A semi-regular column about great comics you probably don’t know about. These could be Indie comics, comics with small print runs, or foreign comics. As reader and lover of comics for over 35 years, I’ve accumulated a huge collection. And this collection runs deep with the weird and the esoteric.

I was a teenager when Grant Morrison blew up American super-hero comics with his work on ANIMAL MAN and DOOM PATROL. Both of these series were incredibly ground-breaking, taking mainstream comics to places they had never been before.

Morrison’s work was like a breath of fresh air in a foul-smelling comic shop. His comics were filled-to-bursting with brilliantly imagined characters and concepts, a direct reaction against the “grim ‘n’ gritty” comics of the 80’s.

(As an aside, Morrison’s DOOM PATROL still holds-up as one of the most exhilarating and emotional runs in comic’s history.)

Like a lot of readers at the time, I felt like Morrison was making comics specifically for me. And I responded by trying to pick up everything he’d ever written.

NEAR MYTHS was a magazine based in the U.K. that began publishing in 1978. It only ran for 5 issues, and besides being the mag where Bryan Talbot began “The Adventures of Luther Arkwright”, it’s also the mag that gave us the first published work of Grant Morrison.

Yes, there were plenty of other creators doing stories for NEAR MYTHS, but the only reason I picked these magazines up is for Morrison’s work. So that’s what we’re going to concentrate on.

NEAR MYTHS #2 is where Morrison’s first story appears. “Time is a Four-letter Word” contains a lot of the same elements we see in Morrison’s work today. It’s non-linear and utilizes the William S. Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique, but the writing is clunky as hell. Style gets in the way of story, not the last time this would happen in Morrison’s work.

But he did improve quite a bit for his second story, “The Vatican Conspiracy (part 1)”. It stars a character familiar to readers of THE INVISIBLES, King Mob’s “buried personality”, Gideon Stargrave!

In an interview from 1988, Morrison said, “Stargrave was originally based on the lead character in J. G. Ballard’s ‘The Day of Forever’; everyone thought he was ripped off from Jerry Cornelius, but it was Ballard.”

This is a really fun story, with its non-squinters and over-the-top characters. The experimental style in which the story is told actually works quite well here, signaling Morrison’s growth as a writer.

Morrison, who did the art for all of these stories, does a nice job laying out the pages. His artwork has an almost Neal Adams feel, with a bit of Paul Gulacy thrown in. It was the 70’s after all.

Here’s a closer look at a couple of surreal panels. Is that a cameo appearance by Howard the Duck?

We get the next two chapters of “The Vatican Conspiracy” in NEAR MYTHS #4, a whopping 14 pages of adolescent Morrison madness!

Despite the fact that he was still a teenager while writing these stories, there are traces of what would become Morrison’s brilliant wordplay. “Time unravels. Impossible colours explode behind Stargrave’s eyes. Fragments of burning music craze the air with webs of liquid sound. And slowly, seductively, his soul is torn.”

NEAR MYTHS #5 features “The Checkmate Man”, and it’s another leap forward in the quality of Morrison’s work. It’s much more straight-forward than his last two stories, even though he’s still playing with time.

What I loved about this tale is that it starts with an assassination, descends into pure sci-fi exposition, and ends with a domestic squabble. In fact, the last panel is so boringly domestic that it puts a fine, ironic bow on the whole story.

I wanted to highlight this exchange because it’s just hilarious. Makes you wonder if this was the sort of thing Morrison heard from his own parents.

In the next installment of The Comic Exotic; a Dave Sim Cerebus comic so rare that only 25 copies exist!

Questions, comments, insults, send ‘em here: dubcomicsjon@gmail.com

See ya’ next time!

Jon Vinson is the writer of the graphic novel Edge of the Unknown and recently launched the new comics series Nightingale and the Finch. He is the Founder & Publisher of DUB Comics.