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I think, essentially, that Morrison hit his own glass ceiling a while back - his creativity isn't in question, both in original material and in his appropriation of others' material and attempting to place a new spin upon it. I just don't think he's currently a good enough writer to place those ideas in the context of a good story. And the lowering of critical standards in reviewing his work has probably given him the impression that he's still firing on all cylinders, in all honesty. He's an excitable chap, after all, and it's not beneath him to completely believe in his own hype when it's perpetuated on a daily basis.
I think that due to the nature of the way they're produced, monthly comics, more than almost any other medium or aspect of the medium, require tight editorial control and an objective critical presence for the writers, in particular, to continue to produce serially good work. With the loss of letters pages in comics, and the only people online willing to properly go over Morrison's stuff being his fans who - pardon me - can verge on the obsessive, I don't think anyone's actually had the guts or the interest in approaching him and telling him that his storytelling skills are suffering.
Like Ellis, he tends to lasershark (ie, throw in seven mediocre-to-good ideas when one excellent idea will do) - again like Ellis, he also tends to have his characters speak in exactly the same way, in his own style. Ellis has every paper-thin nails-hard Old Bastard speaking in the same hard-bitten, piss-taking style (the one that Lobo took the piss out of so much in the recent Lobo/Authority comic) because he thinks it's cool, and because he wishes he actually talked like that. Morrison has his characters speaking in Morrisonese - for example, Jean Grey calls Cyclops "her favourite superhero", not because that's something Grey would ever say, but because Morrison thinks it's cool, and because it's something he'd say. And because it's a lovely one liner for a superhero (by any other name) to say to another superhero, we skip over the poor collision detection in the characterisation.
And I've noticed far too often in the last few years that deus ex is the order of the day when it comes to a drmatic climax - characters will have the upper hand, only for their victims to say something like "You don't understand," pull the rug out from under them in an underwritten fashion, and pontificate in a few choice, cool-sounding soundbites for a few panels. Sometimes this will happen several times in a row in one scene. His New X-Men stuff is full of this kind of lazy writing, there because Morrison thinks this kind of showdown is cool, not because it works dramatically. This, for me, leads back to the subject of the atrophy of his storytelling skills.
Zenith, St. Swithin's Day, Doom Patrol, Animal Man, the first half of the Invisibles - all wonderful stuff. It's since then that things have fallen off, in my opinion. |
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But yeah, to elaborate, Morrison has characters within the text comment on the use of cliches (the "death" of the Phoenix, the return of Magneto, etc.), and what's more, he has characters comment on the stupidity of the plot itself vs. what has gone before. (As someone else noted in a similar thread, Beak's horror and disgust at Magneto's behavior -- said behavior being no more than an amplification of what Magneto has done a million times before, in previous x-fanboy epics -- is also commentary on the tired tropes of superhero comics vs. what Morrison had been trying to do in his run to that point.)