Summary
- One of the biggest influences on Grant Morrison's superhero comics is the Silver Age issues of The Flash, which inspired them to reject the dark and gritty trend.
- Morrison's work in The Multiversity showcases their approach to superheroes, embracing whimsy and imagination instead of realism.
- The Multiversity: Ultra Comics is a culmination of Morrison's work, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, and speaking directly to the reader.
Grant Morrison is known for their ground-breaking superhero work, with the famed writer a part of the “British Invasion” that brought an added depth and realism to comics. Yet Morrison cites Silver Age issues of The Flash as their biggest influence, pointing out how the old comics’ particular brand of innocent whimsy propelled them to reject the “grim’n’gritty” trend of the day.
Perhaps Morrison’s greatest superhero work is The Multiversity, the 2014-2015 event series that saw the writer chronicling a different Earth in DC’s multiverse with each issue. The eighth installment is the most experimental of them all, taking place on Earth-33, or “Earth-Prime” — a world without super-humans, heavily implied to be our Earth. However, a new hero called “Ultra Comics” is introduced into this world: a living comic book that manifests itself as an ultra-modern superhero to help the reader combat the Gentry, a coterie of cosmic horrors threatening the existence of the entire multiverse.
Ultra Comics Pays Homage to the Whimsical Silver Age Flash
Morrison has been annotating The Multiversity via their newsletter Xanaduum, and they have now tackled The Multiversity: Ultra Comics #1 by Morrison, Doug Mahnke, Christian Alamy, Mark Irwin, Keith Champagne, Jaime Mendoza, Gabe Eltaeb, David Baron, and Steve Wands. In their annotations, Morrison cites the cover to The Flash #163, a Silver Age issue, in which the hero urgently tells the reader his life depends upon them reading the comic in question. Morrison goes on to state how these old comics were an influence on not just Ultra Comics, but also on their entire approach to superheroes:
“Earth-Prime first appeared in quirky ‘60s stories where we’d read about the Flash travelling to Earth-Prime to meet editor Julie Schwartz and writer Gardner Fox in drawings of the actual DC offices…Those stories, which destabilized the boundaries between what was real and what might be (maybe Julie Schwartz actually did have a Cosmic Treill in his office, gifted to him by the Flash) gave me the foundation for my entire approach to superhero comics.”
For Morrison, this approach allowed them “to explore a different path from many of my contemporaries who were intent on bringing ‘realism’ to superhero stories.” Morrison points out how they learned to embrace the whimsy and imagination of the superhero concept “instead of subjecting the charming customs and dress codes of the super-people to the grim imperatives and limitations of our own world.” In that way, Morrison treated the paper comics readers held in their hands as “real” in their own right. These concepts come to a head in The Multiversity: Ultra Comics, which Morrison cites as one of their favorites in the whole series.
Morrison's Ultra Comics Sums Up the Writer's Ethos
The mind-bending issue reads like the culmination of a life’s work: it starts with Morrison inserting themselves into their ground-breaking Animal Man series and ends with the comic they're holding addresssing the reader directly, much like in The Flash, as if the comic itself were a living being speaking through the veil of pen and ink. Whether Grant Morrison’s "Ultra Comics" superhero truly exists somewhere in the multiverse is up to each reader to decide for themselves, but the hero lives on in their hearts and minds every time they read this comic.
Check out The Multiversity: Ultra Comics #1, available now from DC Comics!
Source: Xanaduum
