Comics College is a monthly feature where we provide an introductory guide to some of the comics medium’s most important auteurs and offer our best educated suggestions on how to become familiar with their body of work.
Strap yourself in, kids, because this is going to be a big one, as we run through the lengthy and considerable career of one of mainstream comics’ biggest stars, Grant Morrison.
Why he’s important
If nothing else, Grant Morrison is a writer with a definitive vision. ( ... )
Where to start
Morrison’s most well-known and beloved work is easily All-Star Superman, and thus makes as likely and new-reader-friendly a place to begin as any. ( ... )
From there you should read
After his run on Doom Patrol concluded, Morrison spun-off one of his creations from the series, Flex Mentallo, into a self-titled four-issue mini-series. ( ... )
At the same time Morrison was pushing the dada envelope in Doom Patrol, he was cheerfully breaking the fourth wall in Animal Man. ( ... )
Rounding out Morrison’s collaborations with Frank Quitely is We3, a surprisingly effective sci-fi revamp of The Incredible Journey with a cybernetically outfitted (and incredibly dangerous) rabbit, cat and dog on the run from the military that wants to “decommission” them and trying to find their original owners. ( ... )
And then you should read
The Filth was Morrison’s follow-up to The Invisibles and something of a flip side to the latter’s more positive, rebelling against the status quo attitude. ( ... )
Morrison must have a deep fondness for Oscar Wilde. How else to explain Sebastian O, which re-imagines the author of The Importance of Being Earnest as a witty assassin, wrecking havoc on the establishment that sent him to prison decades ago? ( ... )
Though the bulk of his work has been done for DC/Vertigo, Morrison spent some time a decade or so ago at Marvel. The most notable fruit of his labors there was his run on the New X-Men, where he shook up and in some cases completely altered the status quo ( ... )
Further reading
Morrison teamed up with Duncan Fegredo for Kid Eternity, a three-issue prestige-styled mini series that was yet another dark revamping of a long-forgotten superhero character, in this case a boy who could summon classic (and dead) characters from history just by saying the word “Eternity.” ( ... )
Morrison first made his name in 1989 with Arkham Asylum, a heavily-hyped standalone graphic novel that teamed him up with a pre-Cages Dave McKean. ( ... )
Even further reading
Morrison went Bollywood with Vimanarama, a three-issue mini-series he did with Philip Bond about a nebbishy British Asian man who finds himself battling ancient giant monsters bent on destroying the world as well as juggling various personal crises( ... )
Ancillary materials
Morrison teamed up with Mark Waid, Geoff Johns and Greg Rucka for 52, a year-long, weekly series that juggled various plot threads to reveal what was going on in the DC universe after the events of Infinite Crisis. ( ... ) Probably his most notable early work is Zenith, another epic superhero saga starring a snotty youth who would rather be a pop star than fight crime. It’s a bit too jam-packed, though it settles itself out a bit as it goes on, and you can see a lot of his initial ideas on the superhero genre being laid out here. Eclipse published two volumes of Zenith but those have sadly long since fallen out of print. Supposedly a collected edition will be coming out from 2000AD sometime in the near future ( ... )
Avoid
Don’t let the subtitle to Supergods fool you. The book is not really about “What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human.” ( ... )
Comics College | Grant Morrison by Chris Mautner, November 26, 2011
