Having now just read The Filth, Sleeper, Age of Bronze volumes one and two and Seaguy today (Amazon giveth!) I wanted to discuss the similarity between the adventures of Morrison's oceanic hero and Cabell's Jurgen. Both start out wanting things to change (Seaguy wants an adventure, Jurgen wants to be young again to win the love of the girl he lost as a young man), both range from strange experience to strange experience that ultimately end in a somewhat morose statement about love (in Seaguy we have Lotharius say The sooner romance and love and all that rot's wiped out, the happier we'll be round here and Jurgen himself chooses the comfort of his familiar life over passion and romance in his encounter with Koschei, the ultimate force behind all that Jurgen has experienced... indeed, it's interesting to note how Lotharius serves the same role as Koschei in Jurgen, both setting the series of adventures into place as a prime mover behind the scenes who has an encounter with the hero and setting the status quo back into place at the end) that seems both gloomy and a touch unsettled, as Seaguy ends up in the chess game he begins the story at, minus his pal Chubby Da Choona and Jurgen finds himself in the exact second he stepped up in conversation to defend evil as part of creation, minus his poetic sense of rebellion.
Obviously Morrison uses the common Superheroic tropes as part of his tale, if twisted into new and slightly unfamiliar forms (the Anti-Dad slamming into Antarctia, forming the Thousand and One Islands of Lostralia) but the trip to the artifical moon, built as a tomb by a demented pharoah and blasted into space by Chinese fireworks is almost of a piece with Jurgen's trip to Heaven, constructed by a God who was Himself the dream of an old woman set into motion by Koschei. Seaguy seems on my first couple of readings to be an almost perfect slice of the fantastic as it was often rendered by writers like Cabell, Dunsany, Eddison and Peake. Seaguy's trip to the moon in the huge buckets dropped down into the desert or Jurgen's descent into Hell and his entry into the Satanic camp with its bemused demons, badgered into torturing the damned that they never asked for in the first place and who demand eternal suffering and thus, cause both their own and that of the demons both have a similarity to them, while Jurgen's fruitless pursuit of sexual pleasure and worldly greatness reminds me of Seaguy's naive desire to impress She-Beard which ends up leading him into an encounter with a bio-engineered foodstuff named Xoo, a trip to Atlantis (a trip Jurgen himself engages in, although in his case he gets to have sex with the Lady of the Lake while he's there) and ultimately a painful and humiliating return to conformity that's a touch more sinister than Jurgen's wearied acceptance. They're hardly mirrors of each other by any means but the general shape is so similar that I do find myself wondering if it's deliberate.
I was astonished to see so untrammeledly fantastic a story in comic book form: I'll doubtlessly have more to say about Seaguy in the near future. Of the books I've read today, Seaguy was undoubtedly my favorite.
Posted by Matt Rossi at February 12, 2005 3:58 AM