Reading Comics #85 "Grant Morrison Forever!"

(from fright.com)

In my continuing efforts to read more Grant Morrison, I've just read Kid Eternity, which was a three issue mini-series he did for the fledgling Vertigo imprint in 1991.

Now, I'm probably missing some Morrison context, not having read the majority of his early material, which includes not only material previous to his first working with DC/Vertigo, but also Doom Patrol and most of The Invisibles.  However, I have had the chance to enjoy his seminal Arkham Asylum, which Kid Eternity closely resembles in tone and indeed art.

A word to the uninitiated, as far as this era of Grant Morrison goes: if you think he's impenetrable now, in Batman Incorporated or Action Comics, you probably don't even want to begin contemplating Kid Eternity, which seems almost like an ancestor text to his efforts at transcending typical fiction, the prototypical vision of a perspective that looks beyond the usual in order to find greater clarity, the mundane in the absurd.

That's a lot of what Vertigo was like in its origins, a way to explore known DC concepts in new contexts, more intricate, more mythologized, in many ways the product of Alan Moore's revision of Swamp Thing at the start of the 1980s as a creature who thought it was once a man rather than a man who became a creature.

This early Vertigo is best understand by the series that is still, justifiably, the imprint's best-known work, Neil Gaiman's Sandman.  In a lot of ways, Kid Eternity also reads a little like Morrison's condensed version of Sandman, which in 1991 was only about at the half point of its run.

Okay, so what's Kid Eternity actually about?  It's Morrison's map of Hell.  This is appropriate, because it deals with the title character, who at one point was a tad more conventional within DC lore, but as with anything Morrison touches (and yes, in this era of Vertigo everything the imprint did) becomes a lot more grandiose.  In fact, Kid Eternity at one points comes into possession of maps of Hell, because he needs to navigate the nether regions in order to convince a man who has recently died to help him, although he subsequently discovers that his quest is part of a greater design by the damned to revamp reality into an order that works for everyone.

Now, Morrison has claimed for years that the Wachowskis basically stole The Matrix from The Invisibles, but I am going to argue now that The Matrix owes a lot more, as far as I can tell at this point, to Kid Eternity.  Perhaps The Invisibles was simply Morrison's effort to make Kid Eternity more accessible.  I don't know enough about what Morrison did in The Invisibles to know how closely the events of the Matrix trilogy follow it.

But I can say that the three films closely follow Kid Eternity, which I now believe to be Morrison's greatest work.  In the Wachowski's movies, Neo is drafted into a war he subsequently learns he has already been fighting across many lifetimes, and by the end discovers that the only way to end the conflict between machines and mankind is to find a happy compromise between them.  In a lot of ways, that's what Kid Eternity is all about, the everlasting conflict of mankind with death, which the denizens of Hell have sought to overcome with the unwitting help of Kid Eternity.

Throughout the story Morrison harkens to a lot of things, not the least being the Byrds pop song "Turn! Turn! Turn!," which in some ways is about the idea of the Wheel of Fortune, which in some ways is about the Buddhist idea of reincarnation.  Kid Eternity, then, is all about coming to a new idea, which like Morrison continually repeating "turn! turn! turn!" throughout the narrative is answered by the constant refrain of "eternity! eternity!"  By the end, it becomes clear that what this means is that the only way to break the cycle is to embrace the concept of eternity, that things don't have to fall apart, that breaking the cycle means embracing the cycle, internalizing it.

The universe in the palm of your hand.

If it seems like a lot to ask, it's because it is.  That's Grant Morrison in a nutshell, though.  His idea of storytelling seems to have that refrain running through it, his use of archetypes, whether obscure or iconic subjects, which is why he can start his popular career by writing little-known characters to spending years with Batman, the definition of the comic book mainstream.  Kid Eternity is the switching post, the point where he gets his own archetype set so he can explore it elsewhere, a mission statement that makes difficult concepts clear in a very obtuse way.

It's no surprise that very few fans talk about this one, because in a lot of ways it's impossible to talk about.  But it's also Morrison's Inferno.  Every other comic book he has written is basically Virgil escorting readers through the tricky depths of imagination.