The Multiversity

Grant Morrison etc. The Multiversity (2015)
I know I said I was getting a bit tired of self-aware comic books pretending that a drawing of a man in a cape is just a different level of reality because of something a theoretical physicist said whilst off his tits on special brew, but sod it - Grant Morrison, for all his faults is occasionally great, and Captain Carrot was on the cover of the first issue. It seemed worth a punt.

I never read Crisis on Infinite Earths so most stuff about the layered realities of the DC universe has been lost upon me, and Final Crisis was incomprehensible. I'm not really sure what this one is supposed to do either, but on the assumption that Crisis happened so as to keep us from having to read about Krypto the Superdog, then Multiversity seems to reverse that particular act of po-faced revisionism and is therefore a good thing. Roughly speaking it seems to be a mash up of Morrison's Zenith and Alan Moore's 1963, or at least has elements inevitably in common with both. We have a load of alternate realities, some of them fairly absurd, under attack by something vaguely Lovecraftian from outside; in addition to which it's all massively self-referential with characters attempting to work out what's going on by reading earlier or later issues of the comic in which they appear. It's not actually big or significantly clever, but even this is acknowledged in online potshots which become caught up in the narrative.

Yet another comic-about-comics treatise retreading the same tired themes.

Ordinarily I'd agree, but what's different this time is that it just about has a story - albeit one in which individual chapters could probably be read in any order - and that it's a hell of a lot of fun.

Multiversity first appeared as a series of loosely related issues of comic books set in different parts of its reality, allowing for a great deal of horseplay. My favourite iteration is probably The Just, set on a world in which Superman's robot legion has rendered caped crime fighters redundant, leaving their offspring to lives of super-powered boredom and killing time; but equally enjoyable is the obligatory trawl through the history of superhero comics rendered in stylistic tribute to Siegel, Shuster, Kane, Kirby and all of the usual suspects. Morrison's Alan Moore fixation is expressed as an issue focused on the Charlton comics characters which inspired Watchmen, and which is clearly a comment on Watchmen, although I have no idea what it's actually saying. We also get Marvel's Avengers with the plates switched and a thinly disguised version of Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon, which is amusing if you like that sort of thing, and happily I do in this instance; and whilst I'm over-thinking such things, I'm sure I recall the evil one-eyed egg with bat wings as one of Dorothy's imaginary enemies from Morrison's version of Doom Patrol.

Multiversity is probably deep, meaningful, and stuffed to the gills with references I didn't get, but it doesn't actually have much in the way of story if you look closely; which isn't a problem because Grant Morrison seems to be at his best when he's all surface and can keep himself from mentioning Aleister bloody Crowley every two pages. I'm not sure this is all surface, but that was how it read to me and I therefore invoke the same difference clause; and yet it is of sufficient complexity as to yield unexpected rewards upon second and third readings. This might be one of the best things he's written in a while.

Batman Incorporated

Grant Morrison & Jim Nick Nick Davidson Batman Incorporated (2012)
Ever since Stewart Lee described him as such, I can't quite pull back from thinking of the guy as Batman the children's character, and probably because I've never really found him that interesting. Although I haven't read it in a while, I recall loving Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns in which our man is portrayed as a vicious nutcase, which seems about right. He's more or less a vicious nutcase here, but a vicious nutcase inhabiting a story which may as well be derived from the goofy 1960s television show, albeit a version of the  goofy 1960s television show without much in the way of humour.

The story is that Batman, having decided that crime is a disease and that there's only one cure and so on and so forth, trains a whole team of international Batmans so as to cure the disease of crime on a global scale. It starts well enough, and seems beautifully told regardless of whatever it is that's actually being told, and then it sort of gets lost in an undifferentiated mush of narrative and stuff you might understand if you're some kind of Batman expert, which I'm not. I'm all for showing rather than telling so as to instil a comic book with the portentous atmosphere of a Fassbinder film, but occasionally it helps to tell your audience what the fuck is happening, particularly when what you're showing is mainly ingenious plot points and obscure references to Jorge Luis Borges punctuated with scenes of Batman kicking someone's head in. It tends to give the impression that the point of this comic is principally as a vehicle for Jim Davidson's beautifully cinematic illustrations of Batman descending upon ne'er-do-wells from tree, balcony or tall building and then kicking their heads in; so it's more or less Judge Dredd, except there's a point to Judge Dredd and it's usually funnier.

Come to think of it, I very much enjoyed Keith Giffen's Batman in the old Justice League comics, but then the point of that Batman was giving the other characters something to take the piss out of.

Raving Communist that I apparently must be, the thing I took from Batman Incorporated is more or less the same thing I take from Donald Trump's presidential campaign - tough on crime but protect your investment in the causes of crime, so let's get the drug dealers and kick their heads in and shit. Chavs too - let's add them to the list whilst we're here, the greedy bag-snatching work-shy fuckers.

Conversely, I suppose you might point out that we also have a Native American Batman here - which is a nice idea - and Morrison takes the trouble to explain in the appendix how he identifies and empathises with the slow genocide of the native American because he went to a reservation and it was a lot like some parts of Glasgow.

Great.

Well, it's not so much an appendix as pages of Jim Davidson's preliminary sketches, mostly of amazing new character sensations - some of whom you'll miss if you blink whilst reading the actual comic - notarised by Morrison listing the obscure 1950s issue of Detective Comics in which they first appeared.

Also there are schoolgirls wearing stockings and suspenders, like they do. Phwoaar! Eh? Eh? They love it!

I have no idea what I've just read, but it wasn't for me.

Jim Davidson didn't really draw it by the way. I just couldn't be arsed to type out the four million names of those who did, although they all did a really tremendous job.

Great.

Seaguy

Grant Morrison & Cameron Stewart Seaguy (2005)
Having been looking in the other direction when this came out, I was slightly pissed off to find it apparently only available for silly money on Amazon and eBay - silly money here meaning lots of dollars rather than payment by fish, hamburgers, lego bricks or whatever; so I was hugely chuffed to find a copy at Half Price Books for less than the cover price. I guess somebody screwed-up.

Seaguy was sold to me as something wonderful during discussion generally themed along the lines of how The Invisibles is shit and Grant Morrison disappeared up his own arse around 1998 and is yet to resurface - Seaguy and We3 being exceptions to a general trend. True enough, it's decent, and it commits none of the sins of his absolute worst writing, although I probably wouldn't go so far as to call it a classic. I suppose it's sort of like David Bowie's Black Tie White Noise, which was actually somewhat shite and yet seemingly garnered a fairly respectable reputation through sheer force of relief that at least it wasn't fucking Never Let Me Down.

Just to get it out of the way, I can't help but notice some faint similarity to Underwater Guy from Shannon Wheeler's wonderful Too Much Coffee Man, but anyway...

Seaguy is sort of like Morrison's Doom Patrol as a Saturday morning cartoon - all primary colours and things that only make sense if you live in a Hanna-Barbera version of reality.

...actually, Chubby da Choona is a lot like Billy the Fish from Viz, come to think of it...

Where was I?

On the surface of it, Seaguy is mostly enjoyable surrealism and general stupidity, but knowing some of Morrison's preoccupations I have a feeling it may also constitute some kind of statement on comic book narrative. The narrative is full of big ideas and improbable concepts provided without explanation, and none of the adventures or scrapes encountered by Seaguy and his fish buddy ever quite play out to the end or amount to anything, just like in a Saturday morning cartoon show. We get evasions and distraction rather than conclusions, at least up to the point at which Chubby comes to a peculiarly realistic and gruesome end, before quickly hitting the reset button and we start over again with a new animal sidekick. I suspect the point of this amounts to two fingers up at the supposedly gritty and realistic comic narrative as supposedly introduced by Alan Moore - perhaps represented here as the She-Beard, which itself suggests the slightly odd possibility of Morrison wanting to shag Northampton's finest.

The message is, I suppose, nothing deeper than this shit is more fun than all that frowning; which is fine, because they don't all have to be the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. So I wouldn't call Seaguy a masterpiece, but there's nevertheless plenty to like.

Seven Soldiers of Victory

Grant Morrison and a cast of thousands
Seven Soldiers of Victory (2006)
Seven Soldiers comprises seven four-issue miniseries plus some other stuff, each miniseries featuring one of the seven principal characters as they form a team without actually meeting. It's been collected in the four volumes I have here, which I was going to write about individually until I realised it might become too repetitive. The idea is that one is supposed to be able to read the seven miniseries in any order, and I initially began with order of publication - as they appear in the collected volumes - but it became a little too confusing so I've opted for one character at a time bookended by the two specials.

Okay.

The relationship between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison was vividly and uproariously depicted in the beloved 1970s sitcom That Plonker Next Door wherein the suburban Morrison family find themselves frequently and comically at odds with their neighbours, the Moores, headed by the gruffly bearded Alan who worships Sid's Snake from the old Whizzer & Chips comic strip - with hilarious consequences; and there's probably some sort of irony that the best description of practical magick I could find in a short time just happened to preface an interview with the latter:

Moore believes magic is a grammar—a linguistic, symbolic structure for looking at the world. He has at times described interactions with gods and demons; he insists these entities are not real in the phenomenal sense. They are ideas, but they contain all the power of these gods as if they were real. Moore believes that art and magic are aspects of the same part of human consciousness: the will to create. Magic, for Moore, is not about the material world but the world of the mind. Its only authentic external expression is art.

Much as Moore and Morrison seem to harbour serious reservations regarding each other's continued existence, I'd suggest the above applies particularly well to the work of the latter; and I'm suggesting this just to make it clear what we're talking about here, given how Seven Soldiers of Victory might be deemed an alchemical work, broadly speaking - narrative as ritual.

The story, divided as it is into seven parts which intersect to a lesser degree than you might expect, is reasonably straightforward in terms of mechanics, but disorientating in regard to the whole. This is particularly so as each individual story tends to serve up an odd shaped slice of the fantastic life of its star, chronology leaping around all over before ending seemingly abruptly in a couple of cases; so the whole is some way from being a neat little jigsaw puzzle which slots happily together and dispenses a chewy gum stick of perfect sense when you press the red button at the end. There is a lot going on in this story, so I'm just going to have to concentrate on what made sense to me, otherwise we could be here all evening.

The dominant theme of Seven Soldiers of Victory seems to be that of layered realities, those of the characters and their readership and how we might intersect and so on; all with some of that trendy quantum physics thrown in for seasoning and the sort of mathematics by which it can be proven that the story is a universe in its own right - although I can't remember if I picked that up myself or from one of Andrew Hickey's excellent related essays. Grant Morrison becomes a character in his own comic, not for the first time, writing the lives of people who seem to recognise themselves as essentially fictitious.

Equally significant may be the recurrence of that which springs to life, which emerges from below the earth or the underworld, and the animation of previously unliving matter - variations on a theme which crop up time and again and may be seen as crossings made from lower to higher levels of being, or travelling towards Godhood as I suspect Morrison may see it.

This transmutation is disrupted by the Sheeda - villains of the piece identified with the Sidhe, the fairy folk of myth - creatures who devour culture, pillaging and corrupting their own history and who, it turns out, seem also to embody the aforementioned Godhead towards which everyone else aspires given that they turn out be humanity from the far future at the furthest reach of evolution. On one level this may be deemed to reflect - ooh off the top of my head - Alan Moore's Watchmen recycling the culture of a more innocent age for its own ends, or even what Morrison himself does with the Seven Soldiers in question - each one hired from DC's stable of also-rans, arguably excepting the comic book incarnation of the Frankenstein monster who, by the way, seems commendably faithful to Mary Shelley's verbose original. On another level, the story represents culture as a self-generated institution, symbolic perpetual motion, a universe bringing itself into being, which probably qualifies as magick at least as much as anything Paul Daniels ever did; and the why is addressed in an Ed Stargard newspaper column in the final chapter:

In the fury of bright crayola colours, broken bones, and sound effects that can burst your ear drums if you let them, the themes may seem unfamiliar but trust me, those are human stories, writ large, dressed in capes and riding magic carpets to other universes, and if life with the Super-Cowboys taught me anything it taught me this...

When you use your X-ray vision to really, really look... ever day is mythology.

At least it feels like an answer to me. Obviously it's all much more complicated than can be summarised in four or five paragraphs, and Seven Soldiers of Victory distinguishes itself as a comic which not only rewards repeat reading, but quite possibly demands it and certainly deserves it. I'd rank it as the best thing Morrison has written since Doom Patrol, and therefore one of the best thing's he's written by some way.

Seven Soldiers of Victory volume one

Grant Morrison & others Seven Soldiers of Victory volume one (2006)
He's been on stage for twenty five minutes churning out the same improvised composition for electric toothbrush and washboard when the first bottle is thrown, then a beer can, then a few more at least one of which has been topped up with piss. Play some fucking songs, you tosser, somebody shouts...

I realise that slagging off Grant Morrison has become something of a guilty pleasure, an activity into which I slip all too easily because I think it's funny, and because I have unresolved anger issues stemming from three years or more during which I patiently spent my hard-earned man's wages on issues of The Unreadables with the understanding that it would eventually stop being shit, which of course never happened; so having once had occasion to regard its mystic slaphead author as the greatest comic book writer of all time, I felt slightly betrayed; and it wasn't that I failed to understand The Invisibles - it's just that it was, as I say, shit.

Anyway, everyone's entitled to the occasional droning musique concrète instrumental from time to time, and when the domed one is on top of his game, he really is astonishing. With this in mind I approached Seven Soldiers of Victory, reckoned by those whose opinions I tend to value as being pretty damn snappy.

All the same, I approached it with certain reservations, specifically that there is clearly one hell of a lot going on in Seven Soldiers, and - lacking confidence in my being able to keep track of it all - I was concerned that I might not get the full benefit. For example, I see from an essay incorporated by Andrew Hickey into his An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers that sections dealing with the character of Klarion the Witch Boy draw on Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progess - and never having read The Pilgrim's Progress, I've been dithering over whether or not I should first get into training with Andrew's book. Then again, I reasoned, I was entirely familiar with all the references which The Invisibles kept trying to rub in my face and they really didn't help, if anything serving only to increased my general loathing of that particular excerpt from Morrison's underpants; and there's something to be said for a comic book which can be read without first having to enrol in evening classes.

Seven Soldiers, I am told, might be viewed as a ritual undertaking designed to turn the comic industry into a sentient being, or something of that sort. This is only one of the myriad potentially deep and meaningful interpretations of the series, but I've elected to go in cold and with little idea of what to look out for, just to see if it works because as Andrew Hickey states somewhere or other:
 

Read a mediocre book, and you come out knowing exactly what the author intended, and what she wanted you to know. Read a great book, and you come out thinking things neither you nor the author ever thought of.

Furthermore, I'm going to take the story one volume at a time because that's how I roll, and I only have the first two at present, so we'll just have to see how it goes.

Seven Soldiers of Victory was originally one of those golden age comic books so definitively of its era as to resemble its own parody - now that we're all older and a little more cynical; seven superheroes, one of whom was a cowboy; Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy being two others - a sort of composite human flag I guess. DC Comics has a  long tradition of reviving and revising forgotten characters, generally with mixed results depending upon the writer and how much nostalgia is involved. Some tales were of their time and might have been better off staying that way, but if there's a new angle it can sometimes work.

I can't help but notice that Seven Soldiers seems almost like Grant Morrison doing what Alan Moore did with all those old Charlton characters he dressed up as Watchmen - although it's probably best not to read too much into that - and judging by these first eight issues, it looks like it might indeed work. The grinning kids dressed as flags are replaced by similarly obscure also-rans upon whom, lacking much in the way of back story, Morrison scrawls all manner of weird and wonderful patterns, artfully tying this version into the mythology of its golden age ancestor with some additional commentary on the genre made all the more palatable by the wit of the dialogue. That said, it's quite dense in terms of information, which has presumably led to the accusations of incomprehensibility, although on the face of it I would say it's more the case of Seven Soldiers being something which can't be rushed, and which rewards patience and consideration.

It's not perfect - some of the art seems a little underwhelming, and the Klarion sections keep threatening to become Tim Burton - which obviously no-one wants to see - but these are at present just minor niggles for the sake of keeping my hand in.

On the strength of the first volume, specifically on the strength of all its ultradimensional mutterings, Seven Soldiers has the potential of being The Invisibles that isn't shit: admittedly esoteric but at least it has a bit of a tune.