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From the Annals of Fauxprundity: THIS STORY IS ABOUT GRANT MORRISON WRITING THIS STORY! Two or three years back, tomemos and I were discussing Grant Morrison's The Invisibles and he said something like, "Morrison is the ultimate 'either/or' author writing today: you either love and appreciate him or hate and are incapable of understanding why other people appreciate him." Until this week, I never understood quite what he meant. With most polarizing literary figures—Pynchon, Barthelme, Acker, Wallace, and so forth—even when a person chokes on the air of consuete affectation, he still understands why other readers happily inhale it. Pound might not be your bag, for example, but you understand why someone else would stick his head in it. It also works the other way around: I love Ulysses, but I can understand why an intelligent person would just as soon chute the book as read it. Except with Grant Morrison. The chapter Wolk devotes to him in Reading Comics scans like a fanboy's paean to a body of work he barely understands: It's smart and complicated, and sometimes rushed and baffling, but mostly it's awesome, and where The Invisibles occasionally kicks back to indulge in its metaphysical side, Seven Soldiers starts hammering the FUN!!! button on its first page and never really stops. Still, it's loaded to the gills with subtext. It doubles as a Kabbalistic parable that also discusses the relationship between two-dimensional and three-dimensional existence and features symbolic correspondences with the chakras and the elements and planets—nearly every character, object, and incident in it has some kind of distinct allegorical value. The symbolism, as clear as it is, is almost never made explicit, but if you're looking for it, it's there on every page. (278) What can a critic do with a paragraph in which someone praises Morrison for writing an obliquely-allegorical new-age amphibian with a fun-button? Nothing. So this past week I sat down and read reams and reams of Morrison (about 70 percent of the material on this bibliography) and came to the conclusion that tomemos knows of what he speaks—because now I both hate Grant Morrison and am incapable of seeing why anyone appreciates him. Why? Because in the end every Grant Morrison story is about Grant Morrison writing stories. Consider the final issue of his run on Animal Man (1990): Morrison inserts himself into the story so his character, Animal Man, can learn he's a character in the comic Animal Man. This scene works because for two years the book had relentlessly fiddled with its meta-fictional conceit. (As with, for example, the Passion of Wiley E. Coyete.) Moreover, the consequences of this meta-fictional interaction work within the confines the of the narrative: Buddy Baker had been distraught over the murder of his wife and children, and as a result of his conversation with Morrison, they are resurrected (none the wiser for their grisly murders) and returned to him by the end of the issue. The narrative ruptures draw attention to the conventional features of comics as a genre. They differ in degree from the sort of formal...