Is this the most underrated Grant Morrison book?
If not, what is?
Let's talk Grant!
>>84172963
What is it with Morrison and this style of glasses?
>>84172963
Not the "most", but I think Annihilator is underrated. Lot of talk about Nameless, not much about Annihilator.
>>84173429
I simply found Nameless much much better, which isn't a knack at Annihilator, just that Nameless was fucking amazing while Annihilator was really fucking great. Klaus is also really fucking great.
>>84173315
John Lennon (drums!)
>>84172963
>If not, what is?
Vimanarama. Fight me.
>>84174341
heynong man
>>84173315
>What is it with the 90s and John Lennon and those glasses?
What are you, like 12? As in you literally weren't alive.
>>84174405
>Vimanarama
>Phil Bond
fuck that. He did all the Invisibles issues that I hated.
>>84172963
I'd say his Marvel UK Zoids run
>>84177393
t. Alan Moore
>>84175171
CLASSIC JARLS
I binged on a great deal of his work when I was first getting into this stuff and I am glad I did. The resulting burn out led me to far more interesting comics.
Some of his stuff still stands up well but the reputation he has and the blind devotion he puts in people is unearned I find.
>>84178226
Its because making comics ARE LITERALLY his way to live his religion, his belief on meme magic makes he put his soul on his work to affect others.
So people answer to that in a religious way. He is literally preaching to them.
>>84178226
I dunno, I got burned out on him after reading Action Comics, ASS, FC, the batepic, Flex, Animal Man and early JLA,
but WWE1 and reading Kid Eternity got me back into him, and I've just orded the Doom Patrol and New X-Men omnis, and I have Seven Soldiers ready to go on my shelf.
/blog
Point being, I had been getting to the point where I felt it was all hype, but I fell back in love and I think that he is, if nothing else, fairly unique in the PRESENTATION of his ideas.
I find Morrison to be a slightly more unhinged version of Milligan, insofar as writing styles.
It is interesting what comics of his people hold up and what falls away
>>84178471
>I find Morrison to be a slightly more unhinged version of Milligan, insofar as writing styles.
>>84178300
I mean in regards to with his work it almost doesn't matter who is drawing it people will eat it up.
I would flip that personally.
>>84178528
*I would swap Morrison and Milligan in that regard. I feel like that comes from only reading American Milligan (hell Shade is almost more out there than most of Morrison's comics)
>>84178550I've only read Animal Man, Batman, and JLA: Kid Amazo from Milligan. I just compared his AM and Bat runs to Morrison's.
>>84178606
There is very much two Peter Milligan's and you have only read the one considered not nearly as good.
>>84178631
Damn... I loved the stuff I have read.
So would you say Shade is his best? Or what?
I'm partial to DC, but anything goes, really.
>>84178673
My favorite Milligan comic is Engima, shade is absolutely spectacular for 50 issues, and then after that the stuff he did in the UK is out of this world.
>>84178724
>Fegredo
Nice. Will check it out.
>>84178631
Not that anon, but the above mentioned stuff was great and Batman and Animal man would be some of his better works, if not best. If only Milligan kept up his consistency over the years.
The thing about Morrison is that unlike Milligan or Moore, he isn't afraid to put his weird shit in mainstream comics like Batman, Superman or Final crisis. I think that's what sours a lot of people over Morrison. He writes some out there stuff for a very different demography compared to the Vertigo one.
>>84178830
Those can't compare and wouldn't have compared to Engima or Shade or Strange Days or Sooner or Later or the early Bad Company or Skin or Rogan Gosh
But that doesn't mean anything because all the books exist as things that fight for your time.
Also Engima is 100% a Superhero comic
>>84172963
I'd say the New Adventures of Hitler is pretty underrated, or at least under mentioned. I've only seen it spoken of once in a story time here years ago.
I tend to think of Grant as existing in several artistic periods, that can be judged individually.
>78 to 87, Early Period.
Fairly run of the mill, he was defiantly an Alan Moore copyist at this point. Zenith stands out as interesting.
>88 to 2000, Classic Period
This is probably his most ambitious period in terms of bending the genre by adding subversive elements such as dadaism, surrealism, occultism and finding his own voice. Classic books like Animal Man, Doom Patrol and the seminal Arkham Asylum start off this period and morph into more personal works such as The Invisibles, Sebastian O, Kill Your Boyfriend and Flex Mentallo which is probably his crowning achievement up to this point.
>2001 to 2004, New X-Men Years
New X-Men is probably Grants most hard to classify work. It's probably the most interesting run on the X-Men that had been done since Chris Cleremont, but he even admits he fucked up on some bits like making Magneto a genocidal maniac. In all honesty it was actually one of the first comics I had ever read so I actually very partial to this run.
>2005 to 2012, Infinite Batmans
He's very productive at this point and is using the DC universe for all its worth, with Batman, It's at this point that I feel that Grant is starting to come down with a case of Stephen King syndrome, trying to shoehorn all his older works into some kind of shared universe/ interconnected epic. It's really quite technically brilliant, but at the same time I can't help but feel it's a bit forced( t make us buy more books).
>2013 to Present, Current period
He's been making some pretty good comics in the past few years but I can't help but feel mos of them are just movie pitches in comic form (Happy!, and Klause come to mind) and Klause was the first Morrison comic I was ever bored with.
>>84179226
The Multiversity is damn good, imo.
>>84178865
I've only read Rogan Gosh and Shade from Vertigo, but Engima isn't a mainstream comic that most of Batman and Superman readers would usually read.
>>84172963
Loved it; the ongoing...not so much.
Why isn't Seven Soldiers recognized as one of the great artistic accomplishments of the human race?
I posted his whole run of Doom Patrol, y'all got no excuse if you haven't read it.
>>84172963
I haven't read many Morrison stories, most of what I've seen has been the mainstream BIG2 superhero work, from what I can tell the more constrained by corporate comic status-quo he is the more the work will suck. He needs free reign.
So because I can't honestly make a comparison between *all* of his stories, and I know what stories have been praised here on /co/ and what one's haven't, and what types of stories have worked out well, I'm just going to have to make my value judgement on the odd facts I know:
It would have to be Batman: R.I.P..
Readers were expecting it to be the "death" of Batman event that was promised (that happened in Final Crisis) and because of that, the response to what was otherwise a great story was contemptuous for no good reason.
That's the very definition of "underrated".
>>84180183
>I AM fookin joan Lennon
Final Crisis was one of his most beautiful works of all time in the comic industry. It really let me remember why I started reading capeshit.
It showed the world of superheroes at it's most bizarre and horrifying. It was literally despair and death incarnate. Yet, in that Crisis, no one gave up. Even a normal human like Batman did great feats in that Crisis without Morrison resorting to cheap 'Batgod' gimmicks. Most of all, it was the story of overcoming evil. Which at the end of the day, is what superheroes were all about.
They were not maniacs. They were not morons. They were good men and women who represented the best in us.
I just wish more writers remembered that.
>decide to write an honors thesis on Morrison because why not
>20 pages, sounds like plenty
>Start reading Jameson, Debord
>told I should refer to the history of comics before Morrison, and of course should simplify for the people unfamiliar with cape comics
>gotta explain pre and post crisis, what that means, going to be at ten pages before I can even get to Morrison and then I have that much space to talk about BOTH Animal Man AND Flex, plus a conclusion.
It's got so crammed I'm paralyzed every time I write.
Help me.
>>84180832
It's not a question of remembering, it's understanding the mechanics and minutiae of how these things can and could be portrayed and conveyed for the readership with emotional impact.
Just think about all the times you've seen some cut-rate writer try as hard as they could to create the desired emotion in the reader and they just can't because they don't know how.
That's not to say there's no thugs in the industry pushing stories about self-congratulatory raw superhero strength with no depth at all, or silly writers who know better but underperform out of slothfull habit or general apathy.
It's harder than it looks.
>>84181571
The strength of a writer is also the ability to know what not to write. Finish it at however many pages then review it and cut the parts that don't need to be there
>>84181571
Yikes. I'd reccomendrereading Flex for inspiration.
>>84181610
>It's harder than it looks.
I was listening to Gilbert Hernandez talk about his Wonder Woman story in Sensation Comics. He admitted that writing a decent superhero story was much harder than he though it would be
>>84181571
Start with footnotes, a structural outline, and a overarching message or insight that you want comunicated by your efforts.
The footsnotes can often spur writing as it's own inspiration, or offer subjects to move on to next when you hit writer's block. The structure is important to keep things to the point and free of rambling on any one thing for too long. And having that theme/point message to go back to and reflect on creates a goal to strive toward and links the different parts of the work together, so that the future reader will find it to be a focused effort overall.
>>84181791
I've got my outline, I just worry that I can't fit it in 20-25.
Basically, it explains what a multiverse is, why the conditions of the industry made it a useful authorial tool, what changes made it go, specifically the older audience, the growing idea of the writer as auteur, and a growing reliance on events. Then I look at Morrison's critique of that through the historical lens of Jameson, I.e. pastiche and self-reflexivity, but also the ideological lens of Debord, saying that Animal Man and Flex are more than metafiction, but evoking the fact that we are living virtual lives just like the fictional characters, which Crisis leaned heavily into by trying to make their characters "more like us" and "more adult" making them debordian Celebrities, necessitating the extreme separation from the reader with "I can see you!" In AM and "who am I" in Flex.
My main problem is that I'm having to balance a historicist and formalist analysis at the same time with limited space.
>>84182644
You already sound beyond any advice I could give.
Perhaps you could structure each topic focus in repetitive (and thus predictable) layering of the analysis so that the readers expect which perspective the writing is going to shift to next?
But then there's always just omitting whatever brings too much lag into the flow of reading it.
Simplicity of design is usually the most elegant solution. But then, I'm a bit of a fool and simple appeals to me.
In short: I dunnoe.
>>84173429
I didn't find annihilator to be pretentious...but maybe obnoxious?
An awful person can make for a great character; but I think when I read it I had seen a few too many of those.
>>84177393
I would murder my own anus for any sort of compilation of that. Too bad Morrison's more or less written it off.
I feel like Sebastian O is pretty damn underrated.
BANE?
