Tag Archives: Grant Morrison

It’s! So! Super!

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A while back I talked about All-Star Superman and why I thought the first 8 issues or so weren’t as great as they were cracked up to be. Several folks argued that I’d be more impressed if I finished the series.

So I just reread issues 1 to 12 and…eh. It’s not terrible or anything, certainly. I appreciated Frank Quitely’s art more this time around than I have in the past. The series has a nice, bright, striking color palette, and I like the clarity of the linework and layout; there’s a touch of Winsor McCay there, I think. I still find his figure drawings and faces off-putting; his women in particular often look like uncomfortably slender fetish mannequins, and facial expressions seem rubbery and oddly unexpressive. But as far as mainstream art these days go, this is about as good as it gets, I think.

The story is fine too…Morrison keeps things humming along; there’s no shortage of nutsy throwaway ideas — using a gravity gun to warp time; descendents of dinosaurs living underneath the earth; Jimmy Olsen dressing in Kryptonian garb for a lark; underworlds, overworlds, shrunken super-doctors — it’s all good. And, of course, there’s Superman’s approaching cell-death hanging over the series, giving it weight and pathos.

Except…man, how much do I care about these folks at all? Jimmy Olsen for example; he’s hip, he’s incredibly resourceful, he’s got this sixth sense which warns him of danger, he’s got his signal watch — he’s just so cool! And, well, irritating. Same with the endlessly chattering Lois who won’t believe Clark is Superman; or with Superman himself, always rushing off to save someone or other, constantly forgiving everybody; or with, say, Lex’s gratuitously fetish-goth-garbed niece. Everything’s just. So. Awesome! and. Inventive! and Cool! “No one but me can save the world Lois! My cells are converting to pure energy, pure information. And I only have moments to save the world.” Tum ta tum! You feel like you need to utter a little inspirational horn bleat after every panel; it’s all characters making preposterously pompous little speeches and the racing off to be heroic. Everything feels like it’s at maximum volume.

Morrison’s always written like that. In stuff like Doom Patrol or even the Filth, I always felt it was thrown off tongue in cheek; making fun of the immensity of super-hero stuff, and often undercutting it with pratfalls or ridiculousness (like the silly Brotherhood of Dada, for example.) But as he’s moved into more mainstreamy work, that deflation has gotten lost. And…it’s not that he’s not clever. It’s not that he doesn’t have good ideas. It’s not even that there aren’t touching moments. I just hate the feeling that he’s tapping me on the shoulder every page yelling in my ear, “This is soooo great! This is Superman, booooy! Go! Go! Go!”

I’ve said this before, but…it totally vitiates everything that’s best about Silver-Age storytelling when you try to tell a story capturing the brilliant innocence of silver-age storytelling. Because a lot of what was fun in those Silver-Age stories was that they were really off-hand and not at all pretentious. Sure, a Silver Age story might have Bizarro in one panel and evolved dinosaurs in the next and then an intelligent sun on the next page…but that would just be the story. There wouldn’t be the winking about, wow, this is so cool. I felt like Alan Moore handled it better in “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” by slowing the pacing down and being somewhat more bloody minded; trying to think how the silver age stuff might work out if you looked at it from an older perspective. It was an homage to the era, not an attempt to recreate it. Morrison though seems to be trying to go back in time through sheer puffery and volume and frantic pacing. And I think it’s significant that Moore’s message was that the world doesn’t need Superman (which is, as it happens, true), whereas Morrison’s message is that we do need Superman watching over us forever, at least as a kind of beautiful ideal. Which is basic fanboy aggrandizement — and also not true, even if you bellow it.

Also, the end? I really thought, from all the foreshadowing and what people had said about the series that, you know, he dies. But he doesn’t quite. They still think he might come back. It just seems…I don’t know. It seems kind of lame, really, with all the build up.

Again, I didn’t hate the book. It’s entertaining. There are a lot of wonderful moments (Clark Kent bumbling around while interviewing Lex Luther is lovely; reminded me of the Chris Reeves Superman movie, which I still think was pretty great.) And of course, it’s hard to resist Luthor’s eyes checking out the superpackage:

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I know everybody goes on about the freshness of the series, the way it rejuvenated the character, and on and on. But it feels really decadent to me; definitely part of the zeitgeist, rather than an answer or alternative to it. I’d way, way, way rather read this than Marvel Zombies…but I don’t necessarily think they’re different in kind.

All Star Fan Scruff

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I just went to visit my brother, and was able to read all the comics he buys that I’m too cheap to get. Among those are All Star Batman, All Star Superman, and Grant Morrison’s Batman run. These varied a good bit in quality — Frank Miller’s All Star Batman is a completely embarrassing self-parody; All Star Superman is a workmanlike nostalgia exercise which has been denuded of the ambivalence towards super-heroics which characterizes Morrison’s most interesting efforts; Morrison’s Batman is quite entertaining, despite the obligatory and atrocious grand crossover efforts.

But, whatever their merits or demerits, finishing the pile I was struck by (A) how completely uninterested I am in spending my own money on any of them and, (B) how thoroughly repetitive and kind of pointless they all seem. Miller isn’t just rewriting Dark Knight; he’s rewriting his own rewrites of Dark Knight (like Batman: Year One and Dark Knight Returns 2) and his own oeuvre in general (Wonder Woman’s characterization is particuarly painful, not so much because he reflexively dumps the pacifism and wisdom which is a big part of the character, as because his decision to turn her into a ball-busting fetishized dominatrix with a thing for strong men is at this point such a cliche in his own writing, from Sin City on down.) Morrison isn’t just rewriting the Weisinger era Superman; he’s rewriting Alan Moore rewriting Weisinger, and, indeed, 15 years or so of hip fetishization of the goofiness of old Superman stories. And Morrison’s Batman stories — obsessed as they are with the replication of Batman and alternate possibile Batman — seem to just be reworking, with a good deal less zip, similar concerns in the Animal Man stories that Morrison put out there twenty years ago.

Of course, any genre thrives on repetition — but you also need variation, and while American mainstream comics are good at the first, they haven’t been able to deliver consistently on the second in quite a while. Many people blame super-heroes themselves, but I don’t really think that’s the problem. For example, Cardcaptor Sakura combines Judy-Bloomesque girl Bildungsroman with a video-game fantasy tropes and comes up with something which, while not necessarily great art, is certainly a fresh, and even bizarre, take on super-heroics.

So personally, I don’t think it’s the super-hero genre that’s the problem, but rather that, in American comics, the super-hero genre has largely degenerated into fan fiction. Though, really, that’s kind of unfair to fan fiction, which, is usually motivated by real love for the material and a willingness to do all sorts of ridiculous and counter-intuitive things with it (see this sex-changing slash effort by Vom Marlowe for example.) Mainstream comics are actually the worst of all worlds — corporate fan fiction. Often, there’s little love or respect for the original vision and, conversely, a whole set of arbitrary rules in place about what can and can’t be done with them. The result has been a shrinking of the comic audience (fan fiction is always going to have a fairly limited appeal, whatever its virtues) and a stifling of creativity.

Grant Morrison’s one of the genres great writers — why put him on Superman, a character in which, as far as I can tell, he has little interest? And yes, I enjoyed his runs on X-Men and JLA, but wouldn’t it make sense, if you have a talent like that, to give him a chance to create something new? Wouldn’t that, if promoted correctly, create the possibility of new marketing possibilities, new movie tie-ins, and so forth? Similarly, why make Frank Miller go back again and again to the Batman when he’s clearly said all he has to say about him? Wouldn’t it be better to get him to do something new? I mean, it’s not like Sin City and 300 weren’t successful. Surely he could make up a marketable super-hero if he tried.

But, of course, forty or fifty years of this fannish, clannish, corporate bullshit has taken its toll. Super-hero comics are now hopelessly uninteresting to everybody outside of the tiny fan community. Distribution and marketing is aimed at this insular group who wants the same thing over and over, and the opportunities for new creations which might appeal to a broader audience are limited indeed — you can be successful with a television show like Hero, but it’s really unclear how something similar could work with comics. Still, I think that maybe the best thing the big companies could do for themselves is just stop with the endless Superman, Batman, Hulk, Spider-Man, ad nauseum. If people want to read that stuff (as they will), look at reprints of the stories that made them famous. Start investing instead in new creations…and for god’s sake, give the creators ownership, so somebody has some interest in quality control.

Update: Jason points out in the comments that Morrison is in fact interested in Superman, and hand-picked the project.

Filth blurb

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Not that I want this to turn into the all-Grant-Morrison-all-the-time blog, but…this is a blurb about “The Filth” I wrote for the Comics Journal a few years back (2004, I think?), just in case anyone’s interested.

Grant Morrison’s first two popular series — “Animal Man” and “Doom Patrol” — were notable for, of all things, their elegance. Dreamlike, addled, bursting with ideas, they nonetheless unfolded with an inevitable grace, akin to the best movies of Buñuel or David Cronenberg. Since then, though Morrison has largely forsaken his idiosyncratic sense of pacing, . These days he relies half the time on relatively conventional super-hero plots, and the other half on an aesthetic of one-damn-thing-after-another. The Filth is an example of the second of these, but if the whole isn’t quite the sum of the parts, the bits and pieces still form some of the trippiest debris floating through comics, mainstream or otherwise. Marxist assassin chimpanzees, psychic-defense toupees, porn stars spurting black semen, plus standard Morrison themes like pulp-comics-as-metaphor-for-reality and the sadness of pet owners — like, what does it all mean, man? Something about the deliberate destruction of utopias? The insanity lying beneath the surface of the workaday world? And is the Weston/Erskine art really meant to look like Hanna-Barbera’s take on H.R. Giger? Who cares? I’ll plop my money down as long as I can open the thing at random and find characters spouting lines like, “I learned to read the intestinal weather and correctly guess the lifestyle and habits of the people around me from their stifled farts.” Morrison doesn’t really do beauty that well anymore, but God (or whatever) bless him, he’ll always have dada.

Grant Morrison, Transcendence, and Shitty Art

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I was looking at Douglas Wolk’s essay on Grant Morrison, in which he says, among other things:

“Fortunately, Morrison makes it easier for our own vision of The Invisibles, as readers, to be multiple, too. Return and begin again with what we asked earlier: who’s telling this story? Who’s making it possible to see? The Invisibles is comics, not prose: the creator of its images is, to a significant extent, the person telling the story. But various sections of the series are drawn by roughly 20 artists, and there’s no single “true” or “correct” representation of any character. The climactic storyline is drawn “jam”-style, with everyone taking a few pages, including the one Morrison himself drew. Morrison nonetheless has a prior claim as the image-maker, since he’s the one who directed the images via his own use of language.”

In other words, Wolk argues that the inconsistency/multiplicity of the artwork fits into Morrison’s themes of multiple identity and identity indeterminacy.

Okay…but this ignores a major point. The Invisibles’ artwork sucks. In fact, in virtually every title Morrison’s worked on, the artwork sucks. I know some people like Frank Quitely, and, by contemporary super-hero standards he’s not bad…which is to say, if you’re not grading on a curve, he’s pretty lousy. Moreover (with the possible exception of Arkham Asylum) Morrison hardly ever makes an effort to collaborate with his artists. You don’t get the sense with Morrison (as you do with Alan Moore) that he chooses people he wants to work with based on a particular project. At the end of Animal Man, he noted that he had yet to even communicate with his artist, if I remember correctly. In the recent “Grant Morrison: The Early Years,” when asked if he gives any consideration to his artist, he responds, basically, by saying “no”. “I just write what I feel the need to write and expect my collaborators to be professional enough and creative enough to interpret my stuff to the best of their abilities.” He notes that some artists interpret his ideas better than others…but it never seems to occur to him that he might be inspired by particular artists, or learn something from them in a back and forth creative process. Nor does he think visually in his writing. Where Alan Moore (for better and sometimes worse) experiments with layout and panel transitions and different looks for his comics, Morrison clearly couldn’t care less — which is why so many of the comics he works on are, visually, either boring or desperately cluttered.

Rather than being some sort of pomo strength, I think Morrison’s indifference to art is his signature weakness…and not coincicdentally, a major weakness of super-hero comics in general. Its says a lot about the field that the person who is, in many ways, its most thoughtful and intelligent proponent has no discernable visual aesthetics. I’ve actually read a couple of Grant Morrison’s straight prose stories (in an old series of erotic horror anthologies) and they’re great. It might really have been better if he’d stuck with that, though it pains me to say it. I love Animal Man and Doom Patrol, and have enjoyed Morrison’s other work as well. But, and alas, no matter the care and genius he puts into the writing, even his best efforts look like shit.