Excellent points. The thing about reactionary movements in art and literature is that if successful enough and given enough time, they eventually become incorporated into the institutions and conventions they were initially reacting against, and thus they are no longer reactionary and novel, but simply part of the expanding vocabulary of conventional and accepted technique, and so it is with "magic realism," deconstruction, and metatextual techniques. Not a "good" thing or a "bad" thing, mind you. It's just the way these things go.

But how many people actually read superhero comics in a sincere search for literary innovation? Superhero comics have traditionally been slow to adopt genuine innovation in art and writing (so it's hardly surprising to hear comics reviewers rave about Morrison's deconstruction of the genre as "bold" and "new").

That reticence is partly because of the genre's commercial roots (publishers and editors don't want to mess with a formula if it sells books), and partly because of what I feel to be a large segment of the readership and creator community that are comfortable with reading and creating variations of what's gone before (Alex Ross has been making "Superfriends" comics for how long now?). Sure, superhero deconstructionists like Moore, Morrison, Ellis, and Ennis break through commercially every now and then but their collective work is hardly representative of a spreading trend in superhero comics writing. And "superhero deconstruction" itself has lost much of its luster, for me, at least. It's been over 20 years since "Watchmen" and almost as long since Morrison started on "Animal Man," and I think it's symptomatic of the genre's stagnancy that "new" in superhero comics is still measured against the standards those titles set.

Don't get me wrong... I still enjoy the occasional superhero comic book (what can I say, deep-down inside of me there's still that 10 year old who was absolutely thrilled at the X-tinction Agenda storyline), but damn if the majority of them out there just leave me feeling indifferent.

I'm a big fan of Paul Auster, always have been, although for a while I've been conscious of the law of diminishing returns. This quote from the New York Times review of his latest novel is interesting:

The intent is not camp, nor is it parody. It is an act of disbelief in traditional fictional values. The trouble is that the disbelief is getting to be as old as the values. With “Man in the Dark,” Mr. Auster’s literary collider has lost its subatomic energies; the result is wan as well as scattered.

I guess this is the problem with anything experimental, as Auster's metafiction is. Eventually, the experiment has to either lead somewhere or stop. We've had metafiction for forty years (and more) from Auster, Barthelme, Barth, Pynchon et al. They've broken down the barriers. But is there anything beyond? Or do you, in the end, have to return to traditional storytelling in order to tell a story?

I haven't read the new Auster yet but I shall. But not, this time, because it's Auster or because it's metafiction, but because it is another example of the way post 9/11 fiction appears to be going in the US: there seem to be two camps, either domestic dramas or apocalypse. Auster gives us America at war with itself. What a gloomy bunch American writers have become...

That's my problem with metafiction in comics, we've had classic stories in the pre-Crisis DC Multiverse of metafiction done well in lighthearted stories, a great run of British writers since the 80s doing it in a more literary fashion, and a lot of current American writers doing it in a horrible hamfisted fashion at DC (Superboy Prime, the narration and exposition in Final Crisis, etc.), We have a pair of horribly overrated pieces of metafiction from the late 90s/early 2000s still held up as classics today (Kingdom Come, the Action comics issue where he fights the Authority analogues). British writers currently still doing it (Team 13). The problem is, how long are we going to keep pretending this is novel, groundbreaking or pushing the envelope? It's become as big a cliche or institution as the storytelling conventions it's supposedly bucking. How long do you keep breaking down the same barriers? And where is the final destination? Or are you just breaking down the barriers for the sake of breaking them down at this point, just because you've gotten lazy and stuck in a habit?

At this point I think it's more challenging to just tell a traditional story. Abhay discusses the problem with this genre of writing here.

Which, to me, gets boring after a while...I do find myself agreeing with Jeff more than the author. To each their own.

T., I realize that you did enjoy JLA and New X-Men and do not deny that, I just added them to the larger context to prove my point. And I also think that being " art about art " is a hell of a lot better than being " comics about comics ". Art is so entrenched in human culture that even by doing a story about the form specifically, you do relate back to humanity at large; Dada's postmodern tendrils reached much further than a few jag-offs smoking clove cigarettes.

Animal Man's descent into metatextuality did not derail the animal rights story line, so much as it tied it into a larger human framework. Since the whole story seems more about Grant Morrison's avatar than Buddy Baker, Animal Man's anger at environmental abuse was avatar-Morrison trying to work through his issues, then trying even harder by murdering Buddy's family and sending him into the Darker and Edgier phase. Buddy may have gotten his life back, but Morrison didn't...

Ah, we seem to be talking a bit past each other here (my fault for not making my position clearer). I didn't say that Morrison is unable to inject subtlety in his work when he tries to invest his superhero comics with social relevance, all I'm saying is that it's a difficult thing to do for most any comics writer because of the conventions, real or perceived, of "superhero storytelling."

My main criticism of his work largely focuses on his attempts to co-opt the "magic realism" narrative techniques pioneered by Calvino, Borges, Donoso, and other postmodern authors and apply them to superhero comics. At times, it works, such as in his "Animal Man" run. Other times, though, it simply makes his work dense and somewhat impenetrable, leading some readers to accuse him of pretension or of being intentionally and deliberately obscure. The problem, I suspect, is that the superhero setting is already so far removed from the context of our reality that illogic and narrative non-linearity simply don't pack the same punch as they would in a non-superhero setting. Alternatively, their use sometimes has the net effect of simply piling the absurdity of postmodern writing on top of the absurdity inherent in superhero stories, leading to the scratching of many heads and the furrowing of many brows in comics shops all over the world.

But even if you go back further, i think there were always roots of the problem lurking. Most of his social commentary in those old issues you mentioned were just scattershot mentions of some decent concepts that related to current headlines without much in terms of deeper exploration or provocative execution. He introduces intriguing concepts well but doesn't do much in terms of following up on them. But give him a chance to make an allegory about superhero comics specifically or art in general and that he'll beat to death and explore the hell out of. ” the Brotherhood of Dada ” are was just more art about art dedicated to showing how knowledgable he is about great art, the silent issue of New x-Men is about salvador dalo, so even if he isn’t strictly a ” comics about comics ” guy, he at least has a tendency to fall into the broader "art about art" trap.

I don't mind metacommentary, don't get me wrong, but I don't want to read comic after comic devoted to the writer working out his feelings about superhero comics. It just becomes self-indulgent after a while.

Grant Morrison has always used superhero comics to express sociopolitical insight. The thing is, he can do it in a much more subtle and obscure manner than 95% of his colleagues in the genre. In terms of location, he had Animal Man in apartheid-era South Africa in the early 90's, the X-Men in various parts of the world ( including Beijing, Mumbai, and Afghanistan ), and the Seven Soldiers in an impressively developed version of New York. In terms of themes, he's dealt with animal rights ( We3 and Animal Man ), emergent youth culture ( New X-Men ), and rampant commercialism ( Seaguy ). In terms of artistic influences, he's even more diverse; seriously, a guy who did a Doom Patrol story arc with " the Brotherhood of Dada " as the villains, and wrote that silent issue X-Men script for Frank Quitely with directions very clearly invoking Salvador Dali isn't a " comics about comics " guy.

Compare this to all the other authors who believe that being socially relevant means making a connection from Adolf Hitler to George Bush to Tony Stark. Morrison's skill is in realizing that ripping story ideas from the headlines doesn't tell the whole story of the human condition.

I don't really mind if Morrison doesn't use his DC work as a forum for his metatextual social commentary. I've always felt that superhero comics are a clumsy tool with which to intelligently express social and political insight, owing to the medium's rootedness in classic melodrama, overt physical conflict, and the exaggeration of physical and psychological types. It's a genre given to distortions, and it's a very rare writer who can inject any social commentary that rises above the level of caricature in tales featuring superpowered and musclebound archetypes punching each other.

My problem with Morrison's recent work (outside of his All-Star Superman) is that I just don't find them as enjoyable and as engaging as much of his previous material. Partly because I have no interest in the main conceit of the recent string of DC events but also because I find his attempts at Italo Calvino-esque post-modern narrative structure to be ham-fisted and ineffective, and more importantly, I don't find them entertaining. It's all a matter of taste, of course, as there are a lot of people who derive more enjoyment from his recent DC work than I do. Just doesn't work for me, I guess. The good thing is that there's no shortage of Morrison material that I do enjoy, so it's all good.

I think Brad's given us enough reasons to complain without inventing new ones.

Reading this comment and looking back at Brad's post, this made me pause too. Not everyone has the personality required for a lit major ( though I personally do, hence why I acquired a BA in English despite Avenue Q's advice to the contrary ), but parading the fact that you don't have that temperament around is troubling.

What's more, this sort of anti-snobbery isn't an improvement over the problems of snobbery, merely an inversion of it. It's still bragging about oneself, just bragging in terms of being an expert in pop/"low " culture instead of high culture. At least the people who are elitist about Charlotte Bronte and Jean-Luc Goddard actually worked to decipher their texts of choice, an admirable quality that fans of Christopher Paolini and Michael Bay can't exactly claim.

And while I don't want to insult Brad, I have to say that anti-snobbery is the exact thing that put Bush Jr. in office, and should be avoided at all costs...

Grant Morrison remains in my good graces at the end of the day for writing comics about more than just comics.

It's funny, because at the end of the day my main problem with Grant Morrison lately is that all he DOES in my eyes is write comes about comics. I mean sure he does a lot of lofty metacommentary, allegory, metaphor and symbolism, but it all boils down to sharing his views on the current state of superhero comics, where they've been and places they can go. He used to be able to write about the world outside of superhero comics, especially his JLA in the 90s and parts of his X-Men books, which had a lot of good social commentary that reflected the world outside our windows, but since going back to DC his stuff has just been all self-reflexive musings on superhero comics, pure intellectual masturbation. Even the stuff like his New Gods stories which may seem like genuine social commentary to me really aren't. As created by Jack Kirby they were, but for Grant Morrison he tackles the New Gods not as genuine social commentary but as comics commentary, in this case he's commenting on what the best way is to pay homage to Kirby's original vision is in today's modern comics market and aesthetic.

What really makes me pause, is your insistance on not being interested in works of literature. I suppose that this is fine, in and of itself, but really, what you're doing is bragging about it.

This could turn out to be an awesome thread.

Seems like a waste!

I don't know if Morrison would be better at just being a writer working within some grand "event," as opposed to being the one who is orchestrating everything in some quasi-editorial/creative director capacity as he's doing now with DC's Final Crisis of Everything You Must Infinitely Buy.

A lot of my misgivings about DC's execution of their last few events can be traced to a lack of editorial coordination and foresight as well as poor inter-office communication (if the numerous interviews and articles on the subject are to be believed), so I don't know if Morrison (and Dini and Johns before him) is any more accountable than the editors for the somewhat lackluster comics that have been spawned by DC's Event Machine.

I'm probably the wrong person to ask about Morrison's 52 and Final Crisis work, though, as I've always been lukewarm to the ideas at their core. The shared-universe spanning event thing has never been my cup of tea... I'm too cheap, I guess.

That's splitting hairs, Tim. He means reading the comic at the surface level.

Anyway, to the post, I love Morrison. I love his work a lot and have read practically everything I can get my hot little hands on, but I'm not going to say he's perfect. He's done some subpar work (most of his Batman run). I don't think naysayers of his work are stupid or ignorant. It's all a matter of taste.

Also, Brian, adding annotations isn't an attempt to legitimize the comics. Adding annotations does not automatically do that to any work, no matter the medium. However, it does add context to a layered work, if the annotations are of good quality.

The analogy of annotations to "blood, guts, rape, etc" is terrible. Annotating a work is rarely done haphazardly (notice the single "z"). You also say you have nothing against annotations but a couple paragraphs later you remark that they are "sad". Well, which is it?

Fair enough that you disagree with Lester, but you haven't really argued against his main point, of the model-kit analogy (which is quite elegant in my opinion). For Lester, that detracts from his enjoyment, but for me, the model-kit style is Morrison's strength rather than a weakness.