As careful readers of Monday’s post might have guessed, I’ve been delving into a lot of Grant Morrison’s work again.

It started with New X-Men, the smaller sized editions that Marvel has been releasing lately. Even though I have all these comics, three moves later those are all in storage, and my desire to reread and have them in a loanable format won out over my usual desire to avoid unnecessary double-dipping. This is still amongst my favorites of Morrison’s super-hero work, though the collected format really drives home how inconsistent art can hurt a long-form story, and Marvel’s insistence on pricing each volume the same, regardless of how many actual issues are collected, is almost admirable in its mercenariness.

I moved on to buying the trades for The Invisibles, as I had noticed that several volumes had gone out of print, and given how dated much of the material is I thought the odds of new printings were low. More fool me, apparently. This is still one of Morrison’s better long-form stories and still holds up remarkably well, even though the scenes that take place in “the future” are now mostly in the past and look faintly ridiculous. It happens. The other sore point is that the final storyline (excepting the Frank Quitely illustrated coda), the one which features a different artist on almost every page, feels so rushed and compressed that very little of the story actually gets resolved. I can easily imagine that an additional issue or two would have given Morrison more room to bring the story to a close the way he intended.

Also noteworthy is the expanded edition of WE3. The new pages fit in seamlessly, and I had to check against the older edition to make sure that certain segments were actually new. Still, bar none, Morrison’s finest work.

The collected edition of Joe the Barbarian was also recently released, and I’m very glad, as it gave me a chance to give it another look. The series was largely overshadowed by Morrison’s Batman run, and an erratic shipping schedule hurt its momentum, but it’s an excellent book that deserves more attention. It’s a straight-forward heroic fantasy series, almost but not quite appropriate for all ages and extremely accessible. Sean Murphy creates a detailed, expressive world, and script-wise, this is very much in the “funny/emotive” vein of Morrison work. I’m tempted to suggest that releasing this through Vertigo may have done the book a disservice, as the line suggests “mature reader” works and the audience for this is much broader. This feels like an ideal book for a teen getting interested in comics, and just the Vertigo label alone is going to cause many comic stores to stick this into a restricted section.

I’ve also belatedly jumped onto the bandwagons for The Unwritten and Locke & Key, both books I’d initially dismissed as “not for me” only to encounter friends consistently telling me that they were excellent. Mostly my friends were right and I was wrong. Unwritten‘s riffing on the Harry Potter books becomes quickly tiresome, and it has the same problem most Vertigo books do these days-writing for the trade means you pretty much have to read the entire first storyline to get an idea of whether the title is going anywhere interesting, rather than the first issue. But Mike Carey is writing a very smart book that manages to be about fiction and fictionality in a smart way while still having enough of an adventure story edge to be compelling.

Locke and Key by contrast, completely failed to impress me with the Free Comic Book Day sample issue from earlier in the year. It felt like an all ages comic aping a horror series. To be honest…even three volumes in, it still fills like Joe Hill sort of wants to write a Young Adult series with fantasy-horror overtones, with the occasional bouts of horrific violence on hand to make sure that the book stays firmly Adult Adult. But despite that, this is a very good fantasy-horror series, tightly plotted and with a strong sense of having a definite destination in mind and a plan for getting there (a rarity in the current long-form story model that I’m thankful to see here). Story developments feel natural and logically progress from previous events and revelations about what is really going on build on what has already been stated and implied.

Lastly, I’ve been reading the IDW collections of DC’s old Dungeons & Dragons and Forgotten Realms comics. These were fun fantasy comics at the time, and having them back in print is welcome. Jan Duursema is criminally under-rated, and her work on D&D is impressive, and Vajra Valmeyjar is my favorite “fantasy warrior” character for a number of reasons.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011 at 12:01 AM and is filed under reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.