The best and most distinctive of Grant Morrison’s work is, as he admits, “deliberately elliptical… and provocative”. His stories flout narrative convention, fragmenting, reforming, looping back upon themselves, appearing sometimes to be almost improvisatory before, eventually, cohering. At their conclusions, they demand that the reader return to the first page and begin again, the narrative deepening, growing richer and more satisfying, with each revisitation.
Morrison has been writing for more than twenty years and while his oeuvre is vibrant, fearless and fascinatingly strange, his name has yet to achieve the mainstream recognition of Neil Gaiman (say) or Alan Moore. This relative obscurity outside the industry may be connected to the following details: that the vast bulk of Morrison’s work (unlike that of Gaiman’s) have been in the medium of the comic book and that the genre in which he most frequently practices is that of the superheroic adventure.
He has written other kinds of stories – a contemporary fable, The Mystery Play; a furious left-wing revivification of Dan Dare; the occult espionage series The Invisibles – but the majority of his productions feature improbable costumed heroes of one kind or another. His most successful fictions, with their cheerfully pulpy titles - Arkham Asylum; All-Star Superman; Final Crisis – refashion familiar characters into something which approaches modern myth. Operating within the confines of the genre (which, he describes as being analogous to playing “twelve-bar blues”) he transforms plots which might, in other hands, have been nothing more than gaudy fisticuffs into the kind of free-form experimentalism described above.
Happily, those qualities which have characterised his comic book career – provocation; the elliptical; formal invention – are to be found in abundance in his first full-length prose work: Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero. Appearing at its outset to be simply a well-informed cultural history of the superhero, the book opens with descriptions of the earliest examples of the species: Superman (who first appeared in 1938) and Batman (who made his debut a year later) - “the ur-god and his dark twin”. Whereas Superman seemed to embody the modern age and brought with him the promise of “a fiercely human tomorrow”, Batman’s world was one of “crime, madness and the supernatural”, his exploits mining “a rich seam of blood and thunder sensationalism”. The vigilantes’ garish outfits Morrison links persuasively with the costumes that were once worn by circus strongmen. “In 1938”, he explains, “underpants on tights were signifiers of extra-masculine strength and endurance”.
Itemising the train of imitations that followed – Wonder Woman; Green Lantern; Captain Marvel; the Flash – he is droll about less likely and unenduring superheroes, singling out Funnyman “a crime-fighting clown”, Madame Fatal, “secretly retired actor Richard Stanton, who fought crime dressed as an old lady” and the Red Bee who kept a “hive of trained crime-fighting bees... in the buckle of his belt”. The most successful such champions, however, provide a frame “through which our own best and worst impulses” may “be personified” and which point “to something great and inevitable in us all.” He goes on to track the fortunes of the genre – its post-war slump, its corralling by the censors in 1954, the introduction a decade later of such new characters as Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the Incredible Hulk (all “radioactive with rough-hewn novelty”), and the faltering shift towards social relevance that took place in the 1970s. Gradually, Morrison’s own biography enters the book, first keeping pace with the historical narrative, then participating in it before, finally, subsuming it altogether.
Born in Glasgow in 1960 to pacifist parents who believed that he should “be raised according to nonviolent principles”, Morrison found comfort in comic books as a child when his home life fell painfully apart. While still a teenager he wrote and drew his own cartoon strip in his local paper before graduating to the British comics’ scene and, before long, being headhunted by American companies to work on their most famous characters. The history of the 1980s to the present day is filtered through his experience and Supergods becomes full of anecdotes and side-swipes at his contemporaries. Eventually, this approach is overtaken by descriptions of a vision that Morrison claims to have experienced in Kathmandu in 1994. He communicated with “intelligent sculptures”, he tells us, “made of what appeared to be ultraviolet neon tubes”, who informed him that “time was a kind of incubator, and all life on Earth was one thing”.
Towards the end of this inventive, eccentric, occasionally maddening book, Morrison suggests that if the preceding pages have “made any point clear… it’s that things don’t have to be real to be true.” As is often the case, it is unclear to what extent Morrison is being characteristically playful though the temptation remains, as he surely intended, to return to the first page and begin again.
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