Supergods by Grant Morrison

Supergods by Grant Morrison

Author:Grant Morrison [Morrison, Grant]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-679-60346-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-18T16:00:00+00:00


Gaining possession of a mysterious painting, the Dadaists sucked Paris into its recursive structure. Each of the levels inside the Painting That Ate Paris was rendered in prose and illustrations evocative of different art movements, and even the storytelling structure was a recursive sequence of nested flashbacks. Encouraged by Doom Patrol’s cult following and a healthy readership, in 1990 we introduced Danny the Street: a sentient transvestite street, inspired by the popular British drag artiste Danny LaRue, that roamed around the world inserting itself quietly and unobtrusively into the street plans of different cities. This was the product of a conversation I’d had with Brendan McCarthy in Dublin.

I began to receive letters from MPD and abuse survivors or from gay kids thanking me for introducing them to the queer slang vocabulary of a hitherto unheralded aspect of their culture but familiar to anyone in Britain who’d grown up listening to the camp characters Julian and Sandy on the BBC radio comedy Round the Horne. I felt I was finally connecting with my own people, an imagined secret constituency of glamorous oddballs, and I pressed on deeper into the bush.

As a fan of the Beatles, the Doors, Jim Starlin, and Doctor Who, I also loved sixties movies, trippy comics, and more or less anything that could loosely be described with the word psychedelic, and so in 1988, after a lifetime’s puritanical denial in the face of this fascination, I took the plunge and sampled a fistful of psilocybin mushrooms. Listening to a preview tape of the Bachelor Pad’s first album while reading Doom Patrol brought about an epiphany right on cue.

In the eerie lantern-lit mushroom high—where every object in view had the lambent, numinous singularity of the murder weapons on Cluedo cards—I became aware of something new and interesting about the comic in my hands, and it brought the breakthrough I’d been seeking. Somewhere around page 17 of a particularly engrossed reading of Doom Patrol, a reference to an earlier plot point made me turn back to page 8. The shock was profound: It was as if I had time traveled backward. The characters had no idea I was there, but I had come from their future to observe their past, which I had already experienced in my own past. I flipped forward again, jumping to page 17, where the timeline of the characters was stalled awaiting my return to the exact moment I’d left and where page 18 was still about to happen.

Although each isolated panel seemed posed and angular, the characters were filled with life and charged with meaning. They interacted with us: made us laugh, cry, feel afraid, anxious, or excited. They were living characters, and their reality was pulp and ink. What real world was this paper slice of the living DC universe? A 2-D universe, hidden in plain sight, growing and breathing in a strange symbiotic relationship with its audience in the “nonfictional” world above it.

From what little reading I’d done, I concluded that I was possibly witnessing the activation of some kind of hologram.



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