Grant Morrison S/D

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?

We killed Chubby by not buying enough of issues of Seaguy to ensure the whole story gets told.

it quite often veers into prog rock album cover territory, and everyone talks in post-modern slogans

Was this your first time reading a Morrison series, Joe? (Sorry, I just found this amusing.)

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.