Seaguy comes out on Wednesday as we all know from the blurb-ish info that's hit the usual comics news websites and such. But what does it all mean? Let's speculate!
In the comments following my howl, The Superhero Breakdown, Ken Lowery posted a link to his blog where he followed up on my thoughts on superhero secret IDs. While perusing Ken’s site, I spotted a link to a Newsarama interview item with Grant Morrison regarding his upcoming Seaguy comic (scroll down a little), which will be in shops this Wednesday, the 19th, if I’m not mistaken. This interview is typical of much that passes for comic book journalism [I could be snarky and put that word in quotes] in this country:
“So, genius comic book creator, what is Talking Point One for your new project?”“It’s all about [the Catch Phrase]. And by that I mean [slightly wordier phrasing of the Catch Phrase, possibly with a Buzz Word or two].”
“Wow. Rather than follow up with questions about what you just said, let me just lob you a softball question that leads in to Talking Point Two for your new project.”
“Talking Point Two is all about these additional Buzz Words.”
“Really? Let me lob you another softball asking for you to expand on those Buzz Words.”
“Right. This is where I connect these Buzz Words to what I said earlier by referencing my Catch Phrase again…”
And so forth. This interview/news item with Grant Morrison is very much in this mold. But that’s not what I want to talk about today (heh). I thought it might be fun (at least I hope it will be fun) to take a look at what Mr. Morrison says Seaguy will be about and see if we, as smarty pants comic book blog writers and readers, can figure out what he means before we have a chance to read the first issue when it comes out Wednesday. Ken quoted the relevant section on his site, and I shall quote it again here:
Q: Starting at the ground level – how do you describe this book? A simple ‘superhero with nothing to do’ tale, or the examination of man’s inhumanity to man told through iconography we’re all familiar with…or something like that?Morrison: A bit of both, as usual. the story started out as a kind of palate-cleansing exercise - after the heavy, 'realistic' approach of the Marvel stuff, I wanted to do something surreal and whimsical, in the vein of my DOOM PATROL stories again - an ocean-going picaresque adventure, you might say.
Then I had the idea to develop SEAGUY into a weapon I could use to fight back against the trendy and unconvincing 'bad-ass' cynicism of current comics, most of which are produced by the most un-'bad-ass' men you can possibly imagine. In the current climate, it seemed like an act of rebellion to deliberately create 'the new sentimentality' and produce work that was almost embarrassingly dripping with tender and awkward feelings. There's a strange kind of Edwardian vibe hitting the world right now - a kind of slowing down, a promenading feel as people rebel against manufactured 'cool'. SEAGUY can be seen as art at the vanguard of this new attitude.
Okay. Before we take a closer look at the buzz words, I want to take a moment to address the “‘bad-ass’ cynicism” comment. That phrase makes me think of Wolverine and the Punisher circa the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s when those characters were at what I perceived to be the height of their “best there is at what I do, but I what I do isn’t very nice” popularity. The only comic I can recall off the top of my head in recent years that conjures up thoughts of “bad-ass cynicism” to me is the “Batman as unstoppable juggernaut” thing, which of course Morrison himself was instrumental in propagating. I’m just not seeing recent comics, superhero or otherwise, as suffering from a particular epidemic of “bad-ass cynicism.” Am I just missing something here?
I also have a thought on the men (and presumably women) who create “bad-ass” comics as being some of the “most un-bad-ass men you can possibly imagine.” That seems like a pointless and superfluous slam to me. Morrison is hardly a bastion of bad-assness himself (except as a writer), and he’s certainly written his fair share of superhero-y badass characters (and one could argue that a Batman who feels the need to have a plan to take out all members of the Justice League is showing a fair amount of cynicism). I mean, is one to slam Nora Roberts’ success because she herself is actually not very romantic in real life or something?
That having been said, let’s first take a look at the keywords in Morrison’s answer and define them:
Picaresque: Of or involving clever rogues or adventurers. Of or relating to a genre of usually satiric prose fiction originating in Spain and depicting in realistic, often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social degree living by his or her wits in a corrupt society.Surreal: Having an oddly dreamlike quality.
Whimsical: Erratic in behavior or degree of unpredictability.
Sentimental: Resulting from or colored by emotion rather than reason or realism.
Up to this point I’m sensing that we’re talking about something like Don Quixote without the cynicism (presumably, given Morrison’s comments).
Promenading: A leisurely walk, especially one taken in a public place as a social activity.
This is mentioned in the sentence in which Morrison talks about this vibe that he thinks is “hitting the world” where people “rebel against manufactured ‘cool.’” Maybe they’re doing that in Britain? I know there’s no rebellion against manufactured anything in the United States.
Edwardian:
This is the one that slowed me up. I was familiar with the time period but couldn’t articulate a meaningful definition. I looked online, but all I got were “of or having to do with the period of King Edward VII’s rule” definitions. Not helpful. I read some encyclopedia entries on Bertie’s reign but didn’t come up with a gestalt, adjectival, sense of what “Edwardian” should mean. I consulted a couple of the Howlers and got one “I’m not sure either” and:
I suspect Morrison is using it to mean dandyism, aestheticism, devotion to style. A last flowering of a softer, androgynous sentimentality before Empire's collapse.I couldn't really find a good definition either - even the Glossary of Literary Terms was no help.
I would be tempted to connect his usage to Decadence, Oscar Wilde, etc., all of which came the decade before Edwardianism proper but seemed to set the tone for what followed. But Morrison expressly says he's talking about the embarrassingly earnest, not the artificiality of cool.
So we’re not sure either. Thusly I turn to you, the Howling Curmudgeons reader, to explain to us what you think Morrison means by “Edwardian” in this context.
Now that we have, “Edwardian” aside, working definitions of the words Morrison throws out there to describe Seaguy, I want to survey you guys and gals and see what you think it means and what you expect the book to be like. Morrison talks about Seaguy as being on the “vandguard of this new attitude” – what new attitude? What do you think this new attitude is, and do you think it will influence any mainstream Marvel or DC comics? If so, how?
Fire away!
I think Morrison is talking bollocks. I think he's got something hard to describe in Seaguy and he's flailing about for a way to describe it.
He usually talks bollocks in interviews; remember when he told us he was masturbating over magick sigils in order to get Invisibles sales figures up?
I figure, he talks bollocks in interviews, but the comics are good and often brilliant, and that's what matters.
Well, sure, but way to sap all the fun out of my interactive post! :-)
Other Readers: Please just ignore Greg.
That was actually Mark Waid who wrote the story where Batman had a plan to take on the entire Justice League.
Anyway: what I thing Grant is saying, underneath the BS, is that Seaguy is going to be about the aquatic adventures of an effete snob who gets his ass kicked a lot.
Note: above, when I used the word thing instead of think, that was punishment for my earlier statement about Mark Waid being the one to write the Ra's al Ghul vs. the JLA storyline.
Now, I'd actually like to see a Grant Morrison comic narrated by Benjamin J. Grimm, mind.
Matthew's wrong, or rather, he's right but also wrong. Morrison was the guy who started the idea that Batman had a plan to take out the JLA; Waid was the guy who used Batman's plan to take out the JLA.
I don't recall whether Morrison specifically said it in the comic, but in interviews local in time, he said to questions about which JLAer would win if they were pitted against each other, that Batman would, because he'd have a plan to take out every member.
Much of P.G. Wodehouse's comic fiction takes place in the "Edwardian" period, roughly 1890 to 1910, in Great Britain. Most of his characters could be divided into two categories: one category consists of wealthy, stupid and well-meaning people, striving valiantly to waste as much time as possible and getting into all sorts of trouble (usually involving women). The other category consists of lower class, sensible people who often think rings around their social betters.
Do you think this is what Mr. Morrison means? Perhaps Seaguy is the Bertie Wooster of the new millenium. If so, who is his "Jeeves"? Would it be the talking fish?
I don't recall whether Morrison specifically said it in the comic, but in interviews local in time, he said to questions about which JLAer would win if they were pitted against each other, that Batman would, because he'd have a plan to take out every member.
He didn't specifically say it in the comic, and to me, that's what counts. In an interview, it's no more authoritative than that guy in the comic store who argues that Batman could take out the Silver Surfer... it's not until you actually see Batman taking out the Silver Surfer that it matters. Morrison, as you pointed out, said that he was masturbating over occult sigils to increase the sales on the Invisibles... if Mark Waid then had Batman masturbate over occult sigils to stop the Mirror Master, the fault is Waid's.
As the resident devotee of the Mad Scottish Genius I feel the need to stick up for the bald Weegie bastard.
Not the "Edwardian vibe" comment, because we all know that a Morrison Newsarama interview is just slightly more meaningless than every other Newsarama interview, but the "bad-ass cynicism" comment. I think your current absence from comics means you are missing something, because that makes perfect sense to me.
He's talking about the post-widescreen crop of Authority and its knock-offs, comics that pretend both their protagonists, their authors, and their readers are all hard men because they feature scenes of a gay Batman anally violating Iron Man or what have you. Authority, Wanted, probably also all the superhero books furiously trying not to be superhero books by Bendis and so forth. Read even one Bendis letter column and you will entirely understand the desire to demolish that particular myth of bad-assery.
Although Morrison's JLA is one of the forerunners of the widescreen fad, I wouldn't put it in quite the same league. Maybe it venerated certain bad-ass heroes like Batman, but it was not itself bad-ass and definitely not cynical. And, as Matt said, it was Waid who wrote the ludicrously pissy Batman who had plans to take out all his friends; Morrison might have mentioned it in an interview, but we all know what that means. (It means that if he had written the story, it wouldn't have featured anything as uncharacteristically blunt as Ra's al Ghul digging up Batman's mommy and daddy, but that's another post.)
And then there's that bad-ass Batman. Yes, he became a cliche. Yes, he became a raging asshole who was plotting ways to hurt his own friends (although this is really a vestigial trace of Frank Miller's take on the Dark Knight Returns Batman, and John Byrne's clueless interpolation of that take into modern DC continuity).
But you have to remember that three years before issue #1 of Morrison's JLA Batman had his back broken, Wonder Woman was out of work, and Superman was dead. That's the context for reading his heroes; they were suddenly heroes again, who could take out Martians with a match or hold back the Moon, not incompetent boobs who were getting their asses handed to them by Mexican wrestlers.
Now that would be how you out-British the weird British writers! :-)
In any event, we can certainly agree, I hope, that Morrison did as much as anyone in recent years to promote the Uber-Batman take (although that's not the main point of my post, which I say only because I have visions of 20 more comments in which people argue over how macho, or not, Batman is).
Patrick: Now that's actually an interesting thought, although I wonder if that would qualify the book for "vanguard" status or if it would just read as another slightly comical/mocking take on superheroes?
Marc: Oh, of course, I should have known that but completely spaced on the Authority, etc. And I wasn't attacking Morrison's work on JLA, which I quite enjoyed, but I was questioning the idea that he had not written some of what he seemed to be criticizing. But after reading your comment, I agree that there is a quantifiable difference between Morrison's work and the "hard men" stuff. Morrison's comment in that regard now makes sense to me, and I certainly agree that reacting against that "hard men" business is a noble cause.
Dude, drag in some Mythos and have SeaGuy's Jeeves be a Deep One. Or a Shoggoth (who were made to be an Elder One's Elder One or something like that).
You know, I never thought I would hear myself say this, but fuck the Cthulhu Mythos. As much as I love them, leave them the hell out for once. Drag in some Arthur Machen if you need good old fashioned weirdness. The Great God Pan would work just fine.
It's interesting to me to hear people say, "Oh, that's just Grant Morrison! He says whatever crazy shit he wants when he does interviews or press blurbs."
Fair enough, I suppose, but since I was poking at comics journalism earlier, I'll ask the question: Is there a problem with that? Does Morrison have some sort of professional obligation to be more serious about this stuff? Or can he say whatever he feels like, and it's up to the journalist speaking with him to challenge what he says to elicit a deeper or easier-to-understand/meaningful response? Or is this simply a "who cares?" moment?
You know, it's weird: I was reading a Frank Black interview recently, given a few days before the announcement of the Pixies reunion, and it's striking how similar Black and Morrison are in their lighthearted approach to being interviewed. They seem to treat the process as a game: how much utter codswollop can I pass off on this person?
To be honest, if I were Grant Morrison, the only answers to any interviews I ever gave would be nonsense words in Sanskrit. This is a guy who was called racist by comic book geeks because he didn't put Black Lightning in the JLA. But it's a fair question, and looking at it objectively... well, comics journalism is kind of hit and miss, isn't it? So far the comics blogs I'm reading are doing more to get me interested in comics again than the comics press has managed to do. So while I suppose that straight answers would be a good thing, I figure by this point Grant's probably enjoying winding them up a bit too much to stop.
Maybe you guys could interview him. I'd rather read what you'd ask him than what Wizard does, as an example.
My guess on "Edwardian" is that Morrison is one of those dorks who likes to point out that when people deried things for being Victorian they're really talking about things that happened in the Edwardian era, so he's saying we are, in common parlance, neoVictorians.
When comics "news" largely consists of press releases, we probably shouldn't be surprised that comics interviews basically become, "So, tell us in your own words about your latest press release!"
On "Edwardian": I've always associated the term with writers like Arnold Bennett, the Virginia Woolf of Night and Day, H.G. Wells, and G.B. Shaw--that whole Fabian Socialist vibe. These people countered the decadence of the 1890's with a kind of "clear-eyed" progressivism that didn't last long, once modernism took hold.
I suppose the world that Seaguy inhabits sounds a bit like the actualization of H.G. Wells' dream, but Morrison's intention seems to be to shake up that world--and if so then he's really talking about a romantic/modernist/you can't rationalize problems away kind of aesthetic, which is nothing new for Morrison.
Oh well. I hate interviews. Never read one yet that held a candle to an actual work by the person being interviewed, or that proved at all instrumental to my enjoyment/understanding of said work. Try reading a Capra interview sometime. The guy's just begging people to accept him as a sentimental clown, and, sadly, many have.
Can't wait for Seaguy!
Dave
It feels to me that he's using the term "Edwardian" of the traditional British sense of "Y'know, a bit like Victorian, but not so bad", prevalent in architectural discussions but also found in social critiques.
Chris:
Does Morrison have some sort of professional obligation to be more serious about this stuff?
His professional obligation is to meet his deadlines with material that moves books and achieves some measure of artistic merit.
If taking the piss in interviews moves books, he's meeting his professional obligations. Given that the phase he's headed into is more wacked-out stuff than mainstream, reminding people of his wacked-out image might well be entirely appropriate.
There is clearly value in both kinds of interviewing, where the interviewer is complicit in Morrison's airy latherings and where the interviewer probes for a more in-depth analysis.
Matthew:
Maybe you guys could interview him. I'd rather read what you'd ask him than what Wizard does, as an example.
Kevin's a Hugo-nominated editor, Marc's an incisive critical scholar, and Chary's done everything else in his life, so he's probably got interviewing experience, so I'd bet we could put together an interesting interview.
Be a bit like herding teenagers, though.
Comics journalism as you've described it is the equivalent of, "I just want to help the team. There's 24 other guys out there, and I'm honored to be associated with them. We're just gonna take it one game at a time. You go out there and you try to play good... you want to play good... and I think we played pretty good tonight." It's that way because the creators don't profit from being more sincere or honest. Maybe if you put them in a scholarly setting (the comics equivalent of Inside the Actor's Studio, but with less James Lipton), they'd be more likely to open up, because in return, they'd get the satisfaction of being on stage while a horde of fanboys hung on their every word. Then again, that's what cons are for.
Inside the Curmudgeons' Parlor?