![]() The Invisibles and JLA explored humanity rising up and uniting to a glorious new millennium, while New X-Men and The Filth dealt with moving on, growing and rebuilding after the devastation of that dream. Animal Man and Doom Patrol both dealt with broken people and concepts rebuilding themselves, and the power of support systems and family. While the surface-level reference files and commercial success levels of these Grant Morrisons have differed considerably, what hasn’t is their thematic content. ![]() What’s fascinating about these two tracks of work is less how they differ than how they reflect. There’s the superhero comics, metafiction-obsessed Grant Morrison we met in Animal Man, with a love of remixing and polishing previous superhero comics ephemera, and the occultist, big-R Romantic Grant Morrison, dealing with (to the layman) obscure occultism, sexual exploration, and existential dread we got introduced to in Doom Patrol. ![]() They certainly don’t encompass his entire oeuvre by any means, but they’re a fairly consistent dual lineage of theme, idea, and style. They’re both unmistakably very Grant Morrison in approach-digesting, internalizing, and resynthesizing a mix of obscure and popular culture in new and unexpected ways-but apply that algorithm to different libraries of material. I’ve theorized, for a while, that Grant Morrison really has two primary “tracks” of work, which developed almost simultaneously at the beginning of his tenure at DC, just as he was breaking into American comics. ![]()
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