GRANT MORRISON POLL

For me, Vol 1 of the Invisibles is his best work, though in subsequent volumes what would become his trademark problems in my eyes came more to the fore: a slew of rapid-fire dazzling ideas getting in the way of coherent storytelling. I love Doom Patrol as well, probably his best balance of weirdness and superheroic soap opera, and Zenith deserves props.

In later years, Seaguy stands out for its sheer exuberance, and I really enjoyed The Filth, despite it suffering from some of the faults I mentioned earlier.

I think if I had read all of the New Adventures of Hitler I would vote for it. But I have not, so it must be Zenith or Seaguy.

I agree that with Chap that Volume 1 of Invisibles is probably the best thing he's ever done, because he manages to combine impressive ideas with tight plots and a surreal edge. Volume 2 is almost as good, but by Volume 3 the whole thing has become pretty much hit and miss. Doom Patrol is more solid throughout and has somewhat better characterization, but heights of genius are a tad lower there. Some of the shorter works of course have the benefit of being more compact and therefore not succumbing to the sort of incoherence the longer works often do. But I still gotta go for The Invisibles, because despite its shortcomings few comics have ever made me as excited both emotionally and intellectually as it did during the best parts.

If I could vote for a single issue though, I'd vote for the last issue of Animal Man. Few 24-page comics have managed to be both totally postmodern and sweetly sentimental in the way it does.

Seaguy or The Invisibles will win this but I think the correct answer is We3.

No, the correct answer is FLEX MENTALLO or DOOM PATROL.

If I could vote for a single issue though, I'd vote for the last issue of Animal Man.

is that the OMG Animal Man is a comics character!!! issue? My new theory is that this is not actually that great an idea, and merely represents a rather tired kind of postmodernism.

I know this is a just a meaningless poll, but I spent way too long agonizing over it. In the end, I had to go with the Invisibles, since it was pretty much a distillation of pretty much everything I had read or watched from the ages of 15 to 28. For single issues, though, I think I'd go with Doom Patrol #63, which just kills me every time I read it.

I love the last ish of Animal Man to bits but it also strikes me as pretty much a lift from the epilogue of Alasdair Gray's Lanark - the apologetic metafictional tone is very similar.

I am really tempted to vote for Zenith as being the only good comic about British superheroes ever, but Book IV is noticeably weaker than the other ones.

Perhaps I shall vote for BIG DAVE.

Not listed: St Swithins Day, Bible John, ZOIDS (and other early Marvel UK stuff), WildCATS (arf), The Authority (arf arf), DC One Million, the Millar collabs.

Of those, I've never read Bible John but I think DC1M and St Swithins might even have picked up a vote maybe! DC1M is probably my favourite ever mental crossover event, certainly.

I voted JLA as it's totally constructed from Thrill Power whilst still having an average of at least one wtf! idea every issue. I mean, shaving the Shaggy Man, come on; what is there not to love about that?

Although Zenith Phases 2 & 3 have their moments.

My new theory is that this is not actually that great an idea, and merely represents a rather tired kind of postmodernism.

I don't think the idea of a character meeting his creator is necessarily new or great in itself (though I can't remember any comic book where it would've been done to this length, instead of just as a singular gag), but the way that issue is written is pretty great. All the talk about story and genre conventions is spot-on (it's quite clear already at this point that Morrison doesn't much care about Milleresque "dark and edgy" superhero stories), and the endings he gives to both Animal Man and himself are really quite touching.

(though I can't remember any comic book where it would've been done to this length, instead of just as a singular gag)

Dave Sim spun it out for about ten issues! Also in a very interesting way.

The best Morrison single issue is from Animal Man, but it isn't the final issue. It's the Wiley Coyote issue. FACT.

"the filth" could have been twice as long

What a toughie. I have read (almost) all of these Grant Morrisons! Doom Patrol, New X-Men, Invisibles, and Flex Mentallo are probably in my all-time top ten comics ever. I guess since his Spawn run was omitted from the poll, I'd have to go with Invisibles. It's patchy, and I've outgrown a lot of the things I found exciting about it the first time 'round, but it's still pretty amazing.

torn between:

-Animal Man (tight narrative, agree with Tuomas about the ending)
-New X-Men (maybe didn't hit the heights of some of his crazier stuff but was consistent and the most fun i've had reading x-men since i was a kid)
-Invisibles (kinda sums up all his strengths & flaws)

if someone went with doom patrol or JLA, i would understand.

i've had cbr's of Flex Mentallo for years but never got around to reading (actually i think they got lost with my last laptop). ;_;

flex mentallo, having found it in my teens and having had it make me significantly more happy to be alive for a good couple days in my teens. if i had to say which was 'best' of these i'd have more trouble, i have yet to square which of these works impacted on me on what kind of levels, 'good art' (ech) vs being moved in a specifically targeted way (LOOK UP) vs just plain pandering aspirationalism (man, it'd be so cool to be a superspy against the forces of conformism! especially if it meant getting to take drugs and have sex a lot!). this forum should be renamed 'i'm rather fond of grant morrison', he's actually mentioned in every single thread updated this week.

(n.b. 1) i am aware that there are probably people on barbelith who think that invisibles does a better job of subverting its jamesbondisms than it actually does. 2)don't get me wrong, i totally wuv james bond)

The art is a bit off-putting in the Animal Man reprints.

should GM's different Batman stories have been presented separately? The Hush (or whatever it was from LOTDK) is very different in tone from the current Batman run.

Just because it's looming large in my head these days (also it's amazing) All Star Supes.

If All Star Superman were done yet I might have picked it, but I'm gonna say 7 Soldiers (with profuse apologies to The Invisibles, which I think is actually better in its later volumes than earlier ones).

Speaking of All Star Supes - where's Mxyzptlk? And Brainiac? They're important enough figures in the mythos that I'm surprised they haven't shown up yet. Well, I guess LOSH Brainiac did, unless I'm misremembering that.

Flex Mentallo is good, but it also feels, I dunno, somehow a bit too compressed. Like everything is a signifier for something else, and the actual story isn't that joyful to read. The final payoff is pretty great, admittedly.

I liked We3 a lot, but it felt a bit too short for a totally different reason. Here the story was the main point, and it was simple yet gripping, with lovely (maybe that's the wrong word) characters, but it was over too soon! I would've wanted their journey to last longer! Though I guess Morrison said everything he wanted to say in that short space. Seaguy had a similar problem, it just felt like the sort of odyssey Seaguy was going through should've been longer. But I hear there's gonna be sequels for that, maybe that'll correct things.

One more thing that makes Doom Patrol and especially The Invisibles my favourites is sheer length of them. Morrison had years to run free with them, so he could just throw in issues which only explored the background of a certain character or had some odd subplot that had little to do with the big story. That sort of freedom and length meant that the stories had air to breath, that it wasn't just about the Big Ideas and signifiers and metaphors, but also about sense of adventure and interesting, three-dimensional characters. I'm not sure if any publisher is gonna give him that sort freedom again to run with a big series for years, but I hope it's gonna happen some day.

I've been thinking about picking up 7 Soldiers... Does it make any sense for someone with a limited knowledge of DC universe?

7 soldiers is very self-contained.

Myx was in the chronobeast issue, wasn't he? Or am I thinking of something else?

That was the 5th Dimensional Superman. Close enough.

Voted Big Dave. Also missing and among his best: A Glass Of Water.

The Hush (or whatever it was from LOTDK)

this was Gothic.

Doom Patrol INCLUDING Flex Mentallo would be my vote if I could do that. I was away from comics between childhood and adulthood, and when I stumbled into a comics shop for the first time it was Doom Patrol (then mid-run) that I picked up and was hooked on: some sequence with Cliff running around saying, "Shit!" and Crazy Jane looking for him. It looked interesting so I bought it and the few issues before it, and was HOOKED. I hadn't read Watchmen or anything at that stage, and I was very into surrealism, and I went all, "Wow, I never thought anyone could do stuff like this with superheroes!"

By the way, whatever happened to Richard Case?

Also, Tuomas spot-on re Animal Man: that issue manages the rare feat of combining cleverdick postmodernism with actual emotional heft; whereas postmodernism normally either gives me the shits or leaves me impressed in a detatched sort of way, but not involved.

I have to go for Doom Patrol, as it's the best synthesis of all his good points: the thrill power, the forehead-slapping longterm plotting, the one-liners, the great characters, ideas, and the occasional all-purpose WTF-ness. (I mean you, Sex Men.)

But also because when I bought them as they came out, the last six or so issues were SO EXCITING.

Arkham Asylum, I think, is the only one that's actively bad.

Arkham Asylum is unforgivably beautiful, but storywise, yeah, It's on the messy side. Read an awful like "Here, you're English, do some Alan Moore voodoo!" Lurved it at the time, but then I was a litwanky college student when it came out, in the deepest throes of my studies of Postmodernity. Hasn't aged spectacularly well.

a lot of people are using the word 'postmodern' on this thread. maybe as many as a half dozen.

The story's not the problem with Arkham, the art is! Invisibles (esp vol 3) I suppose, but it could easily be JLA/Zenith/We3/Seaguy/Seven Soldiers/Doom Patrol/All-Star... oh I've listed nearly everything of his I've read. Invisibles cos it comes closest to encompassing it all, all his work seems a piece.

Yeah, he always said Invisibles was his "Here's everything" work. I think that's one of the reasons why I love it, along with everything. It meant a lot to me, and I'm even fond of the faults in the last volume.

I would definitely click an "ALL OF IT" button, though. The only thing that I started but couldn't finish was Marvel Boy. Also, it was nice to see Skrull Kill Krew getting a whole page in the recent Secret Invasion: Secret Files thing :)

Also it's been said before (not least by me), but fucking hell, he can write endings.

Actually, maybe I should book a day off for All-Star Superman 12 :) Which has I think been his most flawless work - the Bizarro story could maybe have been two issues, but other than that it's all gold, in my opinion.

Also the future history of Superman, as apparently ghostwritten by Grant in Man of Tomorrow #1,000,000!

For what it's worth, I'd like to exclaim my praise for Marvel Boy. It's not my favorite (probably Flex), but it's joyous in it's irreverence - I can't think of another modern comic that can beat in in terms of pure velocity.

Doom Patrol: But also because when I bought them as they came out, the last six or so issues were SO EXCITING.

So, so, so OTM.

those last eight or so issues of Doom Patrol maybe ruined comics for me forever

I mean I still love 'em (obviously) ('em being the comics) but nothing has come close to matching that experience

although I might go see a local community theater presentation of Li'l Abner tomorrow and maybe that'll make me forget Doom Patrol ever existed

We3

(ANOTHER FAVE)

KILL YOUR BOYFRIEND - I recall reading it five or six times the night I purchased it. The only comparable experience that leaps to mind is CHUNGKING EXPRESS, which I saw twice the night I rented it.

Kill Your Boyfriend was actually the first Morrison comic I read. I remember it made a big impression on me back then, but I've been kind of wary of rereading it, because I'm not sure if I'd find it as great now as I did when I was 16. It is his ultimate teenage rebellion story, isn't it? Though I haven't yet become old and cynical enough to hate teenage rebellion stories, so maybe I should just read it again to see if it holds together.

i have hated teenage rebellion stories since i was 14

looking in my old boxes of comics to find 7S resulted in two more missing from this poll i bought as an impressionable but distrustful-of-being-pandered-to teenager: 'kid eternity', and 'steed and mrs peel' (with ian gibson!); don't worry, though, both of them a bit crap. probably more so than kill yr boyf or st swithins day.

The correct answer is Doom Patrol.

Or Kill Yr Boyfriend.

remember it made a big impression on me back then, but I've been kind of wary of rereading it, because I'm not sure if I'd find it as great now as I did when I was 16.

I was a bit older than 16 when I read Kill Your Boyfriend, which maybe is why I consider it to be puerile rubbish.

how many readers of this thread like pretty much everything that Grant Morrison has written? I like a lot of his stuff, but I also reckon that a lot of what he does is not good at all.

Well, out of the stuff I've read, I'd rate them like this:

Classic, even if not perfect all the way through (few Morrison comic are "perfect" in the same sense something like Watchmen is though, nor are they supposed to be):
* The Invisibles
* Doom Patrol
* Seven Soldiers
* We3

Good. Mostly great but not total classics because they're hindered by Morrison's typical flaws: the plots being badly paced, hard to follow, or downright indecipherable, and/or bad characterization:
* Animal Man
* The Filth
* Flex Mentallo (I think this was perfect on a thematical level, but the actual plot wasn't that fun to read and the characters were kinda boring)
* New X-Men
* Marvel Boy

Not very good:
* Arkham Asylum

Not sure about these:
* Kill Your Boyrfriend (haven't reread this for 10+ years, maybe it isn't as good as I thought it was back then)
* Mystery Play (I've only read this once, years ago, and I don't think I really got it, maybe it would become clearer if I'd reread it now)
* Seaguy (this was mostly quite good but felt too short, can't really give a total judgement before I've read the coming sequels)

Most've of his comics I've only read some time after they'd originally came out (i.e. as collected books), so I've had the privilege of reading the reviews before picking them up. The Invisibles is the only series of his that I started reading while it was still ongoing. I'm pretty sure he's done his share of mediocre stuff, but mostly I've missed it because it hasn't gotten much acclaim.

Didn't he do a Batman miniseries called "Gothic" or something? I remember it felt a like rather generic "dark and gritty" Batman story with few interesting things in it. In fact I can't really remember anything about the whole story, which is quite rare for a Morrison comic, so it must've been pretty bland.

Oh come on, Shakey, deciding for other people how much caring is too much caring is a LOT worse NAGL.

perhaps I need recoloring

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/252/8411149.jpg

lol

was there a convo on here about gmo's rolling stone interview where he slams chris ware and mark millar?

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/grant-morrison-on-the-death-of-comics-20110822

I was about to say, didn't he do that forever ago? Yeah, we talked about it a bit, around the time we were cringing about his big-company superhero ownership apologism circa-Supergod

hadn't read that. agree w him 100% on chris ware. this too:

I was reading some Alan Moore Marvelman for some reason today. I found one in the back there and I couldn't believe. I pick it up and there are fucking two rapes in it and I suddenly think how many times has somebody been raped in an Alan Moore story? And I couldn't find a single one where someone wasn't raped except for Tom Strong, which I believe was a pastiche. We know Alan Moore isn't a misogynist but fuck, he's obsessed with rape.

http://www.liveforfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/grant-morrison-korse-my-chemical-romance.jpg

"I had a good life. I was a clubber in the Nineties."

agree w him 100% on chris ware.

what is Ware saying that you find so indefensible?

his shit depresses me to no end. i don't find the portrait of humanity he paints accurate or insightful enough to justify its unrelenting miserableness. it's just cruel. shame is that he's such a fucking BRILLIANT designer and draftsman.

reading ware is like watching a child push pins through a mouse.

yes, i am a bleeding hart babby

I don't see that eg Building Stories is miserably unsympathetic, as opposed to supportive (if perhaps distantly observant) of its characters - let's take the one-legged woman as example - and I absolutely don't see how any authorial viewpoint in that book comes from a place of sneering, moneyed privilege. Can you elucidate how you do?

Mmm...I get where you're coming from if you've only read Ware's narrative stuff, contenderizer, but I'm glad I held on to all of my old Acmes because there's some good, dark humor in the ephemera and fake ads (I think most of that stuff may have been reprinted in the eponymous Acme Novelty Library book).

yeah I'm more entertained by his minutiae and side-stories than by his longer narratives

and I absolutely don't see how any authorial viewpoint in that book comes from a place of sneering, moneyed privilege.

ah, i get you. i do not dislike chris ware (as morrisson clearly does) for class-based reasons. i could care less about his background and don't interpret his attitude as one of "sneering, moneyed privilege". i should have started off saying that i agree with morrisson, say, 66%. i object to what i see as ware's sadism and nihilism, a vision that perceives life almost completely in terms of flaws, failures, weakness and emptiness.

agree w deric and shakey about the appeal of his minutia and side stories (i've held onto those old acmes too). they're just as cruel, really, but at least they're funny about it.

Ware's worldview is one informed by his own enormous insecurity and penetrating self-loathing, not sadism or nihilism - he writes characters as flawed and self-sabotaging and internally critical as he perceives himself to be. I can totally see not liking it! but it always reads as ultimately sympathetic and caring to me, not hateful.

they're just as cruel, really, but at least they're funny about it.

yeah the Jimmy Corrigan stuff where he actually is a little kid and Superman is some guy his mom sleeps with etc are still bleak as fuck but the jokes are better.

i get that sic, but i don't see much difference. self-loathing is sadistic by nature, and it tends to nihilism.

i read him as addressing ware's public comments more than his work, but then i found gmo's comments there a bit hard to parse - seemed like a poor transcript or something

Something that crops up in E.M. Forster (Howards End) and also Virginia Woolf (although I can't place a reference) is the notion that if ordinary clerks like Leonard Bast (one of the most condescended-to figures in literature) should attempt to improve themselves by exposing themselves to "high" culture, they would eventually make the horrifying discovery that beneath all of the elevated sentiment there is an esoteric message of profound spiritual desolation, which if
haplessly uncovered will terribly maim them. The proper owners of high culture are shielded from this radioactive kernel of anomie by their ownership of nice country homes, etc, but if they ever let on that life is essentially meaningless and tragic, morality is a lie, not to be born is the best for man and so on, then dire social consequences will surely ensue. (Burroughs: bring it on). The exoteric meaning of high culture is that it is improving, ennobling, a worthy object of aspiration, but the esoteric content is the total destitution of all of these values (and the privilege of being the insider who *knows* they are destitute, and laughs at the pretences of those who still aspire to realize them: thus the ruling class disdain towards any sort of passionate cultural commitment - to them, culture's a bunch of old stuff they keep in their attics, like the picture of Dorian Grey...).

that's an interesting reading of forster and woolf but er why

oh just an implication that maybe GMo isnt the only one who sees a social dimension in nihilism/miserabilism. I've never read Forster or Wolfe, and don't have much more than a passing familiarity (at least, firsthand) with Ware, but when I read GMo's comments, ^^this (which came from here) is what I was first reminded of...

okay, so i finally read (or finished reading) flex mentallo. picked the 2nd and 4th issues back in the day, but never found the others, so this is my first run through the complete story. pretty great. 2nd leg of the "my cat" trilogy that started in animal man and finished in the filth. the recoloring isn't an issue for me, cuz i'm not intimately familiar w the original, and i think it's pretty good when taken on its own. then again, i'm not knowledgeable enough to comment, so...

anyway, i loved the various levels of the story and the way they interact, but was a little disappointed by the obviousness of the conclusion. "shaman"? really? was hoping for a bit more than "reality is what you make it", but as such things go, it's quite powerful, and i'll take new age optimism over tough-guy nihilism anyday.

thought the "shaman" conclusion was a headfake away from the more obvious "shazam"

did morrison grow up poor? i thought it was moore who was all working class aspiration.

Morrison's dad was a lefty/no-nukes/anti-war organizer, don't think his family was exactly posh

Does the FM collection include the essays?

essays? there's a 6 pg fictional publication history/intro, dunno if that's what you're referring to

The original issues had some backmatter fictional essays about the comic book history of Flex. Think the various bits in the back of Bulletproof Coffin. Sounds like that intro may be another version of that.

Speaking of Morrison's dad, the Morrison documentary made it pretty clear Flex is based on him, they even look alike.

thought the "shaman" conclusion was a headfake away from the more obvious "shazam"

well it was, but not a welcome redirect, imo

i thought it was moore who was all working class aspiration.

― Philip Nunez, Monday, 23 April 2012 22:58 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what does this even mean??

It means he were a workin' clas' l'd from N'rth'mpt'n.

and now he worships a blood sausage in his basement

IMO class isn't a big issue in either Moore's or Morrison's comics. (Except maybe in From Hell, but even that one is kinda paternalistic towards the lower classes.) Sure, they've written comics about large social revolutions, but in those the revolution is brought about by Byronic Messiah figures, not by class conflict. Compare that to, say, Garth Ennis, whose working class sympathies and distrust of the upper classes is rather evident in his comics.

this fucking blood sausage thing has to die

tuomas do you remember the bit in the invisibles w/ the fox-hunt for homeless people

Yeah, but that was a minor detail among larger things. I'm not saying Moore or Morrison never address class, just that it's rarely/never a major theme in their works.

But that's to be expected: they both write for American publishers, and in American mainstream fiction class is hardly a popular subject.

class was a big theme in moore's WildC.A.T.S. run... it really made 12y/o me think....

curious what you mean about the paternalism in From Hell, tuomas

minor work, but wasn't class big in Skizz?

I mean that even though the working class characters aren't portrayed unsympathetically, they aren't really given a voice of their own, perhaps with the sole exception of the woman (won't mention her name so that I won't spoil the ending) Abberline meets in the bar... Mostly they're treated as "poor, lost wretches", like a paternalistic Victorian benefactor would.

(x-post)

I haven't read Skizz, what's it about?

ET, only the alien lands in dole-and-concrete early 80s Britain.

It's basically a rewriting of ET in 80's England.

I think it might be fairer to say that class appears in their stories as appropriate - more so in volume 1&3 of the Invisibles than in volume 2, for example.

I don't know, GM tackles class in America in volume 2

sorry, can't say that with a straight face

Yeah I think you mean race - no I can't do it either.

The Invisibles, omnibus edition: bigger, heavier, and seems to be pretty good so far. I just browsed through it yesterday upon finding it on my front doorstep, but it seems like it'll hold up to multiple readings.

I recently got the New X-Men omnibus as well -- the two together are about 16 or 17 lbs.