All-Star Superman pt. II

In part one we talked about Frank Quitely. By "talked" I mean I wrote at you and you sort of quit reading after three lines, which I would prefer as a method for ALL my communication if that were an option.

Here in part two we'll be taking a little time to talk about your friend and mine, Grant Morrison.

My earliest memorable introduction to Grant Morrison was a Doom Patrol trade paperback.

Before every comic was collected in trade paperbacks, there were only so many of them out there. In fact, and you whipperdickheads won't remember this, we had to go as far as the next-closest large city to find a comic shop, which was the only place that sold trades. Bookstores hadn't caught onto this one yet. So I would save cash and then go down and buy a huge cache of new books, enough to last the next couple weeks, or more realistically, a day or so.
Because they were so hard to get, I ended up reading the same ones over and over. Maybe ten times a piece, no joking.

The only reason I'm explaining all that is to explain this: I enjoyed the Doom Patrol trade, but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I must have read it half a dozen times. Also, Cliff the robot man seemed really interesting to me. Usually you see a superhero, and he complains about being cursed to exist outside humanity and all you can think is, "Fuck off. You can fly." But Cliff was just in this robot body that was tougher than a human body, but other than that kind of shitty.

Anyway, my next exposure to Morrison was great, his run on JLA in the late 90's. I thought these stories were fantastic. Even though they had to deal with that weird electric Superman and about 18 different Green Lanterns, there were some pretty cool things going on here. Characters were born, died, and did other shit in the meanwhile.

What really drew me to these stories is that things were explained just enough. You didn't have to know 100% of the science behind why a dude could put a CD in his head and then know how to fight like Batman, but he would show some crazy-ass machine and you would get the gist.

So, after liking those so much, and after getting old enough, I made the decision to seek out some more stuff by Grant Morrison. I think comic book readers all mature in stages, and one of the big ones is when you discover that the character probably matters less than the dude who's writing it. Fuck, Bone is a rounder, whiter Mickey Mouse, but Jeff Smith pulls it off.

I can still remember that I was going on vacation the next day, so I bought a comic for the plane. The plan was to have something awesome to read, and I had the perfect thing: Invisibles vol.1

Of course, showing all the restraint of a death row inmate eating his final meal in a Brazillian steakhouse, I read the entire thing that night.

Aaaand it was the first trade paperback I ever returned to the bookstore, and probably the last.

I told them that I had bought it as a gift and got the wrong one, but the truth was that I goddamn hated it. I didn't have the slightest inkling of what the fuck was going on in this story. No clue. The individual sentences didn't even make sense to me. It was like transcribing everything a severely stoned guy said and then adding pictures. But hey, I'm an idiot, so for your pleasure, here's the summary of that very trade:

The first volume of The Invisibles introduces Dane McGowan, an angry teen from Liverpool, as he attempts to burn down his school. Abandoned by his father and neglected by his mother, Dane takes out his anger and frustration through destruction. In the first issue of the series, Dane is recruited by the Invisibles, a ragtag band of freedom fighters led by King Mob, a charismatic, cold-blooded assassin. The next arc, "Down and Out in Heaven and Hell", shows Dane as he tries to survive on his own in London after being abandoned by the Invisibles. Dane is mentored by Tom O’Bedlam, an old homeless man who is secretly a member of the Invisibles. Tom shows Dane the magic in the everyday world and helps him realize that his anger prevents him from experiencing real emotions. While wandering with Tom, Dane has a partially remembered alien abduction experience and is transported into a different dimension. Eventually Dane returns to the Invisibles, taking the codename "Jack Frost." The next arc, "Arcadia"^[, follows the Invisibles as they go back in time via astral projection to the French Revolution. Jack is almost killed by a demonic agent of the Outer Church, the Invisibles’ chief enemy. As the volume closes, Jack declares that he is leaving the Invisibles.

Okay. So a kid tries to burn down a school, is recruited by some insane-o's to do god knows what, then is abandoned by that group, but not really because he's just being mentored by a bum in disguise, who helps him remember that he was abducted by aliens....alright. The one thing to take away from this is another reason to not burn down a school because if you do you might find yourself embroiled in something like this, not to mention the horrible smell of a burning school locker room.

Since then, I've been wary of Grant Morrison. There have been things I liked. We3 was fun, and Seven Soldiers, though kind of a lot of running around in circles in retrospect, was an experiment I could get behind. But his run on X-Men didn't do a whole lot for me.

THEN, I picked up Batman R.I.P. I got about two pages in before I got this familiar, creeping feeling that I didn't know what in the fuck was going on. I get that a lot from DC comics just because I'm not super acquainted with most of the characters, but Batman is one of the few that I know well enough, at least as well as my dad, which means I know the highs and lows although the last couple years are a gray area. I flip to the front, lo and behold, Grant goddamn Morrison.

Back to the subject. All-Star Superman.
What I liked is the idea of a Superman story that did a decent job of telling us what we needed to know about Superman, brought in a large variety of characters, but almost stood on its own. I don't follow too closely, but you didn't need to know much beyond Lex Luthor=bad, Superman=good.

What I didn't care for so much were all the, well, Morrison-y elements. The bizarre creature that brought with it a bunch of alternate dimension Supermans? A weird portal that Lex Luthor shoves Clark Kent through, one that takes him to an underground cave where a babe in bondage gear is taking him somewhere on a canoe? And Jimmy Olsen having sexcapades while appearing oddly flamboyant?

In other words, when he was clearly expressing the vision of Superman as laid out, it worked for me. Pa Kent worked for me. Lex Luthor worked for me. But when we got into new territory, I wasn't really down with it. It all felt disjointed, and half way through the damn thing I wasn't even sure whether or not Superman was still supposed to be dying or if we'd dropped that story entirely.

By the time the bizarros showed up in volume 2, I called it quits. Me am FUCK YOU BIZARRO.

I didn't really want to do a whole thing bashing on Grant Morrison. He's done some really great stuff. But when I hear his name spoken in the same sentence as great writers, I have to stop myself from uttering the first word that beings every great nerdly correction: "Actually..."

The reason it bothers me is that writers like Grant Morrison and Alan Moore are often put in opposition to writers like Kurt Busiek or Mark Waid, people who tell somewhat run-of-the-mill stories where nobody has to get sodomized or fall into some goddamn dimension all the time. There is something to be said for originality, no doubt, but for me there has to be something said for telling a simple story in an interesting and clear fashion.

The life of buying trade paperbacks has become laughably easy. Between Amazon and bookstores, you can get access to whatever you want. Partly because of that and partly because there is just so much more out there, I don't read the same trades a dozen times anymore. Most of the books I own, I've probably only been through once or twice. Whether it's a good thing or not, I don't have time for those kinds of stories anymore, the ones that require me to make a chart of who the fuck the characters are, to diagram sentences to figure out what they mean, and so on. You can dismiss that as laziness if you want, but I consider it laziness on the part of a writer who makes a reader do all the heavy lifting. And when I see Morrison on the cover, I get out my fucking sweatband, shitty shorts, and big-ass leather belt that doesn't seem to really do anything.