"With great power..." Grant Morrison on comic books

Grant Morrison is one of the most successful and influential comic book writers around today. So much so his ideas were ripped off by the Wachowski brothers for ‘The Matrix'. He seems to have taken this in his stride; after seeing the sequels he reportedly said, “They should have kept stealing my ideas.” On the back of the dust jacket of his new book Supergods: Our world in the age of the superhero, he looks like a comic book villain, intense, bald, handsome, in a round collared jacked with gold buttons up to his neck. His life has been shaped by comic books, as he tells us. Not only were they a welcome diversion in his Scottish childhood and adolescence, they have been his career. And now he has produced a book about both comics books and his life.

And for the most part it’s good. Any successful writer of comic books is going to be converscent with the history of comic books, their characters, their stories, their tropes and conventions. His view may be a little limited – he credits the writers of Superman with the invention of the secret identity, ignoring the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro and countless others. But as a history of comic books, it was for me informative and interesting. He traces the impact of the world onto comic books and the impact of comic books on the world, finding why a genre that was born in the Depression and the Second World War, is increasingly popular in a time of globalisation, terrorism and uncertainty. Heroes who spoke to the masses at a time when the enemy was clear and in uniform, still speak, in altered voices and with different attitudes, to our modern age, and Morrison has some interesting ideas as to why.

The book lost me in its more autobiographical sections, and discussing comic books of which I have no idea. Reading an appraisal of any art work you don’t know is always problematic. Comic books in particular depend heavily on their fans’ knowledge. (This in itself was an innovation of Marvel, taken up by DC creating complex worlds and multiworlds for their heroes to play in.) So when Morrison discusses Spawn, for example, at some length my eyes glazed over. Fans of Spawn may well be gasping now, but having never read Spawn, there wasn’t much I could do about it.

I also didn’t particularly care for his autobiography, and I skipped a lot of it. If I were more knowledgeable about his work or a greater comic book fan, I imagine this would have been much more compelling. Morrison comes over a little self-involved, and perhaps he is. Even so, it gave me some insight into how comic books are created and managed, both new and continuing titles and characters. But having someone tell you about their drug days are as dull as people who want to tell you about the enormous amounts they used to drink. It’s probably significant to them, but hardly interesting to the outsider. There are some exceptions to this rule, but this wasn’t one of them.

Al that said, I enjoyed the book. (Although he dismissed the Phantom with one line about the 1996 film. Humph, I say. For those who don’t know the Phantom, he’s a bit like Batman with a more positive upbringing – no superpowers, just fit, fast and intelligent. Also he lives in the African jungle.) Oddly for a book about comics, it could have used more illustrations. A minor quibble. Those with a greater interest in the genre will doubtless get more out of it, but still a good writer is a good writer, regardless of the genre in which they work.