grant morrison’s action comics

towards a postpunk superheroics pt. 2

Understanding this melding of postmodern, irreverent deconstruction of the Superman story, and Morrison’s own reverent reconstructive preservation of the Superman story. In my last post I briefly mentioned Morrison’s view of superheroes as, very literally, the modern gods of humanity as a whole. For him, the ultimate members of this pantheon, those who most closely correspond to say, the greatest gods of Mount Olympus, are the Justice League of America(JLA). I’ll talk about Morison’s run on JLA later in this series, but in order to discuss Morrison’s JLA it’s important to look at his depictions of the team’s central figure: Superman.

Morrison’s run on the New 52’s Action Comics is notable because it sees the writer being given free reign to build Superman’s origin from the ground up in a new continuity for DC Comics. Rather than rewrite a hero’s origin story to make the character more culturally relevant, make a social critique, or critique the genre itself as writers have done in cases such as Marvel’s Ultimate universe, DC’s Absolute Universe, or, arguably Watchmen itself, Morrison steadfastly insists on the sanctity of Superman’s original character.

This alone, however, isn’t particularly of note. Mark Waid’s run on Flash, for example, shares a similar flavor of fundamentalist respect for its titular character. What I find so fascinating about Morrison’s particular brand of dedication to Superman’s building blocks is that the very climax of Morrison’s run on Action Comics is so deeply concerned with the metaphysics of the comics medium. I find it somewhat daunting to engage with Morrison’s understanding of the comics medium in large part because they see comics as being an accurate representation of the substance of time itself. Morrison isn’t the only cartoonist or comics scholar to note that comics is one of the best, if not the only, narrative medium that challenges, on a fundamental level, linear time. Several notable members of the British invasion, in fact, made work very concerned with this very concept, although none as obsessively as Morrison.

Morrison argues that we should understand comics as a two-dimensional representation of the flow of time itself. He understands the continuity of the comics page to be the most accurate depiction of time that three-dimensional beings(humans) can create without actually being able to see time(the so-called 4th dimension), as a 5th dimensional being could. In the climax of Action Comics, Morrison makes their imagined fifth-dimensional beings characters in the two dimensional pages of the comic. These godly beings who can not just reach into and manipulate the second dimension as we can, but the third and fourth with ease are the facilitators of Superman’s confrontations with his many metatextual(multiversal) selves. It’s this canonical confrontation, which treats Superman not as a thing to be manipulated by Morrison, but instead honors unimpeachable sanctity of his character, and the reality of his power.

janethesturgeon, July 20, 2025

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grant morrison’s action comics

towards a postpunk superheroics pt. 1

Action Comics is a pair of words as important to modern American culture as We the People. It’s almost impossible to fully understand the cultural significance that the American superhero genre has had on the American psyche over the last eighty or so years. The evolution of superheroes which were spawned in the early twentieth is a subject which Morrison is deeply concerned with.

In Action Comics, Morrison creates a postmodern deconstruction of Superman, engaging in a metatextual dialogue with the several historical stages of the Man of Steel. At the same time, however, Morrison has a literal reverence for the heroes he is tasked with writing. More on this in a later post but to Morrison, superheroes are on a very real level, the pantheon of humanity. A kind of deific future towards which humanity moves.

This meta-portrait plays out across multiversal versions of Superman, rather than the central ‘real world’ Clark Kent with whom we spend most of our time. The central Clark represents the character of the original Action Comics, or at least, how Morrison sees him. Superman in this iteration is a labor hero.

This Clark wears double-kneed work pants and a t-shirt. Despite his alien biology he is in a much deeper emotional and psychological sense, human. It’s in this humanity that Morrison’s reverence for his characters is most readily apparent. His dehumanization by the billionaire Lex Luthor is thus an allegory for the dehumanization of working class people who, in this idealized deified version of humanity, is able to break free of Luthor and the military’s chains and choke out some billionaire throat.

Action Comics #4, Grant Morrison & Rags Morales, DC Comics

Morrison, as I’ll continue to write about, exists as a transitional member between the postmodern and metamodern eras of the superhero canon. As a pivotal member of the British Invasion of the eighties who continued to write massively popular superhero comics well into the 2010s, he stands in contrast to writers like Allen Moore, arguably the most important member of the British Invasion and certainly the most famous, who sought to deconstruct and critically(cynically?) reframe the genre as a whole.

janethesturgeon, Jul 16, 2025

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james novak’s kafka’s manuscript

“In the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea. Comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality.” Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: Blood in the Gutter

It’s rare that I read a comic and find myself struck by its poetry. While a good cartoonist’s work is often an excellent example of craft, comics are so complex with so many moving pieces that creating a work of art cohesive enough to be called ‘poetic’ is incredibly difficult. But poetic was the word that came to mind within the first ten pages of Jason Novak’s wordless novel Kafka’s Manuscript(Fantagraphics, 2025). The book is a short, black and white story about author Franz Kafka’s final manuscript as his best friend and biographer, Max Brod saves it. The novel is entirely wordless, with only a single minimalist panel in the center of each page, normally depicting Brod and his suitcase carrying his friend’s papers. While the art is charming and emotive in only the way a true cartoon can be, it’s in the negative space which surrounds each panel that the affective power of the book lies. In it, there’s so much geographical but also temporal space for the reader to digest what they’re seeing. That, coupled with the cartoony simplicity of the art and the lack of words creates what I can only call a poetic meter.

A lot of the magic of Novak’s work in Kafka’s Manuscript is dependent on a reader’s willingness to truly take the time to contemplate a single panel and the space around it. Comics, more than any other literary art form, offers a reader a great deal of autonomy about how much time they take with one page of a book. The intense minimalism of each of Novak’s pages increases the importance but also the tenuousness of that choice to sit with a page. It’s a big swing, especially in the era of internet-shortened attention spans, but the rhythm of Kafka’s Manuscript slows and hastens in waves, keeping the reading experience fresh in much the same way rhyme scheme might in a poem. Some scenes are meant to be lingered on, like Brod’s mourning period, and others, like Brod hurrying to escape the Nazis, are dynamic and even suspenseful in a cartoony way.

Novak’s character work does credit to this demanding rhythm. The first two pages of the book are immediately intimate, introducing us to the close friendship between Brod and Kafka. The scenes’ emotional impact are of vital importance to the book, because without it the reader is set adrift in a wordless book with no emotional tether. It’s here that Novak’s simple cartooning style and absence of words first come to his aid. The quiet intimacy of the two friends reading and editing together is immediately recognizable before it’s achingly taken away from us on the next page when we see Kafka’s deathbed. It catches the reader, making us immediately invested in the lives of these characters.

In other more action driven scenes, Novak’s simple linework creates playful motion, with Grod running down stairs into the bottom right corner, drawing us to the next page only to find Grod peeking out of a doorway on the lookout for Nazis. The book is an endearing duet of tension and release within the structure of Novaks cartoon meter. Kafka’s Manuscript is an excellent example of the great strengths of a stripped down style in the hands of a thoughtful artist. By presenting his reader with art quickly understood on a surface level without any distractions, Novak invites his readers to choose to become active participants in the story, to elaborate and fill in the blank spaces between solitary panels. It’s refreshing to be given this freedom, this trust, when so much of our media spoon feeds us, not believing in our ability to opt into a story.

While Novak’s actual comic is entertaining and also fascinating from a technical point of view, his introduction to the novel is equally complex, and gives us a glimpse into a novel view on comics. The introduction begins by giving some biographical history of Kafka and Brod. The information is helpful, but it’s a mark of Novak’s cartooning chops that he could have simply provided us with his title, and the book would have been equally gripping and understandable.

What’s most interesting about the introduction is Novak doesn’t use the words “comics” or “graphic novel” once in describing his book. Instead he calls it a “picture book” or a “novel,” before likening his choice to forego words to poetry, writing “Words are like boulders in a ravine. The more boulders there are, the more definite their pattern. But as the number of boulders increases, the less room there is to move freely. I think this is what’s meant when it’s said of poetry that the true meaning of a poem is somewhere in the space between the lines.” Normally I’m averse to the use an explicitly ‘literary’ vocabulary instead of a comics vocabulary to discuss comics. I’m of the opinion that it enforces a hierarchy between comics and literature(as I’ve just done) which is unhealthy for everyone. Yet when Novak does it, there’s no sense of a rejection of the comics lexicon in favor of the literary one. Denying that Kafka’s Manuscript is a comic would be more absurd than pretentious, given its publisher(Fantagraphics), and its undeniable use of comics conventions.

By acknowledging that his work requires a vocabulary beyond that of comics, Novak suggests something we’ve been scared to admit: that the two realms are inextricably intertwined. It’s difficult to imagine a world in which the language of literature and art criticism embraces that of comics and vice versa; we’re scared of sounding base, or pretentious in turn. But many of the best comics, and non-comics literature are demanding a more holistic understanding of both worlds. Works like Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters or Marinaomi’s I Thought You Loved Me can’t be discussed without a more diverse critical language than that of only comics or only literature. What Novak has managed to do is quietly present an introduction whose language does not refute that of comics, but embraces that of literature, before following it up with a story that insists on having a diverse critical framework to discuss it.

janethesturgeon july 1-, 2025

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eddy atoms pinky & pepper forever

I’m a sucker for any art that makes me aware of it as something that was made. I love Brecht, whose theater is all about making you aware that you’re watching a play, or Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, which is admirably dedicated to stopping you from losing yourself in its language. Eddy Atom’s newest book, Pinky & Pepper Forever(Silver Sprocket 2025) is such a comic. The story is about Pinky and Pepper, a lesbian couple of anthropomorphic dog girl art students who end up dead in hell, training to be grim reapers.

The art is hyper-stylized and incredibly campy, drawn with various media including several kinds of paint, scratchy colored pencil, digital art, and even a sculpture. In a book populated by less frenetic characters, driven by a more subdued plot, this kind of change would be jarring, but in Pinky & Pepper Forever, the style is illustrative of the wild subjectivities of suicidal, BDSM-obsessed puppy-girl lesbians. 

Like many stories about artists, Pinky & Pepper Forever has a meta narrative woven throughout the book. The intense, psychedelic colored pencils of Atoms’s world don’t just reflect the fun colorful mania of his two protagonists, but also the ways which artists hyper editorialize their own lives, turning them into Narratives, rather than face the intrinsic unpredictability of lived reality. Such editorialization takes on a more sinister note when paired with the obsessive  toxicity of Pinky and Pepper’s relationship as the story develops(Pinky ends up committing suicide to spite Pepper, whom Pinky believes doesn’t appreciate her art, turning her body into an art piece).

Their relationship is a combination of melodrama and kitsch, emotionally intense enough to end in suicide, fraught with all the very real complexities of a queer relationship, and yet also about as mature as two children fighting over a toy truck on the playground. It’s this interplay from which much of the campiness of Pinky & Pepper stems, fueled by Atoms’s beautiful, affected art style. As a kitsch art object, Pinky & Pepper Forever is a wild success. 

Unfortunately, the narrative complexity of Atoms’s work gets lost in this sea of camp. The themes of victimhood, self-worth, art, and suicide, all within a queer relationship don’t get the room they should to breathe, ending abruptly in a rather forced “happy” ending. Our introduction to Pinky and Pepper’s relationship is so fast that we don’t get a chance to understand their status quo before they fall apart. This problem persists throughout the story, with each story beat feeling over before it’s begun. The pace adds to the whirlwind, manic feeling of the two’s relationship, but reading a book centering queer relationships and suicide without being allowed an emotional attachment to the characters and their struggles is frustrating. 

janethesturgeon july 5, 2025