The DC Morrisonverse 5: They Fuck You Up...

Most of the things I've posted so far in the look back over Seven Soldiers have been about fairly obscure elements in the series, things that have in large part been ignored by other writers on the subject (possibly, I accept, because they're not as interesting as those subjects they have focussed on).

However, to move on to Morrison's other DC work (and, eventually, to Final Crisis) I think I need to cover one of the most covered aspects of Seven Soldiers, (and in this post I'll draw a lot on the posts of both Jog and Marc Singer ), fatherhood and influence.

If we look through the seven soldiers and their fathers, we see a pattern in those where they're mentioned:

Shining Knight - no mention is made of Ystin's parents, but Ystin has to kill the undead King Arthur, the most important authority figure in the young knight's life.
Guardian - No mention of his parents, but has to let his father-in-law, who is also his mentor, die.
Zatanna - Goes on a quest to find her dead father('s bequest) , ends up killing people in a recreation of his death, meets an evil counterpart of her father and finally has to come to terms with his death.
Klarion - Goes in search of his father and discovers him to be evil. Kills him. The only one of the seven whose mother plays a role in the story, but her role is minor. Ends up taking the place of his evil ancestor Melmoth (who introduces himself to the puritans with "Daddy's home!") after Melmoth dies.
Frankenstein - Had two fathers, both evil, and killed them both.
Bulleteer - No mention made of her parents, but her oldest ancestor, Aurakles, is portrayed as a once-great god who's now an accidental destroyer who needs to be killed.

Now the interesting thing about this is that Aurakles is also drawn as looking exactly like Alan Moore.
Morrison's relationship with Alan Moore is a tricky one, and he knows it. Morrison has said in interviews that he was inspired to start writing comics by Moore's work in Warrior, and his early work shows Moore's influence very heavily (for example the Watchmen visual references in Animal Man, and the striking similarity between The Coyote Gospel and Pog) but has also on a number of occasions been absolutely scathing about Moore's magical practices and later work. In fact much of Morrison's career can be seen as a reaction to Moore's work (for example his championing of Robert Mayer's horrible novel Superfolks makes sense when you consider it a stick to beat Moore with - Moore 'borrowed' more than a bit from the novel).

Much of Seven Soldiers can be seen as a reaction to Moore, or as homage, depending on the part of the work in question. Zatanna #1, for example (which I just typed as Promethea in a Freudian typo), contains the famous cutting parody of Promethea and the line about Zatanna's writing about magic being 'non-preachy', but it also contains an almost exact recreation of Zatarra's death-scene from Moore's Swamp Thing run. In fact a lot of Swamp Thing makes its way into the series - not only is Frankenstein very much in the same vein, but Zor is reborn as Solomon Grundy in much the same way that Alec Holland becomes Swamp Thing (in, of course, the origin story by Len Wein, who Morrison also claims as an influence) and Alix Harrower's job is working with autistic children, as Abby Holland (note the initials) did in Moore's Swamp Thing run.

But the aspect that has had most people talking is what has been interpreted as the inclusion of several avatars of Moore within the story, usually in negative roles. While the similarity in appearance of Aurakles to Moore might be charitably viewed as coincidental (and the similarity of Melmoth that some have pointed out extends only to him having a beard), and even the rivalry between pirates All-Beard (with his huge bushy beard and big hair) and No-Beard (bald like Morrison) can be seen as people reading too much into it, Zor is another matter.

Zor (rhymes with Moore) is one of the major villains of the piece (and in fact is also the person directly addressed by Morrison's avatar in the last issue), a magician who was one of the Seven Unknown Men ( who are all DC writers) but went renegade, who is responsible for much of the darkening of the DCU, and who has a beard of which he is comically proud. I wonder who that could be?

From The Comics Journal 176 (as quoted in a post on Barbelith):

Actually, at one point there was a sense that we were all marching into the future together waving the same flag, then I realized that we weren't, which is probably why I criticized Alan quite a lot, which is why he doesn't speak to me anymore. But I really felt the need to get out from under his shadow, because it had become so oppressive, and we were all being expected to do as he did.

This need to get out from Moore's shadow characterises huge chunks of Seven Soldiers, but another creator is equally present - Jack Kirby.

At first sight Kirby appears to be treated better than Moore - three of the minis ( Guardian, Klarion and Mister Miracle) are updatings of Kirby's concepts, and Kirby's avatar in the story, Ed Stargard, is one of the heroes - he has behind the scenes put together the seven soldiers who will defeat the Sheeda.

However, Ed is also trapped in the body of a child, grown wrinkled and decayed, but still a baby - a pretty potent metaphor for the US comics industry that has largely been built on the back of Kirby. He is also revealed as possibly having contributed to the death of an old friend, and is generally a far more ambiguous figure than he at first seems.

Kirby and Moore could be seen as the 'fathers' of Morrison-the-writer, and Seven Soldiers as a whole says that 'fathers' are to be distrusted - as is all authority. The work undercuts authority figures at every turn (the Submissionaries are tools of the Sheeda, Stargard isn't the imposing man he presents himself as, Shilo Norman's psychiatrist is a minion of Darkseid, Melmoth is a slaver, the expert on the past in Shining Knight turns out to be the Sheeda Queen) and over and over the message that's hammered home appears to be 'don't trust anyone over thirty'.

Remember, as well, that in Morrison's evolution, Seven Soldiers comes after Seaguy (which it resembles in many ways), with its apocalyptic conflict with 'the Anti-Dad'. This ties in with the big themes of the series - to live we must change. We must outgrow the influences that formed us, and become ourselves. Zatanna is the books her father wrote, but she is not her father. Frankenstein is immortal because of Melmoth, but he still kills Melmoth. And Grant Morrison has been shaped by Alan Moore and Jack Kirby, but he has to move beyond them (whether he does or not is a different matter).

Oh see ye not that narrow road so thick beset with thorns and briars?
That is the path of righteousness
And see ye not that broad broad road, that is the path of wickedness
... though some call it the road to heaven.

But don't forget... there's a third road.

(Next in this series - 52).

The DC Morrisonverse Part 4: They All Float Down Here

This entry isn't going to be as in-depth as the other posts I've been doing on Seven Soldiers as I'm not identifying any new themes or ways of looking at the material, merely pointing out a novel that I think almost certainly provided some of the inspiration for the series, but that I don't recall being mentioned anywhere else. As a result, it's only a few paragraphs long, and I'm just pointing out similarities, not drawing conclusions. I'll be doing more of that in tomorrow's post, which will be much longer than this one.

Morrison has described the structure of the collected versions of Seven Soldiers as being "like a Stephen King book", and I'm pretty sure he had a specific Stephen King book in mind when he said that, because the parallels with King's book It are much greater than most people appear to have picked up on.

It is represented as the personification of destruction and consumption, somewhat equivalent to the personifications of entropy scattered throughout Seven Soldiers, and is also portrayed as a giant spider. It is from a realm outside spacetime known as the Macroverse.

All these things are parallels, as is the fact that It mentions a Roanoke-like event in Derry' s past. But there are closer similarities.

It, like Seven Soldiers, deals with a team of seven. In fact their story in many ways parallels that of the Newsboy Legion - working together as children to defeat a menace that the adults don't believe in, but drifting apart after that, then working together when the menace resurfaces. The seven are all damaged in some way by the event, but most go on to wealth and fame.

In both stories when the menace returns in the present day, it is fought by a team of six, rather than seven.

Almost all King's characters have fathers who are absent or outright evil.

I'm not sure what to make of these similarities, but I thought I'd throw them out there for people to comment on - a more thorough, analytical post will be up tomorrow.

The DC Morrisonverse 3: ytilautxetatem dna annataZ

Before I start this post, I'd just like to put in a quick plug. My own webcomic, Dumb Angel, is finally restarting after a lengthy absence. The latest page is drawn but I'm having problems getting it on the site - by the time you read this it may well be there, though. Let me know what you think of it...

One of the most common complaints about Seven Soldiers concerns Zatanna's role in the story. While the Zatanna mini itself is possibly the best-received of the minis (in part because its mild attacks on Alan Moore allow some reviewers to use Morrison as a proxy for their own assertions that the Emperor has no clothes, which says more about them than it does about Moore, Morrison or the mini), it has been asserted by many critics that Zatanna plays no role in the final issue, Seven Soldiers 1.

In fact, Zatanna may be the most important character in that issue.

Morrison has spent the whole of the Zatanna miniseries having her travel between dimensions, popping out of flat surfaces (the 'brane universes in issue 1) and, in the climax of her miniseries, meeting the Seven Unknown Men, who are the personifications of Morrison and his fellow DC writers.

Now, several DC characters had met their creators over the years, with for example the Flash meeting Cary Bates and, in one memorable issue of The Brave & The Bold, artist Jim Aparo being held hostage and forced to draw the comic in the way the criminals wanted. But this kind of thing has usually been played as a joke - just a throwaway idea, with no real significance.

The two big exceptions in comics have been Morrison's own Animal Man and Dave Sim's Cerebus, both of which had creator/creation meetings as the climax of their respective storylines. However, both these comics came from the same source - the classic cartoon Duck Amuck, and carried over a good chunk of Chuck Jones' moral (such as it was) - "like flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods - they kill us for their sport".

Zatanna's reaching out to the third dimension is something else though. It brings the readers, as well as the creators, into the story - we can no longer be voyeurs, but have to choose sides. And it does so extraordinarily effectively - I've read time and again that readers of Zatanna, when they get to the crucial point, have placed their hands against Zatanna's. (I, of course, am a rational adult who would never do such a childish thing. Of course.)

And at the climax of Seven Soldiers 1, Zatanna interacts with the readers again, and this time actually becomes three-dimensional.

Or rather she doesn't. She attains the illusion of three-dimensionality - and she does so at precisely the same time as she says "it's not about illusion or trickery". Words, as have been shown throughout Zatanna's story, can be untrustworthy.

Zatanna is absolutely essential to the story because she is the only character in the DCU who is capable of literally rewriting reality (which is why she is able to join the writers, however briefly, in her own series). Something that Morrison has noticed that I believe had never been made explicit before is that Zatanna's reversed speech bubbles look exactly like a speech bubble would if coming from someone facing her - that is, coming from outside the page, from 3-space.

This is made explicit in her climactic scene in SS1, where the reader actually responds 'ydaer', with the lettering, as well as the letter order, reversed. But few people have noticed what this implies - whenever Zatanna is casting a spell, she's projecting her words into our reality. In other words, she's changing the script.

This makes Zatanna one of the writers, as well as one of the characters, of the DC Universe, and thus we can see her as one of Morrison's 'fictionsuits' (Morrison's term for characters who are essentially avatars of the writer). It is notable that Morrison makes Zatanna a published author (whose Hex Appeal sounds very like Morrison's own proposed Pop Magick book) . Zatanna's whole story is about the interchangeability of words and reality within the DCU - she is searching for her father's books, the Libri Zatarae, only to discover that she is the book he has written in the universe. Gwydion is also portrayed at one point as being living words in a book.

When she calls on the universe to awake and the seven soldiers to strike, then, Zatanna is Morrison, trying to complete the story and also trying to bring about his project of making the DCU sentient. But she needs the help of the reader.

Morrison's point (well, one of them - nearly everything in Seven Soldiers admits of three or four different readings) couldn't really be more explicit - we can have comics full of hope, where good triumphs over evil, or we can have dark Sheeda 'raping our childhood' (which is literally what the Sheeda are doing with their wholesale destruction of previous times, but also a common accusation from the more unreasonable type of comic-book fan aimed at the powers that be at DC after series like Identity Crisis), but only if the fans, as well as the writers, want them.

Zatanna's spell is the point where everything starts to come together, where everything that had previously looked hopeless starts to brighten up. The split between Jake Jordan and Carla had been the biggest symbol of hopelessness in the series (used as an example of 'anti-life' in Mister Miracle) yet on the very next page after Zatanna's spell, they are reconciled. Zatanna has reached out into the third dimension and changed the script, chosen to use her free will rather than being the puppet of others. She's escaped from the Life Trap, and taken everyone else with her.

More on this tomorrow.

DC Morrisonverse Part 2: Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold

Before I start this post, I just want to let people know I've started a second blog, at http://olsenbloom.blogspot.com , where I'm going to be posting about music and songwriting. If you're interested, check it out - the first post is on Brian Wilson.

Anyway, on to the second of what appears to be an interminable series of posts about the themes of Seven Soldiers.

I finished my post from Friday by talking about entropy. Entropy has been a recurring theme in Morrison's work (see for example the Invisibles volume Entropy In The UK) but never more so than in Seven Soldiers.

For those of you who don't know, entropy is a measure of the amount of chaos or disorder in a system. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, possibly the single most fundamental law of physics there is, says that in a closed system entropy must increase.

I've written before about how this applies to the Mister Miracle mini - and how that only made explicit what was implicit in Kirby's original conception of the Fourth World characters - so I won't go over that material again here, save to say that Morrison's relationship with the concept of entropy appears a very ambivalent one.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics means that no authority can ever have ultimate control - there will always be a random factor outside their control, and that random factor will always increase until there is no authority - definitely an idea that would appeal to someone of Morrison's politics (I've not seen Morrison put a label on his politics, so I don't know if he regards himself as socialist, anarchist or what, but all his interviews and writings place him pretty firmly in the lower-left quadrant of the political compass ...). In that sense, the second law is undoubtedly A Good Thing (if you share Morrison's anti-authoritarianism, as I do).

However, Morrison is also a hopeful writer, in the most fundamental sense. And the Second Law is a fundamentally pessimistic law. It says that in the end, the universe will simply fade away, that everyone and everything in the universe, everything that has ever existed or will ever exist
, everything will decay, crumble, and vanish and there will be nothing at all left. Any effort to stop this can only make things worse - every single act increases entropy. Even by reading this, increasing the information in your brain, you are contributing to the heat death of the universe. Everything is futile and life is a hollow joke. In comparison to the Second Law of Thermodynamics seen in this light, Ozymandias is positively Norman Vincent Pealesque - after all, those two vast and trunkless legs of stone are still standing, even if nothing else is. The Second Law is a true Anti-Life Equation.


So throughout Seven Soldiers there is a tension between these two views. In Zatanna #1 entropy is represented as the ultimate Big Bad:

"Doesn't the red god look just the way he's described in the Omninomicon?"
"...I'm witnessing large-scale entropic decay"
"Thank Tahuti your father trapped the beast here when he did"
"Well, see, that's the thing... dad couldn't stop the red god. All he could do was freeze him. He'll eat the universe in the end."

And throughout the series, entropy and decay are portrayed as something negative, but fighting against them as being pointless or outright evil. Alix Harrower's husband tries to preserve her perfect physical form from decay, but ends up killing himself - he can't breathe once his superskin is applied (breathing of course being an oxidation reaction, as are most forms of decay - again going back to the theme throughout that the only way not to change is to die). The world of the Sheeda, a billion years from now, is "steaming in the squalid, luscious decay of the refuse-littered slopes at Summer's End".

But at the same time, entropy can be used to the advantage of the forces of good. I've gone into this in the Mister Miracle article linked above, but there's also Ed Stargard's plan - making sure the Seven never meet, so they remain a random factor, unaccounted for by the Sheeda.

But in the end, though, Morrison points out the get-out clause - "In a closed system entropy will always increase". From the same double-page spread as the above Zatanna dialogue, the line straight after what I quoted before is "I'm hoping we all get a bigger place to stay in before that happens". Later on the same spread, we get:

"No way out of a closed system! Don't you see how it all has to fall down in the end?"
"teg su tuo fo ereh! If I say there's a way, there's a way."

I'll go into this more tomorrow - there's much more to say here. But in Seven Soldiers Morrison is talking about closed systems - systems of thought, the DC Universe that endlessly recycles the same tropes with little or no influence from the larger culture, and our universe as well - and saying that there are two choices - stagnate and die, or open up to new possibilities and live free.

Tomorrow, I'm going to talk about magic, metatextuality, and Zatanna...

The DC Morrisonverse Part 1: Seven Against Gravity

I'm sorry it's been a little while between posts here. I tried to write a post reviewing last week's comics, but junked it - I had nothing to say about most of them that wasn't just surface-level stuff, with the exception of Batman, and I want to wait until next issue before discussing that.


What I would like to do, though, is discuss Grant Morrison's DC Universe work.

Morrison is almost unique in his generation of comic writers (those who started in the late 70s and came to prominence in the mid-late 80s) in that almost all his significant work has been done in mainstream superhero comics. Morrison has been hugely prolific, of course, and worked in a variety of genres and for a variety of publishers, but while, say, Alan Moore has done almost all of his important work outside of the shared superhero universes, Neil Gaiman found his own little corner of the DCU and played there without interacting with the rest, and Dave Sim wrote his own indie comic and never ventured into the shared-universe arena at all, Morrison has produced a staggering amount of major work planted firmly in the mainstream DC (and to a lesser extent Marvel) superhero universe. If you read only Animal Man, Doom Patrol, JLA, Arkham Asylum, All-Star Superman, New X-Men and Seven Soldiers, and never read another word Morrison wrote, you'd have a fair idea of his strengths, weaknesses and preoccupation as a writer. Read The DC Universe Stories Of Alan Moore and Swamp Thing and you'll certainly be impressed, but you'd have no idea why their writer was considered the finest ever to work in the medium.

While this has caused any number of problems with Morrison's work - too much of his work shows the signs of editorial edict, and he has often been forced to work with unsympathetic collaborators - it has advantages. Working in what we laughingly call the mainstream means that Morrison has been able to expose a large proportion of the comics readership to his ideas in a form that makes them palatable. Morrison, for example, said that his run on JLA was intended as a 'Cliffs Notes' version of his creator-owned magnum opus The Invisibles, the action and concepts in the two comics often paralleling each other closely. (Personally I use them the other way round, finding the storytelling of Steve Parkhouse, Frank Quitely, Steve Yeowell, Phil Jiminez, Cameron Stewart et al much easier to follow than Howard Porter's Image-isms).

This also means that, at least to a greater extent than his peers, he is regarded as a 'good company man' and is given the keys to the company's most important intellectual properties on occasion. This is particularly true at the moment - Morrison is writing both Superman and Batman, and is in charge of two major crossovers (which will probably tie into each other) - this year's Death Of Ra's Al-Ghul running through all the Batman titles, and next year's Final Crisis (to which the whole DCU is patiently counting down).

Given that Morrison will effectively be guiding DC comics for much of next year, I think it could be valuable to look over some of his earlier ventures into the DCU and see what, if anything, we can glean from them.

To start with, I'd like to do a few posts about Seven Soldiers. I wrote quite a bit about this series when it first came out (some of you reading this will have read those posts) , and it's been talked about by some of the most intelligent commentators in comics criticism - Jog and Marc Singer in particular have done an extraordinary job of covering the themes in the series, and the annotations at Barbelith are absolutely essential. I also strongly suspect that Douglas Wolk's coverage in his book (which I have on order at the moment) will have much of interest to say.

I have no hope of bettering what those excellent writers have already said on the topic, but what I find fascinating about Seven Soldiers, and what I hope to show over the next few days (I've got a few days off work and some important procrastinating to do, so I expect to write several posts) is that no matter how much you write on the subject there's always more to tease out of it. Morrison's writing is hugely dense, with allusions to folklore, mathematics, physics, superhero comics, occultism and, for all I know, Belgian clog-dancing, and at times the writing in Seven Soldiers reaches that Finnegans Wake-esque state where there are so many references and allusions that connections that almost certainly weren't intended by the author become apparent.

I'm going to deal with those connections, and more, over the next few days, but in this post I want to focus on a theme that appears to have been ignored by most commentators on the series - gravity. (This will come back into play when I finally get around to writing about All Star Superman).

A lot of commentators on Seven Soldiers have mentioned the parallels with Newton's theories of colours that can be found in the comic, but something I found quite interesting is the role of gravity in the series.

The very first speech bubble in JLA: Classified #1 reads "F= γ(m1m2/r^2)" (allowing for my inability to represent formulae in HTML. This is also repeated as a thought bubble in Frankenstein #1 . Anyone who's studied any physics at all will recognise this as the formula for gravitational attraction.

Now, there could be several reasons for the prominence of this equation (which, as far as I know, has not been picked up by any other commentators on the series, which is why I'm leading off my analysis with it). It could be to make oblique reference to Newton, whose obsession with the number seven is well known (the reason why we differentiate between indigo and violet when looking at a rainbow, despite the two colours being almost identical, is so there would be seven colours to fit in with Newton's numerological ideas).

It could also be because Newton's ideas about gravity stemmed from Newton's occult investigations - the whole concept of forces acting at a distance is one that comes from Newton's magical beliefs.

But I suspect there's a deeper meaning. Gravity is referenced in many places in the story, but most prominently in Mister Miracle. On the first page of this mini we are told "nothing can escape the deadly gravitational pull of a black hole!" and asked "Can he cheat gravity itself and free himself from the crushing oblivion inside black hole X?!?"

The latter is, of course, the main question in the whole Mister Miracle miniseries. Gravity here is the life trap, a crushing force that we have to fight or die, a force that should by rights overwhelm us. In fact, much of the Seven Soldiers story involves the characters in orbit, sucked in by the gravitational pull of 'black holes' - absences (the missing god of the witch-people, the missing eighth soldier, Zatanna and Klarion's absent fathers) and occasionally pulled in by each other's force before swinging off in their own directions, their orbits perturbed by the presence of characters of whose existence they are unaware.

But I think there's a deeper meaning to gravity here. Much as Morrison used JLA to explain The Invisibles by paralleling it, I think gravity - a natural force against which our heroes have to fight - is being used for its resonance with a lesser-known concept in physics, one that I think is the theme - or at least one of the overriding themes - of the story.

I'm referring of course to entropy, and that shall be the topic of my next post.

Final Crisis and Morrison 1

I've been wanting to write about Grant Morrison on here for a few weeks, but have held back. There appear to be two default options for comics blogging. One is to post a panel from a Silver Age comic out of context with hilarious results ("Batman said 'I need Dick!' - he's so gay!"). The other is to wax lyrical about how great Morrison is. I didn't want to fall into either of these cliches. (A third cliche of course is blogging about blogging, which I'm doing here).

However, now that Morrison and J.G. Jones have been announced as the team on Final Crisis, the event to which Countdown is counting down, I pretty much have to talk about Morrison. So I'm going to try to do a series of posts over the next few weeks looking at his recent DCU work, especially his Batman, which for some reason is making no impact at all compared to his other recent work, and try to see what the recurring elements are, both in terms of themes and motifs, and try to figure out what kind of thing Final Crisis will be.

I must say, the announcement and the interviews that have been reported about it have done a lot to reaffirm my faith in DC's current editorial direction. Morrison is the only person (after the original Crisis On Infinite Earths) to have written a DCU crossover that was actually good as opposed to competent (DC One Million, which I hope to look at here some time soon), and J.G. Jones is one of the most imaginative artists in comics today. A reunion of part of the 52 team (and the team behind Marvel Boy, which I'll look at in a few posts' time) has to be an improvement on the incoherent mess that's passing for a line-wide crossover at the moment.

The few statements we've had about the project so far (that it'll begin with Anthro and end with Kamandi, that Morrison wanted to do it out-of-continuity if it couldn't be done in the regular DCU) tend to suggest that this will be a crossover that is actually worth reading.

So, Grant Morrison.

The obvious question when discussing Morrison is why he's so popular among a certain segment of comic readers (especially those with blogs) and so unpopular among many others (especially those who post on superhero-related message boards).

Part of the reason, I suspect, is that he has ideas. The cliche about Morrison that turns up within a page or two of any message board discussion of him is 'mad ideas', usually followed by 'what was he smoking when he thought of that?' or some similar dismissal. The fact is, it is extremely unusual in the comics medium for anything approaching an actual idea to make it to paper. Most superhero comics deal primarily in melodrama and conflict for its own sake, while far too many independent comics are nothing more than the autobiographies of people who have nothing unusual about them other than the gargantuan ego that presumes the tedious details of their life, presented without comment or technical ability, qualifies as art.

With the de facto retirement of Alan Moore, Morrison is almost alone in trying to express any ideas in the superhero genre. To the extent that most mainstream comics have any ideas in them at all, they are, as in Infinite Crisis, ideas about the genre itself, the current state of superhero comics, and not much else. If I never again read a comic in which a symbolic representation of modern comics, a symbolic representation of the Silver Age, and a symbolic representation of fanboy entitlement have a three-way battle to the death, I'll be ecstatic.

Morrison is, of course, guilty of this kind of thing himself - in fact more so than almost any other comics writer I can think of. I was hugely amused in 2005 when Morrison and Jeph Loeb (his polar opposite in terms of fanbase and critical respect) both had Superman and Batman fighting not-at-all veiled counterparts of the Ultimates/Authority in an attempt to show that Violent Superheroes Are Bad. And I was even more amused when it was announced Morrison would be writing the Authority and Loeb the Ultimates.

But Morrison's 'mad ideas' often contain much more than that. There was a storm in a teapot in the 'blogosphere' recently (deliberately stirred up by one writer in an attempt to promote his book on Morrison) about describing some people as 'bad readers'. Without wanting to stir that up again, I would suggest there's definitely an element of truth to this - many people don't like having to interpret a narrative on anything more than a surface level, and even most of those who do like to read things that contain some level of metaphor, allegory or ambiguity don't have the necessary critical tools to comprehend them.

(I include myself in the latter group, incidentally. I constantly think I've got everything there is out of a text, then read what Matt Rossi or Marc Singer or some similar writer has found in it and realise that my reading comprehension has advanced little beyond Janet And John books.)

However, there is also some truth in the claim that Morrison doesn't always give the reader enough information to appreciate fully what he's talking about. To take the first example of one of Morrison's lines to pop into my head, in Shining Knight #2 (part of the Seven Soldiers maxiseries and collected in one of that series' trades), Ystin is confronted by a monster named Guilt, a 'Sheeda level-seven mood destroyer' who kills with words.

Now, this is a good and interesting development in the story for a relatively attentive reader. Morrison is combining the fall of Camelot and Ystin's exile to the modern world with the expulsion from Eden (with a hint of the fall of Satan too). Ystin lived in a prelapsarian, guilt-free state until sin entered the world, but after falling from a castle in the sky is left with the knowledge of guilt and death. There's a lot of resonances packed in there, especially when you consider that the serpentine Sheeda Queen (the villain of the story) is presented in Zatanna as being the Wicked Queen from Snow White (who also caused a lot of problems by persuading a woman to eat an apple...)

Then, on top of that, there's the resonance with Pilgrim's Progress and similar stories. Given that Morrison has essentially been doing a Grail-quest narrative up to this point (later in the series he will mix in other classic folk tales), having his pilgrim accompanied by a monster called Guilt makes perfect sense - you almost expect them to meet up with Mr Worldly Wiseman (which in fact sounds like the name of a Silver Age character - possibly a humorous sidekick).

But the literal reader - and, indeed, many readers who enjoy the series on multiple levels - will balk at the introduction of this character. The rest of the series has been realistic in tone (well, as realistic as a series about one of King Arthur's knights on a flying horse fighting a woman from the future in a flying castle that travels through time can be) and every other element in it works on a literal level. Guilt appears to be purely symbolic, something that has drifted in from another level. He appears in isolation to be intended as metaphor, but in terms of the story as a whole, he really is a giant monster. But the giant monster is given no reason for existing - no-one knows who he is, or where he comes from.

Most readers of both types will gloss over this - just go with it and see where he's going with the story - but it appears a definite flaw in the issue.

However, in an interview shortly after the issue came out, Morrison mentioned The Origins Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. For those who haven't read this book, Jaynes' thesis (now generally considered to be incorrect in a number of details) is that until fairly recently in evolutionary terms, roughly three thousand years ago, the corpus callosum (the body in the brain which connects the two hemispheres) was thinner than it is today, making the brain less integrated, and as a result those ideas which we now know come from our own brain would have appeared to our ancestors to have come from outside themselves.

Jaynes argued that our ancestors lived in a state of near-constant hallucination, with these hallucinations appearing as gods, demons and so on, giving people orders which were in reality messages from the other side of their brain. He also argued that people at that time were not truly self-aware - that there was no concept of introspection or thought generally even as late as the Bronze Age.

Once you know Morrison had this in mind, then the sequence becomes clearer - Ystin is literally perceiving the emotion Guilt as a giant monster, and from Ystin's point of view the scene plays out exactly as it does on the page (in fact Ystin here could easily represent a particular mode of reading). It also adds another level to the Fall resonances - given that Adam and Eve were thrown out of Eden for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and becoming aware of their own nakedness/sin, the parallel with the brain becoming integrated and self-awareness coming into existence is inescapable.

It's incredibly well thought-out, a quite brilliant logical extrapolation from a bit of information found in a pop-science book to create a sequence that moves the plot along, expands on the themes of the story so far, brings in allusions to medieval literature to add to those already present, ties in neatly with material in the other Seven Soldiers series, and does so in one line of dialogue. But one crucial link in the chain is missing, having not quite made it to the page.

I think this tendency of Morrison's, to think things out in exhaustive detail and then not quite get round to putting all the detail on to the page (see also his scripts for Arkham Asylum, which are infinitely more interesting and entertaining than the finished comic) is the reason he is both loved and hated to the degree that he is. I also think that when working on the keystone book for DC - the culmination of everything they've been doing for four years - rather than a project being sold on the value of his name alone (as Seven Soldiers was) he'll have an editor who insists on a narrative clarity that might otherwise be missing (I'm not certain of this given the lack of editing apparent in Countdown, but I'm making the perhaps hopelessly optimistic assumption that DC editorial can learn from their mistakes).

With luck, we'll have a story that works on its surface as a universe-spanning superhero epic, but also has something to say and a reason to exist beyond trademark maintenance. Let's hope so. We'll see in 40 weeks.

Countdown To Countdown 1 (52 Wrapup Part 1)

First, I'd like to say hello (and happy Free Comic Book Day) to all of you who've started reading in the few days since this blog was linked by Douglas at 52 Pickup and Heidi at The Beat. For those of you just joining me, the idea of this blog is to use DC's weekly Countdown series (which starts next week) as a springboard to talk about stuff pertaining to comics. Some weeks I'll be doing page-by-page analyses of the comic, other weeks I'll barely mention the content of the issue itself, but it'll always be relevant in some way.

The big Countdown news this week, of course, is the preview that is up at MySpace comics. I'll be going over that tomorrow. But today I want to talk about 52.

The last issue of 52 came out on Wednesday (Thursday over here in the UK), and I loved it. It has its flaws, of course (the Gotham Gazette on Earth-2 reminded me more than a little of Chevy Chase saying "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead") but overall it was possibly one of the best issues of the series.

So, with that read, I decided to sit down and read the lot. I also read, along with every issue, Douglas' summary/review at 52-pickup and Al Ewing's Diary Of Ralph Dibny. I'll be posting as much as I can about my reactions to the series over the next few days, until Friday when I can pick up Countdown 1 (Monday is a bank holiday in the UK, which means both New Comics day and my payday will be a day late).

This first 52 wrapup post will cover something I think a lot of you will find extremely pretentious and silly. So do I, as a matter of fact, but I still think it's a fun idea to play with. More normal commentary of the "why did we not see Most Excellent Super Bat?" type will appear in the next few posts.

One thing that struck me about the series on reread, that I'd not been able to say for certain until the last issue (in case the writers tied everything together more neatly than they did) is how little the main characters interact. For the most part, there are several different storylines going on here independently of each other, each of which meets up occasionally then splits off again.

What interests me about this, in retrospect, is how simillar the structure of 52 is to co-writer Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers project (which Morrison was working on concurrently with the early parts of 52). Both involved largely unknown or third-tier DC Universe characters fighting (largely independently of each other) different aspects of the same larger menace while telling their own separate stories. 52 could very easily have been released as (say) a Ralph Dibny miniseries, a Montoya/Question one, a Mystery In Space series, a Steel and a Black Adam one, with threads from each recurring in the others (much as one sees the same scene from different angles in Klarion 2 and Manhattan Guardian 2). This is very different from the normal model for a superhero crossover story, where everyone gets into a team to fight one big bad baddie, then splits up to fight a few smaller ones, then get together again to fight the real big baddie behind the scenes. (Not totally different of course, but the superhero crossover is as formalised at this point as a medieval passion play, and even slight changes in the way they're done can appear shocking).

In many ways 52 (and Marvel's Annihilation crossover, which I've not yet read, and which was largely the work of 52/Countdown layout artist Keith Giffen) is a mainstreaming of the Seven Soldiers structure, and a sign that we can hope for more stories using this model (which I prefer to the normal linear model of crossover storytelling). Partly, no doubt, this structure arose because of the fact that four people were writing the story (and while according to the writers themselves everyone wrote bits of everyone else's stories, each writer definitely had their own pet characters). But I suspect it was very strongly influenced by Seven Soldiers.

Now, one of the things I found most interesting about this structure in Seven Soldiers is that it (possibly just coincidentally) ties into one of Grant Morrison's more ludicrous-sounding ideas, which is that he wants to make the DC Universe sentient, through some combination of magic(k) and science - he's spoken about the idea that intelligence appears to be an emergent property of some complex systems, and how sometimes stories seem to 'write themselves', and wanting to see if he can get the DC Universe complex enough to write itself (for example in this interview on Fanboy Radio ).

Now, in this context the way intelligence appears is something that matters. Intelligence (as far as we can tell) is an emergent property of only some kinds of complexity. In particular, the structure of the human brain appears to be a type of network known as a 'small world' network.

Now, the small world network is also the way that most social interactions happen - the structure of the social network that connects you with your friends is structurally very simillar to the structure of the neural network in your brain. So if you were a comic writer attempting to bring a comics universe to sentience, one way to do that would be to make the structure of the social networks in the comics similar to the structure of real-world societies.

There was actually a study done a few years ago of the structure of the Marvel universe's social network (which we can assume is simillar enough to the DCU to generalise from). It showed that the MU had a very simillar structure to a real-world social network, but with a few significant differences. Mostly these were - characters were more likely to team up repeatedly with the same people in the MU than in the real world, characters collaborated in general with fewer others than in the real world, and a few important characters were far more important in the MU's social networks than in the real world.

So if you were going to go for a more realistic social network, the way you'd do it is get rid of a few of the major players ("a year without Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman"), raise the importance of some minor characters, and create a lot more links between otherwise-disconnected bits of the DCU. You wouldn't do this in the standard team-up manner, but in a series of encounters between peripheral characters. In short, you'd do what both Seven Soldiers and 52 do.

I'm not saying this was definitely the conscious intention of anyone involved, but it seems possible given Morrison's statements that it could be. But one thing that seems to suggest there's more to it than that is Mister Mind's final fate. There are a lot of different resonances to be found in what happens to Mister Mind - most obviously the way it connects with what he did earlier to Daniel Carter, trapping him in the same type of time loop (but a loop of 52 seconds rather than 52 weeks) - and Jog as always manages to find a lot of connections between this and other themes set up in the comic. But one thing it reminds me of is the 'strange loop' that Douglas Hofstadter claims lies at the basis of consciousness.

Of course, I don't think that the DCU is actually becoming sentient. Nor do I think this was in the minds of any of the creators of 52 with the possible exception of Morrison. But the fact that this kind of thing can be found in there suggests that 52 is worthy of more attention as a comic (as opposed to just as a comic-industry phenomenon) than has been paid it.

Countdown To Countdown 2

Sorry for the delays on today's post - I've been working on a paper that took a little longer to sort out than I thought. To make up for it, I'm going to do two posts today - the usual one going over this (last) week's 52 and DC Universe stuff, and then later I'm going to talk about Bryan Talbot's incredible new graphic novel Alice In Sunderland.

After the horrible disappointment of 52 50 and World War III, 52 51 is much, much more like it. I've accepted for a while that 52 isn't going to have a satisfying end as such - the middle was much too flabby and 'decompressed' and now the writers are rushing to try to get as much in as possible in these last few issues.

This issue manages to resolve quite a few different bits from the storylines I'm most interested in, now that the tedious Black Adam nonsense is over and done with. There's still three pages of moping about Superboy being dead (given that only a month or so ago Black Adam killed over twenty-six million people, this suggests a certain lack of proportion among the people of the DC Universe, but anyway...) but otherwise this issue nicely wraps up the Space Odyssey storyline and sets us up for the big reveal next issue (you know, the one Dan Didio spoiled a few weeks back).

The big twist - Mister Mind's whereabouts - had been guessed by a few people a while ago, but was done very nicely. But it's the little details that made this issue - Starfire coming from across the universe to make sure Buddy gets his jacket back. And it's nice that in the space story at least, everyone (for now) has had a happy ending.

Is that a... Countdown on the cover, incidentally?

I don't have much more to say about 52 except that I'm looking forward to Thursday (I'm in the UK, in a strange timewarp where we get our comics... a day late! The horror!) and I intend to take a day out at some point and read the whole thing from beginning to end.

One of the things I'm hoping for in Countdown, and something I've only got occasionally in 52, is the creation of ideas with far more potential than the creators realise. This kind of thing happens more when creators are pushed against impossible deadlines. Half the reason Jack Kirby was so great was that he was so productive - during the time he was working on the Fourth World stuff, he was producing four comics a month (correct me if I'm wrong - I don't think any of them were bi-monthly) - essentially writing and drawing a weekly comic by himself.

As a result, a lot of Kirby's stuff has resonances he was quite possibly not aware of himself. That's not to say the power of his work is accidental - obviously he was a craftsman with decades of experience working on something he considered his masterwork - but there are resonances there that might not have been there if he'd had more time to think things out more coherently.

Take Darkseid. Darkseid is one of the characters with a major role in Countdown, and one of my all-time favourite characters. Darkseid was for a long time over-exposed, used every time a lazy writer wanted something really bad to scare our heroes (parodied exquisitely by 52/Countdown breakdown artist Keith Giffen in an Ambush Bug miniseries in which every issue ended with a splash page of Darkseid doing something innocuous with our hero exclaiming "Darkseid!"). But in preparation for Countdown DC have wisely taken him off the board for a while, using him only in Seven Soldiers in the last few years.

Many comics bloggers (myself included) tend to assume a familliarity with characters and creators that is perhaps unwarranted (whether this is a cause or an effect of the increasing tininess and incestuousness of the comics fan community is left as an exercise for the reader). I will probably make that mistake time and again, but I would like this blog to be readable by those who do not have a Masters in Kirby Studies and a PhD in Ditkology, so I'm going to try to provide links to anything necessary for understanding these posts. (Not always possible - some of the ideas here are from a conversation I had with my songwriting partner Mr Tilt Corazón Araiza, and I can't link to that - but where possible I'll link it).

Those of you who don't know who Darkseid is should, of course, read Jack Kirby's original Fourth World comics (wait for the forthcoming colour reprints - the current black & white paperbacks lose a lot of the impact of art that was intended for colour). But as a quick primer you could do worse than check out Newsarama's Counting Down To Countdown article on the Fourth World. Greg Morrow has provided a more entertaining explanation, but Marc Singer has provided the best summary of why Darkseid is such a great character. As Marc puts it " imagine a Hitler who's both physically intimidating and not the slightest bit insane. Darkseid is what Hitler wanted to be, the visions he sold to himself in his sleep made real. A walking dream, or nightmare, of total control."

As someone with an interest in cybernetics, the phrase 'total control' makes me prick up my ears. What's really interesting to me, though, is that Darkseid is, in order to gain this control, after the Anti-Life Equation. The reason this interests me is that in real life there is, in effect, a real anti-life equation - and it is precisely that that stops Darkseid getting control.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is usually expressed as "in a closed system, entropy will always increase" or (as Flanders & Swann memorably put it) "Heat won't pass from a cooler to a hotter. You can try it if you like, but you far better notta". While this seems a fairly trivial result, it is possibly the most important single statement about our physical reality, underlying almost all of modern science. It is the rule that states why we can never have a true perpetual motion machine.

That rule essentially says that everything must decay eventually - columnated ruins domino, civilisations fall, bodies fall apart. It's essentially the law that says time's arrow moves forward to the heat death of the universe.

But it's this law that says Darkseid can't win - Darkseid can never have the absolute control he wants. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, as well as turning up in physics and statistics, has two secret identities. One is Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety , the fundamental principle of cybernetics. This states that to control a system, you need as many options as there are things that can go wrong. This means that to control the population of the universe - Darkseid's desire - he would have to have as many options as there are actions that everyone could take. This is clearly impossible. He would also need perfect information about every event in the universe. The Second Law, in its disguise of Shannon's Tenth Theorem - the most important theorem in information theory - says that he can't have this either.

So what Darkseid is doing when he searches for the 'Anti-Life Equation' is searching for a way to overrule the Second Law Of Thermodynamics. If he can control the universe, he can avoid decaying - he can avoid death. Darkseid is so terrified of his own mortality that he wants to make the universe in his own image in order to stop it killing him.

So why is this equation - the source, after all, of immortality (by my interpretation - I've not seen this stated explicitly in any comics, though some writers seem to imply this) - anti-life ?

Well, because the only way to get what Darkseid wants is to stop the universe from changing in any way. Grant Morrison understood this when he gave Darkseid the slogan 'Darkseid Is'. For Darkseid (or anyone) to have absolute control will mean an end to time. An end to change. Darkseid is - and always will be, unchanged and unchanging. An end to life, in short. As Kirby put it in Forever People 5 - "if someone possesses absolute control over you - you're not really alive."

Because Darkseid isn't scared of literal death (which he, after all, inflicts on others on a regular basis) as much as metaphorical death. To quote from Alan Moore's masterful examination of the tarot in Promethea:

Though this card sounds a funeral knell
It has another tale to tell
Death, our eventual, awful fate
Means nothing more than 'change of state'
One state must end ('tis common sense)
Before another may commence
This card permits, then, a fresh view
Death of the old that births the new.

Compare and contrast Mister Miracle. While Darkseid is the embodiment of order, Mister Miracle is the embodiment of chaos. He's the random element that can never be accounted for. No trap can be designed to hold him, because there's always one degree of freedom left for him to take advantage of. In both his Scott Free and Shilo Norman incarnations, he can get out of anything. One other way of phrasing the Second Law is "imposition of order = escalation of chaos" - every attempt to hem Mister Miracle in is doomed to failure, as is any attempt at control.

In Grant Morrison's Mister Miracle miniseries (part of his Seven Soldiers set of interlocking minis, which I consider possibly the best superhero comics ever created), Morrison shows an understanding of this. Shilo Norman eventually escapes from 'the life trap' and dies, but is resurrected. By accepting change, he overcomes it.

The only true death is stasis. Darkseid in his quest for immortality wishes to doom himself and the rest of the universe to this death, while Mister Miracle has overcome death by embracing change and the new. Mister Miracle adapts to the universe, Darkseid tries to deny the existence of the universe, of anything except himself and his own will. He is doomed to fail in this, but his great tragedy is that, because he's blocked himself off from anything he doesn't want to hear (an inevitable result of his kind of authoritarianism - control closes off lines of communication, by both Ashby and Shannon's formulations) he will never know.

In other news, there's apparently going to be a DC Countdown Myspace...