Grant Morrison the early years

Using plain language, Callahan opens up Morrison's sometimes difficult texts and expands the reader's appreciation of their significance

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Brilliant, June 5, 2007
By J. Bukalski "comic book scholar" (Honolulu, HI) - See all my reviews

What Timothy Callahan has done here is to open up Grant Morrison's early texts, which are often confusing for many readers.

For some reason Amazon have twinned this product with the 2-disc collector's edition of the slight and whimsical Tom Hanks-directed "That Thing You Do".

What I've read from the SeqArt site in the past has been very very wanky & joyless. Tho the site's layout (back in the day) might've accentuated the severe lack of joy.

I got all I needed to know (I think) out of the original, online, free columns - can't imagine how much more the book would really add to it.

I didn't know Morrison was important enough to deserve a book about his "early years", rather than an overall analysis.

it's not even his early years, doesn't it only pick up stuff a decade into his career?

'Twould be fun if the cover art were more representative of "early years" Grant Morrison - collarless white shirt, tight tight pants tucked into Doc Martens, ultra-fey Grant Morrison.

Just got my copy of this via Amazon - I'll be savouring it slowly tomorrow.

'Savouring' is the wrong word - it's awful. Pedestrian analysis combined with a truly mind-boggling amount of factual errors.

Did the pedestrian analysis in the original web version and the mind-boggling factual errors in the title and cover illustration not tip you off?

No, as I jumped right in like a fool without even checking that there was an original web version. And I can forgive the title and cover illustration as being subject to the whims of marketing.

Here's where the writer chimes in...

James, the book has two additional chapters not available online--one covers Arkham, the other covers Gothic.

Vic, I'm very sorry that you didn't like the book. I'd love to correct the factual errors that you've come across. E-mail me the details and we'll fix that stuff for the next edition. Surely there aren't a "mind boggling" amount of errors, though, right? Please let me know.

If you find the analysis pedestrian, I can't help you there. It's probably stuff you already thought about when you read the comics, but a LOT of readers don't think as deeply about comics as you might want to believe. Even devoted "Morrison fans" have told me that they understood his work more deeply after reading my book, and Morrison himself has read the book and found the analysis quite astute. So if it didn't impress you in any way, then you are clearly ahead of the curve (in a good way).

As for the cover and title. The cover ironically shows the current Grant Morrison juxtaposed with the Animal Man background. There are plenty of reasons why it's designed that way, much of those reasons boil down to: we thought it was cool. And the title refers to Morrison's first major creative phase, beginning with Zenith. Morrison himself identifies the Zenith to Doom Patrol era as the early part of his career, and he says that phase ended where my book ends.

Please e-mail me if you have any other questions or concerns. Even if you don't love the book, I'd like the book to be a jumping off point for a greater Morrison dialogue in the comics community.

Thanks!

You're never safe on the internet these days...

My mind felt pretty boggled at the time, and I'd probably have felt a bit happier with the analysis if not for that - there did come a point where I totally lost confidence in the work. I'll do my best to email with the most obvious ones when I've got time.

I once got a thankful e-mail from the writer of Over the Hedge, because I'd included the strip among my top 100 comics list posted here.

Right, I've sent an e-mail detailing my problems with the book - if you don't get it, tell me and I'll be more than happy to print it up here.

Go on, Vic!

What does Morrison describe the first ten years of his professional comics-writing life as?

Trying to get a nut to move that butt.

(I'm paraphrasing.)

I wouldn't say "the first ten years of his professional comics-writing life." He publshed about a dozen stories as a teenager, and at around the same time wrote and drew Captain Clyde. His career really didn't start in earnest until the mid-80s with his 2000AD stuff, and his first major work was Zenith.

I didn't ask him what he calls those teenage projects, but the accepted literary term for such work is "juvenelia," so that's what you can consider it, I guess.

Hope you got that email - and I ought to apologise for the harsh tone I took in it. I hope it made for constructive criticism, despite the anger.

I didn't actually get the e-mail. Can you try to send it again.

It's TCal✧✧✧@hotm✧✧✧.c✧✧

Thanks!

Oh, I guess it won't let me give you my direct e-mail. Well, its TCallah AT hotmail DOT com

Okay, I'll tone it down a bit and resend later today.

All of his Tooth shorts, his Zoids run, his short in Warrior, his first two fantastic DW stories with Ridgway and a bunch of miscellaneous shorts were done in his mid-twenties, not his teens. And to write off his (actual teenage) Near Myths stuff as irrelevant is moronically snobbish, given that it ties directly into the Invisibles.

That he was exploring themes and characters in his teenage work and (seven years later) Zoids strips that he would return to in his biggest work ever surely makes them specifically worthy of consideration, not hand-waving away as never having existed.

Just post yr crits here, Vic!

There - it's sent.

Still fairly angry, I'm afraid. I'd cooled off slightly, but then I picked up your book again to check I'd got my facts straight, and was reminded of how easy that is to do.

im a "bad reader"

I'm biting my tongue regarding that one.

On the subject of GM criticism, what do people think of Anarchy For The Masses? Have we covered that?

Comics Journal review by Noah Berlatsky:

"Super-hero comic books... aren't taken seriously in the critical community," Timothy Callahan claims in the introduction to his monograph Grant Morrison: The Early Years. If that's true, books like this are the reason. Instead of in-depth analysis, Callahan provides his readers with lists of themes, like chaos and sacrifice (and yes, the themes are printed in italics.) Rather than synthesis, he gives us tedious, page-by-page plot summaries of every single damn issue. And rather than attempting to arrive at any complex conclusions, Callahan merely gushes bland, fanboy boosterism. As the final sentence states, "...Grant Morrison is, indeed, a master of the medium." And then there's this gem: "[Arkham Asylum is] a more fully realized combination of words and images than almost any comic-book story every published." In other words, "Manga? Underground? Duuuh... What dose?"

The book is amateurish in every bad sense of the word. There's no index. The proofreading gaffes are sometimes so overwhelming as to make the text difficult to read. And there are multiple errors of fact. Callahan claims, for example, that "the reader isn't told" why Cliff Steele's robot body explodes after a brain transplant in Doom Patrol #34 — but, in fact, Morrison takes a panel to tell the reader exactly that (the body wired itself to detonate in case of brain transplant.) In another instance, Callahan states that Morrison's filching of older copyrighted characters has made it difficult to collect and distribute the Zenith comics in trade paperbacks. But in an interview at the end of the book, Morrison says that the problem is actually a rights dispute between him and the publisher over ownership of the Zenith comic itself.

This interview, at least, is worthwhile. Callahan's questions are sturdily innocuous, but Morrison is game, talking about his interest in magic, his time on the dole, his relationship with his artists. He also politely punctures several of Callahan's pet theories, which (given the level of animosity I had worked up after trudging through all 200-odd pages) is quite satisfying. But overall, this book just made me embarrassed of my 12-year-old self, who probably would have had enough sense not to enjoy reading it, but might well have written something like it if he'd had the chance.

Grant Morrison: The Early Years is supposed to be the first in a series from Sequart "devoted to the study and promotion of comic books as a legitimate art." From now on, I plan to avoid them all, including the next one, entitled Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy From Comics to Screen. 'Nuff said.

ooh, clever code parsed out my italics tags on chaos and sacrifice