Grant Morrison S/D

Zenith is really good, probably my favourite thing of his. What I read of "The New Adventures of Adolf Hitler" was great too.

Chuck, I have Adolf as a PDF file on slsk if you want to download it; my user name is "servoret".

The rest of the discussion is here:

Grant Morrison: S&D

More 'meh' but still enjoyable: The Filth, Arkham Asylum, his Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight miniseries, his Fantastic Four mini

S: Doom Patrol (except around issues 40-50); the Hellblazer two-shot; Gothic; Animal Man; Recent New X-Men
D: Invisibles, "Disco Dad" tendencies

S: Kill Your Boyfriend, Flex Mentallo, Doom Patrol, Animal Man, Zenith, New Adventures Of Adolf Hitler
Only Worth Buying For The Artwork: The Filth, Arkham Asylum, Mystery Play
D: Marvel Boy

The Invisibles, much as I like bits of it, is too patchy to fall into any of the categories.

There's a handful on ebay at the moment in the US at around $5, plus a Frank Quitely signed Dynamic Forces hardback for 10 Euros...

Other Zenith Bks, New X-Men, Invisibles = definitely worth reading.

The rest of his stuff is patchy, still good compared to most people.

Did anything ever 'come' of Bizarre Boys?

And did he do Bible John? Or was that John Smith?

His character work here is really fantastic and heartfelt, it seems to me. The liberal arts drop-out "-ism" dropping gets a little tiresome, but who am I to complain if it brings with it monkeys vs. robots and brain-in-a-jar vs. brain-in-a-jar?!

I have to take back what I said about The Invisibles and Sebastian O up top. Andrew is right, I think, in his claim re: uniform brilliance. Everything makes sense, seen in the context of Grant's work as a whole. I think the system of "magick" that he's worked out through his books is both valid and totally genius as a method of working out and disseminating a deeply personal mythology. It's amazingly lucky for us as readers that he's been able to popularize his work through the medium of mainstream comics.

(he's been saying so for ten years but apparently has written some of it now)

I am secretly glad he has never come out with this novel because I do not want to hate him for it.

Classic(ish): Doom Patrol, Flex Mentallo, The Invisibles (I'm the only volume 3 fan). Half the ideas in New X-Men, when it didn't get bogged down by rushed art or half-assed ideas with the Shiar. The Filth is good as a collection of ideas and reads better the second time through. It's part of Grant's "feel sorry for my dead cat" genre. We3 is necessary, when collected I hope it sells a bajillion copies. Marvel Boy is carried on half story, half art and is practically a blueprint for the style of Marvel's Ultimate line of comics.

Close to dud: Arkham Asylum, Mystery Play
Ambivalent: St. Swithin's Day, Seaguy.

I still haven't read any of his mainstream DC superhero stuff! Animal Man is the closest I've been. Any suggestions on anything that's particularly outstanding?

DC Superheroes: No point in pissing about, go directly to JLA. The first collection is called 'Brave New World', I think.

Or JLA Earth2, the graphic novel drawn by Frank Quitely.

If only Seaguy #3 wasn't so horribly dark, I would have given in to everyone in the world. My partner now refuses to read any Grant Morrison after she read that. If I do end up interviewing Cam3ron St3wart, I'm going to dictaphone record him saying, "Hey Sheila, Chubby is really still alive."

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)

Nope. I think there was a collection of NAOAH at one stage, but it is now out of print. There were several volumes of Zenith (but not the resolution of the long running story about The Plan) brought out by Titan, but they are out of print too.

Around the time he was setting up his FA website, Martin Skidmore mentioned that there was some talk of a new Zenith collection coming into print, but that does not seem to have happened.

Thanks to my local British Isles copyright library, I re-read all the Zenith collections they had last summer (for an article for FA I never got round to writing). I ended up thinking that it starts off well but that the loads of superheroes from alternate worlds get together to fight the Lloigor was not quite all that. It seemed a bit of a mess, plotwise, seeming to be an early case of the Grant Morrison problem (his writing stories that are very hard to follow for people like me of only sub-average intelligence).

I was a bit ambivalent about all the "oh there is that obscure British comic character" cameos in it... on the one hand, this is the kind of thing that annoys me about LOEG, but on the other, it was great to see some of those crazy characters get an outing again.

That said, I really hope that someone does bring out a complete Zenith collection. When it is good, it is amazing, and Steve Yeowell is a great artist on it.

Hitler's never been collected.

The first volume of a new to-be-complete round of Zenith collections was printed around ten years ago, sat in a warehouse for about eight years, then supposedly got pulped*. The Titan ones covered the first three "Phase"s of Zenith in five paperbacks; Phases 1 and 2 were also reprinted in 2000AD Super Specials or suchlike after the paperbacks went OOP; the colour stuff has never been reprinted.

*Morrison pointed out to Rebellion that Fleetway didn't actually own Zenith.

A shame that neither is readily available. I really enjoyed what I read and would gladly pay for nice editions of both.

This new deluxe version of We3 is really nice. I didn't really notice the additions, but the print quality and extras are great.

I do hope that movie gets made.

Reading that RS article--there's no way, on that evidence, that I'll be reading Supergods... and I LOVED Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Flex, Invisibles, AS Superman, etc etc

I'm planning to read the autobio stuff and barely skim his disingenuously inaccurate early-decades-of-superheroes stuff.

I haven't read the RS article but I liked Supergods!

his disingenuously inaccurate early-decades-of-superheroes stuff.

this was the part I preferred, tbh

wow

This review actually guarantees I'll be making my purchase of issue #8 (and soon - like after work) a priority.

haha that looks awesome!

RT @jollybaez: A glimpse at some of the new artwork from the expanded deluxe WE3!

this was the part I preferred, tbh

lying about Siegel & Shuster to shill for his employers during the lawsuit is gross to me, so

Wtf is that new WE3 panel? It doesn't even look like Quitely's art. And how does it fit into the story?

that's a joke, it's from the new issue of Inc

Ah, okay.

lying about Siegel & Shuster to shill for his employers during the lawsuit is gross to me, so

What did he say? I don't recall this at all, so I'm thinking I must have missed something potentially interesting.

yeah I don't recall that either...?

http://twiststreet.tumblr.com/post/7831373160

That's the dick move? I read that interview and it seemed pretty damn innocuous.

Whatever.

Even that quote doesn't seem like he's being a dick, only that he doesn't delve into the reasons why Bob Kane got a good deal at that point. Kane was the outlier, not S&S! I thought that was pretty clear when I read it.

I think he also mentions that Bill Finger was rather screwed over by history and finances.

it's the context of totally glossing over them being fucked, 1) while a lawsuit is going on that DC are paying lawyers more to file paper on every month than they ever paid S&S while they were alive, and 2) Grant is actively redesigning Superman's costume and origin to be potentially legally distinct from the S&S creation, while being 3) ickily disingenuous about their situation, that I find unpleasant.

So he's supposed to just avoid the franchise right now due to a lawsuit, or forever?

he can make whatever employment decisions he chooses, I'm not talking about that. I'm saying I personally find it distasteful to lie about the situation of creators of said franchise in this context, and thusly find his position on the backstage history of early superhero comics untenably compromised and proven inaccurate, so I'm unlikely to even read those aspects of the book.

So you're saying you haven't read those parts of the book, or what he actually said? I think he's a little vague, but I think people are stirring the bucket and reading more into it than is there.

I have really enjoyed Supergords, it's got everything you love about Morrison comics: big ideas, lots of heart inconsistently spread out, misdirected spite, and glossing over of elements he finds boring or inconvenient. Not surprised that he has little sympathy/empathy for S&S considering the jackpot he scored with Arkham Asylum, which succeeded more because it was published at the absolute height of Keaton/Burton Bat-Mania than on its own merits. As humble as his writing/cartooning beginnings may be, the ordeal of Siegel & Shuster beyond his imagination. Which is a pity, considering his fascinations.

Caleb Mozzocco stirs the bucket.

I wasn't super-impressed with that, actually

Morrison to put the sex back into Wonder Woman comics --

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/10/13/grant-morrisons-wonder-woman-series-planned-for-2012-or-thereabouts/

Just finished Supergods. Overall, I thought it was entirely inessential. It seemed to me like two books rather poorly integrated; his life through and in comics, and an overview of superheroes. I enjoyed reading the sections where he talked about what inspired him along the way, but thought he gave little insight into his own work (except for his admitted chickening out on pushing Final Crisis as far as he had initially planned), and his overall "history of the superhero" is, um, unique.

Grant just got an MBE.

I wonder if he's gonna give the Queen the issues of Inivisibles where he honours the royal family...

On a more serious note, is he the first superhero comic writer to get one of those? Do Gaiman or Moore have one?

Moore would turn it down, surely. (but that then raises the question of whether he'd say publically he'd turned it down, which is bad form iirc.)

I've read it twice now, very slowly and carefully the second time, and I think Nameless is up there with his best stuff. Which is nice, given I thought he wouldn't produce anything that good again. A fair bit of the credit definitely goes to Chris Burnham, though.

ok lol
http://i.imgur.com/cmzDlhV.png

Wow! Is Morrison writing GL now, or is that just a one-off gig?

No, GM is writing one of the GL books. IMO it's not really lived up to the hype, some neat ideas but really doesn't hold together - it's more like a handful of 2000ad ideas in search of a character.

It's pretty silly but I like it! It's like Batman Incorporated In Space (although not quite as good as that sounds). It's the first thing he's done since Batman that I've enjoyed. although Liam Sharp doesn't really do anything for me - it's a bit sub-Gene Ha.

This cover sums it up really

https://files1.comics.org//img/gcd/covers_by_id/1237/w400/1237279.jpg

Great cover, eh?

Or, er:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/cmx-images-prod/Item/737712/737712._SX1280_QL80_TTD_.jpg

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.