Kenbo Slice said:
May I ask why you hate Morrison? He's one of my favorites. Yeah not all his stuff is great (Nu52 Action Comics being a shining example) but his Animal Man and Doom Patrol runs are classics. I'm also quite fond of his run on Batman with Dick Grayson as Bats and Damian as Robin.
Grant Morrison, for me, is a mixed bag. Some of his output I would rate as the best work I've ever read - All-Star Superman, JLA, Doom Patrol, We3, Wonder Woman: Earth One - but some of it isn't.
My major problem with him is that he has trouble keeping the narrative coherent.
The Invisibles and
The Filth are good examples of this; I had no fucking idea what was even going on, and didn't care enough to try and decipher it. He sometimes gets obsessed with "meaning", and seeds every panel and line with various esoteric references in ways that only a crazy person would think made sense; it ultimately only succeeds in making me think that he's a bit of a tosser.
Part of the problem is that Morrison rapidly became so popular in the mid-2000s that he was allowed to operate mostly unedited, with the end result that his stories rapidly became a rambling mess of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. When Morrison restrains and focuses himself, the quality of his work increases dramatically. Unfortunately, his run on
Batman was a case of the former, and so we had...
- Talia al'Ghul making an army of man-bats;
- Damian Wayne kind of hanging around and being a jerk for no reason;
- a weird poseur villain claiming to be Thomas Wayne with photoshopped pictures of Batman's parents having orgies with Alfred;
- a lady named Jezebel [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jezebel], who was - in a shocking twist! -
untrustworthy!!!
- Batman having his psyche destroyed by...words, and then reverting to a back-up psyche placed by hypnotic triggers that just got
retconned revealed;
- Zur-En-Arrh [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_of_Zur-En-Arrh#Modern_Age];
- Batman grabbing a gun [http://www.gothamcalling.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Untitled-27.jpg];
- Batman dying, but not really, because he was sent back in time, but he left his flesh-stripped skeleton behind, but Darkseid had turned him into a time-bomb, and it was all part of his plan, or something.
You see what I mean? I find he's gotten much better recently, but during his protection-from-editors phase, he was unbearable. He's really good so long as he has someone around to slap him in the face every time he says "And
then, it turns out the entire plot was the dying dream of a microscopic civilisation that lived in between the follicles of his pubic hair!"
[sub]And don't get me started on New X-Men.[/sub]
