I'm not saying Morrison's an terrible writer. He's once of my favorites. I even donated his entire run on Animal Man to my high school library, that's how important a series I think it is. But with a lot of his mainstream work, it just feels kind of lifeless to me. Like the characters and events are only there to make a point about comic books and fiction in general, and the fact that they're used that way is part of the point. Cool and entertaining things happen in pretty much all of his stories, but when characters and events are used in that manner I begin to lose interest, no matter how cool everything is. It just feels very fake. And I know that it's fake, I know that these are fictional characters and events and I don't try to treat them as anything other than that. But when the story fails to treat the characters as anything other than an artifical construct, then the stories fail to have any emotional resonance with me. I just don't see what there is for me to take away from the story. And this is a relatively recent thing with Morrison, too. His run on JLA, as mainstream a title as they come, was very well done. It just seems to me that I would respond to his metafictional treatment of mainstream comics if he flat out made an essay in a comic book format. If he did that, I'd feel less like I'd been cheated out of a story, or that I have to deal with a cast of characters and a series of events that are essay examples that jutated and grew to consume the entire essay. But still, all in all, I love Grant. We3 is probably the most recent thing of his like, but I also dig Doom Patrol, JLA, Aztek, and what I've read of The Invisibles. I'm just not a huge fan of this one thing he does.
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