Grant Morrison, anyone?

[Wandering Sensei: Moderator Man]

Should we bring the Morrison discussion over here now? I don't know how...

[Figserello]

Good on you, for giving it a go.

It's not at all a typical book, so I suppose it wouldn't be eveyone's cup of tea. Perhaps I'm a little biased as O'Brien was Irish (and was born about 10 miles from where I grew up), and this book captures a lot of how we enjoy language for its own sake.

You are right in that not a lot happens, but if you have ever listened to Irish people talking to one another, we can talk for hours without actually saying anything worthwhile. The talk itself is the thing and the well turned phrase; the Oul Blarney; the Gift of the Gab; only blethering.

"Tricky little man, you are hard to place, and it is not easy to guess your station.

Tell me, what is your objection to life?"

"Life, is it? Can you put it in your pipe and smoke it? Can you take it home and strip it when you have a half dozen pints in you and you're shivering with the passion?"

That's great writing, in my view (and I'm recalling it from a memory of last reading it 15 years ago). There's just something fantastic about it.

O'Brien loved comics and the pulps, by the way, even though he was up there with Joyce in a literary sense, and a lot of this book throws in elements of them. Comicbook logic.

A lot of his work is just plain funny, so there isn't as much mileage for academics to parse it down and analyse it, the same way Joyce gets, so he isn't as highly regarded outside Ireland.

I loved the bits where the footnotes began to take over the book. A great parody of academia, with the two guys dispute escalating to heavily armed man-to-man conflict. That's hilarious, unless of course you are itching to see what the main character is being put through next, in which case its just a drag.

De Selby's story in The Third Policeman is very like what Morrison often does, in that he seems to be marginal to the story being told, but he's really central. Like John A'Dreams, or Audrey Murray.

There are a lot of similarities and points of comparison between O'Brien and Morrison's work and between The Third Policeman and The Invisibles, but its hard for me to see why the book gets a specific mention, when the other real-world books mentioned seem to be much more central to what's actually going on in the series.

Art always wins out over logic with Morrison, and its pleasing that the book is mentioned in the chapter of The Invisibles where we are introduced to the three unusual policemen.

Of all the writers mentioned in The Invisibles, though, O'Brien is the one whose whole approach and iconoclastic postmodern style seems closest to Morrison's. Morrison puts great store by his background as a Celt, so probably identifies a lot with O'Brien. Both were unique in their fields.

***

Still on the subject of Invisibles background materials I haven't finished Maya Derren's Divine Horseman book yet, but it must be a highly regarded book as it seems to be required reading for anthropology or arts students at the university where I work. There are a lot of copies of the book in the otherwise sparsely stocked comparative religions/anthropology section.

[Figserello]

Here's a link from elsewhere on the board to a neoclassical painting of the steps of Varanasi in India, where some of the key moments in The Invisibles takes place...

[Mark Sullivan (Vertiginous Mod)]

Anyone interested in rereading The Filth and discussing it? I'm not just looking at you, Figs! I'll be finishing my rereading of Transmetropolitan this week, and I feel ready to get back into Morrison at his strangest. I'd expect to start it the weekend of March 6, which gives folks some time to line up a library copy. At my reading speed, the 13 issues should take about three weeks to get through.

[Wandering Sensei: Moderator Man]

Assuming I can get started tonight, I think I can read it in time for this discussion. I just fall asleep as soon as my bed hits the pillow these days.

Mark Sullivan said:

Anyone interested in rereading The Filth and discussing it? I'm not just looking at you, Figs! I'll be finishing my rereading of Transmetropolitan this week, and I feel ready to get back into Morrison at his strangest. I'd expect to start it the weekend of March 6, which gives folks some time to line up a library copy. At my reading speed, the 13 issues should take about three weeks to get through.

[Figserello]

I was gonna say 'Tex Porneau, here I come!', but it doesn't sound quite right...

[Larfleeze]

I've never read Doom Patrol but I loved his All-Star Superman. I believe that is one of the best comic series of the last decade...and that's coming from a reader who is none to keen on most Superman stories.

[Mark Sullivan (Vertiginous Mod)]

Larfleeze said:

I've never read Doom Patrol but I loved his All-Star Superman. I believe that is one of the best comic series of the last decade...and that's coming from a reader who is none to keen on most Superman stories.

I loved his All-Star Superman, too. And I rarely read any superhero books any more (although I was once a Superman fan). I'd say his Animal Man run is more like All-Star Superman than Doom Patrol was, if you haven't read that.

[Jason Marconnet (Pint sized mod)]

I haven't gone through this whole thread by will you be discussing Morrison's New X-men? It's one of my favorite comic runs, ever.

[Figserello]

Jason Marconnet (Lime_Coke) said:

I haven't gone through this whole thread by will you be discussing Morrison's New X-men? It's one of my favorite comic runs, ever.

The opening post of the other Grant Morrison thread (the son and heir of this one, in a way) has all the Morrison books we've been looking at systematically anywhere on this board and the old board. If it doesn't have a hyperlink, we haven't covered it. The last two big longform projects of Grant's that we haven't touched yet are his JLA and his New X-men. I'm looking forward to rereading both, as I loved the JLA first time through, but haven't read them since, and I fell off the New X-men cart about 1/3 of the way through. I think a lot of them were published late and I kinda forgot I was collecting it at all. But I've bought them all in back-issues now and I'd love to reread them.

There isn't any system for deciding what's next on the list. If you are up for rereading New X-men, you could start its own thread and I'll throw in my 2.5 cents worth. New X-men was hugely popular at the time, so there might be a few posters able to join in the discussion. Otherwise, I'll get around to starting the topic eventually. I've got an obsession now with ploughing through all Morrison's stuff no matter how long it takes. Sad, I know!

[Figserello]

And we'll be getting to All-Star Superman one fine day too, Larfleeze.

It's indeed a real high point in all Grant's work.

[Wandering Sensei: Moderator Man]

Figserello said:

And we'll be getting to All-Star Superman one fine day too, Larfleeze.

It's indeed a real high point in all Grant's work.

And I'm also convinced that it's canon in the Morrisonverse. Read Ultramarine Corps and tell me it isn't!

[Figserello]

There's an infant universe called Qwewq in both, and each seems to be our universe. But one is kept in Batman's cave on Pluto in the DCU and the other is kept in the All-Star Superman's Fortress of Solitude in the North Pole.

Literalism is often a curse when reading superhero comics, but that seems to show that they are two different entities in two different universes.

It looks like one of those ideas of Grant's that he just can't let go of. That our universe is still only developing, and is kept under the watchful eye of these benevolent superbeings we all love, is a great, comforting notion, so I'm happy to see it re-aired.

Comparing how it plays out in the two cases probably throws more light on what Grant is trying to say with Qwewq. The trouble is that the DCU Qwewq, despite having the Ultramarines on their clandestine mission inside it, grows up to be the terrible Hunter Neh-Buh-Loh and dies somehow, from a lack of cohesion. What's that saying about our reality? Grim stuff.

Maybe from a mind-blowing fifth dimensional point of view, its possible that our universe is kept both on Pluto in the DCU and in the North Pole in A*S, in which case both might be the same thing...

Far out...