Sorry it's been a brutal year, Grant. I know how much those cats are a part of your life. We left ours with friends in the US when we moved because of logistics, but he's getting shipped back to us early next year. I have no idea what the local moggies will make of our 'murican rescue! He's going to miss the wide open spaces afforded to him in CA, trading it for a Victorian terrace and busy roads. Just hoping that future doesn't prove brutal for us - and him - too! Much love. x
I didn't think there was a beef with Ostrander. If anything, responding to his bit of fun with The Writer here in the comics event of 2025 struck me as surprisingly reverent! You're acknowledging a 30 year old lark from a fairly dense part of comics lore in the middle of a pop track!
That's something I've missed about your comics, I suppose. That feeling that every little thing counts in some way because you're just reporting it.
I remember back when Waid's Birthright hit that the main Super-books were scrambling for how to incorporate it as the new origin and, being "solicited" (mainly for backups in Austen's Action that were solicited then cancelled), I was getting extremely contradictory advice, with Loeb telling me I had to pitch for Superman himself and maybe Tom Palmer telling me to focus on lesser knowns.
DiDio actually commented on that batch of pitches, thanking me for the hit list. Made me a bit anxious as I had a focus on buddy stories with one being Jay Garrick and Alan Scott stranded on a cruise with Blue Beetle and Booster Gold as Amazo scrambles their powers and gadgets. I did NOT want to contribute to the deaths of Alan or Jay -- and I would later learn my role in Earth-2 Superman's demise. That's really my hunting limit for the season.
Anyway, they were trying to incorporate Birthright midstream in a soft reboot launched by Return to Krypton that was meant to marry the Silver Age Krypton with Byrne era folksiness. I gather Jennette Khan had signed off on that and it was axed as soon as she was out.
And I had two ways to do that in a single issue. One was an epic mini-crisis that would have united Bibbo Bibbowski, the Alpha Centurion, Halk Kar, Mon-El, the Hyperfamily of Trom, in a story where dastardly forces from the Council of Brainiacs rewrite history to keep Lois from getting pregnant.
But the other and my preferred of the two was for Superman himself to venture across Hypertime and arrive at our world to give an interview where he explains both why he doesn't show up here to help and intervene and proceeds to go through a stack of old comics up through the current ones to explain that we'd been getting details of his life wrong with unnecessary retcons. His continuity had never been reset! He never forgot the first Crisis! Everyone kept misinterpreting the time period he lives in as whatever their time period was when they were tuning into his universe.
He would then draw reference of the Birthright Jor-El and Lara and sum up how his history was less complicated than we keep making it!
It was on the whole a breezy affair with a number of classic beats such as taking the reporter flying.
With the last page twist that the man we'd just been seeing was Ultraman. "The idiots bought it all!" He'd announce. "Obviously the best lies have considerable truth to them. But everything has been set in motion. No one even noticed what I was doing while I was there."
And with that, the history gets updated going forward with the double reveal that all comics up until then had unreliable narration of real events... and the guy who just set the record straight is ALSO a liar.
Damn, I was 10 years old around that period and was (am) a die hard Superman guy, so every week I went (still do) to the grocery store and got $10 for comics and bought all the superman books and justice league over the month. (leftover money and off weeks were Star Wars, Wolverine or Sonic the Hedgehog at that age).
That would have blown my child mind had it come to pass. As it was, I didn't think much of continuity not adding up at the time, which I think was because I'd read a comic, Superfriends and Lois and Clark were on reruns, I'd seen the movies, I was catching the JLA cartoon and Smallville first run, and none of it added up at all together, but Superman was there so I didn't give a damn.
I actually think had that been published that probably would have been the first time I both thought about, and had some sort of explanation for retcons and changes in continuity.
I do remember that Return to Krypton (or II?) did confuse me at the time because it turned out they were imposters but only sort of, and the dog came back with Clark and the adventure *happened* but I didnt quite understand what that krypton and it's inhabitants even actually were. It's probably simple, I should dig it out, I havent read it in 20 years.
The rule of thumb I followed as a boy, that I still basically do is that 'it all happened, somehow, unless it explicitly says it didn't, but if I liked it, it still did anyway"
As I understand it and I was never actually at a summit...
They wanted to just reveal the Silver Age Krypton had always been real. They didn't actually have a plan for how that fit everything and Loeb had me compile a list with explanations. The Starman issue with Jor-El, a Flash issue I believe Grant wrote, obviously everything with the Cleric and Eradicator.
I worked through those and sent it off to Jeph. The Cleric would return as a villain who had corrupted The Eradicator. Jor-El would pick a different outfit from his closet on the day he met Jack Knight. I forget the Flash issue explanation.
DC lost Jennette Khan, who had approved everything, and DiDio came in with Birthright and Waid, after they'd started to switch Kryptons but before they could explain it.
So many plans were invalidated, Loeb abruptly quit Superman, despite Return to Krypton part 1 being the best seller since Reign of the Supermen. He had years of plans.
As I understand it, Schultz was going to handle the science of the Krypton revamp and Joe Kelly was going to do something with that dangling plot thread where Superman saved Krypton to set up his Zod story, the red armored Pokolistan dictator.
As I recall it, that Zod would be a Kal-El raised on a Krypton that never blew up (because Superman saved it at the end of RTK1). Raised by Faora Hu-Ul as a Zod. And there was an obvious paradox there because they couldn't both exist but Krypton couldn't be saved if Clark didn't exist to save it, so they'd coexist, threatening reality with a Schrodinger's Cat Krypton that both blew up and didn't blow up. Eventually this would threaten reality and someone would have to go back to blow up Krypton to save the universe and untangle the paradox. I think Luthor was going to do it? Basically just destroy the devices Superman left in the past that kept Krypton from blowing up.
The Birthright reboot meant this couldn't happen. Kelly invented a different origin for that Zod. Loeb was talked into doing Superman/Batman still and was the original planned writer for a completely different All-Star Batman with Art Adams. The first issue exists somewhere in a drawer. An army of Man-Bats, before Grant did it! There were various other plans including a new Composite Supergirl. When Loeb's son passed and pressures grew, he left for Marvel.
Geoff Johns wrote Return to Krypton 2 to tidy things up, using Brainiac 13 as the villain who created a "fake" Krypton. Steve Seagle wrote a single trippy issue of Superman that replaced Byrne Krypton with Waid's Birthright model.
Johns did amazing emergency surgery on the continuity but my feeling is that Superman never recovered until Rebirth, Grant's stories aside, because there were so many conflicting visions on his biography and attitude. Johns and Busiek's era was fairly strong. But that Superman was a different guy than JMS' Grounded run, which abruptly changed when the brilliant Chris Roberson took over. Good comics but not cohesive together!
I highly recommend anyone read Roberson and Dennis Culver's indie comic Edison Rex, about a Lex Luthor type who wins and then questions if he's been played. There's a Grant inspired character there as the book's Mxyzptlk, who's essentially Muppet Grant Morrison. Culver did a cover for my comic and co-wrote Justice League Incarnate, a bridge between Multiversity and Dark Crisis. It differed a lot from what I'd do and they interpreted Multiversity lore differently than I would but I applaud it for following up on Grant, something many writers seem to avoid.
I read so much of Grant's work as an invitation: Play with me! And then when people opt not to (their prerogative), I feel like Grant is left hanging. Kieron Gillen and Pete Tomasi and Tom Peyer are great about playing with the loose threads Grant leaves but I have had this urge my whole life to do more with his ideas. I've read Tipler and Crowley and Quantum Mechanics papers and Philip K. Dick and watched David Lynch. Hell, I had one of those visions of silvery static beings back around 96 without touching drugs in a very vivid half-waking dream and Grant's later account made me feel connected! I feel like Grant leaves dangling sentences that I could finish. Alas, some folks seem to cordon off his playgrounds as if they were crime scenes. But I suppose that keeps them preserved.
Fascinating stuff. Brings a lot of context to that era of Superman, that makes a lot of things that seemed a little odd at the time, totally clear.
It's in the nature of a corporate serialized monthly publication in general, but Supes seems to always be the victim of people's plans getting interrupted and hands changing at the nth hour.
I have a real soft spot for the entirety of around 2000 up through the beginning of N52 because I was reading Superman and Action while I was growing up, but even as a kid it was a bit evident to me that hardly anyone on those titles were getting to steer their own ship as much as they should have been, and when they were it seemed like nobody else was playing ball and you'd have a radically different Superman the next week somewhere else.
It's a shame Loeb's run ended how it did, him and Kelly are probably my favorite period of the character that's from my lifetime (Buisek is a close second), but I probably wouldnt have stayed on myself with that large of a shakeup tossed into my lap. At least he stayed long enough for Superman/Batman, which of course, ruled.
On Grant's work it's driven me nuts my entire life that anytime he's ever worked with the characters for a major publisher, he always leaves them a million cool things and nobody follows up on it, or if they do it's absurdly fashionably late.
I have no idea how the man gave them multiversity and there wasnt books about all of those characters on the stands the next year. Batman RIP was 15 years ago and we just recently in Ram Vs Detective & Chip Zdarsky's Batman had anyone go back and done anything with any of that. Which I enjoyed the former a lot and the latter is not what i really wanted out of a return to that material (Although I did enjoy the anniversary issue) but I was just happy someone went, hey why the hell were we leaving this on the shelf?
I just watched the TV miniseries of It! Interesting story. I wonder if it has anything to do with an 1902 Edith Nesbit novel I just learned of, "Five Children and It", where a group of children encounter a 'Sand Fairy' who grants them backfiring wishes. I've been a bit immersed in the novel of The Shining since Halloween as well, so King is on the waves.
Anyways, glad you're thinking and writing amidst the very gloomy and gothic atmosphere which seems to have descended as of late. The blogs are always a highlight of my week, so thank you very much!
I started paying more attention to my page turns after I noticed you were tracking facing pages in your Invisibles thumbnails. It paid off very well, but I still have some lapses in attention.
I know whereof you speak about something "sounding" right or wrong!
I call it "the click" after a scene in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Brick's talking about his alcoholism, and I'm basically teetotal, so it's probably a mixed metaphor but: "This click that I get in my head that makes me peaceful."
I just monkey around with the words and pictures until I get the click.
Do the Flash Silver Age covers where Barry presumably addressed the newsstand buyers count as fourth wall breaking? And in honor of The Writer, shout out to Cary Bates and Elliot S! Maggin for that JlA/JSA/Earth Prime crossover in Justice League in the mid 70s.
Yes, that crossover was a classic. During that same period there was an issue of The Flash where Bates used his plotting power to help Flash in Central City.
That's a good question about the canonicity of comic book covers! The cover is kinda half marketing / half narrative framing device, usually made with at least some input from the storytellers. Its textual status is an interesting grey area :)))
For sure! And on a sliding scale those wd probably be the most canonical with intentional misdirects on the opposite end. I was actually just talking about how I think The Filth covers are a 4th wall breach. I think they dress the comics up like they're an artifact from the world of the story itself.
Sorry it's been a brutal year, Grant. I know how much those cats are a part of your life. We left ours with friends in the US when we moved because of logistics, but he's getting shipped back to us early next year. I have no idea what the local moggies will make of our 'murican rescue! He's going to miss the wide open spaces afforded to him in CA, trading it for a Victorian terrace and busy roads. Just hoping that future doesn't prove brutal for us - and him - too! Much love. x
I didn't think there was a beef with Ostrander. If anything, responding to his bit of fun with The Writer here in the comics event of 2025 struck me as surprisingly reverent! You're acknowledging a 30 year old lark from a fairly dense part of comics lore in the middle of a pop track!
That's something I've missed about your comics, I suppose. That feeling that every little thing counts in some way because you're just reporting it.
I remember back when Waid's Birthright hit that the main Super-books were scrambling for how to incorporate it as the new origin and, being "solicited" (mainly for backups in Austen's Action that were solicited then cancelled), I was getting extremely contradictory advice, with Loeb telling me I had to pitch for Superman himself and maybe Tom Palmer telling me to focus on lesser knowns.
DiDio actually commented on that batch of pitches, thanking me for the hit list. Made me a bit anxious as I had a focus on buddy stories with one being Jay Garrick and Alan Scott stranded on a cruise with Blue Beetle and Booster Gold as Amazo scrambles their powers and gadgets. I did NOT want to contribute to the deaths of Alan or Jay -- and I would later learn my role in Earth-2 Superman's demise. That's really my hunting limit for the season.
Anyway, they were trying to incorporate Birthright midstream in a soft reboot launched by Return to Krypton that was meant to marry the Silver Age Krypton with Byrne era folksiness. I gather Jennette Khan had signed off on that and it was axed as soon as she was out.
And I had two ways to do that in a single issue. One was an epic mini-crisis that would have united Bibbo Bibbowski, the Alpha Centurion, Halk Kar, Mon-El, the Hyperfamily of Trom, in a story where dastardly forces from the Council of Brainiacs rewrite history to keep Lois from getting pregnant.
But the other and my preferred of the two was for Superman himself to venture across Hypertime and arrive at our world to give an interview where he explains both why he doesn't show up here to help and intervene and proceeds to go through a stack of old comics up through the current ones to explain that we'd been getting details of his life wrong with unnecessary retcons. His continuity had never been reset! He never forgot the first Crisis! Everyone kept misinterpreting the time period he lives in as whatever their time period was when they were tuning into his universe.
He would then draw reference of the Birthright Jor-El and Lara and sum up how his history was less complicated than we keep making it!
It was on the whole a breezy affair with a number of classic beats such as taking the reporter flying.
With the last page twist that the man we'd just been seeing was Ultraman. "The idiots bought it all!" He'd announce. "Obviously the best lies have considerable truth to them. But everything has been set in motion. No one even noticed what I was doing while I was there."
And with that, the history gets updated going forward with the double reveal that all comics up until then had unreliable narration of real events... and the guy who just set the record straight is ALSO a liar.
Damn, I was 10 years old around that period and was (am) a die hard Superman guy, so every week I went (still do) to the grocery store and got $10 for comics and bought all the superman books and justice league over the month. (leftover money and off weeks were Star Wars, Wolverine or Sonic the Hedgehog at that age).
That would have blown my child mind had it come to pass. As it was, I didn't think much of continuity not adding up at the time, which I think was because I'd read a comic, Superfriends and Lois and Clark were on reruns, I'd seen the movies, I was catching the JLA cartoon and Smallville first run, and none of it added up at all together, but Superman was there so I didn't give a damn.
I actually think had that been published that probably would have been the first time I both thought about, and had some sort of explanation for retcons and changes in continuity.
I do remember that Return to Krypton (or II?) did confuse me at the time because it turned out they were imposters but only sort of, and the dog came back with Clark and the adventure *happened* but I didnt quite understand what that krypton and it's inhabitants even actually were. It's probably simple, I should dig it out, I havent read it in 20 years.
The rule of thumb I followed as a boy, that I still basically do is that 'it all happened, somehow, unless it explicitly says it didn't, but if I liked it, it still did anyway"
As I understand it and I was never actually at a summit...
They wanted to just reveal the Silver Age Krypton had always been real. They didn't actually have a plan for how that fit everything and Loeb had me compile a list with explanations. The Starman issue with Jor-El, a Flash issue I believe Grant wrote, obviously everything with the Cleric and Eradicator.
I worked through those and sent it off to Jeph. The Cleric would return as a villain who had corrupted The Eradicator. Jor-El would pick a different outfit from his closet on the day he met Jack Knight. I forget the Flash issue explanation.
DC lost Jennette Khan, who had approved everything, and DiDio came in with Birthright and Waid, after they'd started to switch Kryptons but before they could explain it.
So many plans were invalidated, Loeb abruptly quit Superman, despite Return to Krypton part 1 being the best seller since Reign of the Supermen. He had years of plans.
As I understand it, Schultz was going to handle the science of the Krypton revamp and Joe Kelly was going to do something with that dangling plot thread where Superman saved Krypton to set up his Zod story, the red armored Pokolistan dictator.
As I recall it, that Zod would be a Kal-El raised on a Krypton that never blew up (because Superman saved it at the end of RTK1). Raised by Faora Hu-Ul as a Zod. And there was an obvious paradox there because they couldn't both exist but Krypton couldn't be saved if Clark didn't exist to save it, so they'd coexist, threatening reality with a Schrodinger's Cat Krypton that both blew up and didn't blow up. Eventually this would threaten reality and someone would have to go back to blow up Krypton to save the universe and untangle the paradox. I think Luthor was going to do it? Basically just destroy the devices Superman left in the past that kept Krypton from blowing up.
The Birthright reboot meant this couldn't happen. Kelly invented a different origin for that Zod. Loeb was talked into doing Superman/Batman still and was the original planned writer for a completely different All-Star Batman with Art Adams. The first issue exists somewhere in a drawer. An army of Man-Bats, before Grant did it! There were various other plans including a new Composite Supergirl. When Loeb's son passed and pressures grew, he left for Marvel.
Geoff Johns wrote Return to Krypton 2 to tidy things up, using Brainiac 13 as the villain who created a "fake" Krypton. Steve Seagle wrote a single trippy issue of Superman that replaced Byrne Krypton with Waid's Birthright model.
Johns did amazing emergency surgery on the continuity but my feeling is that Superman never recovered until Rebirth, Grant's stories aside, because there were so many conflicting visions on his biography and attitude. Johns and Busiek's era was fairly strong. But that Superman was a different guy than JMS' Grounded run, which abruptly changed when the brilliant Chris Roberson took over. Good comics but not cohesive together!
I highly recommend anyone read Roberson and Dennis Culver's indie comic Edison Rex, about a Lex Luthor type who wins and then questions if he's been played. There's a Grant inspired character there as the book's Mxyzptlk, who's essentially Muppet Grant Morrison. Culver did a cover for my comic and co-wrote Justice League Incarnate, a bridge between Multiversity and Dark Crisis. It differed a lot from what I'd do and they interpreted Multiversity lore differently than I would but I applaud it for following up on Grant, something many writers seem to avoid.
I read so much of Grant's work as an invitation: Play with me! And then when people opt not to (their prerogative), I feel like Grant is left hanging. Kieron Gillen and Pete Tomasi and Tom Peyer are great about playing with the loose threads Grant leaves but I have had this urge my whole life to do more with his ideas. I've read Tipler and Crowley and Quantum Mechanics papers and Philip K. Dick and watched David Lynch. Hell, I had one of those visions of silvery static beings back around 96 without touching drugs in a very vivid half-waking dream and Grant's later account made me feel connected! I feel like Grant leaves dangling sentences that I could finish. Alas, some folks seem to cordon off his playgrounds as if they were crime scenes. But I suppose that keeps them preserved.
Fascinating stuff. Brings a lot of context to that era of Superman, that makes a lot of things that seemed a little odd at the time, totally clear.
It's in the nature of a corporate serialized monthly publication in general, but Supes seems to always be the victim of people's plans getting interrupted and hands changing at the nth hour.
I have a real soft spot for the entirety of around 2000 up through the beginning of N52 because I was reading Superman and Action while I was growing up, but even as a kid it was a bit evident to me that hardly anyone on those titles were getting to steer their own ship as much as they should have been, and when they were it seemed like nobody else was playing ball and you'd have a radically different Superman the next week somewhere else.
It's a shame Loeb's run ended how it did, him and Kelly are probably my favorite period of the character that's from my lifetime (Buisek is a close second), but I probably wouldnt have stayed on myself with that large of a shakeup tossed into my lap. At least he stayed long enough for Superman/Batman, which of course, ruled.
On Grant's work it's driven me nuts my entire life that anytime he's ever worked with the characters for a major publisher, he always leaves them a million cool things and nobody follows up on it, or if they do it's absurdly fashionably late.
I have no idea how the man gave them multiversity and there wasnt books about all of those characters on the stands the next year. Batman RIP was 15 years ago and we just recently in Ram Vs Detective & Chip Zdarsky's Batman had anyone go back and done anything with any of that. Which I enjoyed the former a lot and the latter is not what i really wanted out of a return to that material (Although I did enjoy the anniversary issue) but I was just happy someone went, hey why the hell were we leaving this on the shelf?
I just watched the TV miniseries of It! Interesting story. I wonder if it has anything to do with an 1902 Edith Nesbit novel I just learned of, "Five Children and It", where a group of children encounter a 'Sand Fairy' who grants them backfiring wishes. I've been a bit immersed in the novel of The Shining since Halloween as well, so King is on the waves.
Anyways, glad you're thinking and writing amidst the very gloomy and gothic atmosphere which seems to have descended as of late. The blogs are always a highlight of my week, so thank you very much!
Solid gold!
The process talk is much appreciated :)))
I started paying more attention to my page turns after I noticed you were tracking facing pages in your Invisibles thumbnails. It paid off very well, but I still have some lapses in attention.
I know whereof you speak about something "sounding" right or wrong!
I call it "the click" after a scene in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Brick's talking about his alcoholism, and I'm basically teetotal, so it's probably a mixed metaphor but: "This click that I get in my head that makes me peaceful."
I just monkey around with the words and pictures until I get the click.
Do the Flash Silver Age covers where Barry presumably addressed the newsstand buyers count as fourth wall breaking? And in honor of The Writer, shout out to Cary Bates and Elliot S! Maggin for that JlA/JSA/Earth Prime crossover in Justice League in the mid 70s.
Yes, that crossover was a classic. During that same period there was an issue of The Flash where Bates used his plotting power to help Flash in Central City.
That's a good question about the canonicity of comic book covers! The cover is kinda half marketing / half narrative framing device, usually made with at least some input from the storytellers. Its textual status is an interesting grey area :)))
I like the occasional cover that is actually page 1 of a story.
For sure! And on a sliding scale those wd probably be the most canonical with intentional misdirects on the opposite end. I was actually just talking about how I think The Filth covers are a 4th wall breach. I think they dress the comics up like they're an artifact from the world of the story itself.