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Are there things I don't analyze in detail? Sure. I tried to look at the major themes and motifs from Grant's early work and focus on that stuff. The recursion. The big picture. The way the little details add up. You know, the stuff I thought was important. But, yeah, some stuff was overlooked. For Zenith alone, I had dozens of pages of notes and observations--only half of which I ended up using in my analysis. My book isn't a bunch of annotations. It presents a theory on how to read Grant Morrison. And gives lots of evidence of why he's so remarkable as a writer of comic books.
Well, the theoretical approach in the Zenith pieces seems to be literary criticism, picking up on recurrent textual themes and motifs; and the overriding conclusion emerging from those Zenith pieces seemed to be that these recurring themes and motifs create a kind of "fractal" model of the whole Zenith text. That is interesting, but I think there's a great deal more to say about those stories without the essays just becoming a heap of annotations.
I feel the use of pastiche and cultural borrowing (Richard Branson, Tim Burgess, Robot Archie, Desperate Dan) across the whole Zenith series is really important in terms of Morrison's construction of different historical and cultural periods ~ that the "villain" in Phase II is an 80s entrepreneur, and the "hero" throughout is an 80s pop star who loses his security and identity, and the doomed army from Phase III is from England in the 1940s, fighting a war from the DCU in the mid-1980s. It ties in closely with Morrison's commentary on Englishness in Dare, and St Swithins Day, and Hitler, all of which came out within a fairly short space of time (and then Big Dave tackled many similar ideas to Zenith ~ tabloid fame, celebrity ~ in caricature). Far from just being all clever-clever and knowing by drawing on cultural icons and making nods to almost-recognisable figures, I think Zenith's quotations from culture are part of a sustained exploration of World War Two Englishness compared and contrasted, and conflicted, with 1980s-1990s Englishness, that forms the core of all the important titles I've just mentioned.
As I said above, though, of course a person can choose his or her own approach and decide what to omit. I'm just making the point that I don't think what I suggested would result in a list of annotations; I think it's an important theme and strand throughout Morrison's work over, I don't know, 1988-1992 at least. |
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