Reading Comics #84 "Natural Born Morrison"

Most of the comics Grant Morrison does involve intricate plotting and mythologies that he spends years or at least a good number of issues exploring.  Every now and then he does something on a more intimate scale.  Kill Your Boyfriend is one such example of the latter.

Even after entering the mainstream in 1996 with JLA Morrison has continued to explore his interest in more subversive material.  It might be argued that his unique perspective makes Morrison more capable of finding something of worth in a diverse pool of material.  Boyfriend in many ways is very indicative of '90s pop culture.  In the edition I read he provides an afterword in which he actually laments how his story might be overlooked in the rush by filmmakers to copy material that at the time he wrote it was still fresh, indicating Quentin Tarantino as a predecessor.  Yet some of the movies I can think of that were released by 1995, when Boyfriend was originally published, were actually written by Tarantino, Tony Scott's True Romance and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers.  Tarantino himself never quite directed a film of the kind of psychopaths depicted in Boyfriend and these films.

Morrison's interest in the story is exploring the increasingly jaded nature of youth culture and the growing surge of violence they were capable of, which he couldn't have known was only getting started.  The Matrix, for instance, which by some accounts Morrison believes was based on his own Invisibles, was cited as an inspiration for the Columbine killers.

The star of Boyfriend is actually the girlfriend, whose parents don't understand her and life exactly the kind of stifling life she believes she's destined for until she stumbles across a rebel who gives her the excuse to experience the alternative, which quickly turns shockingly violent, not the least with the execution of the title character.  By the end of the graphic novel she and her new friend have been cornered, he's shot dead by law enforcement and she realizes that she never actually crossed the line, that she can still pretend innocence.

Her parents debate her innocence early on, convinced that undergarments somehow will somehow prove it one way or another, the way some people claim the way a woman dresses encourages rape.  She offers a running commentary on her own life, as if she's an outsider looking in, and that's the kind of alienation that the story is about.  The girlfriend (never named, by the way, so I'm not just being lazy) dons a wig at one point, and a little red dress, completely altering her appearance.  Identity, then, is something that is only a perception, or so she believes throughout the experience.  She and her friend run across a hippy collective that is also all about appearances, failing to live up to the ideals the new boyfriend lives on a daily basis.

Morrison collaborates with Philip Bond (they work together again in Vimanarama), who gives the story a lightly comic look, as if it's up to the reader whether any of this should be taken seriously.  Sure, there's a lot of sensationalism and not too many answers.  Boyfriend isn't a statement and it isn't a love story, either, the way the Tarantino screenplays unfold.  It's simply a record of the mood Morrison was feeling and was only starting to develop at the time.

It recognizable material but it's also a sharp left turn from the extremes Boyfriend only skirts.  By the end, Morrison's conclusion confronts the reader with everything that they've experienced thus far and forces them to question it all over again.  That's patent cleverness from a master.



Don't forget that I've constructed a whole page dedicated to Grant Morrison's career.  Have a look at it here.