Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Near Myths, A Grant Morrison Retrospective, Part 2


We continue our look at the first works of Grant Morrison in Near Myths #2 which features the first appearance of Gideon Stargrave.



I, like most, was first introduced to Gideon Stargrave in the pages of The Invisibles Vol. 1 #17-19. He was a character created by King Mob, a member of the Invisibles who bears a purposeful striking physical resemblence to Grant Morrison himself. King Mob’s real identity is that of a retired fiction writer named Kirk Morrison, all of this crafted as a meta-textual way for Morrison to link himself in the physical world to that of his wish-fulfilling fictional universe. This link was to elevate the shy Morrison into the action star on the page, though there were adverse effects as well which we will discuss in length in a future article on Grant Morrison. The idea is obvious: Both Grant Morrison and Kirk Morrison wrote Gideon Stargrave.



It is impossible not to Google Gideon Stargrave and come upon accusations of ripping off the Michael Moorcock character Jerry Cornelius, a hip secret agent that I can’t go further into simply because I’ve never read anything with the character in it. Jerry Cornelius is generally treated as an open-source character with several key features to his universe that have been perused by Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore (where Jerry Cornelius appears in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), and Bryan Talbot, however, when it came to Gideon Stargrave, Moorcock has no tolerance. I have been told by my local comic book knower of all things, Ed Katsche, that the accusations are warranted, the Invisibles story arc featuring Stargrave features lifted dialogue and situations.

I've read the work of Grant Morrison twice. Once when I wrote it. Once when he wrote it.” - Michael Moorcock



The original Gideon Stargarve appeared in two issues of Near Myths, #3 and #4. #3 features the story “The Vatican Conspiracy” which he also did art on. The story is seven pages long, gaining two pages over the last feature, “Time is a Four Letter Word”. Whereas “Time” was a massive concept compressed into five jumbled pages (that would later play out long form in “The Return of Bruce Wayne”) this first Stargrave story is where we can see more of a fleshed out pacing. This is part one of a three part story, Near Myths #4 featuring the other two. It definitely shows a confidence on the publisher’s end to give Morrison more pages and commit to longer stories.

The story reads like a sequence from Final Crisis. Gideon Stargrave is presented as an indestructible beatnik action star, knowledgeable of all of space/time and it’s limitations, leading the way against an undefined enemy of motion. The entire first page places Stargrave in a swank pad full of iconography of the 60‘s such as The Beatles and Mickey Mouse, a last hope to save time, living in a foreign location where “Joan of Arc died... Over and Over and Over and Over.” We immediately start jumping from location to location, told just enough to know the world is ending.

Morrison fits in enough characterization, giving Stargrave a page to have a glass of orange juice and relish in his own perfection that leads to so much pain. The bad guys surface every other page, only to be blown away by our hero with a one-liner. The enemies keep coming sharing a link, The Vatican, ending with a final chase to stop the future, to be continued next month.

The story has far more semblance than Morrison’s previous story, but we’re still in psychedelic country. The imagery in the story takes the wheel from the story, as if Morrison had these striking shots that he just had to fit in somehow. Lines or corpses hanging from street lamps, the house on the cliff of nowhere, Howard the Duck as an evil Constable, fits of the imagination spilling needlessly. The connecting points building up to the Vatican are actually subtle in that way Morrison is known for building stories today, tiny hints and throwaway lines that hold the clue to the end if one pays attention. The dialogue is very Morrisony, Stargrave’s quips filled to the brim with sarcasm and confidence and the made up sci-fi lingo is spot on as usual with lines like “WE BROKE FREE OF THE ZONE. AND JUST IN TIME TOO. ANY LONGER AND OUR DNA PATTERNS WOULD HAVE BEEN LOCKED IN THE DISRUPTION CYCLE. I CALL IT THE METEMPSYCHOSIS HELIX - BUT THAT’S JUST ME BEING SMART.”

The art makes this all work. The loose images Morrison chose to stick in there were chosen for a reason: He wanted to draw them. Morrison really does have good definition of objects and backgrounds that, when characters are shooting guns in the vacuum of space, go a long way with placing the character in a physical context. The scene with the hanging bodies is especially well drawn, the buildings in the background really detailed and lonely feeling at the end of the world. There are several tricks buried in the art that I’m curious how they we’re done, such as on page 6 a panel at the bottom seems to be cut into 5 vertical strips and made uneven, including the dialogue balloon.



That isn’t to say the art is flawless. More so than with “Time” Morrison takes the biggest leap ever with his paneling, creating very dynamic pages with differently sized strips of panels criss crossing behind a large circular center piece. Sometimes this works, building a very wide and energetic pace, other times it’s just confusing. A lot of the imagery discussed above has no relation to the plot except for broad metaphorical emotional stamps and the backgrounds are at times a wash of time distortion experiments and undefined flashbacks.

At the end of the last page I knew what was going on, that is a step above “Time is a Four Letter Word”. Morrison expects a lot from readers, he prides himself on crafting comic books that are best enjoyed after repeated readings, I just have a hard time believing he was this ambitious to start. The question I am trying to answer with these early reviews is if Grant Morrison’s hallmarks can be seen, halfway through our series I can gladly answer with a resounding yes. Gideon Stargrave in “The Vatican Conspiracy” was still a whole hell of a lot more entertaining than half the rack on Wednesday.

Next we will finish with an extra long, two-part Gideon Stargrave bonanza before finishing with my personal favorite I’m dying to get to, The Checkmate Man.

Be sure to read the First Part of the Gant Morrison Retrospective Series 

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