A Serious Place on Serious Earth

I don’t want to mince words when I say Grant Morrison is the most important writer of modern comics.

Many, many fans would tend to argue, Alan Moore, as if it were perfectly obvious, Alan Moore the creator of WATCHMEN, of many, many projects that have become legendary, crossed over from comics to movies (even if he himself never seems remotely satisfied with the results), whose mystique is so great he can get away with disavowing his legacy and everyone will respect him more for having done so. Moore can do less these days and get away with it, call his shots, determine exactly where he wants to publish, and he has a guaranteed audience, ready to proclaim his next project another unabashed success. Is Morrison so lucky?

Still, I say that Grant Morrison is more important. He’s a writer whose material remains so maddeningly obtuse he has as many detractors who say he’s a self-obsessed hack as those who proclaim his genius with every new piece of work. I will begin my defense by admitting that at this point, the only authority on the mind of Grant Morrison is Grant Morrison himself. Where Alan Moore’s passions can be traced back to the pleasures of his youth, Grant Morrison continues to mystify in the ways he assimilates not just ideas but whole metaphysical mythologies, combining superheroes with the divine without so much as a backward glance. He made himself God in ANIMAL MAN. It was only fitting.

Today, however, I intend to concentrate on three works: VIMANARAMA, THE MYSTERY PLAY, and ARKHAM ASYLUM. It’s fair to say that only the last of these is actually well-known. Most fans associate Morrison with ANIMAL MAN, DOOM PATROL, THE INVISIBLES, JLA, NEW X-MEN, WE3, ALL-STAR SUPERMAN, or his ongoing epic Batman saga, sprawled across the last half-decade. There are other notable works, SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY, THE FILTH, and smaller projects (but Grant Morrison doesn’t really do small, does he?), like KILL YOUR BOYFRIEND, JOE THE BARBARIAN, SEAGUY, even his latest Superman project, the relaunch of ACTION COMICS. For brevity’s sake, a little constriction is necessary.

Because he’s remained in the realm of monthly comics for so long, and even backpedaled, it seems, from his early ambitions (ZENITH, a complete deconstruction of superheroes), there’s a tendency to assume that Morrison has gone soft, given in to the demands of mass audiences and assured work. But perhaps it’s necessary to understand what he’s done before to fully appreciate what he’s doing now.

VIMANARAMA is like a Hindu JOE THE BARBARIAN. The central hero is a man named Ali, who frets about the bride his father has found for him, throughout a crisis that could easily result in the end of the world, even as he and this bride, Sofia, work side-by-side against cosmic-scale forces that at the very least threaten to overwhelm them. Ali has felt like an underachiever his whole life. The art of Philip Bond is a cheerily cartoonish contrast to the real world concerns Ali handles, underscoring the human scale of the story even as events spiral into surreal proportions. For anyone who wonders if Grant Morrison truly has his feet grounded in reality, VIMANARAMA should probably stand as proof-positive.

THE MYSTERY PLAY, meanwhile, is lavished with the painted work of Jon J Muth, an unpretentious, neatly stylized counterpoint to the work of Alex Ross, himself renowned for making superheroes seem real. Here, Muth is given the challenge of grounding another surreal Morrison tale, about a murder mystery and a series of figures that seem to see the world in terms of metaphor, who can’t quite distinguish fact from fiction. It’s an ideal primer for anyone still struggling to make sense of Grant Morrison’s ultimate ambitions as a writer. For someone often accused of overly complicating his stories, Morrison is surprisingly effective at minimalism, and that impulse is on full display in THE MYSTERY PLAY. It’s easy to view this graphic novel as something an artsy Hollywood director might have conceived.

Perhaps the template for everything you ever needed to know about Morrison, ARKHAM ASYLUM may still yet prove to inform his enduring legacy. Created in the wake of Moore’s WATCHMEN and Frank Miller’s DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, it’s a graphic novel adventure that thrusts Batman headfirst into his psychological demons, in the one place where they will best find company. The ringmaster is the Joker, but instead of taking center stage, the Clown Prince instead gives way to the story of Amadeus Arkham, the founder of the asylum, and an exploration of sanity itself. Fittingly, the art by Dave McKean is the most unhinged of anything featured in a Grant Morrison story.

The edition of ARKHAM ASYLUM I read contains the script and commentary from Morrison himself, and adequately represents both his creative process and inspirations. In some ways it’s like a deconstruction of a work of deconstruction. It’s a story of almost as much minimalism as MYSTERY PLAY, with much of the narrative as suggested as the imagery Morrison draws on from his own experience. You don’t need to be versed in Batman lore to understand it; in fact, you can almost read it as a standalone adventure in psychology. This is not a Batman you’re likely to find anywhere else. Those who were turned off by Miller’s brusque Dark Knight in ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN, THE BOY WONDER (it seemed to be just about everyone) might be surprised to find their hero even less forgiving of his foes here, even if the Joker is needling him at every opportunity. Isn’t Batman supposed to be noble, as close to human perfection as humanly possible? That’s how Morrison himself has written him in recent years.

Yet in ARKHAM ASYLUM, even Bruce Wayne’s father, traditionally depicted and most notably in Christopher Nolan’s BATMAN BEGINS as a paragon of virtue, comes off as an unyielding perfectionist, ashamed that his son was frightened by a piece of entertainment, moments before he and his wife are murdered in Crime Alley. Batman remains trapped by these deaths, even in the throes of his ideal in Arkham, ignoring his weaknesses while simultaneously failing to hide them (even if those who hear his confessions fail to comprehend them). As the founder of the asylum realizes his own insanity, Batman must either overcomes his weaknesses, or admit that he has finally come home. The man who fights crime in the guise of a bat has finally come to a reckoning. Commissioner Gordon tries to dissuade him from going to meet this fate.

The minimalism of ARKHAM ASYLUM doesn’t stand up to the same scrutiny as THE MYSTERY PLAY. Morrison by necessity plays fast and loose in this story, allowing its distortions play by their own rules. For once, the idea of Batman can’t hide behind an audience that’s in on the joke. It’s why Morrison can get away with all those layers he can’t pretend the readers will fully understand. The layers don’t matter, only the central conceit, that madness and sanity are a duality as necessary as Harvey Dent’s ability to choose his own destiny, no matter how he reaches it.

Taken together, VIMANARAMA, THE MYSTERY PLAY, and ARKHAM ASYLUM (wistfully subtitled A SERIOUS HOUSE ON SERIOUS EARTH), represent the central challenge of Morrison’s stories, to either accept that the world is more complicated than we can known, or that even the most ridiculous behaviors are still recognizably human. Clearly he intends for his readers to accept both, and so he continues to tell his stories. He’s already tripped the light fantastic, working in a medium where that’s an everyday occurrence. But Grant Morrison simply wants to see just how far down the rabbit hole really goes.