Grant Morrison And His Works

Grant Morrison is an interesting guy when it comes to Comic Books. He loves to do stories that are loaded with Mind Screw!

I have noticed that some people seem to consider him the Second Coming of Comic Books. Personally, I think it's a bad idea to put him on a pedestal like that.

Why? Well, first off, there was that whole debacle with Xorn and Magneto. Morrison portrayed Magneto as a Complete Monster who had to be killed off as soon as possible! This was after writers before him made Magneto into a 3-dimensional character.

Another thing, check out this link. Talia al Ghul is supposed to be a 3-dimensional character. However, Morrison took the romance between Batman and Talia and retconned it to rape, making their child Damian Wayne into a Child by Rape. Furthermore, Talia was turned into a b!+c# who created Leviathan and has totally lost any redeeming qualities she had! Morrison has stated that he hates the al Ghuls.

On the plus side though, she has made almost no appearances since the New 52 relaunch, which would allow other writers to fix this Character Derailment should she make a new appearance.

Let me ask you: is it good Character Development to take a 3-dimensional character and turn hir into a total villain?

edited 5th Feb '12 12:01:56 PM by TiggersAreGreat

Villains can be 3 Dimensional, but abruptly undoing character development rarely goes over well. If a character develops one way, you generally want to develop them another, not just make it out of the blue.

American comics likely won't get a second coming. They had their chance in their Bronze Age and blew it.

Err, Morrison explained Magneto's behavior. He was possessed by John Sublime.

Nobody uses Sublime do they? Why was he really that bad? To tell the truth I barely remember him, some kind of mass of mutant hating microbes? Sure it doesn't make a whole lot of sense but then neither does Galactus and they love using the guy in the purple hat.

Honestly, I don't think Morrison is as good as the hype would tell you, nor is he as bad as the Hype Backlash reports. He's an above average comic book writer but thanks to Sturgeon's Law that doesn't mean he's all that. He is creative, that will always give me at least a passing interest in his work.

I'm of two minds with Morrison.

When he's on a roll, the man is on a roll producing some of the best stories I've ever read like All Star: Superman, Animal Man, Seven Soldiers of Victory and Final Crisis. When he isn't, it all just becomes a mass of ideas that just don't really seem to gel together like Batman: R.I.P, which was actually the series that got me to start writing in the first place.

I really like the JLA stories he did in the late 1990s (although his whole Mageddon story arc ended kind of abruptly), but beyond that and New X-Men I'm not very familiar with most of his work.

Reading JLA and Action comics at the moment (although I already finished his run on JLA). Good stuff. I really like how much energy he puts into his work.

Morrison has great ideas. The problem is, like any good writer he needs a good editor to reign him in when necessary, especially when he's not writing his own original material. But the fans have hyped him so much, he's starting to believe it and act like he should be given authority over everything he writes. No.

And btw, he isn't "The God of Comics". There's one already: [1]

LO Lno. Tezuka only ever created ONE good series (Astro Boy, and by extension; Pluto). Now Jack Kirby on the other hand...he was a God.

^ Ahem.

(Personally, I keep confusing Grant Morrison with Alan Moore, the other famous Western European superhero comic writer who may or may not be insane.)

edited 8th Feb '12 2:40:41 PM by feotakahari

Is it weird that I don't like how Kirby drew mouths? They look... monkeylike to me.

It isn't weird. Kirby pretty much had a style ll his own: square fingers, bulging sinew of muscles, forced perception etc. What made him great was the energy and scope his art and writing had. He may be well know for his art, but to me he'll always be in the same league as Morrison, Moore, Waid and Busiek.

Like Sijo said, Morrison is first and foremost an awesome idea smith... No one in the last 40 or so years, not even Alan Moore, has managed to put so much cool, mind-blowing, freaky concepts and ideas into American mainstream comics. But Morrison's problem is that sometimes he just wants to jam those ideas on paper without too much consideration for plotting, timing, or general story coherence.

Actually, proof of Morrison's flaws as a plotter is in the initial post of this thread. Tiggers Are Great, like many other folks who read Morrison's X-Men run, tend to blame him for "ruining" Magneto, even though he gave a perfectly good explanation for Magneto's "out of character" behaviour. (Magneto was possessed by a sentient mold that entered his system via the drug Kick.) But many people (including other X-Men writers, who retconned Magneto's behaviour almost immediately, without using the handy backdoor Morrison had provided them with) didn't care or even notice that explanation, since Here Comes Tomorrow, the story arc that revealed all this, was a bit of a mess. It was just a non-stop barrage of sci-fi ideas without too much consideration for good plotting or characterization. So I can't really blame anyone who didn't bother to read it well enough to note that Morrison did explain why Magneto behaved like he did in the previous arc. And there are many other Morrison comics that suffer from this "good ideas, weak plotting" syndrome: the final issue of Final Crisis, Rock of Ages, the "artist jam" issues of The Invisibles, etc. So yeah, IMO he probably does need a good editor to overcome his storytelling problems and really shine.

That said, when he has managed to gel his brilliant ideas with good plotting, like in Doom Patrol, All Star Superman, Seven Soldiers etc, the results have been some of the best superhero comics ever made. So I still think Morrison lives up to his reputation, you just need to accept that he can be irritatingly uneven as a writer.

edited 9th Feb '12 6:46:49 AM by Tuomas

That's true, and Grant Morrison has done some fine stories, like Arkham Asylum A Serious House On Serious Earth. If it weren't for him making this story, Batman Arkham Asylum might never have been created in the first place! Video Game players like me definitely owe him big for that!

To be honest the fact that Magneto was reduced to a drug addict was most people's main problem with how Morrison used him.

I actually liked Here Comes Tomorrow and the final issue of Final Crisis. A couple of fun facts, Morrison said he deliberately wrote Here Comes Tomorrow in such a way that, if a reader were so inclined, they could consider it the Grand Finale of all X-Men comics, and Final Crisis was the original place where Dan Didio wanted to reboot (he was talked out of it by the publisher). All I can say is, wow, Morrison sure can write endings.

This is the first time on these forums that I have seen another person actually bring up Doom Patrol. It brings a song into my heart.

Admittedly, I haven't read some of Morrison's seminal works like his Doom Patrol run or his run on Animal Man, but I generally have enjoyed some of his other work. I found The Filth, while at times base and gross and at other times needlessly confounding, to still be one of his works I enjoy the most. I also enjoyed Vimanarama because it was an entertaining take on Kirby-esque pulp sci-fi. I enjoyed Joe the Barbarian despite having a fairly solid idea of where the story was going. It definitely wasn't the best story I have read, but it was nice. Also not having read his X-Men run or Batman R.I.P., I can't really comment on those, although I have heard a lot of criticism regarding the former.

edited 9th Feb '12 2:19:00 PM by Drenius

His X-Men run is actually really good, and led to a lot of really good things in other titles (including Chris Claremont's X-Treme X-Men and Excalibur, Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir's mutant teen drama New X-Men, and David Hine's District X, essentially a Crime And Punishment show meets the X-Men, all of which I would highly recommend). The main issue people seem to have with it is that it at times plays fast and loose with Claremont canon, which is something of a sacred cow in certain corners of X-fandom. Claremont, for what it's worth, didn't seem to take it personally, because as mentioned he wrote two spinoff titles to Morrison's run.

I'm still kind of pissed off that a couple of years after Morrison left, editorial took a sledgehammer to everything he'd built up: District X was blown up, half the New X-Men were killed off and the other half made Darker and Edgier and a particularly heinous Mary Sue was added to the cast, and the Excalibur cast lost their powers and were consigned to Limbo. Why they would do this has been debated endlessly (the theory that Joe Quesada did it essentially For the Evulz due to his documented preference of The Avengers to the X-Men gets floated around a lot), but the reason seems to have been confirmed by Rob Liefeld in an interview toward the end of last year: Marvel wanted to take the X-Men out of the spotlight and put the Avengers in because they have the film rights to the latter but not the former.

I really liked Batman RIP.

One thing that I thought was quite interesting about Morrison's X-Men was the way he tried to portray mutants as a minority community which is more or less tolerated but still subject to oppression and discrimination. I think this was best evidenced by the story arc where the mutant fashion designer is killed, and you get scenes with these guys saying, "I don't hate mutants; they have some good music."

I mean, I guess a lot of people would think that's pretty insensitive, but I think I was fourteen or so when that storyline was reprinted in the UK, so it made some sort of impression on me.

Why would Liefield know? That's just him guessing. Personally I think it's because Morrison wrote the situation into a hole which people have since tried to write out of.

I've disparaged Morrison quite a bit on these forums, but I do think his earlier stuff might be more to my taste.Doom Patrol in paticular has intrigued me for years, before I even read New X-Men. If it's in the next comic book shop I visit I'll get it. Just want to check a few things, was it under DC or Vertigo? My nearest comic book shop has a really weird organisation now, I've spent ages looking for certain stuff in there.

edited 9th Feb '12 4:48:47 PM by C0mraid

Liefeld would know because he asked if he could do a certain X-Men storyline and was told he couldn't do that because the Avengers are #1 now due to the movies, that's how he would know. At the very least, that confirms that they're deliberately restricting the stories that can be told with the X-Men.

edited 9th Feb '12 4:56:40 PM by HamburgerTime

Two things. No. 1 is Liefield's pride, he really seems to think he has more pull with Marvel than he actually does. Wouldn't put it past him to lie for his ego's sake.

No.2 if this is real, is it about something he wanted to do around the time Morrisons run ended, or something he wanted to do last year? Because The Avengers movie wasn't really in the picture when they first started undoing what Morrison did to the X-Men.

@Hamburger time: Ah, another Defelippis and Weir fan. is it really worth giving New Mutants a look?

edited 9th Feb '12 7:51:14 PM by Drenius