One of my goals was to write more, and that included a book review of each book I read this year. If anything, this is more for me, because it's getting me to write more, and help me remember what I've read.
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I saw that Grant Morrison had written a non-fiction, non-comic book, but I didn't dig into the content until seeing the paperback edition at Barnes and Noble and looked more into what the book was about. I was interested.
What I thought the book was about and what the book ended up being about were slightly different. I thought the book was about how comic book heroes represented society, and how they changed with society. It was that, but it was also a history book mixed with a memoir. He goes through the origin of the superhero, who created each superhero, and also why. Morrison continues on talking about the major shifts in comics, and the significant writers that lead the shifts. A great example of this was Stan Lee with Marvel comics. I knew he was significant with comics for the characters he created, but Morrison's analysis of it changes the way I look at Spider-man and Fantastic Four.
Morrison throws in a few personal stories here and there, mostly about what he was going through when he started with comics, why he wanted to write comics, the drugs he took that helped create some of his twisted stories, and how he uses his knowledge of superheroes to change the trajectory of comics. At times it gets a little preachy, like where he gets into a really bad trip. Not sure if it was a hallucination caused by drugs or bad health, or an actual trip outside of the fifth dimension, but it was unsettling. Either way, Morrison doesn't hold back on his personal story.
For any person wanting a better understanding of why superheroes matter in society, or if you are wanting a good argument for the importance of superheroes in society, you'll like this book.
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