Grant Morrison: Writing Comics that Put Novels in the Shade

The Guardian writes about "one of the most interesting writers in the comics medium."

From the piece...

Morrison's friend Warren Ellis, another excellent comics writer, points out that Morrison's occultism is actually very pragmatic. The only reason he was abducted by aliens in Kathmandu in 1994, says Morrison, is "because I went to Kathmandu in 1994 to be abducted by aliens. And it works! These fuckers, they will turn up!" Morrison practises magic, and encourages his readers to do the same. He's matter-of-fact about it: "Anyone can contact the scorpion gods."

At their best, Morrison's comics are crammed with ideas. They are exhilaratingly strange, and kind of puckish. His Doom Patrol featured a gang of supervillains called The Brotherhood of Dada, a sentient piece of roadway called Danny the Street and a painting that ate Paris. But Morrison's masterwork remains The Invisibles, a series about a cell of existential resistance fighters – including a transsexual shaman, a grumpy Scouser, a telepath from the future and their bald-headed leader King Mob, who is the dead spit of Morrison himself. No summary can do justice to how mind-bending and bizarre – and yet compellingly in earnest – this comic is.

Its themes are: order v chaos (the Invisibles are fighting the Archons of the Outer Church, a race of inter-dimensional beetles with obsessive-compulsive disorder), time and timelessness, occult magic, and psychedelic or hallucinatory experience. But, rather than being sombre or preachy, it's rollicking good fun.

Ever since mainstream comics "grew up", with Alan "Watchmen" Moore as instigator, the way they tended to show their maturity was by ditching ass-kicking in favour of ideas. Morrison, although he shares Moore's occult interests, is much more into the biff-pow-bang.