My new book, Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics, comes out this week. I'll be running a short excerpt over the next couple of days, but to kick things off I thought I'd preview the table of contents and the section headings.
Introduction: A Union of Opposites
Working methods
Magic words, magic pictures
Worlds within worlds
Alternating currents
Chapter 1: Ground Level
Zenith: Reign of the superbrats
Dare: The contradictions of protest
The New Adventures of Hitler and St. Swithin’s Day: Angry young men
Zenith Phase IV: The Horus paradox
Chapter 2: The World’s Strangest Heroes
Animal Man: Beyond metafiction
Arkham Asylum: Why so serious?
Doom Patrol: Missing faces and replacement heads
Embodied authorities, imaginary terrors
The hilarity of influence
Chapter 3: The Invisible Kingdom
Sebastian O and The Mystery Play: Dandies, messiahs, assassins
The Invisibles: Permanent revolution
Holographic timespace
The decentered text
Secret identities
Kill overload
The language of the angels
Romantic utopias
Resistance is useless
Chapter 4: Widescreen
Flex Mentallo: When worlds collide
JLA: Fanfare for the common man
Marvel Boy and Fantastic Four 1234: Marvel nights
New X-Men: Survival of the fittest
Mutation and difference
The terror of the ideal
Shadowplay
Chapter 5: Free Agents
The Filth: Status: Q
Enjoy your micro-sepsis
In the world of Greg Feely
Seaguy: Beyond the end of the world
Vimanarama: Bollywood Kirby
We3: The vocabularies of control
Chapter 6: A Time of Harvest
Cryptic connections
Dirty realism
Eternal superteens
Civilizations in decline
Absolute meaning
Chapter 7: Work for Hire
All Star Superman: History under glass
Secular mythologies
Ending the never-ending battle
Batman: The many lives of the Batman
Final Crisis: Contaminating self-consciousness
Afterword: Morrison, Incorporated
Tomorrow: New world order, same old heroes.
Got my copy this week (thank you Amazon) but I've got Neal Stephenson's Reamde to finish before I get to it. From the into it seems like exactly what I wanted- a proper academic study of Morrison. I've always wanted the books about Morrison to be more academically rigorous and this seems to be just the ticket. Cheers.
Posted by: Sean McDonald | March 15, 2012 at 05:04 PM
Thanks, Sean! Hope you enjoy it.
Posted by: Marc | March 18, 2012 at 01:56 PM