Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, DC Comics, Superman | Tagged: 5g, dc comics, grant morrison, Mikel Janin, superman, the authority

Grant Morrison On Superman/Authority As "Clown Fart With Giggle Track"

Grant Morrison continues to expound and expand on what went down with Superman & The Authority, 5G, Dan DiDio and DC Comics, and Bleeding Cool has been paraphrasing along, seeing what matches out reports at the time, and it seems like it was pretty close. We would however like to state that Grant Morrison was not our source at the time. And with their third chapter we are told "Thanks for subscribing to Xanaduum. This post is public, so feel free to share it." Well, even so, there are limits.

Grant summarised the 5G version of the story as relying on "the basic idea of an 82-year-old, waning Superman forming a team to accomplish all the things he'd failed to do over many decades of crises and villain battles, before coming into conflict with the superhero community he'd once inspired – as a basic concept and shake up of the line I thought it had a lot of potential."

And how Grant managed to send the ending in the direction of Action Comics written by Philip K Johnson"I was drawn to Phillip's observation that, although rules of the fictional DCU Earth meant that Superman could never truly change the world of the monthly comics out of all recognition, he could still change other worlds – the thrill of seeing dictators fall and authoritarian regimes crumble before the might of the good guys could be indulged as allegory and metaphor without seeming crassly literal or trivializing real world problems."

You may have even read Bleeding Cool's take of the use of chains in that series as symbolising so much more than enslavement. And Grant summed it all up on the way out, "Superman and the Authority felt like the bathetic clown fart with accompanying giggle track as the door smacked my useless arse on the way out!" Until he saw Mikel Janin's artwork and had to start taking it seriously again.

As to the issue with Supermen being a contemporary of JFK, when the 5G timeline had been done away with "It's easy to see the influence of the 5G timeline here with a Superman only beginning to show himself in public, encouraged by Kennedy to join forces with other 'silver age' superbeings to fulfil his utopian dreams of space travel and the Brother(sister)hood of (hu)Man(s). In the end, I had to handwave this element of the continuity by suggesting that Superman met JFK and participated in something very much like the plot of New Frontier during a period in his life where he was lost in time – rather like my Batman in The Return of Bruce Wayne series – presumably amnesiac and unable to remember that Kennedy was fated to die, or aware that the assassination could not be prevented without the timestream having a prolapse or whatever it does when it's being regularly 'broken' to set up the next cosmic hoedown."

Plenty more on Manchester Black, Tom Strong and OMAC being Jack Hawksmoor at the link…

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