Old Dog, Old Tricks

Sort of depends if he was going to make anything out of it in later issues, but yeah, it should be Grant-Morrison-in-Doesn't-Break-Fourth-Wall-Shocker.

You'll get no support from me on this.

What a great, subtle, way to break the fourth wall without screaming that I'M BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL HERE, PEOPLES! And I'm of the opinion that most fourth-wall breaking in comics is generally not handled well (ANIMAL MAN might be an exception, but AUTOMATIC KAFKA is the rule).

But what is the point of breaking the fourth wall if you're not going to do anything with it? What stories does it actually allow? OMG the action in a comic is happening in a comic, TRIPPY MAN, it's like that Pink Floyd album cover with the photo of the album cover on the wall.

It could be some sort of fourth-wall-break as pathetic-fallacy, which is ok with me.

...it could be fake, that.

FOURTH WORLD / FOURTH WALL

Har har... Is Grant Morrison becoming the Elvis Costello of comicsdom, then?

Me on blogger's blog, because I can't resist commenting when GM's involved (unless it's when he's making freaky stupid posts to Barbelith, that is):

T., metafiction isn't a "shtick" for Morrison-- it's a device he uses that's very much tied in with the main themes of his work. I'm still in agreement with lungfish though. Dropping it in with no set-up or explanation like that would make sense only to people with experience reading Morrison's less mainstream work. As much as he seems to want demand his more mainstream readers to work harder at interpreting him lately, this is exactly the opposite of the right way to go about it-- similarly, his "hypercompression" shtick on Seven Soldiers (and make no mistake, it is a "shtick" in this case) is getting real old real fast.

Oh, and I just noticed I fucked up the copyediting on "to demand" there-- wonderful. And Blogger doesn't accept Firefox-using posters? WTF?