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Coming in late as I only got my copy of Arthur yesterday. Skimmed the interview. And I think it’s interesting and perhaps telling that this small aspect of it has been focussed on. How come no-one’s dwelling on the bit where he refers to Alan Moore later on, eh ?
Anyway, I think Grant’s probably wrong on a variety of levels about this one, but I’m not taking it personally - in fact, thinking about it has illuminated why I’ve found his recent work to be less satisfying.
It’s not so much any need for a three-act structure that makes me feel NXM and Seaguy weren’t quite so hot, but the fact that the storytelling seemed uncertain, and incomplete; events were, or appeared to be, happening off-panel, and the reader had to do the work to fill in the gaps. The Filth and NXM alike seemed to generate the need for loads of people to explain the Qabbalistic relevance, and to refer us to the Lucifer Principle or other books, to understand, which suggests Grant’s writing was more a case of story-suggesting than storytelling. The works don’t necessarily stand alone as complete stories, they need you to look elsewhere.
And that’s not because the reader’s failing to get it, or not seeing the levels, but because the first and most obvious level – that of actually propelling the story along in some fashion – isn’t clearly being met. If that’s not being satisfied, if you don’t actually know what’s happening in the story (and in NXM, the lack of clarity in the art in the last arc was arguably as much to blame for this as the plot gaps), then the reader’s less likely to see metaphor or whatever as an acceptable substitute. If your hero’s quest for the golden maguffin is a metaphor for his spiritual awakening, then if you can’t tell from the narrative if he’s currently lost in the woods of unreason or buying a carton of yogurt from a man with a donkey’s head, then you’re not going to look for the metaphor underlying it. That first level must be clearly present as a foundation before you start adding extra levels.
And in that regard, Seaguy, unfortunately, doesn’t really succeed; despite (and unfortunately in contrast to) the clarity of Cameron’s art and narrative skills, the story jumps from place to place with events happening without any apparent reason for them. So you’re left with a story that feels incomplete. As much as the ‘throwing out of crazy ideas’ might have become Grant’s trademark in recent years, I actually think he’s actually become a victim of the observation he made about his own work in Animal Man 26 about his stories seeming to build up to something that never really happens… which is a shame, as it kind of makes it look like he didn’t really know where he was going, or didn’t have it planned out. With Seaguy, for example, instead of the scene-shifts and plot holes, why wasn’t it a four issue series ? The end has the feeling (like Thomas Harris’s Hannibal) of someone doing an exam and putting in everything in note form before the end of the allotted time (or space). It feels like a creator who’s not wholly in command of their story, and breaks the spell of the story. Which is a shame.
So on a personal level I disagree with his assessment about not getting it; I got it all right, I just didn’t think it was very well done. |
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