I honestly did not like this very much. It may have something to do with how I see/saw its author, as the person primarily responsible for my return to comics after I had gotten tired of reading everything that said Spider-Man on it somewhere in high school. Morrison's Animal Man was a revelation for me, as I'm sure it was for anyone else who was reading it in the time frame during which it actually came out.
I guess I discovered him during the best period of his career since Animal Man, with the beginning chapters of his still pretty great Batman saga and All Star Superman in full swing. But the Grant Morrison of right now seems to be on a downturn, though even at his worst he's still just about the best in mainstream comics. Joe The Barbarian was an excuse to have a great artist draw a lot of really cool stuff, Return of Bruce Wayne was really uneven, from ridiculously cool Milligan-referencing Puritan witchfinder Batman to super-boring Cowboy Batman and unremarkable 30s Detective Batman.
And now he's about to take over the reigns of Superman, the "for real" one this time. If you aren't up on the whole "New 52" deal, DC's taking their entire line of superhero comics back to #1's to give people a fresh start (gain the built-in sales boost they need in an industry dying slower and more painfully than a Dragon Ball Z A-list hero) and putting new teams on the books and changing up a lot of history. Morrison's going back to the origins of Superman, meaning the 30s Superman who couldn't quite fly and was a socialist working man's champion. In Siegel and Shuster's first issue of Action Comics to feature Superman, he beat up a strike breaking governor! Morrison doing this is kind of a slap in the face to the original creators, who were given an extremely raw deal for creating the most iconic superhero of all time. They were paid $130 total for Superman for the rest of their lives, and as Morrison puts it, in an incredibly glib tone, "had created that character and thought they would create more to sell."
Morrison's new Superman doesn't have the costume, for the sole reason that the rights to Superman as he was created by S&S, which includes the iconic costume design, revert to their families in 2013. Even though he's probably doing this out of his own love for the character, the practical reason for all of this is that DC needs to establish a Superman that is recognizable sans costume and without the same power set as the original creation.
This is my whole issue with all of superhero comics. Ever since Hollywood and Comics realized their mutually beneficial relationship, to the point where both of the Big Two are now subsidiaries of companies that made their stock in movies, superhero comics are the flagship of a brand maintenance machine. Before and while reading this book, I thought about that a lot. What if Grant Morrison was actually allowed to turn Batman into the pansexual psychedelic crazy cool machine he writes about Batman being? I am all for greater freedom instead of continuity or marketability. But by the end of the book, the anarchic, fiercely original Morrison of Arkham Asylum's transvestite Joker and the Invisibles' motley crew of gender-bending lsd-magic badasses I love is gone and replaced with a guy who is totally cool with doing the best job he can without pushing against his editors.
And his editors/bosses have that change too. At Vertigo he was under Karen Berger, who is, as far as I'm concerned, the best. If you look at the stuff under her belt, you'll find pretty much every great comic DC is responsible for. Now in the mainstream DC world, he's got Didio and Levitz, who have their own superpower of completely fucking ignoring things that are major issues for their readers.
It seems like, as they attempt to make comics "smarter" and appeal to smarter people, they don't realize what that entails. The new comics fans are feminists and multiculturalist liberals who have the totally reasonable dream of getting every character of every (non-binary) gender and race a chance to get a great story, and the bosses at DC have responded by plugging their ears for as long as possible and dodging questions as much as possible (see these two interviews: on race and and gender, the latter being even more grossly impressive given that Laura Hudson is a great journalist and female comics fan) until this year's comic con where they finally just delivered a big fuck you directly to the ears of their fans instead of trying to bury it in the press.
This year at a DC panel, a woman and her daughter got up to ask a question. "Why don't you hire more female writers?" The response from Didio was "Who should we hire?" She continued with her concerns about the treatment of female characters in the DCU, and Jim Lee, who seems like a nice enough guy usually, had the fucking gall to ask whether she wanted female characters dead center on covers or slightly off to the side.
At this point, they moved from dodging to outright mocking the idea that they should give a shit about non-white males. In this, the year comics lost Dwayne McDuffie, who I would say is the most important black comics writer ever. The guy who made Jon Stewart the most recognizable Green Lantern, who was not afraid to lash out at Marvel by writing them a pitch called Teenage Ninja Negro Thrashers when they created 3 different characters who were all "black guys on skateboards." The guy who gave us Milestone Comics and Static Shock and Icon and Xombi, a comic that was just recently brought back to totally awesome effect and is being completely ignored by both readers and DC's marketing.
So what does all that really have to do with Morrison? Easy. He's helping perpetuate the only defense The Big Two has against those problems. He's keeping that vile precedent DC set with buying Superman all the way back in the 30s alive by writing a book where he softens the blow and then cleaning up the mess for DC. Grant Morrison is capital-G rant captial-M orrison, and if he threw his weight at the bosses about anything like this, it'd start raining authors and artists finally given the courage to unionize against an industry that has take over half a century to barely get almost fair with them. And now, sensing that the product they produce is just the blood in the veins of a much larger body of business, needs them more to maintain brands than produce good work, is going to do its best to keep them, they're gonna pull even harder, lest they learn from Superman, lest they stop worshipping Alan Moore's exemplary talent but slagging him off as a crazy old man who can't get along with anyone.
And that's why, with the confluence of Morrison's book and DC's asshole parade, I ain't buying a new DC book for a long time.
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