I Lose Interest In Grant Morrison

The Morrison/Case Doom Patrol felt fresh and exciting and just a bit confusing and not like anything else that was going on in comics at the time. It had a quality I have since come to realize I like in my entertainment- it rewarded thought put into it. I sum up this particular set of qualities as "trippy."

Morrison and Porter's Justice League of America had a little bit of that trippy factor too. The Key recognizing and exploiting the fact that super-heroes always beat the trap. White Martians disguised as an alien super-team. And Mageddon, a super-weapon of the Old Gods that required making everyone a super-hero for a day in order to beat it. (Oh, and the guys from a million months in the future. They were good too.)

Old Gods is in contrast to New Gods, of course. And the New Gods, the original Kirby books, had some of that trippy factor too. It's just harder to recognize it because Darkseid's been around every corner in DC comics for like twenty years. Let's not forget, though: Jack Kirby made me want to read Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen. The man had, as they used to say, some game.

I can see the appeal of putting New Gods in a little box and declaring a moratorium on Darkseid, Orion, Lightray, and even Big Barda and Mister Miracle. (The original and still the greatest!) No more Darkseid being around every corner, even if the Omega Effect is "the ultimate wipe-out." What I don't see the point of is publishing books in which these characters explode messily. What I really don't see the point of is making new characters with the same names, and then declaring that your creation is "the real one"- because we know it isn't, sir. We know you're taking Kirby characters, hollowing them out and throwing the good stuff over your shoulder.

To judge by the little hints and things that have snuck out in projects like Seven Soldiers, the Morrison Newer Gods aren't really going to reward thought. If I turn out to be wrong about this, I'll retract what I'm saying, happily. But it seems like we're about to get a(nother) five-finger exercise written by the numbers, mechanically, so valuable franchises can lurch from A to B.

(Digression: Instead of screwing over Mary Marvel and the New Gods, why not make some original characters? I used to think that people held back their original characters to do them in a creator-owned venue instead of handing them over to a corporate behemoth. And some of that may go on, because Invincible is awesome. But where are all the other original characters?)

So assume Mr. Morrison wants to play with DC's toys. No big- Astro City is filled with obvious swipes of- I mean, homages to comics characters. Kurt Busiek uses them to tell me a story, most often one I haven't seen before. That's a little trippy in and of itself, because I've read a lot of comics. A lot a lot. These Newer Gods make me want to look at some Personification of DC and ask, "So, that's all you got?"

I no longer trust Grant Morrison to make me think- in contrast to Jack Kirby, who truly was the King of trippy comics. What's been teased so far about Final Crisis, the stuff meant to whet my appetite, makes me yawn.

Yawn.

I do believe this here Grant Morrison has gone stale, so I am throwing him out.

(no subject)

So here's my list of Companions With Whom the Doctor Might Have Has Done It:

Romana (I'm sorry, but I've seen City of Death), Rose Tyler (not with the Ninth Doctor, definitely with the Tenth), mmmaybe Jo Grant (because of some stuff in her final ep), and I sometimes think the Fifth Doctor and Peri were up to something and she was bitterly, bitterly disappointed by the end of The Caves of Androzani.. (Spoiler: he regenerates into Colin Baker.) School Reunion would like me to believe Sarah Jane belongs on that list, but I'm not convinced. I could believe a crazy night where they almost, but that's it.

So, that's not very many, but Rose was not a brilliant and unique snowflake either. I mean, I believe the Doctor can Have Urges, which was heresy in the old days- but I can't wrap my head around the idea of Ace being intimate with the Seventh Doctor. I mean, ew. (But if you're into that, more power to you.)

So, were we to have a companion with whom the Doctor was not Doing It, in a (let's say) Leela way instead of a Martha way where she pines for him, I would actually find that a welcome return to the old state of, heh, affairs.

(Nothing in this post should be read as indicating Romana, especially the second one, is not the personification of hotness, because she is. Hubba hubba.)