Annihilator #2 (Legendary)

writer: Grant Morrison
artist: Frazer Irving

via Previews World

I'm officially really starting to love this one.

Here's Grant Morrison with a big idea again.  Here's Grant Morrison writing a comic about a screenwriter with an inoperable brain tumor trying to complete his latest script, and realizing that the biggest obstacle is actually going to be the lead character, who has manifested himself in front of the screenwriter!

The screenwriter is Ray Spass and the lead character is Max Nomax.  Together they have some great back-and-forth dialogue.  I think that alone, which was an element that also helped distinguish Morrison's earlier Happy!, might be one of the biggest selling points of Annihilator.  That's best thing to take away from the second issue, regardless of whether it continues to be a running feature for the length of the mini-series.

Ray, of course, doesn't believe he's actually talking to Max.  It's crazy, right?

Morrison famously said years ago that his work was the result of trying to channel actual experiences he'd had, meaning The Invisibles was interpretation as much as story.  The Filth had a similar vibe to what Annihilator is doing, but it lacked the streamlined quality Morrison later perfected within the pages of the brilliant We3 and especially Joe the Barbarian.  It feels as if Annihilator is Morrison's attempt to explain what he meant all those years ago, but in a more straightforward, concise way.  There are elements that are typically gonzo Morrison, but they're analogous to sci-fi concepts you'll be familiar with (Aliens, Terminator, even Inception), presented from a standpoint of a real world situation that's taken a slight deviation.

As in, Ray is dying.  Are his subsequent experiences to be believed?  Is he hallucinating (another central question of Happy!) or can he take Max at face value?

But more to the point, Morrison has found a pair of characters who work really well together and can sell all of this quite easily.  Frazer Irving helps keep all of it visually mesmerizing.  He's part of a recent trend that has reemphasized the role of art in comics storytelling, the polar opposite of what Image was doing twenty years ago, when it was only about the art and the story didn't matter, something creators worked against for years until the art didn't really matter anymore.  Now we have artists like Irving and Fiona Staples (Saga), taking big ideas and presenting them that way, playing in concert with the writer and helping to make the whole thing a complete experience, the way comics are always supposed to be.

Long story short, Annihilator is developing into another career-defining work for Morrison.