February 6, 2010 2

Strange thought of the day

By Scott Cederlund in comics
So I've been reading a lot of Morrison lately, primarily his non-mainstream work in Joe The Barbarian, The Filth and now Flex Mentallo. In each story, Morrison's childhood fantasies and heroes try to break through into the "real" world. Another writer I've been reading a lot of is Kurt Busiek, mainly his Astro City.

Driving around doing a few errands this morning, it hit me that the world that Busiek has created in Astro City is the world that Morrison is trying to achieve. The synthesis of a comic world and the "real" world is what Astro City is all about and it's what Morrison has been trying to create in his stories. Morrison's stories tend to be about the "birth" of such a world where Busiek's stories don't even ask about the origin of it and just accepts that capes and tights are flying around in the same world as you and me.

Does that mean that Grant Morrison wants to be Kurt Busiek?

Posted via email from Wednesdays Haul’s posterous

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2 Responses to “Strange thought of the day”

  1. collectededitions says:
    February 7, 2010 at 12:01 pm

    Interesting thought. There’s a through-fare in the DC Universe of Kurt Busiek’s work, from JLA/Avengers to JLA to Superman to Trinity, that gets squashed at every turn by Morrison’s stories (Trinity, for instance, deals with the Crime Syndicate universe just like Final Crisis, but Final Crisis takes precendence). Obviously Morrison has the cache at DC (if Busiek’s stories aren’t sitting secondary to Morrison’s, they’re sitting secondary to Johns), but it’s curious to think what the DCU would be like with Busiek on top.

  2. catullus says:
    February 7, 2010 at 2:57 pm

    No, he’d want to be Alan Moore. In Moore’s first “Top Ten” series, there’s a two page spread involving vermin, variants on Marvel characters, with giant versions of the Watcher and Galactus. And this is a toss-aside, two page joke from Moore. Kurt Busiek, especially in “Astro City” is a world-builder. Grant Morrison, to the degree that his role in “52″ is identifiable associated with the idea of “52 worlds,” might want a world to build and to play in, but it’s got to be for a very specific reason (i.e., “Seaguy”).

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