By Shaenon K. Garrity
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Grant Morrison may have been the first to figure out an essential truth about superhero comics: they don't end. More to the point, they can't be written toward an ending. The villains can never be truly conquered, the characters can never advance in a meaningful way. It's like writing a sitcom, except that a sitcom can get away with being static because its problems are trivial, its characters silly, whereas in a superhero story the writer must maintain the illusion that great goals are being achieved while everyone runs in place.
It's easier to do this in superhero stories for children; children are conservative by nature and are happy to see things return to the status quo at the end of the story. They also enjoy flat characters, and superheroes need to be flat to remain static. The more nuanced the characters become, the more they have to change, and the story creeps toward resolution. I think Tom Spurgeon was right when he theorized that the Spider-Man comics should have ended in the 1970s when Peter Parker rejected the clone of his dead girlfriend Gwen and committed to Mary Jane. At that point, his character arc—the story of a teenager learning how to handle adult responsibilities and relationships—was resolved, and
Spider-Man became a complete story. Everything since then has been the franchise spinning its wheels.
What Grant Morrison figured out was that, if the serial can't be directed toward a logical ending, a daring writer is free to sail off in any other direction imaginable; nothing ever needs to get tied up down the line. In other words, in a story that never ends, you can go batshit crazy. I just read Morrison's entire run on
JLA, and it's considerably more restrained than the number he did on
New X-Men, a series I often reread with fondness and admiration.
But in both series Morrison follows the same basic formula: carefully, intricately constructed plots, often involving tricky time paradoxes or menaces lying dormant for several storylines, erupting in sudden orgasms of planetary-scale action and outlandishness. And so he keeps going until he runs out of steam or the publisher gets sick of his shenanigans and pulls him off the book. Either way, the story settled back to familiar ground often enough that it's surprisingly easy to return things to DC's or Marvel's idea of normalcy.
Both series include trips to bizarre distant futures (in
JLA, necessitated by DC's "One Million" crossover event) where the whole concept of the costumed super-team explodes into hallucinatory weirdness. But these futures aren't endings, just stepping-stones on the circular road back to the beginning. In Month Million, Superman is pure gold and lives in the sun and fights an evil sun/computer and resurrects Lois Lane as his deathless platinum bride…and then he winks, and everyone clicks their heels and goes home. In
New X-Men, the entire lengthy postapocalyptic arc at the end of Morrison's run exists so the Scott Summers of the present day can move on from Jean Grey's death—and Jean Grey is always dying, isn't she?
(In addition to time-travel plots, there's one other Grant Morrison device that crops up again and again: he loves giving Lois Lane superpowers. She acquires Superman's powers in
All-Star Superman, gets resurrected as a superbeing in the far future in JLA: One
Million, and fills Wonder Woman's seat in the evil alternate universe in
JLA: Earth-2. What does it mean? I don't know. But I do enjoy it.)
Of course, Morrison flies even further off the rails when he gets his hands on less meticulously overseen franchises like
Animal Man and my favorite,
Doom Patrol.
Animal Man ends with the apotheosis of the author thumbing his nose at narrative convention: Morrison descends into the story himself and interacts with his hero. In
Doom Patrol, things get crazier and crazier until the characters have no choice but to ascend into Wonderland; the final issue makes the point that there's no appreciable difference between being in the Doom Patrol and being completely insane. And when you let Morrison create a superhero universe out of whole cloth, you get
Seaguy—intricate, loopy, personal, almost transcendently weird. I say "almost" because not even Morrison unfettered can do more than touch the hem of Kirby in the '70s.
As it was,
New X-Men went far enough off-model that Marvel retconned the whole thing the moment Morrison left the series. That's the staying power of the big franchises: editorial forces can declare the entire direction of the story hopeless, cut it off, burn it up, start over—and the whole thing keeps chugging along uninterrupted. There are no long-term repercussions to being nutty, so why not go nuts? Because eventually the readers will get sick of being jerked around, maybe, but being exasperated is better than being bored. Not that I don't enjoy a soothing turn on the carousel, but as long as you're at the amusement park you might as well ride the roller coaster.
Maybe this is why, for all its charms, Morrison's
All-Star Superman feels tame compared to
Doom Patrol or
New X-Men, more like a hazy dream of Silver Age zaniness than a bold new game. Superman is the one character who's been around so long, reinvented so often, put through so many formulas and gimmicks, that not even the mighty imagination of Grant Morrison can come up with something we can't imagine happening to him. This is a man who once had a giant telepathic ant head and handled it with grace. Morrison can't discombobulate his universe.
You know what I'd really like to see Grant Morrison write?
Wonder Woman. Somebody's got to know how to make Wonder Woman interesting.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2010
