It's appropriate for this issue to show up at the beginning of my second year. Back at the beginning of the project, when I thought there was going to be some kind of order to my read through, I did a couple of weeks of 2000 A.D. With this issue, I finally get to finish a couple of the stories I started a year ago. Sort of. This is the last issue of this series before being once more taken over by a different (sort of) company. The last time this happened, the content of each issue changed substantially. Will I ever find out what happens to Harry 20? Probably not, though this issue's story was a shocking one. Will space-Fascist Dan Dare "liberate" more oppressed peoples? Probably. Will Strontium Dog...be a grim outer space Batman some more? All signs point to yes.
The Grant Morrison story in this issue is called "Return to Sender," and it sees a very, very early Morrison attempt at metafiction, though only for the sake of a shaggy dog sort of joke. It's also very, very highly influenced by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with English coincidentally setting off an interstellar war, and a space empire being wiped out on account of their tiny, tiny size. But, honestly, I'd have been surprised to find out that Morrison was not familiar with Hitchhiker's. It's a seminal work of science fiction, and was quite popular at the time that Morrison was developing his talents as a writer. Rather than direct copy, perhaps we can consider the story an adaptation of science fiction tropes introduced by Adams' series.
Much the same way we can see The Matrix in light of Morrison's The Invisibles.
I think this is the earliest of the Morrison short stories I'm reading, so it's interesting to see that both this story and yesterday's story are very explicitly metafictional. I had a professor during my Master's degree who told me he thought that some really great writers took one topic and then spent their lives coming at it from as many different vantage points as possible. The interaction of fiction with reality, the ways that texts seem to ape self-awareness and talk to us - these are Morrison's topics.
More tomorrow.
