Quarter Bin #13 "Grant Morrison's Back Pages"

I’ve been writing about my experiences reading and following comic books throughout the year, and have touched on my devotion to DC and relative aversion to Marvel, and some of the reasons why. I guess this column might explain a little more about that, and why it came to be.

As I’ve noted before, I didn’t actually start out following superheroes by reading comics. I watched them on TV originally, from the Adam West BATMAN to SPIDER-MAN AND HIS AMAZING FRIENDS to SUPER FRIENDS to THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO to THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERBOY. Some were cartoons, some were merely cartoonish, some were original concepts, some were interpretations of established material. Sometimes an action figure would come with a comic book, but my experience with superheroes was almost exclusively on the screen rather than the page. One Christmas I got some ACTION FORCE comics (repackaged G.I. JOE, in other words). My sister somehow came into possession of THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN MARVEL graphic novel, and a very impressionable younger version of myself was completely blown away. Jason Todd made the newspaper when readers were given the chance to kill off Robin, a character I was familiar with, but not as much as I thought.

In other words, I became enamored with and involved in the concept, but not the reality. In many ways, that’s the DC recipe. Every generation of DC readers seems to have its own starting point (which will soon include the “New 52,” come September). It does tend to anger longtime readers (even the second Robin, only a few years into his career, experienced a radical reboot thanks to CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, which probably led directly to his infamous destiny), but it creates endless possibilities, comics that carry unexpected depth, creators who constantly have the opportunity to push both themselves and the medium. We would never have had WATCHMEN if DC hadn’t absorbed another company into the fold, and Alan Moore been given the opportunity to play with a few new characters (in a roundabout way).

Marvel doesn’t really have that. Fans are expected to care about the same characters in much the same context for decades, and while that has inarguably created the most loyal fanbase in comics, it’s resulted in homogenous stories that rarely push the envelope, even when that’s the point of the current storyline. (Ironically, DEATH OF CAPTAIN MARVEL may be the only Marvel story to ever fulfill such an ambition.) Readers invariably find superhero adventures in a strictly comic book sense, the stereotype everyone expects, and the movies that result invariably reflect exactly that kind of storytelling, even when they try (the X-Men franchise) not to.

Grant Morrison famously broke the fourth wall during his acclaimed run on ANIMAL MAN, a classic DC character who at that time was published through the Vertigo imprint. Morrison’s most famous Marvel work was with NEW X-MEN, which was basically repudiated the minute he left the company. His mutant work was a kind of extension of the superhero comics he did with JLA, widescreen storytelling that pushed the boundaries of past glory and made way for future greatness (in other words, the DC mandate). For whatever reason, Marvel experimented with it for a few years, and then went back to what it does best. I’m not saying there isn’t real talent, in the past or present, at the House of Ideas. I would suggest that this talent is relentlessly constrained by a creative mandate that routinely shatters potential in favor of what can best be described as the comfort factor.

There are some back issues I’m getting around to talking about, that serve as the crux of this argument. The first of these is by all accounts an almost throwaway experience I stumbled upon by accident, during a random search in Midtown’s online catalogue for Morrison material:

SECRET ORIGINS #50 (DC)
From August 1990.

It’s the final issue of a series that recounted the, well, secret origins of DC characters, a tradition that’s continued throughout the years, in one form or another, most recently in backup features for weekly comics 52 and COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS. The letters page for the issue serves as much as a memoriam for a cancelled book as a testament to the opinion at the time that the series really had run its course, which is incredibly strange to me, because out of the six stories within it, there are two that were timeless enough that I couldn’t believe my luck at having basically rediscovered it twenty years later. The second is the Morrison piece, but the lead is a prose effort from Dennis O’Neil which revisits Dick Grayson’s Haley Circus days.

Marvel partisans like to boast about two things, that the origins of their favored heroes are distinctive, and that those heroes are invariably uniquely identifiably human. What they tend to ignore is that DC started that same trend earlier. They like to try and obscure this fact by proclaiming Superman to be unapproachably alien, even though his Kansas connection has always been stressed more than his Kryptonian, or that Batman is a fortunate son of unobtainable privilege, even though he’s always been portrayed more as a tortured soul than as a trust fund elitist. These “World’s Finest” scraped together their current lives from personal journeys almost more epic than anything they will ever experience as crime fighters. Fans actually hated SPIDER-MAN 3 because it delved too deeply into Peter Parker’s angst, and the complicated nature of his origins. There’s a reason Christopher Nolan crafted BATMAN BEGINS the way he did. Bruce Wayne is more interesting to him than the Dark Knight.

Dick Grayson is a character who’s been around for decades, and the longer he’s been around, the less relatable his origins have become. I suspect fewer kids in the 21st century dream about running away to the circus than those in the 20th. Yet his story remains intriguing, the more writers have had to explain the appeal (even recent TV shows like HEROES and THE CAPE have tried, in their own ways), as they’ve begun grafting a separate narrative, Deadman’s past, onto it (notably in FLASHPOINT, but also Chuck Dixon’s NIGHTWING: YEAR ONE). I’ve got a great ambition of my own, to attempt my own version.

Then Grant Morrison reinterprets the famous “Flash of Two Worlds” story, which is a more direct version of that same archetype, reconnecting a new generation to a seminal yet increasingly distant milestone. At its heart is the meeting between the first two men to assume the identity of The Flash, Jay Garrick (Golden Age) and Barry Allen (Silver Age). Jay was, when this story was originally presented, a fairly generic member of a lost generation, while Barry literally represented a new one, having personally ushered it upon his introduction. Symbolically, the two inhabited twin cities, one of which had mysteriously vanished years ago. Barry crossed the divide, met his inspiration, and basically introduced the multiverse, a version of DC which embraced different eras side-by-side. Heroes that had been well-known during WWII but who had been discarded over time, most of whom were members of the Justice Society, came back, and their absence had to be explained. The more years that passed, the harder this became. Quite notably, the Society is absent from the “New 52.” I wonder if DC isn’t planning a new version of history to explain it all over again.

Anyway, the most clever aspect of Morrison’s version is that he tells it in the form of a child’s experience of this meeting (we find out later that this narrator is in fact Gar Logan, future Beast Boy of the Teen Titans, who operates alongside Wally West, the eventual third Flash). Kurt Busiek chose a reporter in MARVELS, but it’s Morrison, in this comparatively obscure comic, who truly understands the best possible perspective for such a tale (it might be argued that JOE THE BARBARIAN is his recent attempt to tell this story all over again, in a bit more literary style). The boy isn’t really impressed with superheroes until he goes along for the wild ride himself. Morrison himself has represented for me the ideal comic book writer, perhaps because I experienced superheroes first on the screen rather than the page. I understood the basics long before I read comics. I wanted to be dazzled when I finally did. Grant Morrison understands dazzle. That’s what he does. He doesn’t necessarily do superheroes (which is why most of his early work didn’t really feature them, and why his current work does), but stories that expand the possibilities of his craft. Once he caught everyone up on his style, he could do whatever he wanted, and readers would pay attention. Clearly a lot of readers don’t understand it, which is why for every fanatic there’s someone who claims he’s simply overrated. Even those who love him don’t uniformly get him. They recognize that he’s doing something special, but probably couldn’t explain him if they tried.

There’s also:

SEBASTIAN O #s 1-3 (Vertigo)
From May-July 1993.

Morrison has a reputation for being subversive, which you can understand if you’ve at least sampled THE INVISIBLES or THE FILTH. Perhaps his most concentrated effort in this regard is SEBASTIAN O, which is like his version of V FOR VENDETTA, about a cultural deviant who is actually quite deeply culturally immersed, attempting to wake people up, destroy corruption, even if the reaction he invariably finds is at best confusion. It would have made an excellent satire a decade later, when homosexuals finally started to creep into the mainstream, but Morrison is someone who has consistently skirted widespread awareness (which is probably okay by him), been just on the other side of the zeitgeist. I like to think his breakthrough is inevitable, and that his legacy will eventually eclipse Alan Moore’s, even though just at the moment it seems unlikely.

If Sebastian isn’t good enough, there’s:

DC COMICS PRESENTS: MYSTERY IN SPACE (DC)
From September 2004.

Part of a series of tribute books honoring the legacy of then-recently deceased iconic editor Julie Schwartz, Morrison writes Adam Strange, an intergalactic hero and perfect match for Morrison’s gonzo style, for one of several stories in the one-shot. It’s a wonder, or perhaps a gift for those who read this comic, that other than 52, he hasn’t otherwise worked with the character. More than the outsized possibilities of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, Strange is a character uniquely suited to Morrison’s sensibilities, and has rarely been handled so perfectly.

Taken together, these are comics Grant Morrison won’t often by identified with, but are perfect examples of his unerring gift to elevate the medium at every opportunity, comics that also serve to illustrate the potential DC has consistently strived for and in fact accomplished through the years. Most of this blog talks about DC comics, so you know that I read plenty of those, but I don’t always get to write about Grant, even though he has become my favorite comics writer.

The good news is that I’ve got plenty of other Morrison comics to write about.