Seaguy The Slaves Of Mickey Eye #1 (OF 3)

Hypodermic needles full of tuna fish! The wacky Vertigo Grant Morrison is back! And it’s awesome!

I love his superhero stuff, and to say that there’s a Vertigo Morrison and a DCU Morrison would be oversimplifying it. But it’s stuff like that’s gonna get him a line in the ‘Surrealism’ chapter in the ‘Media History’ textbooks of the 22^nd century.

Ok, I’m getting a little enthusiastic but it’s just so awesome to be reading this stuff again!

Wacky stuff often escapes critical scrutiny. It just gets written off into the ‘wacky’ category without the good wacky stuff separated from the bad. Sometimes it’s just creators throwing up a bunch of weird, random ideas that have no emotional relevance for the reader. Seaguy creates a whole else-world with its own enthralling and unsettling alternate logic. When ‘wacky’ is bad it distances the reader. When it’s good it disorients the reader.

To accomplish this it’s gotta strike a perfect balance between the familiar and the alien. You need a point of reference for the craziness. If you’re gonna get immersed in the fluid world, you have to have someone solid to hang onto or you’ll just get lost and withdraw. Seaguy is that solid someone you can follow. He’s Morrison’s Kyle McLaughlin. The good-hearted guy that discovers the world is stranger and darker and, ultimately, so is he.

The other big touchstone is superhero comics. Seaguy’s logic is silver age melodrama exaggerated up a bunch. Unrequited love and impossible odds! Bold-font super-villain names and lots of exclamation points! All pushed to a surreal extreme and then smashed up against the mundane. Cameron Stewart expresses this perfectly. He does a great thick-line Kirby face but replaces extreme screaming with an impressive, subtle emotional range.

Lots more to say about this, but I’ve gotta go to bed. This comic was so much fun. The brainbow made me laugh for a really long time.