IT BEGINS with
the DJ blasting “Pull Shapes” by The Pipettes, which will forever remind me of
Penny and how we can transcend ourselves through dancing, music, stories,
whatever magic we care to believe in. Standing out in front of the stage at the
Body English, which is this subterranean nightclub that’s some kind of really
big deal to get into, to even be allowed under this entire Hard Rock Las Vegas
situation, but we are all of us in the room prepped and primed, live and
willing conduits to the seething crackle that has brought us to this
convergence in five-dimensional space/time. One thousand have gathered from
Australia, Brazil, China, England, Finland, France, the Philippines, Scotland,
Sweden, Tasmania, Uruguay, and quite a few of the United States for MorrisonCon,
a celebration of chaos-magic and comic books and hypersigils and the people who
create them and the people who love them, a happening designed to break down
the barriers between all of those things, more in the vein of All Tomorrow’s Parties and TED than Comic-Con, instead of waiting hours in line to pack Hall H
full of 6,500 fans to stare at the actors and writers and directors who channel
their dreams, attendees are encouraged to engage the guests in an intimate
social setting, lubricated by alcohol and starstruck delirium and all the
teeming madness fueling this metropolis that Benjamin Siegel first watered with
his lifeblood sixty-five years ago.
The show is
supposed to start at nine but the notion of punctuality runs counter to the
general aesthetic and so we have quite some time to get to know one another
right away in the beginning. I’m standing with the stage-right speaker blasting
right in my ear next to a freelance photographer who’s been here since 8:15 and
only cares about performing the magical ritual of turning his pictures into
money, but then also there’s this real sweet mother/daughter team-up from
Oklahoma, Kristin is maybe ten years older than I am and loves My Chemical
Romance, can’t believe she’s going to be this close to Gerard Way, while
daughter Sage is ten years younger than me and a magic-journal-carrying
Morrison acolyte all the way. They introduce me to some other folks from
Oklahoma whose names get burned out of my brain by the impending set but we all
have a hell of a time singing along to Elastica’s “Stutter” when it roars out
of the PA. At one point, I make a Heineken run, $8.50 a pop. I am terribly
pleased with myself for including a fifth of Jack Daniel’s amongst the contents
of the backpack upon my shoulders.
At quarter to
eleven, Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance and DJ James Dewees walk out and take
their positions behind the two double-keyboard racks set up on either side of
the stage. They’re both dressed like rock stars or Village kids slumming in the
Bowery. Way is chewing gum harder than Dave Grohl, Party Poison in his secret
identity. The house lights come down and a soft blue glow washes over the
stage. A spectral a tempo blend of
piano and keyboard fills the room, not too far removed from what it sounds like
in Trent Reznor’s head. Grant Morrison enters from stage-right to the expected
roar from the crowd, sharp in a tight-fitting suit with blue shirt and tie.
He’s carrying a couple dozen pieces of printed paper. Or twenty-three, I hope,
thinking or receiving the number right there, in the moment before it begins.
He does not acknowledge the crowd, only takes the microphone in hand, steadies
himself, and launches into a performance entitled THE CON, beginning with,
“Here’s hoping, now that someone’s died/You’ll drown in grief, a proper
tide/Ignoring what you feel inside, that moment when God and Jesus lied.” This,
our smiling host goes on to relate, is the “bleak and enigmatic verse” that
Walter Lee has wasted the morning composing. Following along to the utmost of
my upper-dimensional capabilities yields the discovery that this Walter Lee is
in fact Liberace, who eventually goes on to battle Howard Hughes for the soul
of Las Vegas, the entire thirty-minute present-tense narrative delivered with
roaring gusto, evoking the Beats and shamans and spellcasters scored by sleek
skyscrapers. It is a test of endurance and sanity and comprehension that leaves
me battered and damaged, able to do little more than shake my head as they make
their way offstage. I’m not sure how the story ended but am already altered.
Retaining
concert-going professionalism much better than me, Kristin doesn’t let the last
man make it offstage before leaning in to grab Morrison’s pieces of paper cast off
one-by-one after being read, relics and recipes of whatever enchantment or
invocation has just taken place. She keeps one page for herself, another for
Sage, and then starts handing them out to all the grasping hands. Possibly I
don’t make it over in time but she saved me one and hands it to me once the
rest are gone? This is the first thing I’m not certain about, that I remember
in more than one version, already the timelines are fracturing and things seem
to be happening in multiples. I definitely eventually make it back to my room
with a piece of paper with the number ten in the upper-right corner written in
black ink and encircled. It begins the fourth chapter, entitled THE WHITE
KNIGHT RETURNS and the last sentence on it is “In the undergrowth of the
starlet’s eyelashes, hunting packs of wild pseudomonas feast on black matter
mascara clots, spurred on by microscopic demon riders.”
Akira the Don
bounds up on the stage and tears into his set, eager to win over the entire
crowd in that first bleeding instant and inspired to antics and banter of
increasing magnitude when the roar of adulation is not total enough. Dispensing
high-energy rapid-velocity UK hip-hop, he is constant motion and flow of
dialogue, diminutive in stature with a dark beard framing wild eyes underneath
long bleached-blond hair. I can’t figure out why he looks so familiar to me for
the first few songs then suddenly realize he’s Vince Neil’s little brother. He
earns +10 Kirby points for the name of his latest album, The Life Equation. I watch the set upstairs, where I meet Greg and
Mark from Chicago and Brenda and Kai from Atlanta. Brenda could be the Ragged Robin from 2022 but it seems like that could possibly sound a bit forward, so
I keep it to myself. Every time before I refill my Jack, I go to the bar and
leave a tip for a fresh glass of water with ice, congratulating myself for not
cutting the bartenders out of their due earnings and also hydrating my body
very well.
After the set, I
head down to the dance-floor to mingle and watch J.H. Williams III cut some
serious rug, dashing in his suit. You can almost see the layout of his motion
as a freeze-frame Williams double-page spread, dancing here with a jagged
rectangle around him, then he spins on over here into another serrated rectangle,
then a final unexpected lunge to the right side of the page for the last panel,
it’s all very Kate Kane. The pungent scent of something green, delicious, and
expensive wafts over me. A bouncer notices my bloodhound senses activate and
walks up with a smile on his face and says, “Yeah, some of the guests were
burning back in the Green Room but Management said they had to put it out.
Maybe it’s not too late, you want me to take you back there?” It does not occur
to me to question the way in which this man’s dialogue seems angled in direct
opposition to his presumed job description. Maybe he isn’t a bouncer at all,
some kind of hospitality director or facilitator? “Yes, that would actually be
perfect,” I tell him. “Please do take me back there.”
There are maybe
twenty people in the room, none of whom appear to be smoking anything. The
bouncer deposits me next to the food spread and excuses himself. Most folks are
huddled in the near side of the room, the only two I recognize are Way and
Akira the Don. Morrison and James Sime are sitting on the couch in the center
of the room, having a spirited conversation, though clearly Morrison is wiped
from the performance. There’s a guy sitting a few feet down from Morrison
holding some sort of camera out in front of him down low, angled sideways,
filming. The effect is surreal. Just the sight of Sime is pretty arresting in
and of itself, but especially in juxtaposition with Morrison. Sime has got a
tower of maybe six inches of hair shooting straight up from the top of his head
and a mustache that on its own would be right at home back on an old Deadwood
gunslinger but, when taken in context with the hair and immaculately cut suit,
suggests more of a Silver Age supervillain. Kirkman even made him a recurring
character in INVINCIBLE named after his store. He’s the owner of San
Francisco’s Isotope - The Comics Lounge and this entire thing was his idea, or at least the
result of dreaming and discussion with his partner Kirsten Baldock and
iFanboy’s Ron Richards over a meal or meals during Comic-Con 2010. It is
clearly not the moment to approach my man Morrison. I wind up talking to Akira
the Don for a few minutes and am maybe cool enough but shatter the illusion
when Way walks by and I’ve just got to shake his hand and tell him with all my
heart how much I care about THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY and the KILLJOYS business,
blazing all kinds of new trails in the backstage dialogue department.
The Don pinballs
off into his next situation and I strike up a conversation with the lady
standing next to me. She’s a little older than I am and wearing this all-white
dress that you could see from all the way across the club, when I noticed it,
it conjured WHITE SWAN, the anti-Aronofsky/Portman flick in my head, which I almost
manage to tell her before in walks none other than Frank Quitely himself, the
other half of Morrison’s heartbeat, everything he’s drawn is one of my favorite
comic books of all time and I make a real point and big effort not to just like
bear-hug him right there on the spot but I guess enough of it’s on my face to
tell because he just gives a real easy smile and walks up, holding out his hand
and introducing himself as Vin, which is of course his real name. And it turns
out this is his wife Jane who I’ve been talking to. Quitely (it’s at first impossible
to think of him as Vin) takes out a pack of American Spirit Naturals and asks
if I smoke. I haven’t had a cigarette in years and years but the only, the
involuntary, response is, “With you, I do!” and so we all have a smoke back there
by the vegetable tray and the two of them discuss the drawbacks of jet-lag with
me interjecting upbeat exclamations about, yes, how terrible jet-lag really is.
Soon after, we
get kicked out of the Green Room and exodus en masse up the stairs and across
the casino lobby into an embedded nightclub in which a band called Dead-Eye
Radio is performing passable covers of nineties alternative rock. I meet a
member of Sime’s staff named Mike, a nice guy in a white suit. We sing along to
“Say It Ain’t So.” I look around and realize that most of the other guests have
evaporated off to bed. It’s 1:30 and the programming proper commences in
exactly eight hours. I follow suit and end the day under the covers of my
king-size bed, taking thirty minutes to scream everything that’s just happened
at my little brother in Queens because he also smokes American Spirit Naturals.
And received his own copy of the ARKHAM ASYLUM hardcover for Christmas ’89, so
has loved Morrison’s work exactly as long as I have, though not to quite the
same extent.
SATURDAY
I’m up at nine,
showered and out the door fifteen minutes later. The coffee-shop line for
smoothies is insane but there’s no one at the bar, a Bloody Mary morning it
is. Fourteen dollars, with tip. I make my way into the hall and am delighted to
find Kristin and Sage waving from the center of the second row, having saved a
seat for the first new friend who walked in. Sime, Baldock and Richards come
out and warm the crowd up. General euphoria abounds, no one can believe we’re
all here, it’s actually happening. Morrison finally roars onstage at ten, voice
already ragged from the previous evening’s exertions, and works the crowd,
pacing from one end of the stage to the other, setting a strident tone. My
dials are red-lined, an hours-long adrenaline rush surging that starts warping
my perception of space and time. Maybe it’s here that he mentions he had to cut
a few chapters from SUPERGODS that will eventually get posted online. And that
the last issue of FINAL CRISIS had so much going on that they had to cut ten
pages of multi-dimensional conflict to make deadline, pages that will be
included in-sequence in the Absolute edition, which he considers to be the
definitive version. After a few minutes, he calls Chris Burnham and Frank
Quitely to join him on the two couches they’ve got up onstage.
Burnham’s young,
impossibly young to have already produced so many pages with that level of
detail and depth. It looks like he came straight from the barbershop,
baby-smooth face and not a hair out of place. There’s a timeless quality to the
way Quitely carries himself, like he hasn’t aged a day since finishing FLEX
MENTALLO, which, maybe there’s something to that. They start off putting a few
of Burnham’s pages from upcoming issues of BATMAN INCORPORATED up on the big
screen. There’s a four-panel zoom-out from #5 starring the Damian Wayne Batman
first glimpsed in BATMAN #666 that straddles the line between seeming reminiscent of Miller’s THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS while managing a straight homage to Dave Gibbons's camerawork in WATCHMEN.
But then, the
PAX AMERICANA pages.
SUPERCONTEXT:
like a lot of readers around my age, WATCHMEN was absolutely my favorite comic
book growing up, the fullest expression of how far one might push the medium
structurally, stylistically, narratively, etc, etc. It wasn’t until I finally
finally got my hands on the FLEX MENTALLO singles in November 2007 and then
when Morrison/Quitely/Grant finally finished up ALL-STAR SUPERMAN the next year
that I believed I had found work that had also managed to achieve such a high
standard, total unity of form and content presented in a package that
simultaneously elevates and celebrates the medium. All of this to say, I’m like
demographic target-zero for Morrison & Quitely doing a thematic sequel to
WATCHMEN and seeing those first few pages, that bold, finely detailed Quitely
linework up there on the big screen just about melts my hard drive right there
at 10:23 in the morning. Half of the peace sign crackling on the first page. An
airborne assassination. The return of Captain Nathaniel Adam from SUPERMAN BEYOND 3-D. There’s this one page you might have seen online with this sequence
of The Question jumping out onto some kind of metro-rail type situation with
his old partner The Blue Beetle flying up on him, there. But the page is
unlettered, so you’ve got to have Morrison fill in the dialogue for you, right
before that jump, bringing us in from the previous page, is a line of dialogue
ending in the words “leap of faith,” which is of course quintessential 80s-era
Moore transition work, juxtaposing text and visuals to produce a stronger
resonance than either would be capable of achieving individually. And oh hey,
talking resonance, no post-Ditko nine-panel grid for this one, our boys are
mixing it up with a base-8 system to reflect the groundwork that Morrison laid
in FINAL CRISIS with the various parallel universes operating and interacting
with one another on musical vibrational frequencies. So an eight-panel grid can
stand in for the eight notes, octave to octave, on the diatonic scale. Do re mi
and so forth, the harmony of the spheres. It’s not even eleven o’clock yet and
the difference between the pressure on the inside and outside of my head is
skyrocketing in a way that’s not wholly unpleasant, but also kind of worrisome.
Okay, and so but
then Darick Robertson comes out and they show some pages from HAPPY. He’s a
really affable fellow with much more of a breezy humor to him than one might
reasonably expect from sixty issues of TRANSMETROPOLITAN or all of his work on
THE BOYS. The way he wears that hat, you get the feeling that he lives in it,
but you never know. Over the course of the next two hours, he jumps up like
he’s about to walk off-stage or maybe a couple of times just because he can’t
help himself. The comedy accrues over time.
My favorite
quote from the panel, for FLEX MENTALLO Morrison instructed Quitely to draw
“primordial chaos manifesting itself upon unseen neutron cores*.” Quitely
couldn’t wrap his head around that, so when he turned in the page, he pointed to the panel and said, “I drew some circles for you.”
Next is the writer’s panel. Ron Richards moderates a group comprised of Jonathan Hickman,
J.H. Williams III (rocking red shirt, red tie, and tailored suit, and stealing
the title of Most Dapper Man in the Room from Sime), Jason Aaron, Robert Kirkman,
and Morrison. The panelists embody a balance of corporate versus creator-owned
comics, with Hickman and Aaron two of Marvel’s big guns while also having
tremendous success with their original properties, Morrison and Williams two of
DC’s very best, and Kirkman, forever, advocate and poster-boy success-story for
independent work. They spend a fair amount of time talking about the annual (or
sometimes twice-a-year) Marvel creative retreats, which seem like one of the
most brutal writers’ rooms in the world offset by the occasional potential for
uplifting synergy between extremely creative minds generously sharing their
best work with one another in pursuit of the most compelling story possible,
all under the watchful eye of Editorial and Marketing. The next day, Burnham
says that it sounds like Hell.
When the writers
are done, all the artists come out. Burnham, Quitely, Robertson, and Williams
return to the stage, joined by Mr. Jim Lee, pretty much no contest the hottest,
most bankable superstar artist in the industry for going on twenty years now.
He elicits due deference from his fellow panelists, along with assorted
good-natured jibes. An early highlight is Lee’s explanation of why the
O’Neil/Adams SUPERMAN VS MUHAMMAD ALI crossover is a brilliant idea because of
the pocket-dimension training montage in which Superman learns how to box,
which leads into Lee getting visibly choked up while trying to express the
beauty that he saw in those old Neal Adams spreads of KA-ZAR when they first
came out. While all of this is going on, the artists take turns sketching in different fans’ MorrisonCon sketchbooks. Burnham is up first. Someone in the
crowd drinking from a tankard yells for him to draw Robertson worshipping Jim
Lee.
Robertson shoots
right back at Lee with, “Fuck off! And by that I mean, I worship the altar you
stand on.” “Was that a height crack?” is Lee’s reply. “My legs are too short
and this couch is too long. If there’s ever a LeeCon, the furniture will be
smaller.”
Burnham decides
to go with a no-brainer shot of Officer Downe. Quitely follows that up with asketch of Fat Superman that’s impossibly clean and fast. It’s wild to watch it
go down, I always assumed he did a massive amount of erasing to achieve such
tight fine linework but he’s got his craft refined to such a level that every
line that comes out is pretty much a keeper. And then Williams takes it to a
whole new level, whereas Quitely at least dove right in with all kinds of
initial rapid pencil-motion, Williams just sits there with the Sharpie marker
making occasional little dabs of black just one level up from pointillism and
then all of a sudden, Batwoman’s head appears from out of all that negativespace, magic. Robertson’s next with a quick Batman, during which time Jim Lee
drops some calculus humor on Burnham about derivatives, I immediately forget
the exact wording, but then Lee gets up and slams out a sketch of The Joker in
maybe five minutes that’s ready for Alex Sinclair to do up so that they can
sell 250,000 copies of the next issue. It is staggering to sit through. My
favorite thing to hear at this panel, and almost all day long, is something
that Kaare Andrews once told Darick Robertson. We all start out as artists.
Every child draws. It’s the most basic form of communication, predating
language, even. Someone once asked Andrews when he started being an artist. His
answer was, When did you stop?
A quick lunch of
Ham & Brie sandwich followed by a shot of Jack up in my room for dessert
and then I grab all my Morrison/Quitely comics because I’ve got an appointment
to sit down with both of them in the neighborhood of four o’clock. I catch a
glimpse of what’s left of the six-pack of Lone Star talls I’ve smuggled over
from Austin and realize that I must share them. The next panel is THE SOUND OF
THE ATOM SPLITTING, the panel on music in comics featuring Akira the Don,
Gerard Way, Robertson, Morrison, Williams, and Jimmy Urine (pronounced,
inexplicably, you-rine). I’m not familiar with Urine’s work but he gets right
in there and hashes it out with the rest of them, is one of the most outspoken
at the panel and seems to know his shit with the double exception of
challenging anyone to name a good concept album that’s come out recently and
asking the crowd for a show of hands as to how many people don’t exclusively
download singles but actually still buy and listen to entire albums. The answer
to both questions is THE TRUE LIVES OF THE FABULOUS KILLJOYS. Morrison makes a
solid insight about Warren Ellis’s scripts, they’re so percussive, just the
rat-a-tat-tat of them, but the guy’s father is a drummer, which I already knew
but never made the connection. Way reveals that while he was working on the
last issue of UMBRELLA ACADEMY: DALLAS and Morrison was wading through the end of FINAL CRISIS, The Smashing Pumpkins had just gotten back together and
released “Tarantula” and both writers were listening to it on infinite repeat,
searing it into their heads. Morrison took acid and realized that the entire
history of pop music could be distilled into that opening, Jimmy Chamberlain’s
drums descending from Heat Death all the way back through space and time to The Big Bang and into the explosive tempo that kicks off the song. Morrison was
having so much fun with the tune that he decided to try to deafen himself with
it, so turned everything up as far as it would go and just pummeled his aural
cavities into harmonic submission. “Don’t listen to music on acid! Don’t write
comics on acid!” Around this time, for some reason David Bowie gets mentioned
and Way says that there needs to be a Ziggy Stardust comic adaptation. Darick
Robertson says he would draw it and they shake on it. A couple of
recommendations make an impression: MGMT’s “Flash Delirium” and Teenage
Fanclub’s “The Concept.” Robertson does a dead-on impression of Christopher
Walken’s reading of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be . . .” soliloquy and then
Morrison croons some Morrissey and somehow Alan Moore’s name comes up amidst
speculation about his reaction should he descend from his upper-dimensional Northampton plane to confront the spectacle before him. There is, of course,
all kinds of face-palming and wincing amongst the various panelists before
Morrison lowers his voice for a baritone delivery of, “All of this is copied
from me.” Which of course brings down the house.
As has been the
case every panel, they take questions at the end. I make it up in line and wind
up being the last question, which to me seems self-evident, no panel about
music and comics would be complete without a discussion of Kieron Gillen and
Jamie McKelvie’s much-beloved-though-criminally-under-read PHONOGRAM, a
celebration of the glory of pop music and the life-altering effect it can have
upon those who give their lives to it. My man Akira the Don’s response to the question
is that Gillen has just recently tweeted him proclaiming that he and McKelvie
were about to go to the pub and drink and listen to Kenickie and get serious
about the long-awaited third volume. This is good news but hardly scathing
critical analysis. Way says he doesn’t know what we’re talking about. A shake
of the head from Robertson. Morrison says something like he lives out in the
country and hasn’t gotten any e-mails or maybe any new non-DC comics since
2005? I’m not sure, there’s a low roaring rush pulsing in my ears. I feel like
I should maybe bring up LOCAS to at least like high-five on the way out but
then The Don puts the nail in the coffin with “All right, so that question
sucked.” Which is not a very life-equation move, maybe the one guy on stage who
has actually read the work could have championed it to those who hadn’t
experienced it rather than name-drop that the creators were in touch with him
last week. One day, the world will bow before the manic magical majesty of
PHONOGRAM. The panel concludes with an impromptu performance of “I Want To Hold Your Hand” with Robertson on guitar singing along with Morrison and Akira the
Don repeating the last word of every other line like a hip-hop sidekick.
I head across
the hall and check out the art gallery, which has got many many original pages
by the artists in attendance for display and sale. One of my favorite ones from
FLEX MENTALLO is framed, the first thing I see when I walk in, some version of young Wallace Sage reading a comic book starting Nanoman and Mini-Miss. The
Williams pages are staggering in person. I should take more pictures, but being
confronted by so many images about knocks out my last shred of rational
thought.The film panel is next, James Gunn, whose last film SUPER was pitch-perfect and improbably realistic in all the ways that KICK-ASS was over-the-top and histrionic, and Max Landis, who hit a similar blow tonally with the more recent CHRONICLE. Landis kind of runs away with the panel, is clearly just gacking out to be a part of all this, even earns his own serious heckler but then really turns it around in the end by straight-up walking us through this eight-page story that he wrote for ACTION COMICS #900 that features the Prankster leading Superman through a series of Gotcha's with incrementally increasing stakes that really, man, it’s just one hell of a story. So that’s all right but running long and now it’s 4:00 and even though Morrison’s still onstage, I head off to check-in for my signing appointment.
Bad news, there
are dozens and dozens of folks already in line and the signing room is all full
up, so it definitely doesn’t look like anything’s happening anytime soon. I’m all
right with missing Kirkman’s WALKING DEAD panel but am already fearing for
Hickman and Aaron’s next one about mythmaking, which is one of the most
interesting-sounding of the weekend. I stand behind a guy named Jeff, not quite
old enough to be my dad but maybe my youngest uncle. He used to run a shop that
did real good business on the First Comics end of the spectrum but closed it up
in the late eighties before Image boys and hologram covers started blowing up
the speculator’s bubble. A half hour goes by. One of the girls who works at
Isotope, I think, is running back and forth getting people drinks, which I find
just nice as hell but am still rocking my three Lone Star talls in the
ice-bucket and not really in the market for $8.50 Heinekens because it’s never
just the one $8.50. A pair of guys a little ways back catch my attention. One
of them has on a Barbelith T-shirt and is about to collapse under the weight of
a massive stack of books, including THE INVISIBLES OMNIBUS. I offer to lighten
his load a bit and have it in my hands for the first time at last, if only for
a minute.
Dan is
twenty-five from Brisbane. He wants to be a comic book writer and is planning
to move to America to make it so. He became a Franciscan monk when he was
eighteen, had a crisis of faith and dropped out of the order at twenty-one,
fell in love at twenty-two, and broke up with her at twenty-three. And
apparently in Australia, everyone keeps their wallet on the table in front of
them, but when Dan made the attempt to bridge that cultural gap Thursday at a
restaurant and then went to the bathroom, his wallet was eight hundred dollars
lighter when he finally recovered it a few hours later. I tell Dan he’s already
got some serious material for a Pekaresque memoir-type graphic novel in the can
and should probably go ahead and get to work on that. He counters that he
already writes an advice column for geek romance. Though over here, the accent
apparently does half of the work, so the rest of us are just out of luck.
Another incredible thing about Dan is that he’s got a picture on his phone of
the owner at Alternate Reality Comics flashing a Polaroid of young Alan Moore
in the 80s when he blew through town on his second and final American tour. A
medium shot. Staring at the camera. Directly. Naturally. For some reason, Moore
is shirtless. The effect upon the viewer is mystifying and profoundly
unsettling.
Schedel is from
San Antonio, just a hundred miles down the road from me, and has this wispy
kind of soft-spoken thing going on with eyes that look like they’ve seen too
much or maybe just enough. For years now, he’s been writing and drawing a
series called Hero Blob about a hero who can transform into any kind of liquid,
at any volume. He’s thinking of ending it soon with the hero’s final
transformation into a villain who attempts to engulf the world in a Biblical
flood, which sounds about right.
So all of that
takes place and I receive a hero’s welcome from my new gang when I roll back
down all crisp and clean and we take pulls off the old bottle of Jack, Dan
first, and but then it turns out that it’s almost 8:00 and they say we can only
get Morrison to sign two books, which wouldn’t be a problem except of course I
want to get all the ones Quitely signed also signed by Morrison and never even
mind SUPERGODS or all the already-Stewart-signed SEAGUYs or my very own ARKHAM
ASYLUM I got for Christmas ’89 and really quite a few other things. But what
happens is I finally get up there and introduce myself and say that we met at
Con in ’07 and he says, “Sure, I remember,” with such total convincing
sincerity that it about knocks me out because such a thing simply cannot be, and
then he asks, “So, what did you bring for me?” and I tell him about the beer
from Texas and he shakes his head and gestures to the table next to him, which
is loaded up with quite a few empty plastic glasses and one that’s still got
maybe half a screwdriver in it and he says, “People have been taking care of
me,” and Ron Richards sticks his head in to confirm, “He’s doing all right,”
and so I tell Morrison that I brought him some comics I wrote too, and he says
that I’ve got to sign them for him, so we get a rapid-fire autograph swap
system going real quick, an obscene exchange of his very best for my very first
work, and I want to thank him for the novel he gave me with a vigorous
handshake but remember I’ve got to say what I already told Quitely too, about
my dear friend in Seattle who I read ALL-STAR SUPERMAN to when he was dying but
I was only trying to share my favorite comic book with him, didn’t grasp the
hyperdensity of giving a terminal patient the story of Superman’s acceptance of
his mortality and the final heroism that such an act inspires in him, how
crushing of a load that of course was to drop on someone who knows he’s going
to die, only he seemed to accept it, embrace it, even, and the way I watched
the themes of that masterpiece’s hope and optimism waveform right up off the
page and take root to effect positive change in the face of my brave friend, I
will never forget that, resonating with me down through the years, and I want
Morrison to know what work his story has wrought that he never knew, and he
says, “Ah, you’re bringing tears to my eyes, Brother,” and it feels just like
Orion has been going to town on my mid-section for a few minutes now, and we
finish up and embrace and he grabs his Lone Star for the picture and says,
“We’ve got to clink them, Brother!” and we do.
EPILOGUE: One
could make the argument that, for me and me alone, MorrisonCon ends there. That
is certainly the emotional climax of the experience. But it’s only 8:00 on
Saturday night and my flight doesn’t leave for another twenty-four hours. And
there is the whole matter of another night of play and day of programming.
Quick as I can, bullet-point lightning-round edition:
I find Markisan
and The Captain. We sit down at an enormous booth with some other people we
don’t know. Brian walks by in a suit and we invite him to join us. He buys me a
Heineken. Dan stops by and is quite debonair, having also changed into a suit.
Then he’s off to the dance floor to show us how it’s done. Markisan spots Jason
Aaron up on the second floor and makes his move. The Captain follows suit and I
am right behind them. Aaron is up for it, and we all have some mead. It is
sweet and a damn fine thing. I want to rave to Aaron about my love for SCALPED
but am afraid to really start engaging him because he’s got “y’all” misspelled
in that thing through and across all the volumes with the apostrophe between
the “a” and the “l” instead of the “y” and “a” where it belongs and those
aren’t the kind of vibes I want to put out tonight but can sense that once I
get going, I’m not going to be able to stop myself, so I just shake his hand
and try to keep it all together for a few more hours.
I see Dan Didio
hanging out at the bottom of the stairs and walk up to say hello, because
surely the Publisher of DC Comics remembers me from that time we met in Dallas
in November 2007 for five minutes, and but we stand there and shoot the shit for
maybe fifteen minutes. He’s headed out in the morning on a 10:30 flight back to
shepherd his 52+ titles through their various stages of deadline but would
never have missed this, repeats the fact that he’s here for Grant, to show his
support. I tell him that that is a fine thing and elect myself the positive
vocal minority, to counter the effects of all the faceless everyones on the
Internet bitching about the New 52, I instead tell him what about it is that’s
working for me in the form of solid little nuggets like not resetting
INCORPORATED was clearly the smartest move of all and also it’s certainly
within his best interest to keep the teams on all Batman books as happy as
possible because he’s got a pretty sweet little thing going over there, and
Snyder & Lemire should be allowed to do whatever they want. I just barely
manage to choke down my unique understanding of the fundamental framework for
the ultimate THE ATOM story and also THE NEW ADVENTURES OF GRANT MORRISON & BUDDY BAKER but pitching right there on the spot feels like a bushwhacking dick
move unworthy of this momentous occasion so we just keep bantering. At some
point, Jim Lee and a couple of women and Mr. & Mrs. Quitely and Jason Aaron
all roll up and we’re all kind of talk/shouting at each other in the way that
groups do in clubs with loud music playing. I shake hands with the great Jim
Lee and tell him that I have been buying his books in singles since the halcyon
days on UNCANNY. He thanks me but does not ask me to dance.
And maybe it’s
time to go? Chantal Claret’s playing at Vinyl and I’ve been listening to
Morningwood the past couple weeks to get ready but then by the time we’re at
the club maybe half past midnight, a guy is slow-mopping the floor in the
definitive picture of The Gig Is Over. Which is terrible, I was looking forward
to her set. Maybe I go back to The Body English but don’t find any friends
still there? It is time to shut it down.
SUNDAY
I wake up
facedown on my bed at 8:38 AM, fully dressed in suit and boots. oh no. The act
of raising my head up off the pillow is filled with throbbing pain and regret.
I’ve got a little less than an hour before Burnham’s Hangover Breakfast &
Sketch thing. Call it an even hour. I set my phone for 9:38, kick off my boots
and pants, and go back to sleep.
Wake up at
10:28! Emergency! Morrison panel in two minutes + I need to hurl everything I
own into my bags and check out of my room. I bound about trying to effect all
of this as best I can, managing the checkout over the television I hope, not as
much hitting Barry Allen levels of velocity but closer to a Baron/Guice version
of Wally West who has had exactly the same Saturday as me and could really use
a few hundred-thousand carbs to ramp up the old super-speed. This time, there’s
no line for the seven-dollar peach smoothie that tastes like total forgiveness
and redemption and I’m in the back row listening to Morrison answer all kinds
of mad questions from the audience before eleven. He talks about how most often
the connections we see in the universe are nothing more than what we create for
ourselves or that are embedded for us by creators who are resonating on the
same frequencies that we are, which is why 23 keeps showing up everywhere or
why there were so many 108s all of a sudden all over the place after the second
season of L O S T. Of course, my brain pounds back, I’ve been saying all this
for years. Any time someone asks him for some kind of general life advice,
Morrison always deflects it with the sentiment that he’s just another human
being, not a guru or leader or demi-god of any kind. Which might sound
disingenuous delivered from a man at his own panel at a convention that bears
his name, but it’s delivered with such sincerity and absence of pretense that
the effect is empowering. Quit looking for solutions from outside sources.
Become the answer to your own questions.
My favorite
thing he says at this panel, I think it’s at this one, everything starts
blurring pretty hard from here on out as we approach the singularity of the
last panel, maybe he even says it in that one, but it’s the story he tells
about his mom taking him to see 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY three times in the
theater when it opened back in ’68 and the profound effect it had on him
creatively, but what of course really did a number on his eight-year-old psyche
was naturally the psychedelic stargate scene that closes out the movie, the
first-person POV shot of Dave Bowman actualizing humanity’s evolutionary
potential and becoming the Star Child, or whatever you think it means, it’s not
like Kubrick in any way makes it explicit, but the second time she took him, he
brought along his favorite teddy bear and when it got to the stargate sequence,
he hid his eyes but held the bear up to soak up the entire thing as some sort
of proxy. The bear is the first stuffed animal he received as a baby and the
story goes that he reached out to it and uttered his first syllables “buddhi,”
which we all know is the female Sanskrit noun derived from the same root*** as
the more common masculine version ending in –a, denoting an aspect of mind
higher than rational thought and translated roughly as “intuitive intelligence”
or “higher mind.” I would have to call bullshit on just about anyone else
claiming those syllables as his or her first word but with Morrison am by now
just like, “Of course you named your teddy bear that right before you picked up
a red marker and drew the Barbelith circle on your own forehead chakra when you
were eleven months old.”
Marvel’s former
Talent Coordinator Bon Aligmano runs the next panel, leading the entire
audience on a collective pitch for a new series based on a character who’s
entered the public domain, with Aaron, Burnham, and Williams playing the role
of editors. The character is Little Nemo. All kinds of wonderful ideas get
thrown around the room, Nemo as an old man confronting death or cancer and dreaming
of his childhood or maybe invert the entire original situation and have him
badly injured, in a coma and trying to fight his way out of the dream into the
real world. I wish we had Brendan McCarthy here to splash some of the images
getting kicked around up on the big screen in his one-of-a-kind palette.
We pause for
lunch and then Hickman does a panel on how to break in with creator-owned
comics, lots of numbers and a few anecdotes that boil down to “be very very
good and diversify your output.” Probably the best advice that comes out of it
is that if your resources are limited, particularly if you’re a writer who has
to pay an artist, it’s much more intelligent to put together four five-page
previews of four unique projects across a variety of genres rather than putting
all your eggs in one basket and producing a single twenty-page issue. Quadruple
your odds of finding a concept that connects.
Next, Sime and
Baldock sit down with J.H. Williams III, whose pages look absolutely gorgeous
up there on the big screen. The previous day, the guy talked about being
intimidated by various other talents in the industry, which is insane because
ever since at least DESOLATION JONES was coming out, I was so grateful not to
be a sequential artist whose livelihood was dependent upon innovative page
composition, because as stirring and inspiring and beautiful as every Williams
layout is, it seems like they would make the next white page impossibly
difficult to fill with anything even remotely worthwhile. But he walks us
through some of his relatively recent work, a couple of pages from the “The Black Glove” arc with Morrison, then on to Batwoman. The labyrinth that she and
Wonder Woman make their way through in #12 took four-and-a-half days, an
incredibly short amount of time for such masterful work, one that turns out to
have completely screwed-up perspective lines that you just can’t discern
because the drawing makes you believe in it, not unlike Kirby anatomy. He shows
us the artwork he did for the new The Sword album Apochryphon**** and explains that the band threw out his first
pitch to put a sword on the cover, a bit on-the-nose, but then how he found a
way to slide one in anyway via the shape of the logo combined with all of the
elements they wanted. And he’s doing Blondie’s next album cover and designing
new costumes for the band, the latter Sime’s idea when he met the band
backstage during their recent run through San Francisco.
An hour and a
half later, I’m sitting in the back row of the plane, euphoric but battling a
slight twist of regret, still floundering for punctuation, some definitive
endpoint that I can tag as the conclusion to this transformative experience. I
put on “Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken” by Camera Obscura because the
melancholy ache of the pop is perfect, soothing, exactly encapsulates me at
this instant in space and time. I look up and realize that I’m sitting in Aisle
23 and suddenly understand that none of this has to end, ever, I never saw them
stop, Morrison and company could be in that hall taking questions and sharing
themselves forever, until the end of time or December 22nd, whichever comes
last, channeling that enlightening embracing awareness out into the lives of
anyone who comes into contact with their work. We can do anything, the only
thing standing in the way of actualizing our potential is our own inertia, all
we have to do is ignite our own escape velocity. We are all supergods.
* or quite
possibly it was “neutrinos,” another example of the kind of poly-dimensional
simultaneity flying around all over the place by that point, both versions
exist in my head
** this thing
with guys looking like Darick Robertson turns out to be a motif throughout the
evening, before all is said and done, I wind up bumping into two other false
articles with a beard and the same jaunty hat before finally running into the
actual individual near the end of the evening, but only by the fourth time, I’m
so jaded by the exchange that I perfunctorily ask, “Darick Robertson?” and when
he replies in the affirmative, I just nod because it finally had to happen some
time and then shamble right on off without another word
*** budh: to awaken, enlighten, to know
**** which means
“secret writing,” naturally, released four weeks later on 10.22.12
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Yes! YES! YES!
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