Quests for truth in five dimensions: An incomplete consumer guide to Grant Morrison

Somehow I manage to mention Alan Moore only twice

It no longer annoys gatekeepers of High Art to claim that with a few exceptions (some named here), the best English-language experimental fiction these days is comics. It greatly irritates comics gatekeepers, however, to say that the greatest living exponent of experimental fiction in comics form is Grant Morrison, an indie-punk guitarist turned corporate sellout who’s now spent most of their career writing superheroes for variously-named subsidiaries of WarnerMedia. One way their output differs from that of creators more beloved of the Comics Journal is their ambition: to understand a universe that becomes a multiverse because it has fiction in it, and to make Grant Morrison a rock star in the process. Another is the sheer amount of it—helps to have WarnerMedia find top notch artists to do the publication-quality drawing for you. Writing month-to-month for thirty years without having a Word template for the monomyth has required an astonishing quantity of ideas, many of which read very dubiously in precis form (Professor X has an evil twin he tried and failed to kill in the womb!) But while some stubbornly remain dubious in execution (Morrison’s fraught relationship with trans issues is not entirely deproblematized by their eventual coming out as non-binary), they get a remarkable percentage of them to work, thanks undoubtedly to labor in addition to shamelessness. Perhaps the final key is that while Morrison is always serious and not-serious at the same time, seriousness usually wins out. The human ideal, however funny it is, is no joke.

Morrison & Chas Truog: Animal Man

This is most infamous for making its hero meet the character “Grant Morrison” at the end of the run; meditations on the nature of fiction ensue, though their rewrite of Duck Amuck here isn’t nearly as poignant as issue 5’s reimagining Wile E. Coyote as a Christ-figure. In their first long run for DC, Morrison sets up their (mostly one-sided) career-long engagement with/patricide of Alan Moore, the ecologically themed Buddy “Animal Man” Baker contrasting with Swamp Thing through his wife-and-kids suburban setting and his absorption of Peter Singer. Even at this stage, Morrison is already adept at modes from horror to kitchen-sink, with only the ability to seamlessly work in corporate-mandated crossovers beyond them. Unlike Moore, this mostly made them want to run the place.

Grade: A MINUS

Morrison, Richard Case, et al.: Doom Patrol

Morrison’s first chance in the majors to go ham. Though it can be frustratingly uneven, especially after the Big Twist is revealed, they never managed to be this freewheeling again. Rebis (a trinity), Crazy Jane (who contains multitudes), Robotman (who’s unsure if he contains anyone), Danny the Street (who is a street), and other assorted allies battle villains and concepts and narrative logic. Despite demanding an audience familiar with Borges, art history, and oh yeah, decades of comics, Morrison got a four year run; the current HBO series is allegedly Morrisonian but I’ll wait until I see the Sisterhood of Dada before I pay attention.

Grade: A

The Invisibles

A secret superteam, a deeper reality just out of one’s grasp without the help of psychedelics, and a pretty blatant attempt at a magnum opus. Things start to go awry pretty quickly thanks to the foolhardy decision to employ a rotating stable of artists, disrupting any sense of continuity. By the end the plot threads stubbornly refuse to reproduce the five-dimensional mystical experience Morrison had in the Himalayas. Still, in addition to a handful of great issues (like the biography of a random mook who got unceremoniously curbstomped in issue 1), I admire the shape and the ambition of the thing. That deeper reality isn’t meant to be easy to get to.

Grade: A MINUS

Morrison, Howard Porter, et al.: JLA

Morrison gets all the toys they ever wanted, putting together an all-but-unbeatable A-team (i.e. the DC heroes you actually know), then having them get the crap beaten out of them. Through various editorially-directed distractions (Wonder Woman dies in somebody else’s comic and only Green Lantern and Green Arrow are vaguely upset about it, then when Wonder Woman shows up again no one bothers to mention it. Also Superman’s mullet) all the regular superhero beats are hit cleanly, yet even at its best—the peak is probably Luthor trying to deal with Joker in his Injustice Gang—it’s fan pandering, albeit truly epic fan pandering. The second half of the run drops off, as Morrison was distracted getting The Invisibles done, and they end up recycling ideas from a few issues ago using continuity as an excuse. Still, it remains reasonably epic fan pandering.

Grade: B PLUS

New X-Men

A valiant, doomed attempt to set up a new status quo for the mutants, mostly by filling out concepts that had just been sitting there since the beginning. Most famously this meant actually giving Cyclops a personality, but the most promising idea was Xavier’s academy functioning (and malfunctioning) as a genuine school rather than a paramilitary organization. If you've ever taught teenagers, you know you’re not going to get their undivided attention (not least because of the constant horniness) unless you've got mind control powers or something. Anyway, Morrison and Marvel didn’t get along (and it does show by the end), Morrison left, and the company systematically undid everything in here. Comics!

Grade: A MINUS

Morrison/Chris Weston/Gary Erskine: The Filth

Ultimately a much more successful grand unification of all Morrison’s interests than The Invisibles, with the glue a by-product of the oodles of porn they read for research purposes. Where The Invisibles was in some sense a quest for some higher objective truth, this time the hero, one Greg ahem Feely, just wants to get away from his hyperdimensional secret society to spend time with his dying cat and his dirty magazines. And yet somehow after all the killer sperm and universes folding upon themselves, there remains the possibility of heaven on earth. Which, if you’re like psychopathic ex-Soviet JFK-assassin chimp Dmitri-9, Morrison’s greatest minor character, you can decline, and keep flipping the bird to the end, and beyond.

Grade: A

Morrison/Frank Quitely/Jamie Grant: All-Star Superman

I've read a lot of Superman since my first go-round with this, including the Alan Moore issues that Morrison was trying to top, and it remains miraculous. Maybe not Morrison's absolute best writing but maybe their best comic, not least because it's one of the few things they managed to get from a beginning to an end while retaining structural integrity as well as the other kind (helps that it’s only 12 issues, of course.) Quitely’s absolutely correct characterizations play a huge role—coming up with an offensive lineman Clark Kent (who still saves everyone) was a great idea, and maybe no one’s had the chops to steal it since?

Grade: A

Morrison/J.G. Jones/Doug Mahnke: Final Crisis

On re-reading, this makes… sense? Darkseid unleashes the Anti-Life Equation, Batman shoots him and dies (“dies”), Superman sings, heroes of finite universes win? Douglas Wolk’s annotations remain useful if you want to know what Frankenstein’s Monster is quoting on page 19 of issue 5 as he swings a sword while riding a motorbike (it’s Paradise Lost), but this is not necessary to enjoy the book. The complexity here is mostly just density, but that’s still a superpower.

Grade: A MINUS

Batman by Grant Morrison

The bulk of the run (excluding the fizzle-out of Batman Incorporated) is collected in two fat omnibuses. The first features the Bruce Wayne Batman dealing with his dickwad son Damian; in the second, Dick Grayson becomes Batman and deals with Bruce’s dickwad son Damian. Both get across that wearing the cowl is kind of psychologically horrific, requiring you to be constantly paranoid and to have your paranoia occasionally proven right. But that’s parenting, or so I’ve heard. This is where Morrison’s encyclopedic knowledge of DC continuity has the highest payoff, as they can declare anything they want to be canon. Why turn down help from the fifth dimension?

Grade: A MINUS

Additional Consumer News

Morrison & Dave McKean: Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth

Outstanding concept, but if outstanding concepts were what mattered most to me this column would be about Neil Gaiman.

Morrison & Klaus Janson: Batman: Gothic

With all the psychoanalysis and organ-tossing, it’s hard to tell if this is an homage to or a parody of Frank Miller, but at least Janson gets to draw some nice gargoyles.

Morrison & Frank Quitely: Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery

“What is real about an image? A story?” are questions worth asking repeatedly, even if Morrison had better answers elsewhere.

Morrison & Frank Quitely: We3

Another Quitely showcase, this short, relatively straightforward tale of dog, cat, and bunny supersoldiers is quite touching once you get past the dismemberment.

Morrison & Rags Morales: Action Comics Vol. 1: Superman and the Men of Steel

Some fun, but Superman before he was really Superman only needs eight words.

Morrison & Sean Murphy: Joe the Barbarian

“What is real about an image? A story?” are questions worth asking repeatedly, even if Morrison had better answers elsewhere.

The Multiversity

The goofy stuff like Shazam is likable, but those of us who were intrigued that Morrison finally got to play with Watchmen might’ve hoped for something deeper than “hey, superheroes are actually deeply traumatized individuals (again)!”

Morrison & Yanick Paquette: Wonder Woman: Earth One Vol. 1

A Wonder Woman who doesn’t see the point in dumb fights is an interesting idea, though the implementation seems to involve a lot of women in chains.

Supergods

Prose history of the biz that’s surprisingly normie (when it’s not explicitly autobiographical), down to the bootlicking of his main employer.