Just a link today,as I’m glued to Al-Jazeerawatching the Egyptian revolution. He’s Not A Super-Hero, He’s Not Even A Very Naughty Boy: The Case Against Grant Morrison & Steve Yeowell’s “Zenith” is an oldish but excellent analysis of one of Grant Morrison’s first big projects, 2000AD‘s Zenith, the superhero-popstar:
IV. There’s a terrible puritanism that lurks at the heart of the popular concept of the super-hero, and at times it seems almost indivisible from any understanding of the Protestant Work Ethic. Sacrifice is good, fun is bad. Obedience is the mark of the worthy, indulgence is the devil’s stain. The mask, the cape, the platitude and the sacrificing heart is less admirable than mandatory, while private life and private happiness are despicable anti-social cancers threatening us all.
And yet underneath all that alienating refusal by Zenith to become a super-hero, and all his embracing of the shallow and disgusting business of wealth and fun, is a single truth that so many folks seem to miss. (I certainly did.) Zenith is an extremely young man, in a culture and a business effectively hell-bent on offering him every substantial psychological reinforcer to stay so. Which means that he’s often effectively just a boy, for heaven’s sake, while even his creators seem to be judging him as we would ordinarily judge a fully mature and adult man.
Zenith is an uneven but important work, the first time that Grant Morrison showed he was going to be an important writer, one of a wave of revisionist superhero projects done in the wake of Alan Moore’s pioneering work on Marvelman and Swamp Thing. Some of the issues and themes Morrison explored here would return in his later work in e.g. The Invisibles. As far as I know it’s still uncollected, so the only way to read it is to hunt down the old Titan Books collections of the first three series and the 200AD back issues in which Phase IV appeared.