grant morrison
Every house is haunted
As established, I’m a Grant Morrison fan, but apparently I’m a bit out-of-the-loop because I didn’t know about his new project Joe the Barbarian. There’s a great preview and write-up over at Super Colossal. The series chronicles a teenager’s travels through his own house:
[…] the next seven issues […] will document parallel journeys through the house. One where we follow Joe descending through the house from the attic to the basement (where I am assuming his medication is?) and the other where he follows a Narnian/Wizard of Oz like adventure populated by his toys and the contents of the house.
And I love this bit of context from Morrison:
So like I said, it’s really quite grounded, because it’s all about this journey down from the attic to the basement of the house. And I think we can all relate to that, because man of us will have had those moments when we were sick or feverish and had to venture down to the kitchen to get something that would make us better. And we all know how difficult it can be to cross familiar ground if you’re weak or injured or delirious. The terrain of an ordinary home can easily become larger than life and apocalyptically meaningful.
What a great hook to hang a story on! There are shades of Toy Story and The Indian in the Cupboard here, or even Home Alone. It’s that same denaturalization.
Click through and check out the last panel. It alone makes me want—maybe even need—to check this series out.
Gaiman, Morrison, and the strange substratum
Hey cool—a long New Yorker profile on Neil Gaiman by Dana Goodyear. I like this line:
“Sandman,” Gaiman says, is sexually transmitted. “Guys who wanted their girlfriends to read comics would give them ‘Sandman.’ They’d break up, and the girl would take the ‘Sandman’s and infect the next guy.”
(Hmm—a general theory of cult media transmission?)
But reading about Neil Gaiman reminds me of another comic book writer with a striking accent who you ought to know about. He’s not as famous as Gaiman, but I think he’s exerted just as much influence on culture in the last few decades. He’s Grant Morrison.
His All-Star Superman series is one the gems of comics of the past few years: built on familiar foundations, but thoroughly, thoroughly weird. It leaves the self-conscious grit of superhero reboots behind, but it’s not without sharp edges. In fact, it’s hard to put a finger on Morrison’s tone in the series; the whole thing is rainbow-colored but super-sophisticated.
Like a Bollywood movie directed by Wes Anderson.
And it’s particularly remarkable if you also read The Invisibles, the long series that came earlier, and is still really Morrison’s signature work. The Invisibles is a boiling nine-dimensional stew of symbols and sub-cultures, and I mean, it’s just really, really weird. But it’s this guy, the guy responsible for this deep utter weirdness, that DC has now put in charge of the Justice League, Batman, and Superman, all in turn. The weirdest writer of them all is the king of the castle.
So, just to be super-clear—this is your geek-cred talking point—Grant Morrison is the most popular, most important comic book writer working today.
But this is the important part: I think if you look on any writer’s shelf in TV or Hollywood, you’ll find Morrison. That’s definitely true of writers of shows like Battlestar Galactica and LOST. Yes—in fact, LOST is basically a TV series written by Grant Morrison. It’s his techno-occultism, his rainbow sophistication. Comic-book adventure meets quantum foam meets Rider-Waite. I really believe the writing staff at LOST would cop to it.
If “the weird” has gone—is going—mainstream, Grant Morrison (along with Neil Gaiman) gets a big chunk of the credit. He’s been toiling for decades, digging this underground lake that connects all these points, all these people.
Nerds of many worlds, all reading the same comics—all reaching down into the secret substratum of the strange.