The Grant Morrison that I've read, I haven't liked. Am I forever to be denied my precious credibility for this failing?

Hes mostly being worried paying the mortgage since then I reckon...

good: Zenith, early Invisibles, X-Men, Earth 2

bad: Kill Your Boyfriend, late Invisibles, Arkham Asylum (Stinky Asylum, more like), Marvel Boy, Filth

I'm undecided on JLA. Apart from Earth 2, any I've seen have had really lame art and been very hard to get into.

The general Cult o' Morrison is a bit scary, even if he is one of the best writers in comics today.

Has anyone read "Skin", by the way? I've been meaning to borrow it from the library several times, but the artwork always scares me away. Those colours!

His JLA is a treat because, as noted above, he manages to wring some character out of these folks, when they're usually just treated as awesomely powerful cyphers (well, that and the Big Ideas are great).

Arkham Asylum is a big, beautiful mess. It's like he was ordered to channel Alan Moore or something, and didn't really come off quite right. If you read it as a Jungian treatiste, then it goes down much smoother (though the artwork is awesome, no matter how you slice it.)

Animal Man is hobbled by its workmanlike art, but the writing is spot-on, though not as timeless as one might hope.

The Invisibles is largely great, though the thread gets lost near the end, which is a real shame. I almost wish he'd rearrange it, once he gets some time between himself and the work. New X-Men suffers a bit from the same thing, but the highs aren't as high, nor are the lows as low.

Flex Mentallo, if you can get it, is as pure as anything Morrison has ever written. It's an undiluted hit, and bite-sized in comparison to his other works. Doom Patrol is both baffling and sentimental. The art sometimes, like Animal Man, gets in the way a bit, but aside from that, it's an astonishing work.

Of course, lots of people think it's just insane gibberish. Same with The Filth, which rewarded a second reading on my part, but you have to know what to read and what's just there to be disturbing and unappealing.

Seaguy was awesome. Still is.

I don't believe the ammount of love Earth 2's getting. Beautiful art, sure (Quitely's page compostions are just perfect), but the story really is nothing special. In fact I find most of his JLA stuff a bit tiresomely hyperactive.

(It's a bit like watching old Dr Who stories - the series was intended as 25-minute chunks with a mandatory week's wait in between. If there's zero wait in between episodes then you often get the impression of a great deal of capture-escape activity which has zero overall narrative purpose, whereas at the time it was about creating tension *within* an episode)

I love Grant's writing, but there's no necessity that everyone should. His JLAs are my favourite mainline superhero stories ever, even though the art is mediocre. The way he combined outrageously huge ideas and menaces with unforgettable little character moments moved me enormously, and I can't remember a time I was so eagerly awaiting the next issue of any series - Tom's right that these were written as individual issues, not chapters of eventual trades.

I love the Doom Patrols as well - the best run of ideas in comics anywhere, for me.

Kill Your Boyfriend

Invisibles - except for the very end, but I'm not very objective on this since it got me back into reading comics

Mystery Play - I never hear anyone mention this, but it's a lovely little book.

New X-Men - This is really up there with his best work, because you got the standard Grant bonuses (great characterization, cosmic imaginativeness) plus I think it made him plot much more tightly than usual.

Seaguy

Other than that, I'm reading his older stuff a trade at a time (JLA, Animal Man, Doom Patrol). With his more uneven work (Arkham, the Filth, FF) there's enough of the Grant-y things that I like in them to make it enjoyable.

The bottom line, though, is that I'll always buy his comics because he's one of the few comic creators that make me feel like he's really TRYING every time out, even when he revisits his standard themes.

I think Porter's just gotten better as an artist - those JLA pages were from TEN YEARS AGO. But, yeah, Livesay is doing him some good.

DV, what didn't you like about Marvel Boy? I only read an issue of it, but everyone was raving about it at the time.

I've mentioned before that one bit of Morrisoniana I can't recommend is his Swamp Thing run with Millar -- it has its merits, but it was such an abrupt about-face in the middle of long-running plots -- presumably he was brought on to save sales -- that I've never really forgiven it. And ultimately, even in Swamp Thing continuity, it just isn't very relevant.

Ah, I'd forgot that was by Morrison too! Yeah, it's a nice book, though it perhaps aimed a bit higher than it could reach (a common theme in Morrison's work, I guess). Definitely worth a read though.

haha I was thinking about how he treated the changes to cast in JLA (EG electric Superman) as purely consmetic, then remembered they were purely cosmetic anyway!

He didn't just abandon her changes, though -- he pretty much rolled the carpet back to Moore, and then fiddled with that run while he was at it.

Anyway, Andy Diggle's recreated everything again and then handed it over to another writer, so I'm pretty sure Morrison has recieved karmic justice for his slights against Nancy A. The wheel has turned.

the first issue was boring and nothing happened in it.

can someone explain the appeal of Kill Your Boyfriend, which I remember as a pretty lame sexy-girl-goes-on-rampage kind of thing.

That would be nice to see, as both Morrison and Ennis have massively botched New Orleans in the past.

Animal Man has now been rescued from obscurity hooray, and with eight buckets of luck Doom Patrol will follow suit. but stuff like:

Zenith
Flex Mentallo
his first two Doctor Who stories with John Ridgway on art (the third one, with Hitch, sucked)
actually most or all his short stories, whether for DC (eg that two Flashes and Gar Logan thing from Secret Origins, the war toys thing with Quitely from some Vertigo anthology) or indies (erm, the Born To Be Wild story x 2?) are unavailable. is St Swithins Day OOP again?

and for fuxache
BIG DAVE
Dare!
Really & Truly!
NEW GODDAMN ADVENTURES OF MOTHERFUCKING HITLER!!!!

can't be had easily if at all. Batman:Gothic has been in print for over a decade and is one of the lamest things he's ever done. JLA is so crippled by the awful, posed-action-figure art that it's an effort to get through, but is all laid out on your bookstore's shelves - once you do get through it, then yeah it's a really well-handled trademark-polishing, but hardly a creative pinnacle. New X-Men same applies to a lesser degree: bonus points for less shit art and really great collections (ie the hardcovers).

even good things that are in print are compromised: the Filth trade is printed on man-sized tissues, and the Invisibles books are all higgeldy-piggeldy. Too short, printed out of order, no sensible thought given to unifying designs either for the whole series or by volume.

he was my favourite writer at 15, and that carries great residual affection. but I can totally understand why someone would try and get into him now, with no way of picking up most of his really inventive, creatove or fun work, wuold be baffled by the acclaim.

what is Big Dave?

Two stories ran during their editing stint, drawn by Steve Parkhouse in his Bojeffries style. Another ran a few months later, drawn by Anthony Williams in his "who am I, you ask? I am shit" style, and coloured despite being drawn for B&W. A fourth one turned up eventually, drawn by Parkhouse again and now in colour - not bad colour, but I think his cartoony style always works better in b&w (cf. Happenstance & Kismet). Plus one about Young Dave in an annual.