JohnLees
Tuesday, August 11, 2009, 02:16 AM
Hey clubbers! It’s been a week longer than usual between meetings, what with me being off to San Diego and all that, so I’ll try and make this installment worth the wait. Let’s get right to it then: Grant Morrison. He’s a writer who seems to starkly divide comic book fans. Some dismiss him as a pretentious nut that is unable to form a coherent narrative. But others, myself included, would rank him as one of the undisputed geniuses of the comic book medium. Whatever side of the fence you happen to fall on, it’s hard not to have a strong opinion of him one way or the other, as evidenced by the response to both Batman RIP and Final Crisis last year.
Those who hated them, really hated them, and the fanboy backlash in some circles has been so derisive that we’ve seen a number of DC representatives all but apologize for the stories and acknowledge both as failures. And I don’t think that’s fair at all. The biggest perceived problem with these stories is exactly what I feel is their big strength: that they refuse to play by the expected conventions of an “event comic”. I’ve often said the worst thing about both Batman RIP and Final Crisis is their titles, as they might have given readers the wrong idea about what to expect. Batman might not actually die in Batman RIP, but what we do get is a fascinating deconstruction (and ultimately, a celebration) of everything that makes Batman who he is, with Morrison finding new, exciting things to say about a character who has been around for 70 years. And while Final Crisis may not play out like your usual DC Crisis, and failed to match the sales of Marvel’s competing event, Secret Invasion, I think creatively speaking Final Crisis was far superior, because while Secret Invasion was simply more of the same, Final Crisis played out almost like an “anti-event”, following familiar beats but coming at them from an unorthodox direction. All Morrison was doing was thinking outside the box, creating something a bit more ambitious and challenging than the usual, but a lot of readers just couldn’t handle it – “What’s going on? It doesn’t make any sense! WHERE DOES THIS FIT IN CONTINUITY!?!?” I, for one, had little trouble following either story, and I think that, with an open mind and a little contextual grounding, both make perfect sense. Nevertheless, Final Crisis and Batman RIP – and the response to them - showcased the tension between the classic and the experimental that has characterized much of Morrison’s work, and which will be a recurring focus of today’s meeting.
In putting together the reading list for this meeting, I wanted to get a good spread of texts covering different facets of Grant Morrison’s writing. I also wanted to try, as much as I could, to only use complete works here, hence the exclusion of the likes of Doom Patrol or The Invisibles. Morrison is very much a longform writer, his narratives often taking time to generate a meaning which doesn’t become clear until the conclusion. As such, I felt it would be more beneficial to look at graphic novels that featured his self-contained stories, rather than those that are individual volumes of larger works. My aim for this meeting is to look at a selection of Morrison’s original Vertigo projects – The Filth, Kill Your Boyfriend, WE3 - using them to identify the recurring themes and motifs running through Morrison’s work, before studying his Eisner-gobbling hit All Star Superman and examining how much Morrison’s unique voice remains present on a mainstream project with the most iconic of superheroes.
I’m going to start by looking at The Filth, which, from my personal reading experience, is the most “Morrisonesque” of all his comics (at least all his American work) - Grant Morrison storytelling in its purest, most unfiltered form. I fear for the readers who thought Batman RIP made no sense, because The Filth would make their heads explode. It plays like a Morrison greatest hits album, touching on most of Morrison’s favorite things: altered states, universes within universes, mad science, spiritualism, sexual deviancy, animal welfare, transvestitism, people in gimp masks, comic book characters escaping the confines of their fictional worlds, and stacks of mind-bending drugs. So, the implication is that this is Morrison at his most unfettered, able to tell whatever story he wants, meaning that it could be informative to look at what kind of story this is, exactly.
One thing that is striking is the utterly pessimistic tone that dominates the graphic novel. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all doom and gloom – many parts are laugh-out-loud hilarious. But that doesn’t change the fact that the world as presented here is totally miserable, morally bankrupt, just about devoid of any redeeming qualities. The world sucks, life sucks, and more than anything else, people suck, as snippets of dialogue like this regularly remind us:
They crucified a fireman and used his bravery medals to put out his eyes…I…I watched little kids and women fighting over a human heart. And…my own wife went with them willingly, dancing and hollering like a wild thing. That’s why I need therapy.
That line comes in Chapter 8: ^*%$ Police, following on from the events of Chapter 7: Zero Democracy, where recurring antagonist Spartacus Hughes turns a utopian mobile city into a hellish nest of bloodthirsty savages in a twisted kind of social experiment. This could be viewed as a microcosm for Morrison’s view on humanity as a whole, especially since the protagonist – the weak-willed, porn-loving Greg Feely/Ned Slade – does little to showcase the better side of the human race. Even the idealized vision of the comic book superhero isn’t exempt from this corruption, as seen by the deterioration of Secret Original, a noble superhero who found his way into the “real world” of The Filth. Not only is he left a physical wreck by the shift, his twisted, gnarled body confined to a wheelchair, but he has become bitter and debauched upon discovering the nature of his prior existence, as seen in Chapter 3: Structures and Ultrastructures:
I see the cruel reality behind all our hopes and dreams now. I know us for what we truly are, Not supermen but super-slaves in a synthetic prison. Playing out crummy meaningless adventures written by amoral monsters. They farm us, Eve; they farm us for the wonders we simply accept in our ignorance.
I find the whole subplot of Moog Mercury and his expeditions into the fictional comic book world to be fascinating. On the surface, it has little to do with the main storyline, but look closer and you can see how it helps illuminate everything else in the book. Whenever Mercury’s team enters the “paperverse”, they need to rewrite the fictional universe around the alterations they’ve made (“We’ll fix it all in the next continuity update.”), which makes them sound a bit like comic book writers, constantly tinkering with their worlds and fixing errors or outdated elements through retcons and retellings. When looking at The Filth as a whole with this in mind, the whole graphic novel starts to feel like a commentary on writing comics, with dense continuity and rampant death/rebirth taking to cartoonish extremes. Look even at the recurrence of the term “status quo” – the comic book Mercury routinely raids is called Status Quorum, the group Slade/Feely finds himself working for is called Status Q. In the chaos of The Filth, we see the chaos of superhero comics: fantastic worlds of unlimited possibility, where anything can happen, constantly in struggle with the need to maintain status quo.
Though he does it in varied, highly unconventional ways, Grant Morrison often returns to the idea of writing comics about comics, exploring the ways in which stories are told, and experimenting with the format. We’ll return to that later, but right now I want to return to my earlier quote from Secret Original, who describes comic book writers as “amoral monsters”. Is Grant Morrison an amoral writer? I think when exploring this tension between cult and mainstream, this question of morality is important. We are, after all, looking at a medium built on a genre dealing with good triumphing over evil on the grandest of scales. The Filth seems to be a book with little in the way of moral grounding or belief in basic human goodness. But both are utterly absent in Kill Your Boyfriend, a graphic novella that is more straightforward and less ambitious than The Filth, yet manages to be even more potent in its nihilism.
Kill Your Boyfriend is Grant Morrison’s version of a classic love story. Girl meets boy. Girl gets boy to murder her boyfriend. Girl and boy run away together, murdering old people and breaking into their houses. Girl has wild sex with boy, and experiments with a variety of drugs. Girl and boy get on a bus full of social misfits, engaging in countercultural philosophical discussions and more sexual experimentation. Girl and boy go on a crime spree, and desecrate a corpse. Girl and boy go on run from the police. Boy gets shot and fatally wounded, but manages to blow himself and several police officers to smithereens in his last dying act. Girl grows up, gets married and has kids, but merrily feeds her family small portions of rat poison to slowly kill them. Oh, and though they never realize it themselves, we discover that boy and girl were actually long lost brother and sister. And they all lived happily ever after!
There is little in the way of explanation behind the horrible actions committed by the protagonists, other than boredom, and there isn’t a single character in the book that isn’t a fraud, a hypocrite, a scumbag or a pervert, if not all of the above. In the afterword at the end of the graphic novel, Morrison cites the film Badlands, the myth of Dionysus and the frenzy he drove women to, and the plays of Joe Orton as inspirations for Kill Your Boyfriend, but the most telling comment comes in the afterword’s closing paragraph:
Kill Your Boyfriend was my first love story, straight from the heart, and I love it still. Like a favorite record, it retains the power to conjure for me a certain time, certain places and the way it felt to be there at that time, in those places.
Again, this casts a nightmarish, amoral tableau in the light of being a commentary on society as a whole, in this case Morrison’s microcosm of 1990s Britain. Between Kill Your Boyfriend and The Filth, it would be fair to ponder if Grant Morrison sees any hope or goodness in the world.
That brings us to WE3. Given the anarchic, nihilistic nature of the other graphic novels discussed so far, WE3 is almost a sentimental bedtime story by comparison. It’s basically Homeward Bound with guns and a much, much higher bodycount. Morrison shows his versatility here (and his softer side too), for while the previous two stories were about challenging our brains, here the focus is on tugging at our heart-strings. Upon reading a little about the plot, and given my prior knowledge of Grant Morrison’s Vertigo work, I thought I knew what to expect from WE3. Innocent animals become victims of cruel humanity, are turned into monsters, and of course, they die in the end. But the story played against my expectations, on several levels.
While other sample texts relished showing the hidden ugliness at the core of their characters, here many characters show surprising moments of human decency, even in initially unlikeable characters. Roseanne Berry is introduced as one of the doctors who participated in this horrific procedure that transformed three kidnapped house pets – a dog (1, or Bandit), a cat (2, or Tinker) and a rabbit (3, or Pirate) – into cyborg killing machines, so we expect a monster. Instead, she shows remorse for what she has done, setting the animals free and ultimately sacrificing her life to protect them. We assume the homeless person who discovers the animals is going to give them up to the military, but instead he defies the authorities and refuses to help them kill the trio. And Dr. Trendle, the scientist who masterminded these cruel experiments and who oversees the pursuit of the animals after their escape, shows unexpected integrity at the end of the book, testifying in court to bring down the senator bankrolling the initiative, and showing kindness to the dog, the cat, and the homeless man looking after them. With the utter moral decay of The Filth and Kill Your Boyfriend, these small moments suggest that humanity is not completely devoid of redeeming qualities.
As for the cruelty these animals have been subjected to turning them into monsters, that isn’t quite the case here. Yes, physically their appearances become monstrous. And yes, they kill scores of soldiers with ruthless efficiency at the close of the first chapter, before 1 and 2 kill a violently protective father and his dog respectively at the end of the second chapter. But while both The Filth and Kill Your Boyfriend play with the notion that all it takes is a little push to turn “normal” people into bloodthirsty animals, the animals in WE3 remain innocent even after all they’ve done and all they’ve been put through, as seen by 1’s instinctive desire to protect humans from harm – “Gud dog! Help man.”
And finally, we come to the expectation that these poor animals are inevitably doomed to die. I should explain that animal cruelty is something of an Achilles heel to me. I can happily watch people get killed in movies all day, but I find killing a dog deeply upsetting. I blubbed like a schoolgirl watching that Futurama episode with Fry’s dog. So, when the first chapter closes with the exposition of “They can’t survive more than a few days without their medication”, followed by 1’s expression of his simple, singular desire - “Home” - I could already feel a lump in my throat, my prediction for the book’s ending apparently confirmed. As the story progresses, 3 is first wounded, then killed, leaving 1 and 2, sick and near death. On page 29 of Chapter 3, as the dying Bandit struggles to cope with the concept of death – “Is black far where, is where b “Bandit”?” – it seems the tearjerker ending has arrived. But then at the 11th hour, Bandit and Tinker are rescued by the homeless man, and taken into his care, where they recover and are restored into a normal, healthy dog and cat. Amazingly, we are given a happy ending.
And so, despite its fair share of bleak moments, WE3 ultimately stands as an optimistic, perhaps even uplifting graphic novel. Thematically, it’s starkly different from the other Morrison texts we’ve looked at thus far, but does that make it less of a “Grant Morrison comic”? I don’t think so, because though he frequently returns to it, all the amorality, sexual deviance and the like isn’t the most important thing about Morrison’s work. Rather, it’s the exploration of the comic book medium, the experimentation with the format, toying with its conventions, pushing at its boundaries, and celebrating what makes it unique. And though the way he does this is different in WE3, this experimentation is still very much present.
In WE3, Morrison lets frequent artistic collaborator Frank Quitely do much of the work on this front. This is very much an artist’s book, with extensive passages featuring no dialogue at all – we don’t get a single line until page 14. And when we do have dialogue, it’s often coming from animals with only rudimentary conversational skills, meaning it’s scattered, often gibberish. But it’s still Morrison writing the scripts, meaning it’s a creative choice to leave so much of the story up to the artist. Here, Morrison is testing the limits of comic books as a visual medium. For the clearest example of this, just look at pages 20-25, where each page boasts a formidable 18 panel grid!
So, when looking at The Filth, Kill Your Boyfriend and WE3 together, and trying to figure out what is the recurring theme uniting all three, this idea of pushing the boundaries is what emerges for me. The Filth pushes the boundaries of narrative, Kill Your Boyfriend pushes the boundaries of taste, and WE3 pushes the boundaries of visual storytelling. And so we get the sense that this is what Grant Morrison is primarily interested in – testing the limits of what a comic book is capable of, doing new and unusual things with the medium. So, bearing all this in mind, what made Grant Morrison the perfect candidate to tell what has already become a definitive, classic story about, of all things, Superman?
In part 7 of Newsarama’s 10-part retrospective interview with Grant Morrison about All Star Superman, “All Star Memories”, Grant Morrison explains how he and Frank Quitely decided to approach the story in its formative stages:
As I’ve mentioned before, I keep this aspect of my job fresh for myself by changing my writing style to suit the project, the character or the artist... The subject matter drives the execution. And then, of course, the artists add their own vision and nuance. With All Star Superman, “Frank” and I were able to spend a lot of time together talking it through, and we agreed it had to be about grids, structure, storybook panel layouts, an elegance of form, a clarity of delivery. “Classical” in every sense of the word. The medium, the message, the story, the character, all working together as one simple equation… In honor of the character’s primal position in the development of the superhero narrative, I hoped we could create an “ultimate” hero story, starring the ultimate superhero.
But this aspiration could set up a potential dilemma. Isn’t there an inherent awkwardness in having the definitive take on the definitive superhero be told by a writer known for going against the grain and challenging convention? Morrison says here that he changes his writing to suit the project, but in adapting to write something so different from the kind of material he made his name on, does he risk silencing his own authorial voice and becoming invisible? Does All Star Superman truly stand as a Grant Morrison comic?
Morrison certainly succeeds in his aim to do Superman justice, telling a story which respects and adheres to the Superman mythos. No moral murk here – Superman is the pinnacle of inherent goodness. Indeed, in this age of grim-and-gritty comics, it was almost jarring to see a hero this heroic. For me, the moment that best sums up Morrison’s entire interpretation of Superman throughout the story comes five pages into Chapter 11: Red Sun Day, as Superman, nearing death, looks back on his life:
What a life! I’ve travelled across time and space. I’ve seen and done things beyond imagination. Blessed with friends like Pete and Lana and Jimmy. And Batman… what incredible adventures we’ve shared. What amazing people I’ve known. But Lois, dear Lois… I loved you most of all. And no matter how dark it seems. There’s always a way.
Here is Superman, at the end, with the chance to reflect on all that he is. And what he comes up with is something very human. He just feels lucky to have had the chance to experience such amazing things, and know such wonderful people. And more than any of his incredible powers, what makes him truly super is his never-ending optimism, the ability to always hope for something better – Pa Kent taught him that. Morrison isn’t pushing boundaries here, or subverting convention. This is Superman boiled down to his most traditional, basic appeal, heroism at its most familiar and relatable. And he’s all the more powerful for it.
But just because Morrison chooses not to subvert the Superman mythos doesn’t mean he leaves no authorial imprint on the graphic novel. All Star Superman remains very much a Grant Morrison book. We have the altered states, we have the universes within universes, we have the mad science. We even have Jimmy Olsen engaging in a spot of transvestitism. But the beauty of it is, this isn’t stuff Grant Morrison has pulled out of thin air and forced into an unnatural collision with Superman’s world. No, this is stuff Morrison has gleaned from Superman’s own comic book history, and embellished with the Morrison touch. Chapter 8: Us Do Opposite, reads like the kind of mind-boggling insanity that wouldn’t be out of place in The Filth, yet it merely builds on the Bizarro-World concept that has been around in the comics since the 1960s.
And really, that’s why comic books are the perfect medium for Grant Morrison to work in. Superman is the groundstone, the foundation upon which the entire superhero genre was built, and woven into his history is the very kind of pulpy, psychedelic, high-concept Big Ideas that Morrison has long been attracted to. In the world of comic books, anything is possible. And Morrison sets out to prove that, to celebrate it, time after time in each of his projects. I’ll wrap up with a quote from Morrison himself, this one from Part 6 of the “All Star Memories” interviews, where he attempts to sum up in his own words what drives him to write:
We live in the stories we tell ourselves. It’s really simple. We can continue to tell ourselves and our children that the species we belong to is a crawling, diseased, viral cancer smear, only fit for extinction, and let’s see where that leads us. We can continue to project our self-loathing and narcissistic terror of personal mortality onto our culture, our civilization, our planet, until we wreck the promise of the world for future generations in a fit of sheer self-induced panic... or we can own up to the scientific fact that we are all physically connected as parts of a single giant organism, imagine better ways to live and grow...and then put them into practice. We can stop pissing about, start building starships, and get on with the business of being adults… My own work has been an ongoing attempt to repeat the magic word over and over until we all become the kind of superheroes we’d all like to be.
Meeting 12
Next time, we’re going to take a look at the history of horror in comics. How has the genre evolved over the decades? What techniques did comic creators use to scare their readers 50 years ago, and how do they differ from the techniques being used now? And the big one – is it even possible to be scared by a comic book, or is it an inherently ineffective medium for horror?
RECOMMENDED READING:
The EC Archives: Tales from the Crypt, Volume 1
Al Feldstein and Johnny Craig, Bill Fraccio, George Roussos, Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, Graham Ingels, Jack Kamen
Uzumaki, Volume 1
Junji Ito
The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye
Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore
Wrath of the Spectre
Michael Fleisher and Jim Aparo
Meeting 13
Open Forum – I need to give you some advance notice for this one, as you’ll probably need a good amount of lead-time to get the reading done. I want you to go out and buy the DC Showcase or Marvel Essential volume of your choice, and get to work on reading it!
Those who hated them, really hated them, and the fanboy backlash in some circles has been so derisive that we’ve seen a number of DC representatives all but apologize for the stories and acknowledge both as failures. And I don’t think that’s fair at all. The biggest perceived problem with these stories is exactly what I feel is their big strength: that they refuse to play by the expected conventions of an “event comic”. I’ve often said the worst thing about both Batman RIP and Final Crisis is their titles, as they might have given readers the wrong idea about what to expect. Batman might not actually die in Batman RIP, but what we do get is a fascinating deconstruction (and ultimately, a celebration) of everything that makes Batman who he is, with Morrison finding new, exciting things to say about a character who has been around for 70 years. And while Final Crisis may not play out like your usual DC Crisis, and failed to match the sales of Marvel’s competing event, Secret Invasion, I think creatively speaking Final Crisis was far superior, because while Secret Invasion was simply more of the same, Final Crisis played out almost like an “anti-event”, following familiar beats but coming at them from an unorthodox direction. All Morrison was doing was thinking outside the box, creating something a bit more ambitious and challenging than the usual, but a lot of readers just couldn’t handle it – “What’s going on? It doesn’t make any sense! WHERE DOES THIS FIT IN CONTINUITY!?!?” I, for one, had little trouble following either story, and I think that, with an open mind and a little contextual grounding, both make perfect sense. Nevertheless, Final Crisis and Batman RIP – and the response to them - showcased the tension between the classic and the experimental that has characterized much of Morrison’s work, and which will be a recurring focus of today’s meeting.
In putting together the reading list for this meeting, I wanted to get a good spread of texts covering different facets of Grant Morrison’s writing. I also wanted to try, as much as I could, to only use complete works here, hence the exclusion of the likes of Doom Patrol or The Invisibles. Morrison is very much a longform writer, his narratives often taking time to generate a meaning which doesn’t become clear until the conclusion. As such, I felt it would be more beneficial to look at graphic novels that featured his self-contained stories, rather than those that are individual volumes of larger works. My aim for this meeting is to look at a selection of Morrison’s original Vertigo projects – The Filth, Kill Your Boyfriend, WE3 - using them to identify the recurring themes and motifs running through Morrison’s work, before studying his Eisner-gobbling hit All Star Superman and examining how much Morrison’s unique voice remains present on a mainstream project with the most iconic of superheroes.
I’m going to start by looking at The Filth, which, from my personal reading experience, is the most “Morrisonesque” of all his comics (at least all his American work) - Grant Morrison storytelling in its purest, most unfiltered form. I fear for the readers who thought Batman RIP made no sense, because The Filth would make their heads explode. It plays like a Morrison greatest hits album, touching on most of Morrison’s favorite things: altered states, universes within universes, mad science, spiritualism, sexual deviancy, animal welfare, transvestitism, people in gimp masks, comic book characters escaping the confines of their fictional worlds, and stacks of mind-bending drugs. So, the implication is that this is Morrison at his most unfettered, able to tell whatever story he wants, meaning that it could be informative to look at what kind of story this is, exactly.
One thing that is striking is the utterly pessimistic tone that dominates the graphic novel. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all doom and gloom – many parts are laugh-out-loud hilarious. But that doesn’t change the fact that the world as presented here is totally miserable, morally bankrupt, just about devoid of any redeeming qualities. The world sucks, life sucks, and more than anything else, people suck, as snippets of dialogue like this regularly remind us:
They crucified a fireman and used his bravery medals to put out his eyes…I…I watched little kids and women fighting over a human heart. And…my own wife went with them willingly, dancing and hollering like a wild thing. That’s why I need therapy.
That line comes in Chapter 8: ^*%$ Police, following on from the events of Chapter 7: Zero Democracy, where recurring antagonist Spartacus Hughes turns a utopian mobile city into a hellish nest of bloodthirsty savages in a twisted kind of social experiment. This could be viewed as a microcosm for Morrison’s view on humanity as a whole, especially since the protagonist – the weak-willed, porn-loving Greg Feely/Ned Slade – does little to showcase the better side of the human race. Even the idealized vision of the comic book superhero isn’t exempt from this corruption, as seen by the deterioration of Secret Original, a noble superhero who found his way into the “real world” of The Filth. Not only is he left a physical wreck by the shift, his twisted, gnarled body confined to a wheelchair, but he has become bitter and debauched upon discovering the nature of his prior existence, as seen in Chapter 3: Structures and Ultrastructures:
I see the cruel reality behind all our hopes and dreams now. I know us for what we truly are, Not supermen but super-slaves in a synthetic prison. Playing out crummy meaningless adventures written by amoral monsters. They farm us, Eve; they farm us for the wonders we simply accept in our ignorance.
I find the whole subplot of Moog Mercury and his expeditions into the fictional comic book world to be fascinating. On the surface, it has little to do with the main storyline, but look closer and you can see how it helps illuminate everything else in the book. Whenever Mercury’s team enters the “paperverse”, they need to rewrite the fictional universe around the alterations they’ve made (“We’ll fix it all in the next continuity update.”), which makes them sound a bit like comic book writers, constantly tinkering with their worlds and fixing errors or outdated elements through retcons and retellings. When looking at The Filth as a whole with this in mind, the whole graphic novel starts to feel like a commentary on writing comics, with dense continuity and rampant death/rebirth taking to cartoonish extremes. Look even at the recurrence of the term “status quo” – the comic book Mercury routinely raids is called Status Quorum, the group Slade/Feely finds himself working for is called Status Q. In the chaos of The Filth, we see the chaos of superhero comics: fantastic worlds of unlimited possibility, where anything can happen, constantly in struggle with the need to maintain status quo.
Though he does it in varied, highly unconventional ways, Grant Morrison often returns to the idea of writing comics about comics, exploring the ways in which stories are told, and experimenting with the format. We’ll return to that later, but right now I want to return to my earlier quote from Secret Original, who describes comic book writers as “amoral monsters”. Is Grant Morrison an amoral writer? I think when exploring this tension between cult and mainstream, this question of morality is important. We are, after all, looking at a medium built on a genre dealing with good triumphing over evil on the grandest of scales. The Filth seems to be a book with little in the way of moral grounding or belief in basic human goodness. But both are utterly absent in Kill Your Boyfriend, a graphic novella that is more straightforward and less ambitious than The Filth, yet manages to be even more potent in its nihilism.
Kill Your Boyfriend is Grant Morrison’s version of a classic love story. Girl meets boy. Girl gets boy to murder her boyfriend. Girl and boy run away together, murdering old people and breaking into their houses. Girl has wild sex with boy, and experiments with a variety of drugs. Girl and boy get on a bus full of social misfits, engaging in countercultural philosophical discussions and more sexual experimentation. Girl and boy go on a crime spree, and desecrate a corpse. Girl and boy go on run from the police. Boy gets shot and fatally wounded, but manages to blow himself and several police officers to smithereens in his last dying act. Girl grows up, gets married and has kids, but merrily feeds her family small portions of rat poison to slowly kill them. Oh, and though they never realize it themselves, we discover that boy and girl were actually long lost brother and sister. And they all lived happily ever after!
There is little in the way of explanation behind the horrible actions committed by the protagonists, other than boredom, and there isn’t a single character in the book that isn’t a fraud, a hypocrite, a scumbag or a pervert, if not all of the above. In the afterword at the end of the graphic novel, Morrison cites the film Badlands, the myth of Dionysus and the frenzy he drove women to, and the plays of Joe Orton as inspirations for Kill Your Boyfriend, but the most telling comment comes in the afterword’s closing paragraph:
Kill Your Boyfriend was my first love story, straight from the heart, and I love it still. Like a favorite record, it retains the power to conjure for me a certain time, certain places and the way it felt to be there at that time, in those places.
Again, this casts a nightmarish, amoral tableau in the light of being a commentary on society as a whole, in this case Morrison’s microcosm of 1990s Britain. Between Kill Your Boyfriend and The Filth, it would be fair to ponder if Grant Morrison sees any hope or goodness in the world.
That brings us to WE3. Given the anarchic, nihilistic nature of the other graphic novels discussed so far, WE3 is almost a sentimental bedtime story by comparison. It’s basically Homeward Bound with guns and a much, much higher bodycount. Morrison shows his versatility here (and his softer side too), for while the previous two stories were about challenging our brains, here the focus is on tugging at our heart-strings. Upon reading a little about the plot, and given my prior knowledge of Grant Morrison’s Vertigo work, I thought I knew what to expect from WE3. Innocent animals become victims of cruel humanity, are turned into monsters, and of course, they die in the end. But the story played against my expectations, on several levels.
While other sample texts relished showing the hidden ugliness at the core of their characters, here many characters show surprising moments of human decency, even in initially unlikeable characters. Roseanne Berry is introduced as one of the doctors who participated in this horrific procedure that transformed three kidnapped house pets – a dog (1, or Bandit), a cat (2, or Tinker) and a rabbit (3, or Pirate) – into cyborg killing machines, so we expect a monster. Instead, she shows remorse for what she has done, setting the animals free and ultimately sacrificing her life to protect them. We assume the homeless person who discovers the animals is going to give them up to the military, but instead he defies the authorities and refuses to help them kill the trio. And Dr. Trendle, the scientist who masterminded these cruel experiments and who oversees the pursuit of the animals after their escape, shows unexpected integrity at the end of the book, testifying in court to bring down the senator bankrolling the initiative, and showing kindness to the dog, the cat, and the homeless man looking after them. With the utter moral decay of The Filth and Kill Your Boyfriend, these small moments suggest that humanity is not completely devoid of redeeming qualities.
As for the cruelty these animals have been subjected to turning them into monsters, that isn’t quite the case here. Yes, physically their appearances become monstrous. And yes, they kill scores of soldiers with ruthless efficiency at the close of the first chapter, before 1 and 2 kill a violently protective father and his dog respectively at the end of the second chapter. But while both The Filth and Kill Your Boyfriend play with the notion that all it takes is a little push to turn “normal” people into bloodthirsty animals, the animals in WE3 remain innocent even after all they’ve done and all they’ve been put through, as seen by 1’s instinctive desire to protect humans from harm – “Gud dog! Help man.”
And finally, we come to the expectation that these poor animals are inevitably doomed to die. I should explain that animal cruelty is something of an Achilles heel to me. I can happily watch people get killed in movies all day, but I find killing a dog deeply upsetting. I blubbed like a schoolgirl watching that Futurama episode with Fry’s dog. So, when the first chapter closes with the exposition of “They can’t survive more than a few days without their medication”, followed by 1’s expression of his simple, singular desire - “Home” - I could already feel a lump in my throat, my prediction for the book’s ending apparently confirmed. As the story progresses, 3 is first wounded, then killed, leaving 1 and 2, sick and near death. On page 29 of Chapter 3, as the dying Bandit struggles to cope with the concept of death – “Is black far where, is where b “Bandit”?” – it seems the tearjerker ending has arrived. But then at the 11th hour, Bandit and Tinker are rescued by the homeless man, and taken into his care, where they recover and are restored into a normal, healthy dog and cat. Amazingly, we are given a happy ending.
And so, despite its fair share of bleak moments, WE3 ultimately stands as an optimistic, perhaps even uplifting graphic novel. Thematically, it’s starkly different from the other Morrison texts we’ve looked at thus far, but does that make it less of a “Grant Morrison comic”? I don’t think so, because though he frequently returns to it, all the amorality, sexual deviance and the like isn’t the most important thing about Morrison’s work. Rather, it’s the exploration of the comic book medium, the experimentation with the format, toying with its conventions, pushing at its boundaries, and celebrating what makes it unique. And though the way he does this is different in WE3, this experimentation is still very much present.
In WE3, Morrison lets frequent artistic collaborator Frank Quitely do much of the work on this front. This is very much an artist’s book, with extensive passages featuring no dialogue at all – we don’t get a single line until page 14. And when we do have dialogue, it’s often coming from animals with only rudimentary conversational skills, meaning it’s scattered, often gibberish. But it’s still Morrison writing the scripts, meaning it’s a creative choice to leave so much of the story up to the artist. Here, Morrison is testing the limits of comic books as a visual medium. For the clearest example of this, just look at pages 20-25, where each page boasts a formidable 18 panel grid!
So, when looking at The Filth, Kill Your Boyfriend and WE3 together, and trying to figure out what is the recurring theme uniting all three, this idea of pushing the boundaries is what emerges for me. The Filth pushes the boundaries of narrative, Kill Your Boyfriend pushes the boundaries of taste, and WE3 pushes the boundaries of visual storytelling. And so we get the sense that this is what Grant Morrison is primarily interested in – testing the limits of what a comic book is capable of, doing new and unusual things with the medium. So, bearing all this in mind, what made Grant Morrison the perfect candidate to tell what has already become a definitive, classic story about, of all things, Superman?
In part 7 of Newsarama’s 10-part retrospective interview with Grant Morrison about All Star Superman, “All Star Memories”, Grant Morrison explains how he and Frank Quitely decided to approach the story in its formative stages:
As I’ve mentioned before, I keep this aspect of my job fresh for myself by changing my writing style to suit the project, the character or the artist... The subject matter drives the execution. And then, of course, the artists add their own vision and nuance. With All Star Superman, “Frank” and I were able to spend a lot of time together talking it through, and we agreed it had to be about grids, structure, storybook panel layouts, an elegance of form, a clarity of delivery. “Classical” in every sense of the word. The medium, the message, the story, the character, all working together as one simple equation… In honor of the character’s primal position in the development of the superhero narrative, I hoped we could create an “ultimate” hero story, starring the ultimate superhero.
But this aspiration could set up a potential dilemma. Isn’t there an inherent awkwardness in having the definitive take on the definitive superhero be told by a writer known for going against the grain and challenging convention? Morrison says here that he changes his writing to suit the project, but in adapting to write something so different from the kind of material he made his name on, does he risk silencing his own authorial voice and becoming invisible? Does All Star Superman truly stand as a Grant Morrison comic?
Morrison certainly succeeds in his aim to do Superman justice, telling a story which respects and adheres to the Superman mythos. No moral murk here – Superman is the pinnacle of inherent goodness. Indeed, in this age of grim-and-gritty comics, it was almost jarring to see a hero this heroic. For me, the moment that best sums up Morrison’s entire interpretation of Superman throughout the story comes five pages into Chapter 11: Red Sun Day, as Superman, nearing death, looks back on his life:
What a life! I’ve travelled across time and space. I’ve seen and done things beyond imagination. Blessed with friends like Pete and Lana and Jimmy. And Batman… what incredible adventures we’ve shared. What amazing people I’ve known. But Lois, dear Lois… I loved you most of all. And no matter how dark it seems. There’s always a way.
Here is Superman, at the end, with the chance to reflect on all that he is. And what he comes up with is something very human. He just feels lucky to have had the chance to experience such amazing things, and know such wonderful people. And more than any of his incredible powers, what makes him truly super is his never-ending optimism, the ability to always hope for something better – Pa Kent taught him that. Morrison isn’t pushing boundaries here, or subverting convention. This is Superman boiled down to his most traditional, basic appeal, heroism at its most familiar and relatable. And he’s all the more powerful for it.
But just because Morrison chooses not to subvert the Superman mythos doesn’t mean he leaves no authorial imprint on the graphic novel. All Star Superman remains very much a Grant Morrison book. We have the altered states, we have the universes within universes, we have the mad science. We even have Jimmy Olsen engaging in a spot of transvestitism. But the beauty of it is, this isn’t stuff Grant Morrison has pulled out of thin air and forced into an unnatural collision with Superman’s world. No, this is stuff Morrison has gleaned from Superman’s own comic book history, and embellished with the Morrison touch. Chapter 8: Us Do Opposite, reads like the kind of mind-boggling insanity that wouldn’t be out of place in The Filth, yet it merely builds on the Bizarro-World concept that has been around in the comics since the 1960s.
And really, that’s why comic books are the perfect medium for Grant Morrison to work in. Superman is the groundstone, the foundation upon which the entire superhero genre was built, and woven into his history is the very kind of pulpy, psychedelic, high-concept Big Ideas that Morrison has long been attracted to. In the world of comic books, anything is possible. And Morrison sets out to prove that, to celebrate it, time after time in each of his projects. I’ll wrap up with a quote from Morrison himself, this one from Part 6 of the “All Star Memories” interviews, where he attempts to sum up in his own words what drives him to write:
We live in the stories we tell ourselves. It’s really simple. We can continue to tell ourselves and our children that the species we belong to is a crawling, diseased, viral cancer smear, only fit for extinction, and let’s see where that leads us. We can continue to project our self-loathing and narcissistic terror of personal mortality onto our culture, our civilization, our planet, until we wreck the promise of the world for future generations in a fit of sheer self-induced panic... or we can own up to the scientific fact that we are all physically connected as parts of a single giant organism, imagine better ways to live and grow...and then put them into practice. We can stop pissing about, start building starships, and get on with the business of being adults… My own work has been an ongoing attempt to repeat the magic word over and over until we all become the kind of superheroes we’d all like to be.
Meeting 12
Next time, we’re going to take a look at the history of horror in comics. How has the genre evolved over the decades? What techniques did comic creators use to scare their readers 50 years ago, and how do they differ from the techniques being used now? And the big one – is it even possible to be scared by a comic book, or is it an inherently ineffective medium for horror?
RECOMMENDED READING:
The EC Archives: Tales from the Crypt, Volume 1
Al Feldstein and Johnny Craig, Bill Fraccio, George Roussos, Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, Graham Ingels, Jack Kamen
Uzumaki, Volume 1
Junji Ito
The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye
Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore
Wrath of the Spectre
Michael Fleisher and Jim Aparo
Meeting 13
Open Forum – I need to give you some advance notice for this one, as you’ll probably need a good amount of lead-time to get the reading done. I want you to go out and buy the DC Showcase or Marvel Essential volume of your choice, and get to work on reading it!