Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine So what are you READING?

The Radioactive Redhead, can't remember the two author's names though.

Hey Scooter!

How is Book of Lies? I've always liked Meltzer much better as a novelist than an comic book writer. And I love me some conspiracy theories!

I've only recently gotten into the Star Trek novels. The first one I read was a TNG novel called The Eyes of the Beholders. It's pretty solid and A.C. Crispin really captures the characters' voices.

I picked up an Aliens related book at a second hand bookstore a while back. I lasted about 40-50 pages.

There's been very little about the whole franchise I've really enjoyed beyond the movies (well, the first couple).

I picked up an Aliens related book at a second hand bookstore a while back. I lasted about 40-50 pages.

There's been very little about the whole franchise I've really enjoyed beyond the movies (well, the first couple).

Thanks for that Set. I got the very first Aliens comic years ago, and didn't think enough of it to get the second issue. I little dabble much later on (they had changed the character names due to the events of the third movie) didn't change my mind in the slightest. But, I've not seen any AVP ones.

Supergods by Grant Morrison

This book recounts Morrison's development as a creator (and a human being), more or less chronologically. His life story was typical enough, although we can see that his activist father and the difficult conditions of the 1970s and Thatcher's Britain influenced his writing.

I didn't know that he had started out as an artist, as well as a musician.

Morrison's insights into and comments about comics of each era are very interesting. In some cases, it's his own viewpoint; in others, he offers the reader insider, behind-the-scenes information. It made me want to go back and reread the books he mentions.

His writing has reflected his personal mindset at a given time; he was heavily into drugs and drinking, which isn't a big revelation when you read some of his earlier works, like The Invisibles. Then he had a very mystical experience, and we got All-Star Superman....

More gossip would have been fun; Morrison lets out a few tidbits, but he's overall very much the gentleman and no doubt he pulls his punches when it comes to the publishers and his fellow creators. I certainly can't fault him for that.

His description of the Batman TV serials and movies was hilarious, as were some of his encounters at conventions and with fans.

Particularly interesting was his discussion of Iain Spence's Sekhmet Hypothesis (which I had never heard of), which links cycles in popular culture to sunspot cycles. According to Spence, we alternate between punk and hippie culture, to use contemporary terms. Morrison shows how this has played out in comic books, and claims that we are now embarking on a period of hippie culture: interest in the spiritual, peace, long hair, loose clothes,etc. - although he seems to apply the Sekhmet Hypothesis with a grain of salt.

The original content for this book was, according to an interview with Morrison, cut by half. I would really like to read the rest. Still, the 417 pages that did get published were fascinating and thought-provoking.

FC, you've sold me on Supergods. I had been aware of it for a while, but given my extreme ambivalence about Morrison's public image and works, it was always going to be a hard sell.

I still think he's a bit Bowie-esque, often using mystique to sell mediocrity. But like Bowie, he's offered plenty of good ideas (and plenty of bad ones, and plenty of ugly ones -- the killing of Darkstar being the worst offender IMO. Then again, it's the job of the EDITORS to tell him when he's off-base.)

Still, lifting the curtain to reveal the man behind it should make for an interesting read, to say the least.

Best of all, my library carries it.

Well, I finished Supergods, and while I think it's a TREMENDOUS book, it left me more ambivalent about Grant Morrison than ever. But maybe that's the way it should be. Things are never simple with Morrison, literally and figuratively.

The book is at its best in the middle, covering Morrison's beloved Silver Age through the Widescreen era (Authority et al) at the end of the 90s.

The early chapters, covering the Golden Age and the anti-comics panic, seem to rush by, as by the author's own admission, this is well-trod territory.

The later chapters, starting with Morrison's unhappy dance with Marvel at the beginning of the new millenium and ending with Morrison taking over Action Comics, feel somehow compromised, as if Morrison was biting his tongue particularly hard so as not to offend the people involved with the corporation that he currently works for. I just don't buy that he unquestioningly approves of what might be called The Second Dark Age.

Still, there's a lot to recommend this book, as the story of Morrison the working-class hero whose dreams all come true, as a decidedly different kind of self-help book, and as an view-from-the-inside look at pop culture and its synergy with society.

I still believe that Morrison is better at TALKING ABOUT comics than WRITING comics, so I'd certainly be in favor of follow-ups to this book. This could be the start of a whole new branch to his career.

You were very kind to Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis in Supergods.
I was trying to be kind because I like Brad Meltzer. He's a nice guy. I have a lot of interesting conversations with him so I tried to focus on what I thought was good about it and there was actually quite a lot when I read it again. The first time I read it I was kind of outraged. I thought this was just… why? What the fuck is this, really? It wasn't even normal. It was outrageous. It was preposterous because of the Elongated Man with his arms wrapped several times around the corpse of his wife. I thought something is broken here. Something else else has gone so wrong in this image.

That plotline faced a lot of criticism, in part because people saw it as misogynistic.

It's hard to tell because most men try to avoid misogyny, really they do, in this world we live in today. It's hard for me to believe that a shy bespectacled college graduate like Brad Meltzer who's a novelist and a father is a really setting out to be weirdly misogynistic. But unfortunately when you're looking at this beloved character who's obviously been ass-raped on the Justice League satellite, even saying it kind of takes you to that dot dot dot where you don't know what else to say.