Grant Morrison -- shave-headed baldie

[avram]

Ninth Art, the comics criticism website, has a discussion about Grant Morrison, one of the best writers working in comics. It’s pretty heavily padded, but does contain the occasional gem:

I think the difference between someone like Morrison and Moore is that at 7:30 on a Friday night, Moore is probably out covering himself with goose fat and chanting to the moon, whereas Morrison is probably watching Top Of The Pops.

Two important points that I think the participants miss:

One, Morrison has a very distinctive writing style. Not just the themes that tend to show up in his work (more about that in point 2), but his actual prose. Morrison’s work is full of these astonishing sentences:

• “Empress, my Empress! The wheel is broken! The world is lost!” — The New X-Men
• “I have extreme plans for your head.” — Marvel Boy
• “We’ll swallow all your poisons and piss them out as vintage champagne.” — The Invisibles

Two, the difference between Morrison and Moore. Johnston, Watson, and Wheeler skirt around the edges of this, but they never quite manage to see it. Moore and Morrison are both shamans, but while Moore is a mostly traditional occultist writing in comics about what he’s learned, for Morrison comics are part of his occult experiences, a gateway to another realm of perception. Watson gets part of this, when he mentions that “the last issue [of The Invisibles] is also about four dimensional beings in a three dimensional universe”, but he doesn’t hook it up with the issue of JLA where our heroes visit Mr. Mxyzptlk’s fifth-dimensional home, where parallels are drawn between 5-D perception of a 3-D world and our 3-D perception of the 2-D comics page. This is made even more explicit in issue #3 of Morrison’s latest comic, The Filth, in which a superhero literally smashes into the surface of the page pursuing a higher-dimensional being escaping from the comic they’re both in.