From the Annals of Fauxprundity: THIS STORY IS ABOUT GRANT MORRISON WRITING THIS STORY!

Two or three years back, tomemos and I were discussing Grant Morrison's The Invisibles and he said something like, "Morrison is the ultimate 'either/or' author writing today: you either love and appreciate him or hate and are incapable of understanding why other people appreciate him."  Until this week, I never understood quite what he meant. 

With most polarizing literary figures—Pynchon, Barthelme, Acker, Wallace, and so forth—even when a person chokes on the air of consuete affectation, he still understands why other readers happily inhale it.  Pound might not be your bag, for example, but you understand why someone else would stick his head in it.  It also works the other way around: I love Ulysses, but I can understand why an intelligent person would just as soon chute the book as read it.

Except with Grant Morrison. 

The chapter Wolk devotes to him in Reading Comics scans like a fanboy's paean to a body of work he barely understands:

It's smart and complicated, and sometimes rushed and baffling, but mostly it's awesome, and where The Invisibles occasionally kicks back to indulge in its metaphysical side, Seven Soldiers starts hammering the FUN!!! button on its first page and never really stops.  Still, it's loaded to the gills with subtext.  It doubles as a Kabbalistic parable that also discusses the relationship between two-dimensional and three-dimensional existence and features symbolic correspondences with the chakras and the elements and planets—nearly every character, object, and incident in it has some kind of distinct allegorical value.  The symbolism, as clear as it is, is almost never made explicit, but if you're looking for it, it's there on every page. (278)

What can a critic do with a paragraph in which someone praises Morrison for writing an obliquely-allegorical new-age amphibian with a fun-button?  Nothing.  So this past week I sat down and read reams and reams of Morrison (about 70 percent of the material on this bibliography) and came to the conclusion that tomemos knows of what he speaks—because now I both hate Grant Morrison and am incapable of seeing why anyone appreciates him.  Why?

Because in the end every Grant Morrison story is about Grant Morrison writing stories.  Consider the final issue of his run on Animal Man (1990):

 

Morrison inserts himself into the story so his character, Animal Man, can learn he's a character in the comic Animal Man.  This scene works because for two years the book had relentlessly fiddled with its meta-fictional conceit.  (As with, for example, the Passion of Wiley E. Coyete.)  Moreover, the consequences of this meta-fictional interaction work within the confines the of the narrative: Buddy Baker had been distraught over the murder of his wife and children, and as a result of his conversation with Morrison, they are resurrected (none the wiser for their grisly murders) and returned to him by the end of the issue.  The narrative ruptures draw attention to the conventional features of comics as a genre.  They differ in degree from the sort of formal ruptures all comics employ:

The rock breaks through the panel and lands somewhere else on the page.  Happens all the time to comic projectiles: they bust through one panel to do violence in another.  I'm all for formal experimentation.  Just last week I wrote (without the emphasis) that "if a close-reading reveals that a work flirts with the formal elements of its genre or genres—whatever they may be—that work should be canonized."  Only Morrison has devoted the last two decades to an increasingly aggressive flirtation with convention regardless of whether his advances were warranted.  Put differently:

Most readers hold to a folk theory of artistic development whereby the longer an author writes, the more complicated his or her work becomes.  So the young Joyce writes clever realist sucker-punches in Dubliners; experiments his way through Stephen Hero into the introspective of Portrait; transcends the lyricism of the final pages of Portrait alongside stately, plump Buck Mulligan in the "Telemachiad" and spends the rest of that novel (Ulysses) and the next (Finnegans Wake) outdoing what he did the day before.  By that light, the fact that Morrison now writes about how that rock's complicit in a conspiracy to break not just through the panel but through the very page itself because perception of the two-dimensional fictional world in which it exists blends with the three-dimensional perceptual systems by which we come to understand that fictional world in our minds demonstrates the evolution of his particular brand of genius.  But his pursuit of this meta-fictional prey has been so singular as to override all other narrative concerns.  Had Joyce wanted to write another "Araby" in 1928 he would not have written it in Wakese because the form would overwhelm the story's slight content. 

At the present moment, Morrison is so unconcerned with such matters that he subjugates supremely non-slight material to his meta-fictional concerns: Batman does not die in Batman R.I.P.   He gets clipped by the Omega Sanction ("THE DEATH THAT IS LIFE!") and forced into a feedback loop of simultaneous reincarnation in which he will face hardships again and again and again for all eternity and if that sounds an awful lot like what a character featured in multiple monthly comics (Batman, Detective Comics, Batman and Robin, Batman: Streets of Gotham, Superman/Batman, Batman Confidential, Batman and the Outsiders, Trinity, Justice League of America, All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, and Batman: The Brave and the Bold) then you've been paying attention.

I'll reward you for it (and be a little more charitable to Morrison) tomorrow.

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

"Because in the end every Grant Morrison story is about Grant Morrison writing stories. "

I haven't read 70% of Morrison's bibliography -- mostly I've read Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and a few smaller Vertigo things -- but that was his formative period. And what I think that you're missing is that writing superhero comics that are about yourself writing stories was transformed by Vertigo into a sort of comics subgenre. It becomes something more than an individual artistic rut; it's more like taking John Le Carre and asking why he doesn't stop writing spy novels.

Even considering it as subgenre, would James Joyce get stuck like that? No. But no one in comics is James Joyce.

But you have to take it seriously that Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison -- three of comics' best writers, I'd say -- all like to do variations of the same thing. That has to turn it into something more than Morrison's individual tic.

[Stephen Frug]

Hmmm... I like Morrison. This isn't a full defense, but a few random questions:

1) What about We3? That, I think, has to be said as being something other than Morrison writing about Morrison. I lot of people think it's one of his best works (I'd put it on tier two, I think, but it's good (albeit, yeah, sentimental.))

2) What about Morrison's humor? One of the reasons I like Doom Patrol so much is that it's just so damn funny. I mean, the Brotherhood of *Dada*? Holy Dr. Pepper instead of Holy Water?

3) I'm curious if you've read Marc Singer's late, lamented blog (link here: http://notthebeastmaster.typepad.com/weblog/ ). He's one of the best writers on Morrison I know, and I'm curious what you'd make of him.

SF

[SEK]

...but that was his formative period. And what I think that you're missing is that writing superhero comics that are about yourself writing stories was transformed by Vertigo into a sort of comics subgenre.

I'm not missing that at all: what I'm identifying as a problem is the fact that he seems trapped in that period.

It becomes something more than an individual artistic rut; it's more like taking John Le Carre and asking why he doesn't stop writing spy novels.

Or why he won't stop writing variations of the same spy novel.

But you have to take it seriously that Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison -- three of comics' best writers, I'd say -- all like to do variations of the same thing. That has to turn it into something more than Morrison's individual tic.

They've all explored it, but none so tenaciously (or exclusively) as Morrison. What I've half-written for today addresses this via a comparison between Morrison's Batman R.I.P. and Gaiman's What Ever Happened to the Caped Crusader? Gaiman knows the difference between the story being the story and the story being a story, as with the prelude to Doll's House, for example. The act of storytelling needs foregrounding on occasion, not all occasions. There's a joylessness to reading a Morrison story in which the characters never become more than characters even within their own fiction.

What about We3? That, I think, has to be said as being something other than Morrison writing about Morrison. I lot of people think it's one of his best works

I'm going to address this later, but material like We3 works because it's bounded (the same holds for the first 10 issues of All Star Superman); but when DC gives him the keys to the entire kingdom and he takes it upon himself to tackle every continuity error in all its glorious erroneousness, he spins wildly out of control. I've just started going through that blog---which, damn it, of course I found after it went dark---but I love this:

All this could be forgiven if the series added up to something more than a sheaf of character designs and continuity notes for a story that gets outlined rather than told.

That hints at 1) why academic-oriented comic-folk are attracted to him and 2) why his recent work reads so joyless. But now I'm going to spend the morning reading through Singer's blog. Thanks a lot, Frug! (No, seriously, thanks a lot. Great stuff that is.) One last note:

What about Morrison's humor? One of the reasons I like Doom Patrol so much is that it's just so damn funny. I mean, the Brotherhood of *Dada*? Holy Dr. Pepper instead of Holy Water?

It's disappeared, hasn't it? The Doom Patrol material's damn funny at times, as is Animal Man, but it's also occasionally poignant and moving, and his recent stuff isn't either of those either. In fact, he's far too quick to stuff King Mob-style exposition in Superman's mouth for five panels and that just doesn't work.

[Dominic]

Seaguy is quite a departure...

[SEK]

That's one of the ones I wasn't able to put my hands on; that said, even if it's a departure, wouldn't it be a departure from an established late-period Morrison standard? (Because I could very well be wrong, what with 70 not being the same as 100 percent.)

[Rich Puchalsky]

"They've all explored it, but none so tenaciously (or exclusively) as Morrison. "

My theory, based on Animal Man / Doom Patrol, is that Morrison's problem is with narrative as such. At the end of even a Vertigo run, there's a tying-up gesture. Morrison really isn't about that, so his tying-up gestures end up being escapes into metanarrative. Making it about Morrison writing stories means that it can't end, at least not while he's still writing stories.

[Ahistoricality]

variations of the same thing.

Like "1001 Arabian Nights," "Chuck Amock" and a dozen other classics. At this point, doing it badly isn't really a sign of distinction.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Your comment may be a bit too cryptic for me to understand, Ahistoricality, but I think by "variations of the same thing" you're referring back to my mention of the Vertigo syndrome. I don't understand how 1001 Arabian Nights really does this. Do the people in the stories ever Scheherazade ever interrupt or end their stories by themselves acknowledging Scheherazade as their creator? There's a big difference between bumping things up to to the top level (i.e. saying "This is a story, and you're not going to hear the end of it until tomorrow") and making the top level pervade all the others (i.e. having Scheherazade appear within the stories and stories-within-stories, having perhaps a story-within-story end by the character saying "But Scheherazade has pleased the king now, so there's no need for my story to go on -- my life stops here").

There's a difference between a storyteller and a demiurge. The demiurge, in this kind of fiction:

* often appears as a character;
* works out more or less obviously their own writing problems through their characters;
* meditates on their flaws as a creator.

For instance, the Sandman issue where Dr. Dee torments four characters at a diner. Dee is a stand-in for Gaiman, and the issue is about his distaste that the kind of writing that he does requires melodramatic horror (among other things). That's established pretty well by the text itself, his comments on it, and so on, but most certainly by the opening sequence where a waitress muses on what stories she would write about the people there if she were a writer -- she'd give them all happy lives. The rest of the issue implicit says that that would be boring -- or, at least, not suitably dramatic enough for the genre -- and that what people want, or at least all that Gaiman knows how to make them want, is people being tormented. It's really a touchstone issue for the Vertigo writers, I think.

[bbass]

To what extent can you ignore this if the story works on its own terms, though? It's definitely a tic / recurring motif, but in stuff like the Coyote Passion, it's a story that seems to work on its own terms and is also ridiculously funny, despite the obligatory incorporation of GM as the creator-god of the metafictional universe. Is it just that considered as a whole, GM's body of work can't be "canon" because it keeps harping on this one theme?

[Ahistoricality]

Rich, I'll have to go back to Dr. Dee at some point, because I don't buy the idea of Dee as standing for Gaiman, at least not without a good second look. I'll say this, though: There's nothing inherently more interesting about Dee's stories than the waitresses; they're really two sides of the same coin.

[Wally]

I have this half-baked theory that Morrison is Ellis if Ellis had no friends, Gaiman is Morrison if Morrison sat in the corners at parties and didn't get to sleep with all the interesting sensitive girls in black because they were assfucking Alan Moore in the pantry (Moore is Sim if Sim had seen a snake instead of a uterus when he went mad), Ellis is Ennis if he hadn't been beaten as a child...

No.

Actually I have a half-baked theory about the aforementioned Britpunk comics writers' obsessive "coolness == illusion-shattering narrative transcendence" bullshit, with King Mob and the super-white fella from Planetary and Moore's Constantine and the Hunter Semi-Thompson from Transmetropolitan being basically identical embodiments of the same impulse that produces endless variations on the same 'everything is connected' freshman-dorm Illuminatus! knockoff (RAW R.I.P.) and Morrison's disdain for the medium's genre norms, but fuck it, I'm back from a Catholic wedding in Chicago and need to go punch a child, tell you later man.

[Martin Wisse]

I can't help but feel that much of what Morrison has been doing as a writer working on these big DC universe projects the last five years or so is driven by boredom at the standard superhero story, that his flight into meta-textuality is an escape from having to take Batman seriously as a character. In a way it's similar to Moore's slumming on various Liefeld projects a decade earlier, which also went meta from the start.

His creator owned projects seem to suffer much less from overwhelming metatextuality.

[SEK]

BBass:

To what extent can you ignore this if the story works on its own terms

Excellent point, and sort of what I was getting at with Animal Man, which did work on its own terms: I don't think we can ignore the meta-fictional elements when the story works, I think we do ignore them (at least to the extent that they don't actively annoy us).

Wally, I'll deal with you shortly.

Martin:

I can't help but feel that much of what Morrison has been doing as a writer working on these big DC universe projects the last five years or so is driven by boredom at the standard superhero story, that his flight into meta-textuality is an escape from having to take Batman seriously as a character. In a way it's similar to Moore's slumming on various Liefeld projects a decade earlier, which also went meta from the start.

I don't think Moore slummed on Supreme: he was genuinely interested in futzing around with Superman more than DC ever let him, so he took the opportunity when Liefeld offered it. (Though I hope the script included specific directions for the number and placement of feet.) Nor do I think Morrison's particularly bored by the genre --- seems more like the opposite, like he's addicted to and regularly overdoses on it. I'm still working on that other Morrison post, though, and I'll address this some more in it.

[SJG]

You do a pretty good job of describing the varying styles of Morrison's metatextuality. I think you can get to the bottom of his usage of the device by understanding he's a sigil magician. He wrote an article for Disinformation about sigil magic and why it's the best kind of pop-culture/corporate magic. By using his works as a canvas for his sigils, he implants tulpas into the minds of all readers and draws power(or something else?) from them. Usually they are pictographic but can be a repeated succession of words like a mantra. He often describes Invisibles as a hypersigil. The metatexual device is just him describing what he's doing to the reader. He talks about this a bunch in his discussion panels as well.
As to the validity of sigils? I've never tried it, but a great number of western esotericists and occultists throughout the ages have stood by this sort of magic. Buddhist and qigong masters acknowledge it but say that it is a low form of magic, the stuff of ordinary people, but not necessarily demonic or black magic.