetypal strokes. cf. those moments in JLA when the universe is going to shit and Batman has this one line that embodies his Batmanness (as GM sees it) so perfectly while at the same time not distracting from the grandeur of the moment happening around Batman's one line. Or, hell, that line from Emma Frost near the start of his NXM run - something like "The whole world is watching; we must be nothing less than fabulous." That's her right there.

As for continuity-related boggins, I think some of it (the unintentional stuff) has been publically classified by GM as communication breakdowns between Marvel editors and him, like the bit in "Return to Weapon X" where Sebastian Shaw talks about reading minds.

Otm

um..?

(but make it the first one)

re: INVISIBLES, I thought the beginning was great, got a little flabby in the middle and shaped up nicely at the end. And Chuck, the whole point of King Mob was to be a wet dream of cool. But it's okay, he gets better at the end.

I'd say Doom Patrol or Animal Man are the best starting points, but I might be biased because that's where I started.

I'd agree that DOOM PATROL is the best place to start with Morrison. It stats out as a semi-traditional superhero work, but doesn't stay there for very long at all. Morrison's kinda tough to sell to non-superhero readers, as a lot of his best work has been firmly set in that genre/trope/whatever.

I read all of INVISIBLES when I was far older than that, mostly for the first time, too. Held up in spite of that.

Sooooo glad to read that! Someday I might gather the courage to go back to it...

But if I was forced to say at least one thing I could do without, that would most probaby be his Spawn mini.

And, yeah, Arkham Asylum hasn't aged well either.

I'm reading Doom Patrol now as the trades come out, and loving it.

And I have to re-read Invisibles complete someday.

ROB'S ON ANOTHER PLANET
Jessica Callan, Eva Simpson And Caroline Hedley

ROBBIE Williams is expecting a Close Encounter of the Third Kind.

The 31-year-old singer reckons an extra-terrestrial invasion is inevitable, saying: "I've been dreaming every night about UFOs, every night. I can't wait to go to sleep because my dreams have been so brilliant.

"I think they are definitely on their way, seriously. Mark my words. From now until 2012 - watch out, kids."

Haven't we already seen this somewhere?

ASTOUNDING Sci-Fi style Green Lantern as dopey police procedural sums it up pretty well; I'm having a great time with it! The art is maybe overly florid in a Bart Sears way but it gets the job done.

would it be possible to execute the good and funny idea for a superhero cover any worse than they have done there?

(like, there are many ways that you could make it just as bad. but from art to trade dress to layout to lettering, every element collaborates to render the dynamism and joke utterly inert

not sure what the "'joke" is exactly but the covers seem like (occasionally witless) stabs at pulp homage more than anything. computer coloring certainly doesn't help.

the junkie cover is clearly a terrible defenestration of something that could have been much funnier

the god one tickles me, ugly fonts and all

It's Liam Sharp, guys, govern yr expectations.

Not that we saw this contextless cover itt with any expectations, but a) Sharp isn’t responsible for the rigid trade dress, right-to-left layout, bad balloon, awkward speech lettering, mixed fonts or font choices, and b) why do DC keep lumbering Morrison with primary artists who draw lumbering steroid cases & have no sense of humour or wit?

Case was a good match on Doom Patrol and Burnham was a gift from the heavens, perhaps the most “gets it” artist Morrison has ever had on any ongoing project, but apart from that the chasm between artists he brings himself and ones that DC assign to him is yawping.

See also: Quitely (obvs), Cameron Stewart

Quitely he brought himself; Stewart campaigned to get his Invisibles fill-in.

Just checked, and Morrison invited Burnham to do his first 7-page fill-in after seeing Officer Downe; DC signed Burnham to a 2-year contract after his first full issue. Shoulda figured.