While I am always excited to see a new Grant Morrison work, regardless of genre or format, I am exponentially more excited every time I see a new Morrison - Quitely work. There are pairs of writers and artists that seem to synchronize so well that it's hard to imagine that it's actually two different storytellers behind the pages. I think of the seminal X-team of Claremont and Byrne. More recently, I think the Ellis - Cassaday pairing on Planetary achieved a similar effect. But Morrison - Quitely...sometimes it's like they're inside each others' heads. Flex Mentallo, Earth 2, All-Star Superman, The Invisibles v.3, #1. And this, this weird and wonderful war story about Action Man dolls and insects.
The Vertigo comics of the Nineties mark, for me, a high point in the art form. While there was certainly editorial oversight, the amount of freedom given to creators in the Vertigo stable resulted in some of the strangest and most wonderful pieces of comics I've ever read. When Vertigo was actually still a part of the DCU, it gave us a nice breadth of styles for our superheroes, and also gifted us with some amazing creator-owned pieces. This series, from the tail end of what I'd consider Vertigo's Golden Age, offers three great examples of comics short stories. They're limited in location, in time frame, and offer just enough detail (through dialogue and art) to introduce characters and situations, and then make us care about them. "New Toys" leads the charge, and is, as we really should expect from Morrison and Quitely, not your typical war story - it doesn't speak to a specific war, but to all of them, and asks us to think about what's waiting behind the calls to violence that our species seems to love so much. The next two stories are more straightforward war tales, one set during the Serbia/Croatia conflict, telling a tale of families and friends ripped apart by that conflict, and one set during the First World War, offering a scathing critique of the leaders of the British army. I'm not sure either of them was particularly weird, but they were remarkably well done.
I planned this week to bounce back and forth between early Morrison works and later works. The difference is often striking, though one has to wonder how some of the earlier tales might have fared if paired with an artist who "got" Morrison. (Probably they would have been just as basic, but a little prettier.)
On to some small press stuff tomorrow!
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