Where the Weird and Brilliant Converge: Grant Morrison's We3

Morrison, Grant, writer. We3. Illustrated by Frank Quitely. Colored by Jamie Grant. Lettered by Todd Klein. New York: DC Comics, 2005. Print.

Last weekend found me in the crosshairs of a conversation between my comics-obsessed boyfriend and my comics-obsessed former roommate. As they talked my attention wandered. After taking a course on comics/graphic novels (I’m indifferent when it comes to the terminology--life is too short for such battles) last spring semester and a good deal of persuasion from Tyler (my boyfriend), I’ve become a fan of the medium, but on this particular evening I was more engrossed in my beer after the long car ride up to Athens earlier that day. I might have mentally wandered back in on any number of topics, but what I did happen to catch was their brief exchange about Grant Morrison. Tyler is a pretty big fan of his work, but my one time roomie was less impressed by him, claiming him to be “too weird,” or something along those lines.

I’m not totally sure how this was meant to be received--as my roommate finding Morrison to simply be too weird for his personal tastes, or as his feeling Morrison made too much of a deliberate effort to be weird in his work (in an attempt to establish his own quirky trademark, essentially). He also could have been suggesting something else. Language leaves frustratingly ample room for interpretation.

Whatever he meant, Grant Morrison is just the kind of “too weird” I like. Today I read We3, and for all of its brevity and compactness, it was one hell of a read.

The plot follows three pets that have been put on the frontlines of science and war by a highly classified government project. The dog, cat, and rabbit (“1”, “2”, and “3”, respectively) roost within the confines of robotic machinery that visually conjures up images of both insectoid exoskeletons and, strangely, Easter eggs. Bright, cherry-like bulbs tip the ends of antennas that run down the central strip of their heads and necks like an alien’s mohawk. The end result of all this metal and fur is a trio of cyborgs that are part animal, part machine, and entirely deadly. They talk, they shoot missiles, they can spew a shower of poison gas when necessary. The problem: We3 are up for decommissioning, and their ultra fine-tuned fight-or-flight instincts are kicking into high gear.

Aside from being an engaging tale, We3 takes a magnifying glass to a number of ethical issues. Not only does it deal metaphorically (yet quite clearly) with questions of animal treatment, it also touches on more general notions of the basic necessities for survival, which become more heartbreakingly obvious with the animals’ limited vocabulary: “danger”, “run”, “sick”, “hungry”, etc. Perhaps the most woeful and telling word in the entire graphic novel is the repeating question/statement/lament/fuzzy memory, “home”. If science paves a path toward displacement and indifference, Morrison provides a remedy with this empathy-inducing tale.

The storytelling would have been superb either way, but Frank Quitely’s artwork takes We3 to a level of excellence that is located somewhere outside of Earth’s atmosphere. He manages to contrast extreme violence with images of natural beauty and tranquility, which subtly evokes the empathetic response in the reader that Morrison is looking for while heightening the sense of disgust at the cruel and needless acts being perpetrated.

In terms of page design, Quitely has here produced some extremely original and innovative work. Numerous pages are top to bottom populated with the small square boxes of security camera feeds, which paints a large and complex picture of events through disjointed glimpses of particular places and particular persons over a finite period of time. There are also a number of full-page bleeds that take things into epic realms: this could be a myth of our present's future, our distant future's past.

The most impressive pages are those in which larger images are overlaid with smaller boxes presenting fragments of what is happening in the larger context of things. These pages are invariably violent, and the smaller boxes serve to visually convey chaos, speed, and simultaneity of destruction.

Overall, Morrison’s writing and Quitely’s art combine to create an ingenious and disturbing graphic story that can be read in thirty minutes or poured over for hours as desired. Yes, it’s weird. But I ain’t complaining.

My First Encounter With Roger Zelazny

Zelazny, Roger. Doorways in the Sand. New York: Harper, 1991. Print.

Black cats, rooftop clambering forever-students, sentient, organic computers, talking wombats and kangaroos, star stones, inversion machines, telepathic Venus Flytraps, stereoisowhiskey, and desert-tramping lackeys, all wrapped up in a science fiction detective story of epic proportions. This is Roger Zelazny’s 1976 novel, Doorways in the Sand.

It’s not that I don’t want to give a good, informative, brief summary. I want to very much, but I can’t figure out where to even start, so convoluted and meandering (yet easy to follow) is the plot of this book. So instead, this random sampling of the kind of outrageous objects and characters that await the reader will have to do.

I don’t know that I have ever had as much fun reading a novel as I have had reading this one. The characters are well-developed and funny, the writing simple yet poetic in its descriptions, the ideas grand and sweeping, touching on everything from philosophy to alien anthropology and sociology. I can’t wait to get my hands on more of Zelazny’s stuff.

This is cool!

I randomly came across this site and had to share it. I'm usually pretty behind on the times, so the case might be that most people who would care for this site already know about it, but if not, check this out:

http://hirsutehistory.com/

It is a brand of t-shirts that feature the hair, glasses, pipes, etc. of famous writers, philosophers, musicians, scientists, even 80s wrestlers. My personal favorite is Isaac Asimov,

but there are umpteen other really clever ones. I want one!

Why I Love H.G. Wells

Wells, H.G. The Island of Dr. Moreau. New York: Signet Classics, 2005. Print.

H.G. Wells is often praised for being a pioneer in the field of science fiction. While I think his foresight and imagination are commendable, the fact that Wells was one of the first to write of alien invasions and time machines and so on has nothing to do with my love of his work.

I love H.G. Wells because he takes general story premises and structures them around ideas that are not only incredibly intelligent, but weird, mysterious, spooky, and cool by any modern’s standards. For example, in The War of the Worlds, the reader encounters alien invaders in the landscape of Victorian England. Now, given the time period in which Wells was writing, this might not seem as intentional and therefore impressive, but even so, the atmosphere he creates with this juxtaposition of futuristic science fiction and contemporary (for him) horse-and-buggy England is at once incongruous and prophetically mystifying. Another example comes with his following evolution to its most extreme end in The Time Machine, where the future of humanity finds two races--one dominant, lazy, and sickeningly happy and loving in their world of ease and comfort, the other a subterranean-dwelling race of monsters who are subservient to the happy race that walks in sunshine. A final example is the way in which Wells takes the idea for an invisible man (guess which novel?) and makes him an unapologetic bastard. All of these are general ideas--an alien invasion, a time machine, an invisible man--but Wells comes up with certain twists that render the stories freakish anomalies that transport the reader into territories never before experienced in book or real life.

I recently finished reading The Island of Dr. Moreau, and while it has taken me a rambling paragraph and a half to get to it, my point in this entry is to explore in some brief detail the genius idea that takes the mad scientist trope to the next level in this 1896 Wells novel.

To briefly summarize without giving anything away, I think it is sufficient to say that a man (our narrator) out on the open sea is at the mercy of an unmerciful ship captain and ends up stranded on a strange island where Dr. Moreau and his lackey are involved in experiments creating a grotesque and various race of Beast Folk. I think that sums up the premise well enough.

The brilliant twist in The Island of Dr. Moreau is the way in which the story becomes a religious model with man playing the part of god. I realize this does not initially sound like so much--almost every mad scientist in literature or film has a god complex. But Wells literally manages to create a vast, panoramic prototype of Western religion, Christianity in particular.

Let me offer some specific examples:

1) There is, first and most obviously, Moreau, who in his creation of the Beast Folk falls into the role of God. This role is deepened and further put into conversation with Christianity when after his death Prendick insists on his ascension and non-death. He tells the Beast Folk that Moreau can still see them and hear all that they say and will be back someday. Even Moreau himself insists that while Prendick is the materialist he is the religious man.

2) Prendick can be viewed as the general wayfarer caught between opposing forces, unsure of what to believe. At times he does seem to view Moreau as a god, at other times as a devil.

3) The Sayer of the Law is Wells’s version of Moses come down from the mountain, bringing the Beast Men a series of commandments that, if upheld, will keep their fledgling humanity intact (“Not to go on all Fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?” / “Not to eat Flesh nor Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”).

4) The Leopard Man is the Adam figure, who, in eating the flesh of a rabbit, brings about the Fall and triggers the reversion back to beast.

5) The House of Pain is Moreau’s version of a temple, where the redeeming flames of pain burn clean the beasts and brand them with humanity.

6) Most of the Beast Folk play the part of disciples--M’ling to Montgomery and the Dog-Man to Prendick, for example.

There are probably other illustrations, but these are the most apparent to me. There are also other things I have not quite figured out but feel certain Wells intended them to mean something--what Montgomery and the puma represent in this prototype religion, among other things.

As I said before, the mad scientist thing isn’t new (even Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein and his infamous monster appeared some eighty years before this book), but the way in which Wells takes this stereotypical plot device and creates a strange and sinister cult of Moreau separates this novel from other similar science fiction and gives me yet another reason to love H.G. Wells.

When I become a published author...

...I'm making a workspace out of a gypsy caravan.