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Review
"Excellent ... engrossing ... Morrison is a skilled word magician, seeking creativity in a cosmological dimension." --Publishers Weekly
"Morrison is ideally suited to the task of chronicling the glorious rise, fall, rise, fall and rise again of comic-book superheroes. As thorough an account of the superhero phenomenon as readers are likely to find, filled with unexpected insights and savvy pop-psych analysis. Those who dare enter will find the prose equivalent of a Morrison superhero tale: part perplexing, part weird, fully engrossing." --Kirkus
#1 in Wired's "10 Books That Will Fry Your Mind This Summer"
"Grant Morrison has a hell of a tale to tell: The graphic novelist who co-created Batman's twisted game-changer Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth tripped on psilocybin mushrooms, fought movie execs to keep the Joker in high heels and reaped the benefits of going 50 hours without sleep in order to better access his unconscious. Subtitled What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human, this trippy autobiography-cum-critical essay gathers up the deep thoughts and otherworldly hallucinations experienced by the comics writer." --Wired.com
NPR's "Summer High Fliers"
"Grant Morrison is one of the world's leading experts on comic books, and he draws on his entire body of work in Supergods, charting the history of superheroes from the very beginning. Morrison places the figures we all know -- Superman, Spider-Man, the X-Men -- in a broad cultural context, invoking art history, science and mythology to explain why we are so fascinated by the superhuman." --NPR.org
'As a writer for Batman and Superman, Grant Morrison is in the perfect place to analyse the rise and fall of the superhero.' --The Sunday Times
'Supergods is a rather astonishing piece of work that leaves you feeling pretty much as those first readers of Superman in 1938 must have felt: slightly more aware of our place in the universe and cautiously optimistic about the future.' --Independent on Sunday
`The author shows a deft turn of phrase while appraising his fellow creators...Supergods proves an entertaining introduction to newcomers' --Metro
`It offers the same switchback exhilaration as Morrison's comic books' --Sunday Herald
`Morrison makes a passionate and knowledgeable tour guide through comics' golden age' --The Times
`Whatever your views on Grant's own creative output which I find both dazzling and, on occasions, daunting, no one can deny the man's blistering intelligence and throughout his career he has never ceased from innovation. Each new project makes readers sit up and think and I imagine many of his peers have felt the same way. Similarly this 400-page history of and tribute to this medium's meta - humans will give you much to ponder, and I don't think any true fan of the genre, as I have been since five, can afford to be without its illuminating torch'
--Page 45
`magnificently idiosyncratic new history of the genre...Supergods is packed with intriguing nuggets of insight, and it will be fascinating to see how the trends it discerns play out...What was it they said about the geeks inheriting the earth?' --The Daily Telegraph
`If this were just Morrison's story, the reminiscences of an original Scots thinker who works in a medium that silly people scorn, it would be worth your time. The sections detailing the writer's relationship with his father are especially touching. What makes this book exceptional is the history of comics that comes with the history of Morrison...As a superhero fan, I found this a diverting read. As a people fan, I found it unputdownable.' --The Scotsman
`Supergods is perhaps the most satisfactory potted history of the American comic book industry I've ever read (and I've read just about all its competitors) while also offering a brilliantly incisive, if very personal, appreciation and analysis of the most important comic books or graphic novels - call 'em what you will - to be published in the past 30 years.' --The Guardian
`Morrison's analysis of how comic books have reflected and influenced mainstream culture is never less than intriguing, and his turn of phrase is often a joy.'
--Daily Telegraph
`It is stunningly good on the utopian dream that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster kick-started when they invented Superman, and the dark twin that Bob Kane created for the Man of Steel in Batman. As one of the best writers of both characters, Morrison knows what he is talking about...essential without being definitive' --Independent
`authoritative overview of the genre...detailed and thoughtful' --Spectator
`part manifesto, part memoir, part idiosyncratic spiritual/philosophical tract... Morrison knows the genre and loves it deeply, and both that knowledge and that love shine through... autobiographical strand of the book, an often funny and sometimes very moving account of Morrison's life as seen through the lens of his relationship with superheroes, which began in childhood. This is the most interesting and best realised aspect of the book... Supergods is a strange, frustrating, thought-provoking, contentious, and ultimately rather cheering book' --The Irish Times
, `While it begins with an entirely engrossing and detailed history of superheroes and the culture sur¬rounding them, Morrison's own life story creeps into the narrative now and again and if this seems a little self-indulgent, it's also com¬pletely necessary. This isn't just a history, it's an epic, super-charged discourse on why caped crusaders hold such power over our imagina¬tions, what they say about humanity in its noblest and darkest moments. That this is essential reading for superhero fans probably goes without saying, but there's plen¬ty to chew on here for anyone who believes in the transformative power of fiction.' --Leeds Guide
`A unique, inspirational work.' --Oxford Times
`There's probably no one better placed to trace the peaks and valleys of the comic story than Grant Morrison... a fearsomely intelligent analysis of the comics revolution' --The Sunday Business Post
Review
"Grant Morrison is one of the great comics writers of all time. I wish I didn't have to compete with someone as good as him."--Stan Lee
"Grant's whole body of work inspired me."--Gerard Way, My Chemical Romance
"I suddenly realized that everything that I'm trying to say in my nonfiction work, and in some of my fiction work, had been so beautifully and so imaginatively expressed in the work of Grant Morrison."--Deepak Chopra
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Customer Reviews
Why is the superhero an American rather than a global phenomenon? Morrison doesn't really have an answer for that, but the fun of this story -- and any mythology is all about stories that should've happened -- lies in the telling. Morrison sees the cyclical rise and fall of the superhero comic as a recursive process of imaginative evolution, and devises a four-part structure (like FINNEGANS WAKE) to contain and illustrate the theme. "The Golden Age" and "The Silver Age" are funny and critically astute assessments of the subject, although newspaper comic strips and pulp fiction are simply omitted from the discussion, which leaves out the Spirit, the Phantom, Doc Savage, and the Shadow. This may be only because the author didn't grow up with these characters.
What Morrison dubs "The Dark Age" (1970-1995) sees the rise of "realism" in superhero comics, sparked by Vietnam, Watergate, the '70s economic recession, an aging fandom, and the emergence of Morrison's bête noire, Alan Moore, whose downbeat, ruthlessly logical (and bestselling) stories of superheroes who CAN'T save the world caused a paradigm shift in comics writing. For Morrison, realism cripples the imagination of superhero comics writers, and he preferred to seek inspiration in "situationism, the occult, travel, and hallucinogens," not to mention hundreds of unfashionably goofy superhero comics from the '50s and '60s. His response to realism at that time was the exploration of ANIMAL MAN's metafictional universe, "more real" than our own, and DOOM PATROL, relaunched as a book about superpowered PWDs (Persons with Disabilities) who fought threats to reason and to consensus reality.
"The Renaissance" is, surprise, dominated by Morrison's discussion of his own work: THE INVISIBLES as public self-therapy, the long-forgotten FLEX MENTALLO as mental housecleaning, JLA and NEW X-MEN as superior hackwork, BATMAN AND ROBIN as Adam West and Burt Ward meet David Lynch, and FINAL CRISIS as a deliberately "rambling, meaningless, and disconnected" retort to the success of IDENTITY CRISIS, WANTED, DARK REIGN, and to comics fandom in general. (Morrison makes an interesting distinction between horrific "fans" and hip, literate "readers.") While he can be devastatingly funny, as when he's describing Jimmy Olsen's 1950s adventures in cross-dressing, or the checkered history of Batman on film, he can also be uncomfortably confessional: I learned more than I ever wanted to know about the author's messy personal life, and I can't shake the impression SUPERGODS leaves of an entertaining magazine article, spun out, at the last minute, to the length of a sloppy and rather embarrassing book. A waste of time? No. Just less than the sum of its occasionally hilarious parts.
It's a blend of a historical and sociological examination of the early days of comics taking this through to the current era (and there are some gems in there - the fact that Wonder Woman's creator also invented the polygraph is one of those things that is so perfect - when you consider her lariat of truth, that even if Morrison has made it up, it ought to be true), with his own beginnings as a consumer and creator, to some mind-expanding bits of how he opened his consciousness and go his ideas pouring out. He can approach comics and the writing of them with a critical eye as to their limitations, but also an eye on the huge potential and wonder that can be found in their pages if you get the right combination of passion, ideas, talent and an artistic take.
You may well not believe him when he talks about writing sequences in the Invisibles as part of a magical construct to make good things happen to him in his real life, you may or may not believe that he himself believes it, but the fact that he even thinks about it and shares this with the reader is fascinating. Who else is writing that sort of stuff these days? I want my creators of superhero fiction to believe that magic exists.
He writes a very compelling piece on the dangers of listening to the vocal portion of a fanbase, and gets away with what could actually be two fingers at the internet community by the flair of his thoughts and the fact that you can tell he means it. There are times, particularly in his reviews of Alan Moore's work where you can sense some lack of objectivity and a feeling that he just plain doesn't really like the guy (though he calls Moore out fairly and squarely on the central plot device of Watchmen being flimsy and just plain unworkable).
I could personally, have heard a lot more about how it was that the guy who wrote Invisibles (a series that was deranged and inspired and complex to a point where it was possibly near unreadable for the average person who wasn't living in the authors own head) managed to persuade Marvel to let him have control of X-Men, their most valuable commmodity, and then DC to let him have control of Batman, their real big hitter; and write in both of them stories that weren't just beautiful, dazzling comics that revelled in the medium itself, but also intricate and complex and at times unintelligible to a casual reader.
I'm afraid I have gone a bit fanboyish again - there are comic book writers who when they step outside of that medium don't really deliver, or do so in a way that makes you wish they'd done all this as a comic, but from this book, Morrison isn't one of them. I read this at a single swallow, and could cheerfully have read another 300 pages of it. What Morrison does, when he is at his best, is make you read something and occasionally hit a speed bump where you think "I'm not smart enough to quite get this", BUT rather than make you feel resentful or annoyed that he's not taken you by the hand, makes you interested in what he's beckoning at and want to find the way yourself.
Horrible, gushing review, but basically, if you like comics, or are interested in the creative process, or how having access to drugs, foreign travel and lots of cash can actually in the right hands produce creativity rather than self-indulgence, this is worth a read.
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