![]() What is surprising is the extent to which he succeeds. ![]() It is not surprising that Morrison would eventually challenge Moore on his own territory and build a better Watchmen. Moore’s self-awareness was all over every page like fingerprints. The Watchmen characters were drawn from a repertoire of central casting ciphers to play out their preordained roles in the inside-out clockwork of its bollocks-naked machinery. This overwhelmingly artificial quality of the narrative, which I found almost revolting at age twenty-five, is what fascinates me most about it now, oddly enough. His critique of Watchmen’s realism is equally compelling: “I liked superhero comics because they weren’t real”:įor all its pretensions to realism, Watchmen laid bare its own synthetic nature in every cunningly orchestrated line, lacking in any of the chaos, dirt, and non sequitur arbitrariness of real life. Morrison credits Moore’s and Gibbons’ work with “chang] the way readers looked at superheroes forever,” and lays out a convincing close reading of the first chapter. It includes a reading of Watchmen that starts out far more positively that I would have expected. In 2011, Morrison wrote a nonfiction book about superheroes entitled Supergods, which is a typically Morrisonian combination of insight and self-aggrandizement. Morrison has managed to move back and forth between best-selling runs of corporate superhero comics ( JLA, X-Men, Superman, Final Crisis) and creator-owned projects ( The Invisibles, Happy, The Filth), while Moore’s rare forays into other writers’ sandboxes have become events in themselves ( Crossed +100), a stamp of the master’s approval. Where Moore has all but abandoned the superhero genre, Morrison continues to explore its potential. And both of them are among the best writers working in the medium.īut there are also clear differences. Each of them has dabbled in metafiction (Morrison more consistently), and each is comfortable with a variety of genres. Their work has a great deal in common: they’re both obviously postmodern, and each of them is fascinated with the artistic potential of the comics form itself. This feud was easily avoidable: the field was, after all, big enough for the two of them (and more). This is not the place to explore the Morrison/Moore psychodrama anyone interested in their oddly parallel careers is directed to Elisabeth Sandifer’s outstanding book/blog series The Last War in Albion, which examines the two men’s careers in painstaking detail. So how ironic is it that Alan Moore, the man whose work at DC started the “British Invasion” of American comics, has for decades been the object of a largely one-sided feud with the second most famous invader from the UK, a writer whose own ingenuity and accomplishments are slightly tarnished by his embarrassing animus towards Moore? The Scottish-born Grant Morrison has been picking fights with Moore since the 1980s, while Moore only occasionally responds with a withering remark. Adrian Veidt commits atrocities for what he perceives to be the greater good while playing with some of the standard tropes of super villainy after explaining his master plan to Rorschach, Nite-Owl and Silke Spectre, he tells them that he’s not “some Republic serial villain” giving away the key to his defeat before he can implement his plans he already destroyed midtown Manhattan thirty-five minutes ago. ![]() If you’re interested in doing this, you can post and use the hashtag, follow along, or come in and out as is convenient for you.One of the more obvious and least original complications Watchmen brings to the superhero genre is its rejection of the hero/villain binary at the heart of so many DC and Marvel sagas. I usually do my four favorite panels and an overall thought about the issue on the first Tweet, and then I go on to thread auxiliary thoughts and panels in a chain. ET, give or take an hour or two either way. This reading project will start on this coming Monday, September 14, and the hashtag is #TurningInvisibles.Įach night, my posts will go up at around 8:30 p.m. Now, I’m reading The Invisibles, which is a 1990s era Vertigo comic written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by several different artists, including Jill Thompson, Steve Yeowell, Steve Parkhouse, Phil Jimenez, John Stokes, Ivan Reis, Chris Weston, and Frank Quitely, to various degrees. I do it one issue per night, Monday through Friday, and I invite folks to read or follow along, organizing my posts by a hashtag. I take a run that I’ve never read before, and I read it. By Zack Quaintance - So, as anyone who follows me on Twitter has surely seen (or seen, been confused by, and wondered about), I’m perpetually doing nightly reading projects.
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