Grant Morrison

At the one end of the Vertigo spectrum you had Sandman: brooding, gothic, sensitive, chilling, frightfully clever. At the other end you had this: brash, bawling, loud, surreal, probably deserved to be called a word with -punk added at the end but never was, thank God. Mental illness defines these characters as well as physical disabilities or deformities. Depression, dissociation, multiple personalities, schizophrenia, fugue states, mood swings - hardly the stuff of a heroic superteam, show more unless you're fighting, or befriending, the bizarre, irrational characters and situations Grant Morrison dreams up for the Doom Patrol. Strange and horrible, but also at times rather wonderful, their ultimate enemy is normality itself as enforced by a rigid beaueaucratic system weirder than anything it wants to destroy. The Brotherhood Of Dada! Danny The Street! The Real Men From NOWHERE! Wonders and terrors abound! (And I wonder if the TV series, which is quite good too, will also come round to the fact that Mr Nobody is actually the Good Guy in all thils.) It's all very silly and weird and melodramatic, and the last issue of the run was very first comic that ever made me cry, and hey, guess what, it did it again. show less

Genuine work of genius, dazzling in its formal craftsmanship, density of vision and in its control of huge numbers of characters, themes, plots, concepts and universes, executed in a way that seems gloriously, confusingly mess,y but upon careful reading appears to be generating that sense of teeming, overwhelming chaotic detail through sheer dint of good writing. Whether you're interested in a work of genius based around variations of the DC universe executing yet another variation of the show more Crisis On Infinite Earths is a whole other matter.

The story is about multiple realities being invaded by malignant higher life forms using comic books which provide glimpses of superhero adventures in different alternate realities as meta mental traps, allowing them to propagate across the multiverse. Between two bookends we explore the looming threat impinging on different Earths with different artists as appropriate to the style of each reality, Morrison showing off his rather intimidating imagination, skill and knowledge. The high-point is probably the Pax American issue with Frank Quietly, where the Carlton characters who were the basis for Watchmen find themselves on different sides of a conflict when one of them assassinates the President they were supposed to be protecting. In some ways the sprawling mess of Multiversity is a rebuke to the claustrophobic formalism of Watchmen, but the Pax Americana chapter in particular pulls of a whole slew of eye-popping experiments in graphic narrative without ever resorting to the rigid structures and layouts of Watchmen.

This was my second read-through of the whole thing, and I enjoyed it a lot more in one sitting and with an idea of what to expect. That the whole thing turns out to be a prelude to an epic adventure that has not yet materialised doesn't detract from it - comics are always barreling towards their next Crisis crossover anyway, might as well acknowledge it and conclude that even if that story is never told, it's happening right now, somewhere, out there in the Multiverse. show less

Batman Arkham Asylum - ASHoSE is a rare gem of a graphic novel that displays what the visual medium can do. The art works so well with the themes and tone of the story that’s its hard to imagine this version of Batman any other way.
In Arkham Asylum the idea of sanity at the heart of the Batman mythos is explored to its fullest. The inmates might be running the physical asylum but how this parallels the world-building is explored in every panel. Who are the sane ones and what does sanity show more mean - this is the heart of the message. It is an intensely interesting look at what Batman can represent to Gotham and what our interest in him can say about us. There is plenty of action in this comic but the true meat lies in how the author runs Batman through the meat grinder to see what comes out.

The art in this graphic novel would be annoying anywhere but here. It is all over the place. Sometimes it looks like a vivid painting, other times like a collage of photographed objects. But through the lens of theme, this approach is brilliant. It takes the idea of madness as an ever changing beast and amplifies it to a high-pitched wail. It is often phantasmagorical and complements the ideas so well that it only increases the impact. It is sometimes potentially intensely confusing as people and faces are often nothing more than cigarette burns on a melting page, but usually it is a wondrous horror to behold.

Arkham Asylum is an assault on your eyes and mind. Not an easy read: it can be disturbing, gruesome, and revolting. But I would recommend it. To see how well style and substance can blend, to feel the finger nails of insanity rack against your gray matter and to see the same theme play out in this way is a rare experience. Any fan of the bat should read this. It gives wonderful depth to his character and any fan of comics needs to see what visual story telling can really do when unleashed. show less

Supergods, like its author, celebrated comic book writer Grant Morrison, is a complicated book. This is no primitively rendered Golden Age Superman. Nor is it some drug-induced phantasmagoria from the '60s or '70s. (More on that below...) Supergods, rather, is a sleekly designed tome delivered to us from the future. Like Medieval serfs delivered a computer, we poke, prod and stroke it, we admire it and guess its possible uses, but we are unable to comprehend its true potential.

Supergods is, show more superficially, a history of superhero comics from their inception through approximately 2010. (The book was published in 2011.) It begins as any reader might expect: with Superman. Morrison expertly deconstructs the cover of the issue of Action Comics in which Superman first appeared, evoking the mystery of this new character archetype. He further elaborates on the story, discussing the artwork and dialog panel-by-panel. Morrison's analysis is impressive but worrying; the reader will wonder if Morrison's discussion of each character will be this exhaustive. Batman undergoes a similar analysis. But Morrison is setting the stage: the eternal tension in comics between darkness and light.

Although Morrison devotes the bulk of Supergods to superheroes, dividing the text into four units, each reflecting his understanding of the history of comics (Golden Age, Silver Age, Dark Age, Renaissance), the book is at its most interesting when he discusses his own life and his career as a writer. From his first impressions as a child near a US Naval base in Scotland, we are given a detailed biography of Morrison. The result is fascinating in an almost perverse way. Morrison seems, frankly, insufferable: A too cool for school teenager; a self-impressed “artist”; a comics phenom. Morrison relates bluntly how successful he is, how youthful he appears (repeatedly), and how wealthy he has become. Although off-putting, one can't help but be impressed by his honesty.

Morrison has his quirks, and he freely relates them. (He likely doesn't see them as quirks.) He practices and believes in the efficacy of Chaos magic. He heals his cat's cancer through sheer willpower. In one particularly eye-popping passage, Morrison relates a “vision” he experiences in Katmandu, temporarily leaving this reality and traveling to another world whose inhabitants appear to him as a constantly shifting array of fluorescent light bulbs. (This is, he claims, unrelated to the hashish he ingested immediately prior to said experience.) Horrified, one can't help but read on.

Supergods is, ultimately, strangely, inspiring. Morrison's story is that of someone who is completely comfortable with who he is. He creates for a living and earns considerable wealth doing it. More impressive, though, is his take on life. He accepts his artistic medium of choice, comics, on its own terms, and insists that superheroes needn't be “realistic” (or “grim 'n' gritty,” as we called them in my day) in order to be interesting and meaningful. This attitude is reflected in his own life: he acknowledges that something doesn't need to be objectively true for one to believe in it and, touchingly, in this age of cynicism and snark, insists that it's perfectly fine—even desirable—for one to believe in and feel strongly about things, without worrying what someone else might say about it. What a strangely liberating thing to hear, buffeted as we are by negative comments and Internet memes. Recommended less for comic fans than for writers and other creative types. show less