Nameless #1 (Image)

writer: Grant Morrison

artist: Chris Burnham

Sometimes there's no Grant Morrison.  Sometimes there's suddenly an explosion of Grant Morrison.  Last year Morrison launched both The Multiversity and Annihilator, both of which are limited series and counting down to their conclusions now.  Nameless has joined those ranks.  Is it as good as them?

And more importantly, because the actual subject is never clear from the start, what's it about?

Actually, the basic setup is pretty much Armageddon, the Michael Bay movie where Bruce Willis is charged with destroying an asteroid before it has a chance to destroy Earth.

But, Morrison being Morrison, it can't be that simple, can it?  Of course not.

The complicated setup is Morrison revisiting a particular aspect of his own mythology.  While writing The Invisibles, he was quite vocal about his personal dabbling in the occult.  It was a time in Morrison's career where he was known for Invisibles, Doom Patrol, and Animal Man, all extremely out-there material that not only helped define Vertigo comics at the time, but who exactly Morrison was, not just as a writer, but person.  This was not the mainstream-friendly Morrison later introduced for the purposes of JLA.  This was a Morrison who happily skirted controversy, helping to form a firm fan support group.

The last such work of this kind was The Filth early in the new millennium.  He's described this kind of storytelling as his effort to explain experiences he's actually had.

Fast-forward to the present, where there really hasn't been much of that talk in years.  Hence, the mainstream-friendly Morrison, the rough edges rounded off.  Almost.  Annihilator has gone a long way in bringing back the classic Morrison, but Nameless seems designed to bring the thing full circle.  Who better to illustrate the tale than Chris Burnham, the Batman Incorporated artist who brought the rough edge back?

Nameless evokes much of Annihilator while making the unusual more apparent.  Our main character, literally named Nameless, is hiding from things happened in the past, but the present is dragging all that back to the surface.  And yes, calling for Nameless to be a hero.

At this point, it's really a case of letting more of it play out, to get a feel of where Morrison is going with it, a little of how far down the rabbit hole he's really going.  At this point it doesn't seem like the kind of transcendent material Annihilator is, but Nameless is similarly interested in plumbing the depths of Morrison's own life for inspiration.  This is a good thing.