Grant Morrison
Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics
By Marc Singer
University Press of Mississippi
ISBN 978-1-61703-136-6, paperback, $25
ISBN 978-1-6170-135-9, hardback, $65
For Immediate Release
A critical study of a postmodern comics writer who flaunts superhero conventions
One of the most eclectic and distinctive writers currently working in comics, Grant Morrison (b. 1960) brings the auteurist sensibility of alternative comics and graphic novels to the popular genres—superhero, science fiction, and fantasy—that dominate the American and British comics industries. His comics range from best-sellers featuring the most universally recognized superhero franchises (such as All-Star Superman, Seven Soldiers) to more independent, creator-owned work (The Invisibles, The Filth, Animal Man, Vimanarama) that defies any generic classification.
In Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics (University Press of Mississippi), author Marc Singer examines how Morrison uses this fusion of styles to intervene in major political, aesthetic, and intellectual challenges of our time. His comics blur the boundaries between fantasy and realism, mixing autobiographical representation and cultural critique with heroic adventure. They offer self-reflexive appraisals of their own genres while they experiment with the formal elements of comics. Perhaps most ambitiously, they challenge contemporary themes of language and signification, seeking to develop new modes of representation grounded in comics' capacity for visual narrative and the fantasy genres' ability to make figurative meanings more literal.
This is the first book to focus on Morrison's entire career, offering a survey of all his works from Near Myths to present. Singer's study analyzes the ways in which Morrison's comics are married both to pop convention and to literary experimentation. As such, Grant Morrison: Combining the World of Contemporary Comics establishes him as an exemplar of postmodernism in contemporary comics.
Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics is the first scholarly study of Grant Morrison's work. Although the book is aimed primarily at an academic audience it is more than accessible by a general readership. Morrison fans will delight in the 50 illustrations that are also included in this volume.
Marc Singer, Hyattsville, Maryland, is assistant professor of English at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He is the coeditor of Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World.
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Read more about Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics at http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1426
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