Let's Talk About Grant Morrison- A Prelude

Hi, I’m David Harth, and if you’re reading this, you probably already know that.

Anyway, welcome back. If you’ve been following this column, you know that before, I was talking about Hickman’s House Of X and Powers Of X. You’ll also know that I said I was going to change gears this week and start talking about Grant Morrison comics. Well, this is going to be the prelude to that. Next week, I’ll be starting the talk about the comics, but this week I’m going to focus more on the man and what his work means to me.

For those of you who are disappointed this isn’t going to be about Hickman’s X-Men #1, I’m sorry, but here’s a minor spoiler- Cyclops, Marvel Girl, and Wolverine have adjoining rooms in the Summers House, and they have connecting doors in between rooms. Jean’s is in the middle. Make of that what you will.

So, Grant Morrison.

I’m going to give you a little background on my relationship with his work. In the 90s, as a teenager, I was an avid reader of Wizard magazine. The magazine would talk a lot about comics the staff liked, and some members of the staff really liked Morrison’s stuff, like Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and The Invisibles. Now, at this time in my comic reading life, I was a superhero guy through and through, a Marvel guy in general, and an X-Men guy in particular. I didn’t really give DC books too much of a chance until I read Kingdom Come when it was first being released. That story showed me the breadth and power of what the DC universe could do, but I was still a bit reticent. I didn’t know where to go to scratch this new DC itch. Wizard had just the place for me to go through- Morrison’s JLA.

Morrison’s JLA was a return to form for the Justice League. For years, since the DeMatteis/Giffen/Maguire run, the League had been a book that took the spotlight off the big heroes of the DCU. Now, this worked in the DeMatteis/Giffen/Maguire years because these guys had a plan for the League and injected the whole thing with some of the best humor to ever appear in any mainstream comic, both before and since. In the years after, a succession of creators would come on and try to build the book around one or two A-list heroes and surround them with B-listers or new characters in an attempt to get the those lower-tier characters over with readers (over in this context is a wrestling term for a wrestler getting the crowd behind them; I probably could have put it another way, but I think it fits here). This had failed, and DC decided on a back to basics approach with the League. Bring the Big Seven back to the forefront- Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, Flash, Green Lantern, and Aquaman. And they chose Grant Morrison to do it.

Morrison was the originator of what would be called by Wizard “widescreen storytelling” (and which Mark Millar would kill dead with books like The Authority and The Ultimates and nearly everything else he’s done and Jesus, I could write a whole column on how he broke my heart over the years, but let’s not get into that now except to say that Grant got him into the business). His JLA told the big stories, battles that could only be fought by the most powerful heroes of them all. It opened my eyes to what DC comics were all about. See, I, like many, had always thought the main DC guys were way too powerful. I read Superman and Batman books in the past and kept up with things going on with the Flash and Green Lantern, so I knew that these guys were overpowered as all get out. It was hard for me to care about them. JLA taught me that, sure, these guys were powerful, but they had to be because there were things out there that would eat the Earth alive without them.

Morrison was the perfect guy to illustrate this because he is a concept engine. We’re going to get into this in greater detail as the column goes on, but dude comes up with some crazy stuff, huge threats that could only be beaten by the most powerful being on Earth. Do you want to see the JLA versus some corrupted angels? Issues 6 and 7 give that to you. Are you liking Snyder’s current Legion of Doom in Justice League, with Luthor searching for a weapon of ultimate power? Morrison did it first in the Rock Of Ages storyline and threw in some dystopian future stuff with Darkseid (that was my first introduction to Darkseid, and I fell in love immediately). Corrupted Fifth Dimensional Imps? They’re there. The Justice League of the 853rd century and their arch-nemesis, a giant solar computer? They’re there. The ultimate evil at the end of all things? You better believe it’s there.

Morrison delivered this stuff to me, and my mind was blown. However, he hadn’t become my favorite writer yet. That wouldn’t be until he went to Marvel and took over my beloved X-Men with New X-Men #114. He did something that no other writer had really done before and is really only being picked up now by Hickman- he made mutants feel like the future. He gave them a culture. He brought more of his gonzo ideas to the book, and it made me love his work that much more. From there, I started searching out his other stuff, and that’s when I went back and found stuff like Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and The Invisibles.

I dived into The Invisibles like I had with The Sandman years earlier. I found the first two volumes and the fourth for cheap at MegaCon 2004 (maybe 2005, I’m not sure) and had my LCS order me volume three. I gave myself over to the book, and it rewarded me. If I had thought there was crazy stuff in his mainstream superhero work, I hadn’t seen anything yet. Because I’m going to write about it as this column goes on, I won’t go into too much detail except to say that The Invisibles changed me and the way I perceived the world for a long time. If you had to ask me what the 90s were like, I would hand you those seven volumes and say, “This is what the 90s were.” Crazy conspiracies, drugs, psychic powers, time travel, dancing, sex, and so much more.

You are all going to regret me writing about that book. I have so much to say. Clear your calendars.

It’s not just the craziness and wonderfully out-there concepts of his work that make me love it so much, though. Morrison has a way with characters that puts you right there with them. You can dream up the weirdest scenarios and the biggest threats, but if you don’t have compelling characters, who cares? Morrison provides that. He gets into the heads of the characters he writes, and it puts us in there too. He doesn’t ignore anything about them but builds on what came before, revealing new facets to them that still make sense in context.

What I’m trying to say is that in my opinion, he’s the greatest comic writer of them all. Yes, better than Alan Moore.

Moore does a lot of interesting stuff with literary devices, and if it weren’t for him, guys like Morrison would never get in the door at DC or anywhere outside of Britain, really. I love Moore’s work, but there’s a dourness to so much of it. It’s a little too real sometimes. He’s most definitely a genius, but I wouldn’t call his work fun. Morrison does a lot of what Moore does, but even at his grimmest, there’s a whimsy to Morrison’s work that Moore just doesn’t have. Morrison can tell dark stories, but he also manages to capture the feeling a kid gets reading comics- their minds being blown by the action in the panels. His comics are fun.

We’re not going to be talking about everything he’s done in his career. I’ve pretty much talked as much about JLA as I need to in this article. It’s not that I can’t find more to say about it, it’s just that I’m more interested in big, thematic stuff, and JLA is basically a book about the greatest superheroes fighting the greatest threats. It’s not thematically rich. Morrison was also working with a lot of characters that had their own books elsewhere, so he couldn’t really go crazy with them like he could in, say, Doom Patrol (which is my favorite team book ever; number two is New X-Men, number three is JLA). We’re also not going to be talking about his Batman stuff either. It’s great, but it’s not something that I’m that interested in talking about. I also haven’t read all of it yet. I may be a superfan of his, but I’m not made of money, so I don’t have it all and won’t talk about it. What I have read, though, I love. We won’t be talking about Vimanarama or Sea Guy.

We may talk about Kill Your Boyfriend, but if we do, that means I have to go back to my friend’s house and dig it out of the comics I left there, and I’m not sure I feel like doing that. Besides, it’s not like you’ll be able to find a copy of it after reading about it anyway. I was lucky to find mine.

We will be talking about All-Star Superman. It’s the greatest Superman story ever told, and I will fight people over that. Definitely New X-Men. Final Crisis? Oh yes.

So, anyway, this was my little introduction to this series about Grant Morrison. I don’t know if I did a good job of getting across why I love his work so much. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make you love his stuff like I do or if I can really talk about his work in any intelligent way. I’m going to try, though, and I hope you’ll come along with me. We have a lot of ground to cover, and I feel like it will be edifying for us all. So, come back next week, as we dive deep into Animal Man, in which Grant Morrison talks about our relationship with fiction.