Crucifixion in the work of Grant Morrison

Grant Morrison is a masterful storyteller. One of his signature techniques is the use of evocative religious symbols to lend his tales more power and gravitas. Given its centrality in Western art and culture it's no surprise that The Crucifixion is a motif he's employed. But it is striking how frequently he returns to it. Here's a quick tour through his body of work, beginning in 1989:

This is the cover of Animal Man number 5, from January 1989. The issue is entitled Coyote Gospel, and it remains one of Morrison's better-known stories. Animal Man himself is not crucified in this story; that fate symbolically befalls a thinly disguised Wile E. Coyote:

The coyote gave himself up to suffer at the hands of his cruel creator in exchange for the safety for his cartoon animal brethren. We eventually find out that this situation somewhat resembles Animal Man's own in relation to his creator, Grant Morrison. It's all very self-referential, but well worth reading.

Next comes the popular Batman: Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, also from 1989:


Batman spears the villain Killer Croc and is speared in return. "What wounds are these? I am Attis on the pine. Christ on the cedar. Odin on the world-ash." On the next page Killer Croc jumps out of a window, the spear still in his side:


Morrison's original storyboard notes: "Croc is framed in the shattering window as it explodes beneath his weight. His arms are thrown wide, in an attitude of crucifixion. The broken spear juts from his side and the shattering glass creates a jagged halo around his vast, deformed head. He becomes the image of the Serpent/Christ (and also evokes Moby Dick, with the harpoon in his side) a medieval allegory which Jung interpreted as being symbolic of "an overcoming of the unconscious and, at the same time, of the attitude of the son who unconsciously hangs on his mother.""

He added this commentary for the 15th anniversary edition: "In Qabalistic numerology, Christ = Satan = Messiah, which is why Croc appears here in crucifixion pose, taking the place of Christ on this blasphemous cross. In this scene, Batman reunites Christ and Serpent, then confronts and overcomes his own attachment to his Mother in a perverse nightmare of lizards, lace and bridal embroidery. Much of this subtextual material was lost on the casual reader but that didn't seem to stop us from shifting mega-amounts of copies. I do believe that people respond emotionally to deep mythical patterns whether or not they actually recognise or "understand" them as such, but the fact that our book launched at the time of the outrageously successful Batman film by Tim Burton probably helped more than anything else."

I tend to think Arkham Asylum lays on the pop psychology a bit too thick, but Morrison's use of "deep mythical patterns" continues throughout his career. Here's 1990's Doom Patrol:

(Doom Patrol no. 30, March 1990.) Cliff the robot-man takes a journey through his friend Jane's subconscious. Crazy Jane, aka Kay Challis, was sexually abused by her father, but managed to function by creating an alternate personality named Miranda and surpressing Kay's memories. After being raped and killing her attacker (in a church on Easter Sunday), Miranda was destroyed and 64 alternate personalities took her place, Jane being one of the most prominent. As the panel above explains, personalities like Stigmata exist to bear and absorb Kay/Jane's suffering. Cliff manages to help her somewhat, and later in the series, Jane seeks to heal and reunite her shattered psyche:

(From Doom Patrol no. 55 May 92.) The crucifix symbolizes both the rape which sparked the fragmentation, as well as the immense pain which a reunited Jane would have to take back from personalities like Stigmata.

Next up we have a series created from scratch by Morrison himself, The Invisibles (language warning for these next two):

This is The Invisibles, vol. 1, no. 21, from 1996. Young Dane encounters Barbelith, which is... complicated. Basically, Barbelith is trying to help humanity liberate itself from the crushing burden of suffering and evil it is trapped under. (Personally I find this page to be a stunning and unforgettable existential statement about what Terry Eagleton calls the "recalcitrance" of the human condition. As Eagleton writes: "The crucifixion proclaims that the truth of human history is a tortured political criminal.") Later in the same issue Dane experiences the pain of humanity himself:
Barbelith tells Dane that he must transform himself and the rest will follow - as above, so below. And, in fact, Dane will go on to be the saviour of humanity and the new Buddha. Morrison here mixes Christian, Gnostic, and Buddhist imagery (as he will later with Mister Miracle - see below.)

I don't have the image for it, but another crucifixion appears later on in The Invisibles (vol. 2, no. 20). A bug-eyed alien is nailed to a wall by the bad guys and forced to witness depravity, pain and death. The comic makes it clear that Morrison is expressing a Gnostic myth about the divine being trapped in its own creation. This is a major theme of The Invisibles.

Heady stuff! Back in the regular DC superhero universe...

Superman is crucified by Darkseid! From JLA Presents: Aztek, The Ultimate Man no. 10, May 1997, co-written with Mark Millar. Fortunately, this was just a simulation, meant to test Aztek's superhero skills and fitness for membership in the Justice League of America.

All of the above comics were for DC, but Morrison also wrote Marvel's flagship comic, The X-Men. Here the symbolism is a little more oblique, but have a look at these two images:

(From New X-Men no. 121, February 2002.) In a mostly-silent issue, Jean Grey enters Charles Xavier's psyche. Morrison's storyboard notes: "The second tier is filled with Xavier faces, screaming, laughing, howling, crying guardians - extreme emotional defence systems to ward off telepathic invaders. Pointing, accusing, hiding their eyes, pontificating. A smaller figure of Jean spins away from us, down into the center. Splashing into the one face which is calm, Christ-like in its quiet suffering expression." Further in, Jean sees this:


Morrison wrote: "Charles Xavier in grotesque pose, holding his vast swollen dripping brain, like an Atlas. Xavier struggling with the gross weight of his own imprisoned thoughts, sunk to the thighs in bubbling slime and tar like some monstrous Blakean figure. As a nod to Dali, there's an exploded wheelchair hovering in bits around Xavier. The components hang in strange splendor - Xavier's own version of the hypercubist cross." So, a bit more abstract, but not entirely unrelated.

Back in the DC Universe, a few years later, we're back to basics:

This is from the cover of Seven Soldiers of Victory: Mister Miracle no. 1, 2005. Miracle is originally one of the New Gods from Jack Kirby's Fourth World pantheon. In Morrison's introduction to volume one of the Fourth World Omnibus, he refers to the original Mister Miracle comic as "the New Testament strand" of Kirby's mythology. Here Miracle is the evocatively named Shilo Norman, who descends into a black hole attached to the cross-shaped restraint pictured above. (In the original image the cross is upside down.) He eventually escapes but not before finding his way out of Darkseid's false reality of degradation and suffering, a storyline which incorporates Christian, Gnostic, Buddhist and Norse elements. Part of it involves being betrayed by everyone, beaten, burnt, castrated, and left humiliated, hopeless and crippled. (See also the Suffering Servant, etc.) Note the crucifix pose from this scene in a later issue:(Seven Soldiers of Victory: Mister Miracle no. 3, 2006.) After escaping Darkseid's hell, Mr. Miracle returns to reality and, like Christ giving himself up in ransom for Adam, exchanges himself for Darkseid's prisoner Aurakles, the first super-hero. Darkseid tells him his victory was meaningless, takes him into a basement and shoots him in the head. The very last page of the entire Seven Soldiers of Victory series, however, shows a deified Miracle reaching out of the ground. In Morrison's Final Crisis, Miracle will go on to tell a friend: "Then three days later, I crawled out of my own grave. The whole world thought it was Mister Miracle's biggest ever stunt. But it was real. What I did was impossible."

Speaking of Final Crisis, Morrison's ongoing DC project:

This is from the cover of Final Crisis no. 2, August 2008. Ian described it to me as "Batman crucified on a piece of New Gods Kirbytech" and that's pretty much what it is. Early on in the heavily theological series Batman is captured by the evil minions of Darkseid. This page provides more details:

Is that syringe-studded helmet standing in for a crown of thorns? Anyways, Batman is not the only one to be crucified in that issue. Green Lantern John Stewart is nailed to a wooden crate by a mysterious assailant:

In Final Crisis the Justice League is faced with the doom foreshadowed in Aztek: defeat and torment at the hands of Darkseid. I'd heartily recommend following it, though it might be a bit confusing if you don't know the DC universe.

Whew. I'm sure there some examples I've missed, so this tour may not be exhaustive, but it has been kind of exhausting! Anyways, hopefully this helps shed some light on the recurring themes, and brain, of Grant Morrison.

[PS: for an image from 2000's Marvel Boy, which I discovered a few months after completing this post, click here.]

The Beast's God

A beautiful, elegaic moment from Mike Carey and Scot Eaton in X-Men: Divided We Stand #2. Hank McCoy, aka Beast, is standing in the ruins of Xavier's school, casting the ashes of his top secret files to the winds. Xavier's not dead, exactly, but after nearly dying has been remade into someone new who doesn't remember much about the past. Divided We Stand features ten short tales about the scattered X-Men, by a variety of writers and artists, and they're surprisingly good.

Newton and Einstein tended to mean very different things when they used the word "God," but it still works. We know Beast is a scientist, and he's expressing a scientist's spirituality.

Why Grant Morrison is wrong about religion (and right about ontology)

How did I miss this one? At Newsarama, Grant Morrison talks about religion, spirituality, and God. It's a bit annoying, frankly, mostly because he starts out with this:

I think religion per se, is a ghastly blight on the progress of the human species towards the stars. At the same time, it, or something like it, has been an undeniable source of comfort, meaning and hope for the majority of poor bastards who have ever lived on Earth, so I’m not trying to write it off completely.

But it soon becomes clear that when Morrison says "religion" he means "church." Unsurprisingly, he doesn't like hierarchy, but he most certainly does believe in transcendence.

As I’ve said before, the solid world is just the part of heaven we’re privileged to touch and play with. You don’t need a priest or a holy man to talk to “god” on your behalf just close your eyes and say hello: "god” is no more, no less, than the sum total of all matter, all energy, all consciousness, as experienced or conceptualized from a timeless perspective where everything ever seems to present all at once. “God” is in everything, all the time and can be found there by looking carefully. The entire universe, including the scary, evil bits, is a thought “God” is thinking, right now.

Which is, in my mind,is pretty spot-on. It's an old idea called panentheism (not to be confused with pantheism), and it's been appearing in writing—religious writing—for centuries. What are process theology, Kabbalah, and Sufism if not religious? Morrison, it seems would call them "spirituality"—and he argues that "Religion is to spirituality what porn is to sex."

I've always found the distinction between "religion" and "spirituality" unsatisfying. It's like people who argue that they hate science fiction, but that they love Orwell (for instance), or Margaret Atwood. 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale aren't SF, and why? because people who aren't SF fans like them. Their picture of SF is a caricature, just as the picture of "religion" as a cruel hierarchy is a caricature (and a mostly outmoded one at that. The most politically conservative churches have no hierarchy.) 

To Grant Morrison, to all those who draw a line between religion and spirituality, I say: it's okay. "Religion" is bigger than you think. There's room in here for lots of ideas. Just as the universe, in a panentheistic system, is part of God, spirituality is part of religion.

He talks about All-Star Superman some, too, and whether or not Superman is a Christ figure. Read that segment of Newsarama's 10-part interview here.

This post previously appeared in an ever-so-slightly different form at SF Gospel.

Please forgive me, Kurt Busiek

I went to Manitoba Comic Con this weekend, and I had a good time.

The highlight, for me, was meeting the person who is fast becoming my favourite comic book writer--Kurt Busiek. I tried to think of intelligent things to ask him, but I fear most of my questions were more along the lines of: "Did you know that you're Kurt Busiek?" or "What's it like to be so awesome?"

I see Busiek in many ways as an anti-Stan Lee; where Lee is responsible for humanizing and psychologizing super heroes, Busiek seems to be always working with Ironic heroes, and writing about them mythologically and even theologically. When asked, he said that what he wanted to do with Superman was to "do Superman right". He didn't want to do a twist on Superman--Superman the journalist or Superman the alien. He felt that those twists only work if you have a strong center to draw your tangents from. If the center isn't strong enough--if people aren't familiar with the iconic Superman, then none of the twists work either.

And I couldn't agree more. I love Kurt Busiek's writing, and my secret hope going to Manitoba Comic Con was to persuade him to become my best friend.

And then I told him that he wrote my favourite Superman comic--Superman Redemption. Except for three little details. Kurt Busiek didn't write "Redemption", I haven't read it, and I believe Gabriel McKee's review here when he says that it wasn't good.

What I have read, and Kurt Busiek did write, and I did actually like is Superman "Angel", which Gabriel McKee reviewed here, and which review I completely agree with.

Now I'm sure that Busiek isn't sitting around all tortured that some random fan in Winnipeg thinks he wrote an issue that he didn't. It's even possible that he liked Fabian Nicieza's "Redemption" comic, and that he's flattered that someone thought he wrote it. But even so. I feel the need to apologize.

So, Kurt Busiek, if you happen to be googling yourself and you happen upon this blog, I'm sorry. I actually liked the comic you wrote, not the one you didn't. Sorry. Please forgive me.

And be my best friend?

Camassia on The Dark Knight

Check out these two posts:

The Dark Knight

The dream of completion

In which Camassia muses insightfully about idealism, superheroic transfiguration, and the sex appeal (or not) of the Joker.

Superman, Christ and Morrison

Superman’s job is to fight for and inspire those who cannot fight for themselves. His job is to make this world a better place and to help all men realize their potential as supermen. Further to this, it’s important to keep in mind the Superman/Christ parallels WITHOUT being obvious and heavy-handed about them. Superman has to think differently from us, and when we see into his head, we should be shocked by the clarity and simplicity of his brilliance and compassion. This is a god sent to Earth not to suffer and die but to live and inspire and change the face of the galaxy by his deeds and reputation.

More on what Timothy Callahan, writer of "Grant Morrison: The Early Years", calls "the essence of Morrison's Superman" and how the recently completed All-Star Superman fits in with Morrison's attempts to reboot Superman in 2000 at Comic Book Resources.

Review: Mecha Manga Bible Heroes #1: David vs. Goliath

I don't get it.

Mecha Manga Bible Heroes #1: "David vs. Goliath," written by Tom Hall and Joey Endres. Illustrated by Thom Pratt and Daniel Bradford. Backup stories by Dean Rankine. JMG Comics (Flanders, New Jersey): Summer 2008. $2.25.

Some time ago, I posted the press release for this. Because I refuse to be a mere advertiser for anything simultaneously Christian and sf-related, I followed that up in private with some (negative) predictions about the series that somehow ended up getting posted at The Sci Fi Catholic. Now the first issue is out and its creators, in thanks for the earlier postings, have generously sent me a copy for review.

First of all, it's only fair to point out that the target audience for this is clearly very young, as indicated by the general tone. The series retells stories from the Old Testament with almost no alteration besides a dumbing-down of the dialogue and the addition of a few sf flourishes, especially walking robots and powered armor suits, apparently for the purpose of convincing young males to read the Bible.

Ten bucks say Goliath gets p0wned.

After reading this first issue, I'm still asking the same question I was asking when I first heard of this project: "Why?" This issue, "David vs. Goliath," follows 1 Samuel 17.1-58 faithfully except for the additions of the aforementioned sf flourishes, which as a result look like intrusions. Truth be told, I don't get it; it would make better sense to me to create a comic that not only tells the Bible stories faithfully but also attempts to faithfully depict the world in which those stories took place, or else to create sf stories that use the Bible as starting points but take greater liberties with the text.

Because the sf elements are decoration and and not an inherent part of the story, I find them jarring and confusing. For example, when young David relates how he has saved sheep from bears and lions, the illustrations depict him tending robot sheep and fighting robot bears and lions. While reading this, I find myself asking, "What is the purpose of a robotic sheep? Where do robotic lions come from?" In a fully developed sf world, I would expect these questions to be answered sooner or later, but in Mecha Manga Bible Heroes, I'm almost certain they never will be, which again leads me to ask what the point is of putting them in at all.

The only answer I can come up with is gimmick. It's a gimmick designed to coax youngsters to read their Bibles. While I'm certainly in favor of encouraging children and youths to read the Bible, I suspect most of them could detect the gimmick of this comic and would take it as an insult. I also suspect it would give them the wrong idea, suggesting as it unintentionally does that the Bible is too dull or unpalatable to read without a few artistic touch-ups.

The artwork, though not great, is good. The writing is competent enough, but the flow of the comic seems to be off; a few inserted jokes are poorly timed, and I found myself having to stare at some pages for quite a while in order to figure out what's going on. On the whole, the quality is good, but this first issue contains nothing memorable. The two backup features by Dean Rankine, "Bee-Attitudes" and "Green with Envy," are nuisances.

Although this first issue of Mecha Manga Bible Heroes is worth a few minutes' entertainment, it contains nothing compelling and nothing to make me want to continue reading the series. I'd rather go read my Bible instead.