-
1. Ground Level
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
24 Chapter 1 GROUND LEVEL The reconciliation of mainstream and independent sensibilities that has been central to Grant Morrison’s career was initially made possible by the unique topography of the British comics industry in the 1970s and 1980s. British comics had never been dominated by superheroes the way American comic books were after the 1960s, and writers had more opportunities to experiment with different genres. Morrison was also fortunate to reach artistic maturity during the adult comics boom of the late 1980s, a period when his fusion of sensibilities was not only tolerated but rewarded. The boom years offered writers a healthy mixture of mainstream and alternative outlets, and a growing number of corporate-owned comics were becoming open to adult subject matter and independent creative autonomy (see Sabin, Adult Comics chapters 6 and 7). These venues allowed Morrison to adopt a number of styles, enabling his rapid development; he told Mark Salisbury he was lucky to have “two outlets from the start. One for the avant-garde stuff [. . .] and one for really mainstream commercial work” (207). His earliest strips, written squarely in the science fiction and superhero genres and dominated by his adolescent influences, quickly yielded to a revisionist sensibility that challenged the conventions of the genres that inspired him.That revisionism itself proved transitory as Morrison moved on to other genres, shifted his focus to more explicit political critiques, and ultimately arrived at a more self-critical outlook that refuses to accept on faith the generic or ideological assumptions of any comics, even his own. Morrison’s first published work appeared in the Scottish anthology Near Myths (1978–80),one of the“ground level”comics of the late 1970s that positioned themselves “half-way between ‘underground’ and ‘above-ground’” (Sabin, Adult Comics 73). The ground levels operated within mainstream genres—usually science fiction or fantasy—yet approached them with an underground comix sensibility that encouraged experimental layouts and narrative techniques, graphic sex and violence, and complete creative Ground Level 25 control and ownership by the artists. Or, as Morrison described them to Nick Hasted, “It was this concept that you could do comics that borrowed the best elements of the underground, and married them to the readeraccessibility of mainstream comics.In actual fact,it was a recipe for disaster” (Hasted 56). Near Myths failed to reach wide distribution and was canceled after five issues, making it one of the longest-running British ground levels (Sabin, Adult Comics 73). The title nevertheless launched Morrison’s career and marked his first efforts at synthesizing the tropes of popular fiction with the auteurist production methods of the undergrounds and alternative comics; he wrote and drew his Near Myths stories, in keeping with the underground ethos that privileged comics by single creators (Hatfield 16, 18). As we might expect of most eighteen-year-old auteurs, however, these stories are highly derivative, with the Gideon Stargrave serial particularly indebted to the New Wave science fiction of Michael Moorcock and the comics of Bryan Talbot, whose own Moorcock-inspired The Adventures of Luther Arkwright ran alongside Morrison’s work in Near Myths. The art is similarly indebted to Talbot and to American comics artists Jim Steranko, Neal Adams, and Jim Starlin, aping their baroque page layouts and use of screentones. The Near Myths stories attempt to combine mainstream accessibility with underground experimentation, but in this novice work, Morrison ’s most overtly experimental gestures inevitably prove to be his most imitative ones. His next project showed more genuine innovation while remaining indebted to its influences. Captain Clyde (1979–82), Morrison’s first superhero work,ran in three Glasgow newspapers published by the Govan Press.The strip combined traditional superheroics with the first stirrings of what would later be termed revisionism, grounding its mystically powered protagonist in the real world: Glasgow-based superhero Captain Clyde is unemployed and living on the dole, just as Morrison was at the time (O’Donnell), reflecting the deep recession and soaring unemployment of the early Thatcher years (Hitchcock 320). These gestures towards quotidian realism aside, the art and plotting are still derivative of Starlin, Adams, and the more cosmic, psychedelic side of 1970s American superhero comics (fig. 1-1). Morrison has acknowledged that the strip’s ventures into realism were tentative, telling his friend Tony O’Donnell,“Looking back, I wish I’d made it even more realistic but this was before Marvelman, and while I’m proud of my few innovations...