Sorry, going to sound like a cock here. Own it, read it; it has its uses, but they’re pretty limited. The plot rehashes, which’re extensive, are useful, as noted above, if you can’t get hold of anything mentioned in the book, though redundant if you can; I’ve lent my copy out to a student in desperation when teaching Morrison stuff, when every copy of a given TPB’s gone from the shops in town, and Amazon’s been on a week’s delay. I fear I tend to warn them against its fannish nature.
I’m glad that the new edition’s ‘improved’; I hope the second edition sorts out some of the copy-editing cock-ups in the first. For instance, your average first-year university student knows that footnote numbers are ideally inserted at the end of sentences; the book gets this right half the time, but at random. I know it’s a minor quibble, but when you’re trying to pass something off as an ‘academic’ book, it helps if it at least looks like one. It wouldn’t make it any less accessible.
Whilst the Comics Journal article’s a wee bit bitchy, that opening quotation draws blood; it’s a shame that the thoroughness displayed in transcribing the plots of comics isn’t matched by some kind of intellectual heft and research, beyond undeveloped references to Joseph Campbell and T.S. Eliot. The gushing tone of the thing really is somewhat overwhelming, and further bleeds credibility.
There’s a huge amount to be dealt with in early Morrison comics; an accessible book that’d provide a reader with enough to get them through the references to Bohm and Dada would be very useful indeed, and, from the cover, that’d seem to be what ‘Grant Morrison: The Early Years’ is. Needless to say, it isn’t. It’s a missed opportunity; a load of plot rehashes, name-dropping Bohm and Dada, glossing over what they actually said, whilst completely failing to mention Situationism or any influences that’d require more than a knowledge of the primary texts. I understand that giving a decent account of implicate order, whilst remaining accessible and still making Morrison look good, might be a bit tricky, but it would’ve made the book worth $23.
All that said, the interview’s really very interesting; it’s good to see an interview on Morrison’s early stuff conducted at this range. The interview’s really the reason to buy the book, if you’re sufficiently interested; depending on your resources, it might be worth it for the ‘Zenith’ plot description, too, which is fine, as these things go.
(Incidentally, selling it through Diamond seems like a shrewd business move, if only because comics bloke put the new version on order for me without checking, given the contents of my box, and I had to tell him I already had a copy, so you’ve already sold one. Cunning.) |
