After 30 years of mind-wiping work, an irrepressible comics auteur gets a career-spanning close-up in Patrick Meaney's documentary Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods.
The feature film presents Morrison – the soft-spoken writer of indispensable comics like The Invisibles, We3, All-Star Superman and Batman, Inc. – as a tireless experiential sponge in search of peace of mind and spirit.
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For Trippier Comics Flicks, Hollywood Needs to Turn On to Grant Morrison, Warren EllisIt's a head-trip suitable for long-time Morrison fans, who fell in love with challenging graphic novels like Flex Mentallo and The Filth, as well as new adopters who've just discovered his work on DC Comics superstars like the Superman and Batman.
The Scottish writer possesses a deep and probing brain, Talking With Gods asserts. Morrison's intellect was nurtured early in life by his father, an ex-soldier whose wartime horrors led him to a life of nuclear activism, as well as a supportive mother who repeatedly encouraged her son's artistic ambitions and cosmological inquiries. That led, in turn, to a childhood and adolescence spent in the shadow of atomic holocaust and swallowed by comics anchored in one heroic rescue after another.
It also resulted in a thirst for global adventure, often spiked by Morrison's voracious appetite for drugs, and a devoted advocacy of chaos magic that persists to this day.
Talking With Gods reveals that Morrison's bottomless hunger for his hidden selves encouraged his insertion into metafictional comics like Flex Mentallo, Animal Man and especially The Invisibles, whose envelope-pushing gnostic superheroes, Morrison famously argued, were lifted by the Wachowski Brothers for the The Matrix.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Btf9YscT0sIThe movie, released on DVD Oct. 26 by Respect Films but back-ordered until Nov. 22 due to unexpected demand, is well-stocked with such geek-friendly data.
One cool segment digs into the strained relationship between Morrison and writer Alan Moore, whose triumphant work on Swamp Thing and Watchmen paved the way for a British comics invasion that accelerated once Morrison quit touring with his psych-pop band The Mixers and wrote the critically and commercially successful Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth.
Once Arkham Asylum went supernova, Talking With Gods illustrates, Morrison traded in his self-aware shyness for globe-trotting transcendence, absorbing every drug and theory under the sun and steeping himself so deeply in subculture that he barely made it back to reality intact.
Morrison's quiet but quick narration recalls these mind-expanding moments, like everything else in Meaney's doc, with contagious humor. The movie is enhanced by entertaining testimonials from Phil Jimenez, Jill Thompson, Frank Quitely (below), Warren Ellis, Geoff Johns, Douglas Rushkoff, Cameron Stewart, Matt Fraction and more.
The result is an accessible but nerd-friendly journey through the mind of comics' crossover philosopher. Talking With Gods doesn't require prior knowledge of Morrison's brain-busting comics, but it does compel viewers to search them out and dig into their intertextual possibilities. Short on cinematic bells and whistles but long on insightful analysis, Meaney's documentary is an instant classic for comics fans.
WIRED Morrison's catchy humor; eminently quotable co-stars; brilliant comics given their pop-cult due on film.
TIRED Some odd jump-cuts; no Alan Moore; underwhelming rock soundtrack.
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