Grant Morrison hasn't quit comics. His current comic is Marvel Boy (drawn by JG Jones) and for the last four months he has been destroying me with it. Here's a little something he has to say about it: "I got sick of seeing what I call 'Dad Comics,'… It's time to say good-bye to all those boring, nostalgic books. We're here to trash the past and make something new that's relevant to our lives today. This is punk super-heroics. This book is all about blowing things up to make things better."

He has plans to do a Fantastic Four mini-series (with Jae Lee perhaps) whose guiding principle will be that Oedipal relationships betwixt Sue and Johnny Storm are what energized the series in the first place. Another big-assed quote (I understand if it doesn't get printed, but I imagine you will get as excited about it as I did, so I included it for you): 

"My take is to be aware of all those underpinnings and create a story which uses them as its foundation. I must stress this is not a story about incest in the FF but it's a story which gains a lot of power from being familiar with the engine that drives a family-based series like this. I also think I've done something which, for the first time in 4 decades-- owes nothing to the style of Stan or Jack but I don't want to say anymore or it'll turn up as some other fucker's story before mine gets out."

After this he will do a Silver Surfer one-shot with Frank Quitely and beyond that two more Marvel Boy mini-series, not to mention another creator owned series called The Filth (or so he said in an online chat whose transcript is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/edfest/chat/post_chat.shtml … hyper hyper hyper text!) Allow me also to point out that Morrison authored a comic called St. Swithin's Day not "Saint Switchin's day" as your article notes.

Though you offer "timeliness" as a potential excuse for this gaffe about Morrison's exiting, be aware that the source for this unholy rumor was [the just plain-stupid] Wizard Magazine and propagated (surprise!) by the Internet. Morrison explains the confusion as follows: "The Wizard article gave several 'impressions' not all of which are true; I've never intended to 'leave' comics ever. It's surely obvious by now that I love the ghastly things. I'm taking a break, having a life, doing some work outside comics and getting new ideas together." In addition to Wizard's simple negligent reporting , Morrison often adopts what could be called shamanistic guises when doing interviews and says different things about the same subjects all the time-- it can only be assumed that Morrison was screwing with the Wizard interviewer. In fact, Mark Millar (himself not known to be entirely straight shooting in interviews) claims that Morrison once assumed a "Bizarro persona" and his entirely vocabulary eventually devolved to the phrase "Me am not want drink of Vodka."

I bring this up not in some bickering, fan boyish game of one-upmanship but merely as an introduction for a channel in which to plug the anti-Wizard: Savant Magazine. This online magazine (found at www.savantmag.com) is published weekly (in the tradition of "inkies," the old musical weeklies) every Thursday and is the middle ground of passion between the pubescent Wizard and the boring Comics Journal. The editors of this magazine actively encourage the distribution of it in printed form (and not just in comic shops-there is a whole section of the magazine called "Action" which describes various attempts to turn people onto comics) and subscribe to the "freeware" or "copyleft" memes of the idea as virus.

Your article reminds me of Savant. It's smart, it's quick and it doesn't have time for the usual "BAM! POW! Holy shit, Batman, comics aren't for kidz anymore!" condescension-- but I do have some other problems with it. I could be upset you left off Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan, especially considering that Satellite is a newspaper, or Jodorowsky's Metabarons, especially considering that it kicks so much ass, but I'm sure you would have included them if you had had the space. I also don't want to quibble about your description of The Invisibles because I realize that a series as grand and personal as that one has as many meanings as it does readers-but mostly I don't want to argue because I thought it was a great description; I still haven't figured The Invisibles out but I'm ready to "return and begin again," like that scarab guru says.

My main problem is that the intended audience for the piece seems to know at first nothing about comics (thinking they are "pulp for the illiterate") but then to have "gotten over Understanding Comics, read Maus, Dark Knight and Watchmen in freshman lit, and finally realized that Sandman was pretty overrated." Anyone who had read the aforementioned (admittedly seminal) works probably already has an idea as to what's being published and certainly doesn't need to be told "How To Read Comics." As much as we comic aficionados would like to believe, few people outside our steadily deflating bubble have read any comics at all or have any more of a familiarity with them than passing recognition of the Batman and Superman insignia. It seems that an article in a section entitled "Satellite 101" would start with these major works and expand to include others. And that's assuming that Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns are the perfect introductory comics (which they aren't): they may be the ultimate realization of the super-hero genre, but super-heroes aren't for everyone.

Your list is admirable because it focuses on non-super-hero comics. Someone unfamiliar with comics, whose interest was piqued by this article, is at least greeted with a healthy cross-section of comics not usually associated with the medium (please note that I do not take this opportunity to rampage and spurt Warren Ellis's strange-but-true statistic that the majority of comics are about extraordinary people and, in comics, stories about ordinary people are extraordinary occurrences). But where was the justification that comics are the "last outpost for a literary way of thinking?" This bold statement wasn't supported by anything but your organization of the article by creator instead of by title as is the usual method in the comics world. I personally don't think of comics as intellectual playgrounds but as the future fabric of popular culture. I'm going to quote Morrison again because he is truly one of the most intelligent, sonorous, and handsome men involved in creativity today!: "I've watched with interest the stealthy but none the less grand theft of style and content from my beloved comic book medium, ideas magpied into the mainstream so fast that everything I see on crap TV or in the new action movies is something I previously read in a much better comic. But there's a last-ditch rescue at work here as a great American art form enters a strange and possibly life-saving relation-ship with Hollywood." This is from  what is ostensibly Morrison's review of the X-Men movie but really a great essay about the very topic of cultural theft from comics and after you read it imagine me doing that cough and say a word at the same time thing and here's my word: The Cell. The idea of pop culture mimicking comics is the perfect (and Morrison will love me for this) example of the "as above, so below" doctrine: the genius of comics, comics as Art, as "high culture" [above], trickles sometimes, moves wholesale other times, into pop culture [below].

Yeah, calling comics "Art" won't win me any points with anybody but comic fans, but it's true, comics are Art-despite what the big companies are doing. Warren Ellis says it best (in a great column about comic creator's rights at… another website--!  ) "X-Men: it doesn't matter who creates it, it'll come out next month anyway." That is, like the music industry, the big comic publishers truly only care about profit, and profit is garnered by regularly publishing the monthly comics: they care very little about the guts of the comics as long as it's out there to be bought.

And, sadly, the future doesn't seem to indicate a shift to "small print runs, with the emphasis on quality rather than profit, on art, not the bottom line," as your article would like, but a total collapse of the market. Sure, we don't need DC and Marvel, the two biggest publishing houses, to get material from the smaller, more adventurous publishers, but we the consumers need the specialty comic shops to get those adventurous comics and those specialty shops need the big companies (with the big, iconic characters) to stay in business-either that or we need to be content with Pokemon pushing the comics further and further back in the store. In short, we have to take the bad to get any good at all, and it looks like the bad is going to rot away very, very quickly. Marvel's (and DC's) business practices make even the least numbers-minded individual cringe and going into them here would turn this letter totally pessimistic.

Further, the article wasn't actually "How To Read Comics" but "Who Writes Good Comics." The introductory angle to the piece is again misleading in this respect because it claims to list "five comics temporarily canonized," but actually is a superb inventory of innovative creators. I fear that the list, because its title attracted those unfamiliar with comics but perhaps drove them off by assuming a reader's knowledge of the medium, may only have appealed to those already familiar with the works and ready to argue with the ones you singled out. I know I jump at any non-comics media that has any comics coverage, and I actually grabbed the issue of Satellite so fast that the ink smeared all over my fingers-and look what I'm doing now, writing this letter.

BUT, and that is a big elephantine BUT, let me say that your article delights and excites me. It's got that "Comics Part 1" blurb at the top and the reason I wrote this letter is because I not only want to see this series continue, but I want it to be a huge success and bring new readers to comics. Because that is the only thing that will save comics-new readers. New readers & new readers. Keep giving comics to your girlfriend, give them to the staff of Satellite (make Transmetropolitan required reading for the deCal class you guys do), and make sure Comic Relief keeps buying ad space, but most of all keep this series of articles vibrant and captivating. If you can't do it, I gladly volunteer my services (wow, won't that look sad if you print it?)--we have to do something to keep comics around. Fuck the fanboys and fuck the collectors: comics are better than popular TV and movies (and just as accessible) but nobody knows it yet.


Thomas Nosewicz |||

>>>RETURN TO comics

||| DESIGN | WRITING | RESUME | MISC | KENCHEN.ORG

A NOTE OF EXPLANATION: I've followed some of Thom's suggestions and dramatically changed my original comics article. |||