There I sat, jaw hanging, blue-and-red 3D glasses [edit: 4D glasses] clinging to my face, gaping at the pages of Grant Morrison’s Superman add-on to the Final Crisis “Event”. If you are into both comics and weed, I’ll save you a review: run, do not walk, to your nearest comix dispensary, grab your favorite sativa and dial it in. I’ve run through this thing three times and I still have no idea whats goin on. But never-mind, I’m just glad that I don’t have to live inside Grant Morrison’s head.
I’m a comics fan. But since about the age of 12, I haven’t really been a *DC* fan. I was all about the gritty Marvel scene in the 80′s with brief time-outs to stir the pot with Alan Moore or Frank Miller. But recently I’ve mended my ways. You won’t find me reading the monthly Superman, Batman, Green Lantern fare, but I’ve learned that if Grant Morrison has put his touch on something, its worth a serious turn.
To begin with, the plot of Superman Beyond 3D is just flat-out fucked up. Supes is called upon by some kind of goddess from a trans-dimension to join her crew of all of the “ultimate heroes” from the various dimensions of the multiverse (including Captain Marvell, Nazi Superman, Quantum Superman and some kind of freaked-out roid-rage Superman) to travel outside the multi-verse (!) and do battle with some kind of end of all possible end apocalypses that seems to have been generated when the corruption of “story” was introduced into the meta-universe. Seriously, this is a story about how *story itself* fractured the universe and how characters in stories (our intrepid DC heroes) are rising-up to save their (fictional) universes from what might be our (real) universe. Straight, it seems incoherent and jumps around like watching someone else play Halo. But with the right buzz on you feel like you are plugged into that other world.
Then layer on the 4D glasses. A gimmick, yes, and eye-strain city if you happen to be in a room without really good light. But the art director got this one right – the art is, by and large, excellent and the 4D angle is sprinkled on only particularly “blow your mind” scenes to add that extra somethin-something. For those of you who are wondering – yes, these are 4D glasses, not “just” 3D glasses. “But don’t we already see in 4D?” you might ask? Ah, my bother, yes in real life (3 space dimensions and 1 time dimension) but not in comics. Scott McCloud made the point well in Understanding Comics that *time* does not exist in comics. Well, at least not without the active intervention of the reader who fills in the flow of time from frame to frame, over gutters, and through pages. The beauty of the comic medium is this “frozen time” where you are forced to take all of the action “at once” and in no particular order until you have absorbed it and constructed your narrative out of it.
Here is Alan Moore using the comic frame to twist time into a Moebius Strip in his Promethea.
Imagine what happens when you add well considered third dimensionality to this.
Yeah.
This is all well and good and more than enough to put Beyond 3D on this critics bookshelf. But then you recall that this is a Grant Morrison book. Morrison is a Scotsman who came out of the wave of UK comics writers who followed Alan Moore’s breakthroughs’. His first US gig was a renewal of an obscure little DC title “Animal Man”. Here is where the twists start piling in. Animal Man starts out plainly enough about a domestic super-hero who has to figure out how to live a normal life (wife, kids, job, etc.) post-super powers. But as the series went down the rabbit hole under Morrison’s direction, it became about the reality of the imaginary. The hero, Animal Man, discovers and comes to terms with the fact that he is an entirely fictional character made up in someones mind, that all of his crises (e.g., the murder of his family), victories and defeats were no more than the whims of the author. And then, in a triumph of entirely made-up will, he manages to cross the boundary of fact and fiction to have a conversation with his maker, who explains that he (Morrison) isn’t really “The Creator” but is more like a “demi-urge” who has taken stewardship of the “collective imagination” in which Animal Man lives.
With this in-place, Superman Beyond 3D rings like a bell. Layer in some of Morrison’s other work (The Invisibles, Doom Patrol) and things start to fall into place. Or, rather, to break apart quite appallingly.
Obviously, Grant Morrison has a thing about the crossover of the imaginary into the “real”. After tokin to Superman Beyond 3D, I’m starting to believe him.
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