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Grant Morrison Under the Microscope

Grant Morrison Under the MicroscopeTim Pilcher writes for Bleeding Cool – we have added the abstracts to each paper he mentions;

Despite sequential art having been around for over a 100 years it's only in the last 5-6 years that universities and academics in the UK have really been taking comics studies seriously and more and more scholarly events—like the one I just attended—have been happening. Last weekend I was in Dublin attending the Grant Morrison and The Superhero Renaissance conference. Suitably sounding like a Prince concert, the event was held in the very modern (and Swedish sauna feeling—lots of bare wood) Long Room Hub of Trinity College.

As Chris Murray from Dundee University (the only university in the UK currently with a Comics Studies post-grad course) pointed out—with a quote from Harold Bloom's The Western Canon (1994)—we are now exactly at the point in history that cultural elitist Bloom feared, "What are now called 'Departments of English' will be renamed 'Cultural Studies' where Batman comics… will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton [and] Wordsworth…" For me, this is no bad thing!
There were at least 25 academics at the conference, who had travelled from Europe, USA and Australia to present their papers. Organised by Kate Roddy and Darragh Greene of Trinity College, it was more fun than sitting in a room full of lecturers trying to decipher the coded texts of a softly spoken Scot should have a right to be.
Unfortunately, I was late, so missed the first three papers (which was very annoying) but just some of the many talks that leapt out for me were:
The incredibly fast speaking Keith Scott (from De Montfort University) whose Let me Slip into Someone more Comfortable: Fiction Suits, Semantic Shamanism and Meta-linguistic Magic made some excellent comparisons between Morrison, Philip K. Dick and Ken Campbell— specifically the latter's quote, "I'm not mad, I've just read different books." Scott is very obviously a huge Invisibles fan and his knowledge was as extensive as it was enthusiastic.
"the world is made of words […] if you know the words that the world is made of you can
make of it whatever you wish."
– Terence McKenna, Alien Dreamtime
"You'll have to excuse me…I've been trying to learn an alien language and it all came back up."
– Helga, The Invisibles
The sheer variety of the Morrison canon can astound a reader; how can such diverse work spring from a single writer? Is he, like the Joker of Arkham Asylum, 'a brilliant new modification of human perception […] He has no real personality. He creates himself each day.'? My reading of Morrison will be informed by memetics, semiotics, and one of the works cited as influencing The Invisibles: Michel Bertiaux's Voudon Gnostic Workbook. Why choose this work over any of the dozens of other texts Morrison has acknowledged as inspirations? Like Morrison's work, Bertiaux's is synthetic, a combination of apparently unrelated material leading to a new model of the world. As with voudon/voodoo, Morrison presents a vision of multiple universes, literal and fictional, where travel from one realm to another is both possession and the adoption of a persona. Finally, Morrison is a profoundly Gnostic writer, repeatedly dramatising paradigm shift or conceptual breakthrough. An intellectual cartographer, his maps are constructed through language and meta-language; this paper will investigate the nature of these constructions, and the web of connections between words and worlds in Morrison's work.
Kate Roddy's Screw Symbolism Let's go Home: Morrison and Bathos opened up Alexander Pope's concept of Bathos to me, and cleverly applied it to Morrison's work.
'Nothing is so great which a marvelous genius, prompted by his laudable zeal, is not able to lessen.'
– Alexander Pope, 'Peri Bathous, or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry' (1727)
Pope introduced the literary world to the term 'bathos' in an attempt to shame the poetical bunglers of his day, yet bathos has become more than an accident of style. Used consciously by a writer, it can serve as a means to test readers' expectations and expand the limits of genre.
This paper examines key examples of bathos in Morrison's writing, reflecting upon how he achieves the effect and what purpose it serves in his works. It initially focusses on the early serials for DC Comics (Animal Man, Doom Patrol), arguing that the 'downbeat' feel of these comics and their reliance on Dada and the absurd is indicative of Morrison's troubled relationship with post-Crisis continuity and editorial authority. A comparison is then made with more recent works (All-Star Superman, Batman RIP), where bathetic elements are seen to be less pervasive, yet individually crucial to the crafting of more hopeful and uplifting narratives. In moving towards a conclusion, the paper considers if Morrison's work constitutes a meaningful challenge to Pope's notion that bathos is antithetical to the artist's pursuit of 'the sublime'.
Chris Murray gave the keynote speech, I Made the World to End: The Immersive/Recursive Worlds of Grant Morrison, which, again, was an insightful overview of the writer's oeuvre.

This lecture will explore the relationship between two key features of Grant Morrison's writing, the immersive strategies he employs to embed both his own persona (often in terms of an avatar) and an analogue for the reader in his comics, and the ways in which this is linked to recursive strategies. Recursion is a central motif of Morrison's work, with its emphasis on repetition and cyclical structures. The theory of recursion also touches upon several of Morrison's key themes and interests, including language (linguist Noam Chomsky believes it to be a defining aspect of human communication), fractal geometry (where recursive patterns dictate the development of non-Euclidean natural structures), and what the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter refers to as "strange loops", whereby a return to origin is the end point in certain kinds of relations, and where hierarchy disappears and becomes "heterarchy". Many of Morrison's comics blend immersive strategies with recursive structures, and both are realised at the level of theme, and in the form of the comics themselves, on the one hand exploring notions of identity, storytelling, apocalypse and transcendence, but also tapping into the very fabric of communication and cognition. Morrison's comics integrate these concepts and themes in a dizzying roller-coaster ride of playful intertextuality, pop-magic and intellectual seriousness, making him one of the most fascinating authors working today.

David Coughlan's intriguing examination of The Filth in From Shame to Glory made me want to reread the series in a new light, while Roy Cook's look at the writer and The Writer: The Death of The Author in Suicide Squad #58 was a fun dissection of the metaphysical murder of Grant by John Ostrander.
The double identities of comic book superheroes are structured in such a way as to suggest that strength in the masculine public sphere is the truest sign of manhood. At its extreme, the hypermasculine superhero embodies a dominant masculinity armoured against any possible infection by the feminine, even if that means rejecting love, marriage, and the home. Yet, at the same time, this armoured self can be read as the expression of a sense of male shame and inadequacy, with the hero removing himself from the home because he cannot trust himself given the, often sexual, violence that defines him as a man.
As early as 1993, Grant Morrison was concerned with "the idea of diffusing the hard body," the results of which are evident in Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and Flex Mentallo, for example. But it is in The Filth that he tries to show how, as he says, "the shabbiest, shittiest life you can live," one defined and limited by shame, guilty, fear, hatred, and loneliness, "can be redeemed into glory by the power of imagination." Here, the hero seemingly is Ned Slade, a high-ranking officer of the "supercleansing" operation The Hand, whose off-duty persona is Greg Feely, a single man, addicted to pornography and accused of paedophilia, but fiercely dedicated to his cat Tony's well-being. Shifting between worlds of differing scales and dimensions, The Filth, as its name suggests, studies the interactions of perversion and policing and, in the process, the superhero's part in redeeming male shame.
In Animal Man, Grant Morrison meta-fictionally interrogates the comics art form by inserting himself into the narrative, and hence into DC continuity, interacting with his protagonist Animal Man in-panel and highlighting the complex relationship between creator and created. While Morrison's role as the writer of Animal Man ('the writer' as creator) has been a focus of attention in comics studies, his fictional role as the Writer in DC continuity ('the Writer' as character) has been less well examined. I shall focus on the Writer's only other appearance: Suicide Squad #58. In this issue the Writer can control events within the narrative by typing on his word processor. Although killed off by the writer of this comic, Joe Ostrander (providing a novel perspective on old debates about the 'death of the author') the Writer is, prior to his death, aware that his control over events is limited by the fact that he – that is, Grant Morrison – is now a character within DC comics continuity. As a result, Morrison (the writer) no longer has sole control over Morrison (the Writer), since other writers (e.g. Ostrander) can control the character in other comics. Hence, this issue of Suicide Squad forces us to re-conceptualize the relationships between the author as creator and the author as meta-fictional construct within his own creation, at least when this creation is a massively collaborative fictional universe like DC continuity.
There was an attempt to hook up live with Schedel Luitjen in Texas, which sadly feel victim to tech problems, but his Final Crisis, The Return of Bruce Wayne and Neoplatonic Demonology was eventually read out by Darragh, and Schedel managed to answer questions by instant messager.
In his treatment of the New Gods in Final Crisis, Grant Morrison richly weaves Platonic ideas into the DC Universe, from the Radion 'Essence of Bullet' that can kill gods to Darkseid's Hyper-Adapter, a living curse, a spoken idea given form in physical reality, to Darkseid himself, as the Hole In Things, comparable to the Neoplatonic conception of evil as a lacking of good. By making the Fourth World and its elements into a realm of Platonic Ideal Forms, Morrison gives a deeper meaning and an eternal hyper-significance to the events of Final Crisis and the following stories; furthermore, by thrusting Batman into this world and having him fatally wound a god and then travel from the distant past to the infinite future, Morrison makes his Batman an ever-present feature in the history of DC's Earth, essentially making him into an idea as essential to humanity as any other idea in the DC universe, and making him into a new god, an idea powerful enough to be pitted against the idea of crime itself in Batman, Incorporated. My paper will trace the roots of the evil gods of Final Crisis to Neoplatonic sources in sources from the Late Antique and Renaissance flourishings of Platonic thought, including Plotinus, Apuleius, Augustine, Justin Martyr, Iamblichus, Marsilio Ficino, and Giovanni Pico. Further, I will explore how this use of Neoplatonic concepts broadens the DC Universe and adds to the story of DC's stories which is Final Crisis.
I also really enjoyed Will Brooker's The Return of the Represssed: Grant Morrison's Batman RIP where he talked about Morrison's revival of the old multiple versions of Batmen from the 1950s. Will knows a thing or two about The World's Greatest Detective, as he did his PhD on Batman and has just written Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman.
This paper draws on my recent monograph Hunting the Dark Knight: 21st Century Batman, which in turn builds on my previous book Batman Unmasked (Continuum, 2000) – based on my PhD into Batman's first sixty years – and my other published work such as 'The Best Batman Story' in Alan McKee's Beautiful Things in Popular Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), and 'Hero of the Beach', on Flex Mentallo, in The Journal of Comics and Graphic Novels (2011).
It examines Grant Morrison's approach to Batman's history as 'as the events in one man's extraordinarily vivid life' and argues that Morrison's sustained run on the flagship titles, from Batman in 2006 through the stories of The Black Glove and Batman RIP to Batman Incorporated in 2011, subverted the normally-repressive rules of continuity by bringing long-forgotten stories – including science fiction, fantasy and camp – back into mainstream canon.
Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnival, the paper discusses the ways in which Morrison's portrayal of Batman embraced diversity and fragmentation, and captured a sense of Batman's prismatic, mosaic totality, for a brief period before the containment and reduction of the character's history in the New 52 reboot of October 2011.
My own talk (Transvestism, Transgenderism and Transformative Personalities in the Life and Work of Grant Morrison) seemed to go down well.
This paper examines Morrison's recurrent themes of transgendered characters, transvestitism, in both his personal and creative life, and will focus on his concept of the "Liquid Personality." It will explore how many of Morrison's characters evolve, both physically, emotionally and psychically, and how the sense of "the self" is in fact a malleable form capable of being manipulated, either by internal or external forces. Works examined include Animal Man, Kill Your Boyfriend, The Mystery Play, The Filth, The Invisibles, Flex Mentallo, Doom Patrol and All Star Superman, amongst others. It will also examine how Morrison has taken these concepts and used them on himself, reinventing his public face to present different personalities to the world at large. From lonely, post-goth geek in Glasgow, through "angry young man of comics", to hip, counterculture L.A. guru to the stars. As Morrison himself has stated, "I use media exposure as a means of playing with multiple personalities. Each interview is a different me and they're all untrustworthy." The paper aims to peel away the masks of Morrison and his work.
I haven't gone too deeply into the specifics of each paper here as there's the possibility that some of them maybe gathered for publication in the future. There were so many others, and you can read the abstracts here.
Given the narrow scope of study (Grant Morrison renaissance superhero comics) there was considerable overlap in the papers with favoured texts including All Star Superman, Batman RIP, Zenith and Final Crisis, yet no one discussed the New X-Men.
Also, as the majority of the speakers came from English or Philosophy departments, no one discussed the artwork. After all, as I pointed out, comics are generally a collaborative effort and the bulk of Grant's visions and stories are told through the filter of an artist's hand. How that artist interprets Morrison's work invariably effects the final message of the comic strip. A case in point I made regarding the transvestite, Lord Fanny, from The Invisibles, who can look anything from a gorgeous woman to a slightly ropey bloke in a dress, depending on the artist drawing her. I suggested that any future conferences on comics MUST include examinations of art in relation to the text as they are indivisible when in comes to comics. Indeed, the blending of text and visuals is one of comics' USPs.
Chris summed up the conference "Perhaps we haven't gotten much closer to discovering who he [Morrison] is, but hopefully we have got a bit closer to exploring his techniques and his work… And maybe we've got a little closer to explaining why he's such an ongoing fascinating figure." When the group was asked what has been Morrison's contribution to modern day superhero comics, it was generally agreed that he brought hope, fun and positivity to what was once a dour, bleak and grim genre wallowing in post-Eighties nihilism. Further, that he has brought external influences, texts and knowledge to comics—an industry that is notorious for self-referentialism and navel-gazing. Although he does that as well!
Ironically, just as the conference started, Grant announced in an interview for the Spectator that he's moving away from superheroes after his forthcoming Wonder Woman graphic novel and a few other projects. As he says, "Yeah, it just felt like I'd said a lot, you know."
If there were any criticisms laid at Morrison's door, it was that perhaps he was too much of a dilettante who never went into his subjects with enough academic rigour. Others defended this saying that perhaps we need more multi-disciplinarians and I pointed out that if he spent that much time studying, say linguistics, then surely he'd just be a linguist, and not a writer. Writers have to be, by their very nature, dilettantes. When those of us that have met him asked what we thought he would've made of the event, I replied, "Appalled, bemused, flattered and amused. All at the same time." Ultimately all agreed he was, suitably, a renaissance man!

Personally, I can't think of many comic book writers (apart from Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman) who could elicit this much attention and analysis from academics, and that alone speaks volumes.

And if you can't get enough Grant Morrison (and let's face it, who can?) he'll be at his own Morrisoncon in Las Vegas in 10 days time; then on 11-14 October he'll be appearing at the New York Comic Con; and finally, on 28 October, there's the Dundee Comics Day dedicated to Grant (organised by Chris Murray and the Dundee Uni crowd). Phew! He's like a media shark—he never stops moving forward!

 


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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