As one interviewee in Talking With Gods points out, Moore was interested in placing superheroes in the real world – giving them sexual neuroses, bad breath and anxiety disorders. Morrison, although he shares Moore's occult interests, is much more into the biff-pow-bang. But, rather than being sombre or preachy, it's rollicking good fun.Įver since mainstream comics 'grew up', with Alan 'Watchmen' Moore as instigator, the way they tended to show their maturity was by ditching ass-kicking in favour of ideas.

Its themes are: order v chaos (the Invisibles are fighting the Archons of the Outer Church, a race of inter-dimensional beetles with obsessive-compulsive disorder), time and timelessness, occult magic, and psychedelic or hallucinatory experience. No summary can do justice to how mind-bending and bizarre – and yet compellingly in earnest – this comic is.

But Morrison's masterwork remains The Invisibles, a series about a cell of existential resistance fighters – including a transsexual shaman, a grumpy Scouser, a telepath from the future and their bald-headed leader King Mob, who is the dead spit of Morrison himself. His Doom Patrol featured a gang of supervillains called The Brotherhood of Dada, a sentient piece of roadway called Danny the Street and a painting that ate Paris. They are exhilaratingly strange, and kind of puckish. He's matter-of-fact about it: 'Anyone can contact the scorpion gods.'Īt their best, Morrison's comics are crammed with ideas. And it works! These fuckers, they will turn up!' Morrison practises magic, and encourages his readers to do the same. The only reason he was abducted by aliens in Kathmandu in 1994, says Morrison, is 'because I went to Kathmandu in 1994 to be abducted by aliens. Morrison's friend Warren Ellis, another excellent comics writer, points out that Morrison's occultism is actually very pragmatic. This was a properly interesting – albeit rather worshipful – portrait of one of the most interesting writers in the comics medium. Morrison, who is in the DC comics stable, certainly plays up to his own myth with his shaved head, shades and trenchcoat.

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