Near Myths, a Grant Morrison Retrospective, Part 3

Welcome back to our retrospective look at the first series of comics Grant Morrison wrote:  the 1978-79 anthology series Near Myths. His first issue contained a 5 page story called, “Time is a Four Letter Word,” that was all over the place in terms of storytelling and execution, but still contained the hallmarks of Morrison’s writing style, along with early versions of ideas that he would seep into his Return of Bruce Wayne story arc. Last issue, we were introduced to Gideon Stargrave in the 7-page “The Vatican Conspiracy Part 1,”  Morrison’s Jerry Cornelius analogue (ripoff by some accounts) who would come back in the Invisibles, creating a very strange meta-textual reality loop.

With issue #4, Morrison was moved to the front of the book--the second feature--and his entry was now 14 pages, giving us part 2 and 3 of “The Vatican Conspiracy.” It’s impossible to know the behind-the-scenes process; but with this issue, Morrison’s storytelling really gets settled down, spending that extra two panels to stamp a scene shut, or transition to the next. I can’t say whether he drew parts 2 and 3 separately, or if they were intended to be lumped together in order to give him 14 pages to work with in one sitting, but the craft is definitely coming together.

Swinging for the fences, the first page picks up right where we left off:  in a helicopter chase. Morrison’s sarcasm is shoved in your eyes:  “USE THE SOUND PISTOL, JAN ~ IT’S ALWAYS GOOD FOR A LAUGH.” The page is a circular series of panels showing the dog fight with a
larger-than-life detailed portrait of Gideon smack dab in the center, as if ripping out of the paper to drag us in. Keeping his thesaurus handy, the description of the falling mechanical bird would fit right into Joe the Barbarian or The Filth--for example:  “THE GRACE OF A CRIPPLED DRAGONFLY IN ENDLESS SCREAMING SPIRALS, DOWN TO BURST IN RED AND ORANGE IN THE THAMES AT GREENWHICH.”

The second page greets us with the first large, almost splash, page yet. It depicts Gideon and Jan resting in some snowy mountains, looking at the map, keeping diligent watch for enemies, while a caption reads “YOU ARE HERE.” Clues are seamlessly dropped in before Gideon is attacked. Action, sarcasm, ridiculous paneling, rinse, repeat.

The plot moves fairly conventional after this:  the conspiracy reveals itself, Jan is kidnapped, and Gideon is wounded and left for dead, ending chapter 2 with a classic mental fight scene. A Vatican witch of some sort splinters Gideon’s soul and mind, leaving him a helpless amnesiac, before a backup Stargrave personality reestablishes itself, allowing the gunmen in bell bottoms to blow the witch away. Once again, there are hints of the ideas that would become integral to future stories, namely The Batman of Zur En Arh concept from Batman R.I.P.

Part 3 is the icing on the cake, where everything clicks. The movement from scene to scene is very natural as we follow Gideon on a last ditch storm on the Vatican, plowing through a series of foes from earlier. The setup is clearly defined and being brought to conclusion, especially the Joan of Arc mention from the first page of Part 1, which hits a very satisfying beat.

The sexuality is amped up to 10, but not 11. There are scenes of tantric, spiritual sex juxtaposed by a sexy blonde in a thong and spaghetti strap, with her ass to the reader, legs spread, preaching endless sex for world peace.

This all builds to a naked warrior, winged bronze helmets, and a spear in hand with breasts hanging for the world to see. Knowing what Morrison publicly acknowledges about his sexual endeavors, namely that it was nonexistent for much of his early adult life, these scenes conjour images, assumedly, of a 17-year old Morrison contemplating the line between porn and action tits.

The art is all over the place, especially a sequence of action towards the bottom of page 18 (in Near Myths) that is very similar to Frank Quitely’s art, particularly on We3 and Batman and Robin #16.  There are as many small panels as possible showing the smallest flinches and grabs, while the hero brutalizes a series of enemies. The panels go into each other like Tetris pieces, all well defined with “-SNAP!-" and “-CRACK!-"sound effects.

There are several larger panels, a few taking up almost 2/3 of the page (and the pages are much larger than current comic books in the US), that really let the scenes breathe and the characters relax. The scene transitions are more fluid and thought out, but there are still quite a few instances of the paneling being very extreme and hard to follow, with the bottom 1/3 of a page cut diagonally into six panels that spiral around each other.

Gideon is defined by the end of this series as a Wolverine-type tough, post-hippie, gun-slinging secret agent with a broad cast of characters and enemies. Stargrave has safe houses and connections around the world that allow him to travel with the apparent motivation of stamping out Order. It’s no surprise that the issue ends with the promise “GIDEON STARGRAVE RETURNS IN: THE ENTROPY CONCERTO!” which, sadly wasn’t the published story of Near Myths #5, but is similar enough to the “Entropy in the U.K.” arc from the Invisibles to assume there may have been some left over concepts.

I’ve never read anything by Michael Moorcock, and I know most of the animosity to the Stargrave character stems from his appearance in the Invisibles and not these short stories; so, I do not know how much has been lifted from the original Jerry Cornelius books, but with the close of the Vatican Conspiracy trilogy, Morrison has created a character that could return one day. Morrison built Stargrave, gave him the utilities of a protagonist, and should things have been different, Stargrave could’ve gone on to star in more features. I’m not saying I’m dying for “Gideon Stargrave/Batman: The Gods are Falling” (though I would blindly buy it), but these stories do not crumble in the way you would assume an experimental writer’s first forays would. There are enough out-there concepts, witty dialogue, and pleasantly kinetic art to warrant more than one read.

We finish our series with the best of the lot--Checkmate, man!

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