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 All-Star Grant Morrison:
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Twenty-first Century Comic Books

A Thesis
Presented to
The Faculty of the Department of English
Brooklyn College

In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts

By

David Press

Spring 2012
 2

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Comics Studies 5

Scholar vs Fan: Some Preliminary Issues 6

Scholarship 12

Pico and Morrison in Supergods 20

The Oration on the Dignity of Man and All-Star Superman 32

Conclusion 35

Bibliography 40

 
 3

 
Introduction

Grant Morrison, since his arrival in the pages of 2000AD writing a superhero

commentary comic strip called Zenith (1987) has for nearly thirty years written or

collaborated on some masterful pieces of comics work that are now recognized as

classics of the modern comics’ canon. Readers, bloggers, and scholars like Timothy

Callahan and Marc Singer have written extensively about his work, but none of them deal

with the philosophical impact Giovanni Pico della Mirandola had on Morrison, which is

something Grant Morrison himself extensively discusses in his autobiography Supergods.

The task of this essay is to cover just how deeply Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man

influenced Morrison’s work over his career, specifically in All-Star Superman and in his

recent reboot of the comic that Superman premiered in Action Comics.

Morrison was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1960, and raised there by an

administrative assistant mother and a social activist father. Writing in his autobiography,

Morrison says his mother left his father at a fairly young age and Morrison retreated into

comics to cope after an operation that removed his appendix. A particular issue of

Superman sucked the young Morrison in while he was recuperating.

The Morrison family lived in Cokerhill, where he and his sister used to read Lois

Lane comics and like many kids at the time, 1968, his mother took him to see 2001: A

Space Odyssey, and that was a transformative experience which turned him onto Jack

Kirby Marvel comics. His Dad was fired when “he’d been kicked out of his shop steward

position at the Factory for Peace, a workers-run collective, after triggering all out war

between the shop floor and ‘management.’” (Morrison 109). As a result, Morrison began

making appearances in the local paper, handing out pamphlets and, along with the rest of
 4

his family, picketing his father’s former employers. With his father unemployed for

swaths of time, it fell on his mother to support the family, “until he [his father] made the

mistake of having an affair with a teenage Ban the Bomber and the fallout slowly blew

the family apart.” (109)

By the time he was eighteen, Morrison had grown into full-fledged science fiction

punk, and with his family life growing increasingly untenable, his desire to express

himself and escape his daily reality became all he could think about. Throughout high

school, he made his life as a cartoonist, contributing to the local paper and only applied to

one school, The Glasgow School of Art, which he was rejected from. “I’d applied to the

Glasgow School of Art, convinced that my portfolio, based around comic style

illustrations and black-and-white graphics, would easily see me through.” Unfortunately

he was rejected; that said the school was more into “painting and figurative work, and

graphics were out.” (169)

After Morrison abandoned his art school aspirations, his father gave him a

typewriter, and it was then that the young writer decided to turn his attention to writing

rather than drawing. His father taped a message to the inside of the typewriter’s case,

“Son, the world is waiting to hear from you.” (169) This lit a fire under Morrison, and he

soon went on to writing and drawing a character strip known as Gideon Stargrave. The

Stargrave strips were published in Near Myth magazine, run by bookseller Rob King.

King ran Science Fiction Bookstore in Edinburgh. The magazine also published the work

of future Sandman artist Bryan Talbot and Tony O’Donnell, so the three young

cartoonists became instant friends; and Morrison cites that his strips being published in
 5

that magazine helped him gain the exposure that eventually led to 2000AD’s taking on

Zenith.

It is uncertain exactly how Morrison came into contact with Giovanni Pico della

Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, but in a 2006 interview with

Newsarama.com, he says he tried tying Pico to a superhero from as early as Zenith, but

nothing fit until All-Star Superman, the main text we will be examining. Morrison says

in the interview: “The ‘Oration’ also turns up in my British superhero series Zenith from

1987, which may indicate how long I’ve been working towards a Pico/Superman team-

up!” (Smith, http://www.newsarama.com/ 10.28.08)

One might infer that Morrison came into contact with Pico by way of H.P.

Lovecraft through King’s bookstore, which more than probably carried The Case of

Charles Dexter Ward. In Lovecraft’s work a spell is used called “Mirandola” to summon

otherworldly enslavers. This is a likely way that the young Morrison came into early

contact with Pico. Many Morrison scholars have written that Morrison transcends modern

comic book storytelling by incorporating things that normally do not appear in comics.

From fashion, to punk music, to (in this case) five hundred year-old philosophers, this

creates a style that is unique to Morrison and is probably why there have been three major

critical texts published examining his work. From the same website interview, Morrison

points out how long he’s wanted to use Pico.

I see Superman in this series as an Enlightenment figure, a

Renaissance idea of the ideal man, perfect in mind, body and intention. A
key text in all of this is Pico’s ‘Oration On The Dignity of Man’ (15c),
generally regarded as the ‘manifesto’ of Renaissance thought, in which
Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola laid out the fundamentals of what we tend
to refer to as ’Humanist’ thinking. (Smith)
 6

As a result, Morrison has been the subject of multiple pieces of academic study of

his work. The forefather in Morrison discussion is definitely Timothy Callahan, an

associate professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts; Callahan published Grant

Morrison: The Early Years in 2007, which discussed Morrison’s first mainstream work--

from Zenith up to Doom Patrol. This generated further discussion in another book and a

documentary by Patrick Meaney.

The most recent study comes from Marc Singer who published Grant Morrison:

Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics in December 2011, (University Press of

Mississippi), which is the first major university press work to be focused on the comic

creator. Singer’s thesis discusses the roots of Morrison’s popularity lies in his creator-

owned work1and shows how that transfers to his corporate-owned2 superhero work.

“From his [Morrison] beginnings in the ‘ground level’ comics of the

1970s to his most recent work for Vertigo, an imprint of industry giant DC
Comics, Morrison has always sought to synthesize the various cultures of
contemporary Anglophone comics, alternating between corporate-owned
superhero titles and creator-owned work in other genres. His independent streak
motivates him to craft stories of considerable range and depth without becoming
trapped by genre formulas or conventions; his pop aesthetic leads him to tell these
stories in broadly accessible narrative forms.” (Singer 3)

Since we have such texts analyzing Morrison as a literary icon, there is very little

that mentions his work as it relates to a Renaissance philosophical text. In general, most

scholarly pieces relating to comics are about aesthetics and cultural comparisons; most of

1
“Creator-owned” is a comic book industry term for a wholly original work in that the creators (usually the
writer and the artist) own the rights and privileges to the characters, and as rights-holders they authorize the
use of their creation in any other medium, and stand to make a hefty paycheck.
2
Corporate owned is basically the opposite of “creator-owned.” An example of this would be Superman,
Batman, and the Avengers. The medium’s biggest comic book publishers (Marvel and DC) were built by
Prohibition-era bootleggers looking for legitimate businesses to launder money, so they relied upon
contracts that fleeced young, starry-eyed creators like Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel, and Joe Shuster of having
ownership of these characters and as a result gives the opportunity for writers like Grant Morrison to do
what is called “work for hire,” which is a contract that says the writer and artist have no creator rights to the
content, all they do is provide their own personal take on the corporation’s character.
 7

them tread very lightly—if at all—in relation to philosophical thought. Though

philosophical books do exist, like Batman and Philosophy, published by Wiley and

others, academic comic studies do not really take these arguments on. In order to build a

frame, we must first give a survey of the critical work being done in the field of Comics

Studies to provide a lens in which to examine Morrison in this new philosophical light.

Comics Studies

Comics Studies has grown and developed since the mid-to-late 1980s after the

arrival of critically acclaimed work like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Alan Moore and

Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. Currently, scholars like Hillary Chute, Douglas Wolk, Paul

Lopes, and Charles Hatfield focus on the work of Alison Bechdel, Dan Clowes, Chris

Ware, and other independent comic creators. These critics are doing work to enhance the

study of comics in the academy. To begin discussing one of the medium’s foremost

writers, it will be useful to have an overview of the current work of scholars in Comics

Studies. Hillary Chute has written about the work of Art Spiegelman and offers a new

interpretation on the form of the comic book, explaining what she means by the phrase

“graphic narrative” in her article “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.”

Douglas Wolk, in his book Reading Comics, helps new readers grapple with how comics

should be read and presents some values for conducting a close reading of graphic

narrative. Paul Lopes examines the stigma associated with comics. Charles Hatfield, in

his Alternative Comics, writes about how alternative comics—specifically the works of

the Hernandez brothers and Harvey Pekar elucidate how comics have grown into a new

kind of literature.
 8

Most of the critical study being done under the banner of Comics Studies has

focused on Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns or on the aforementioned Maus and

other non-fiction work of writer-artists like Bechdel, Marjane Satrapi, Clowes, and Ware.

Recently, in the work of Chute, Lopes, Wolk, and Hatfield, we gain serious perspective

on where Comics Studies currently stands as a field. Their work is the freshest and the

most open-minded, but it took a while to get to where it is—and even now, there is a

specter of academic stigma lingering over the field. There are many scholarly works that

explore comics as cultural artifacts, pieces of history, or things to be examined in relation

to other pop culture artifacts such as film. But none of these works around the idea that

comics come with their own set of rules as a literary medium. Yes, the history and the

“greatest hits” (Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, Maus, and others) are important, but

that is too superficial an approach, and writers like Wolk and Hatfield have a good idea:

focusing on new creators in the post-Maus era and their work in order to overcome a

cultural stigma is a more ripe arena for discussion. Quite a few academics enter the

debate around these questions: why does this new scholarship exist? and what are the

differences between a scholar and a fan? The latter question is something that has largely

been done to death, but is still something that attracts a lot of discussion, so it is worth

dealing with briefly.

Scholar vs. Fan: Some Preliminary Issues

A recent example of this debate comes from a transcription of a conference panel

held at the University of Texas, moderated by Greg Smith and featuring panelists Thomas

Andrae, Scott Bukatman, and Thomas LaMarre. This transcript, entitled “Surveying the

World of Contemporary Comics Scholarship: A Conversation,” starts out with sarcastic

 9

academic rigor regarding the level of discourse in universities and their study of the

comics medium. These panelists open with a discussion on comics scholars who are little

more than fans.

“Younger scholars, many of whom are comics fans, feel that they have to

overburden their subjects of studies with a lot of ideological analysis. So there is a wave

of ‘representations of’ studies—African Americans in comics, queer characters in

comics, and so on,” says panelist Bukatman, an Associate Professor of Film at Stanford

who wrote a book titled Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Superman in the 20th

Century (Duke University Press, 2003); he goes on to say that this kind of essay “played

out in other fields decades ago.” (Smith 138).

Bukatman continues, “Whatever pleasures they may contain for the very scholars

producing the work, [these studies] serve the purpose of separating the scholar from the

fan and demonstrating to the home department that the scholar is, indeed, doing ‘serious’

work.” (138)

A possible definition of the difference between a fan and a scholar says that a

scholar is someone who does not necessarily enjoy the material he or she is studying, and

that helps to make it serious non-biased work. However, this idea cannot hold water

regarding people who study or even casually read comics. From writers to artists to

editors to critics to readers, a rigorous knowledge is required to understand this medium

at the base level: accrued narrative history, artistic eye, and an ability to understand

literary styles and tropes. Any published piece of comic narrative every week uses these

elements and pushes readers (who are more apt to be labeled “fans”) to recognize their
 10

operations. There is quite a bit of artistic work the average comic reader has to grapple

with in any given twenty-two page single issue on a regular basis.

There are specific skills required to engage a comic, just as there are specific

skills to engage a work of prose or a work of art. A scholar is someone who writes and

debates a subject in a medium in an attempt to examine something of value in it. In this

case, a cultural studies approach to comics is a way to begin discussion, and

representative papers are a good place to understand the character the book involves,

because when one considers the backgrounds of the protagonists and how they may be

representing a cultural norm, one can begin to define what makes the work interesting.

Dismissing this approach, as Bukatman does, suggests he does not understand literary

character value or that he is impatient with the rigors of academic study.

So, while comic readers can be loosely defined as fans, many of them are experts

who have been accruing knowledge of comics’ writers, artists, and characters for years

and are capable of deploying this knowledge to illuminate a comics text. People who

write and explore the defining elements of comics understand what makes up a piece of

graphic narrative and will use considerable intelligence to show why a graphic novel is

important.

Thomas LaMarre, who teaches in East Asian Studies at McGill University, has

mostly done work on Manga and Anime3, continues Bukatman’s chain of thought: “As

[Bukatman] states, rather than grapple seriously with the ‘how’ of comics, scholars tend

3
Manga is the Japanese version of comic books, except usually drawn in black and white with a sole

writer-artist instead of the Western version of comics that typically employs a writer and artist as a team.

Anime is animation. Examples of Manga include: Akira, Dragonball Z, and the extremely popular Naruto.
 11

to dwell on the ‘what’ of comics.” LaMarre is referring to the history of comics and how

that has grown, but focuses on only one side of the critical perspective and generally

ignores the aesthetic element. To understand comics, one needs to understand both sides

of this divide. Certainly, starting out with the historical element creates a base with which

to understand the medium. “The what of comics” for LaMarre means the ideas, the

structure, the writing, the art, and how these come together to create a comic.

The first section of this transcript makes it clear that one problem with Comics

Studies right now—is that it has to tackle uninformed scholars who insert themselves into

this kind of discussion.

Smith, however, is someone who takes the topic to heart and gets into the good

work being done by people who were once part of the industry. “Gerard Jones is a good

example here, telling a solid story about how publishing distribution and industrial

structure influenced the comics world.” (Smith 140). Smith is referring to Gerard Jones’s

history of the birth of the modern comic book industry in Men of Tomorrow. Jones was a

longtime writer on Green Lantern and various other DC properties before deciding to

write about comics’ seedy history.

By the end of the conversation everyone involved in the panel comes to a

consensus about what Comics Studies should be doing: the history of the medium is good

for getting started with an essay, but to focus solely on it would be to tell just a small part

of the industry’s story as a whole. For Smith, the field should take on its studies in a

similar manner to Cinema and Media Studies: it should focus on aesthetics, culture,

authorship, industry, and reception. His idea is mostly correct in all of the ways he lists

except in comparing comics to cinematic aesthetics. A widely accepted notion among

 12

comics scholars is that comics are not aesthetically comparable to film, but yet university

academics seem keen on the idea of comparing the medium to film. We cannot use the

techniques used in motion picture studies, because comics are not motion pictures.

Comics are a static medium. The difference is a reader can choose to spend as much time

on a comic panel as he or she likes. Doing so means one can spend time on composition

of the panel, the art style, the dialogue, and narrative. This differs greatly from the

intention of the filmmaker, which is to show it to the viewer first on a movie screen

where one cannot fast forward, rewind or pause, one can only watch and become a part,

leaving one to dissect the art after viewing. A comic allows a reader to dissect a panel, a

page, or a sequence at any length of time or one’s leisure.

Furthermore, while the structures of the comic book script and of screenplays are

similar, the final result is completely different. Both are driven by dialogue and both have

rules for how much a page can contain. A page on a comic book script can only have a

certain number of dialogue pieces, roughly 210 words, so that the dialogue and narrative

captions do not overtake the art. The number of panels per page limits the number of

words. There are two distinct models of form: decompressed comics, which emphasizes

visuals and character interaction and results in slower-moving plots, usually stretching

over four to six twenty-two page issues; and compressed comics, which are usually

referred to as “done-in-one”. These storylines are done in a single issue, and panels are

compressed usually in six or more panel grids. For example, if you have five panels per

page you can get away with at most forty-two words per panel; this is an example of

decompressed storytelling, as a writer can get away with quite a bit of dialogue without

compressing the art. For a screenplay, a page of script is meant to be one minute of film,
 13

and the dialogue drives character as in a comic book, while the image on the screen and

the comic book page portrays the action. The biggest difference when one compares the

two is that films are restricted by budgetary concerns, so that the action of the images is

limited to how much money the production has, whereas the comic book can literally

show anything because there are no budgetary restrictions to what an artist is capable of

showing, and there is no rating system in place4. Nothing displays this difference better

than movie adaptations of comic books. A specific example is the end of the graphic

novel Watchmen and the film version directed by Zack Snyder.

Spoilers beware: in the comic, Ozymandias’s quest to end the Cold War comes to

fruition with his hatching a giant squid and dropping it on Manhattan, causing the

populace to have such a mental breakdown that millions of Manhattanites die from

psychic heart attacks. In the movie, energy-based Dr. Manhattan, played by Billy Crudup,

has the ability to liquidate any form of matter. Ozymandias (Matthew Goode)

manipulates him to create an engine of renewable energy based on Manhattan’s unique

energy signature. Instead, Ozymandias uses the engine as a way to ignite a Hiroshima-

sized explosion in Manhattan. The result is the same in both works: an attack so

devastating that it unites Russia and the U.S. to form a relief effort, which effectively

ends the Cold War.

4
There used to be a rating system: in the wake of Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, comics

publishers, as ordered by Congress, instituted a Comics Code, which all but limited the medium into a

restrictive format. Only recently did publishers decide they could monitor themselves and the code was

abandoned, which included rules like crimes should never be portrayed in a way to create sympathy for the

criminal, public institutions like the judicial system should not be portrayed in a bad light, and others.
 14

In film there is a desire to make these comic book adaptations as realistic as

possible, a hang-up that is counter-intuitive to comics. Dropping a giant squid that kills

millions of New Yorkers in a film would lead to mass audience rejection and poor

receipts. (It didn’t help anything, as the film adaptation was a fiscal and critical flop,

whereas the book is widely considered to be one of the best works of literature in the

twentieth century). Yet that giant cephalopod makes up a distinct aspect of what makes

Watchmen a comic book—it is not restricted by a need to be realistic. Moore’s modus

operandi, oddly enough, is to make comics’ characters more realistic than their

predecessors, Moore wants these colorful characters to be deeply flawed people, which is

a belief that Grant Morrison—writing in his memoir Supergods—abhors.

Scholarship

Serious scholarship includes Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester’s thorough A Comics

Studies Reader, which features essays from Charles Hatfield, W.J.T. Mitchell, and M.

Thomas Inge. The great point of this book is that it serves as an excellent primer for

introducing concepts serious comics scholars are grappling with. The only shortcoming is

that besides an essay by Peter Coogan, it spends very little time discussing superheroes,

and one would think that a reader involving comics studies would cover all of the ground

as sufficiently as possible. Rather than focusing on the distinct genres within comics, the

editors divide the book by aesthetic and technical considerations: Craft, Art, and Form;

Culture, Narrative, and Identity; Scrutiny and Evaluation.

There are a few notable and interesting pieces in the reader, but none that are

particularly useful for the present essay. Inge gives us the story of Peanuts creator

Charles Schultz and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Schultz, who grew up like Fitzgerald in St. Paul,
 15

Minnesota, was affected by Fitzgerald and admired him. Mitchell discusses the form of

the comic book and how it need not be compared or utilized by other forms of mixed

media narrative (specifically film) when discussing comic books because they are not like

anything else.

“Gary Trudeau’s anti-cinematic, talky cartoon sequences in Doonesbury defy the

normal privileging of the visual image as the place ‘where the action is’ on the cartoon

page,” Mitchell writes in the Reader’s selection “Beyond Comparison” from Mitchell’s

book Picture Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Mitchell does an excellent job of discussing the nature of Picture Theory as it

relates to comics in this paragraph, going from the newspaper strip (Doonesbury) to Maus

to the The Dark Knight Returns:

“Postmodern cartoon novels like Maus and The Dark Knight [Returns]
employ a wide range of complex and self-reflective techniques. Maus attenuates
visual access to its narrative by thickening its frame story (the dialogue of a
holocaust survivor and his son is conspicuously uncinematic in its emphasis on
speech) and by veiling the human body at all levels of the visual narrative with
the figures of animals (Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs. The Dark
Knight, by contrast, is highly cinematic and televisual, employing the full
repertoire of motion picture and video rhetoric while continually breaking frames
and foregrounding the apparatus of visual representation.” (Heer 117)

Mitchell takes a New Critical approach to comics. He focuses on the aesthetic

elements: the dialogue, the panel structure, and the difference in genre (one non-fiction

and superhero) giving us a view of two disparate genres in the medium. This is, however,

using a literary-critical method on comics, and since comic books are not entirely

literature nor pure art, taking a sole method of criticism and applying it to the medium is

not going far enough. Though one might say that the critical methods employed depend
 16

on the academic background of the critic. A step further, however, would be a suggestion

of using a method specific to comics that is a wholly original form of critical discussion.

A Comics Studies Reader does, however, serve as a primer for further reading of

these authors in their books, particularly Inge’s Comics as Culture and Hatfield’s

Alternative Comics. Inge’s work is a 1990 text that is somewhat outdated, but still a

useful work of criticism. This book provides a reason why the study of comics is an

important activity. In the introduction, Inge writes: “Comics serve as revealing reflectors

of popular attitudes, tastes, and mores.” He discusses how comics have grown from long-

distant stories of our historical culture: Dick Tracy was inspired by Sherlock Holmes and

“Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant, Captain Marvel and the Fantastic Four draw on the heroic

tradition to which Hercules, Samson, King Arthur, Beowulf, Davy Crockett and Paul

Bunyan belong.” (Inge, xiv). Inge spends much of the text discussing the cultural roots of

comics and gives a very complete look at how they became a twentieth-century cultural

icon.

Hatfield’s book is a more recent critical study in the tradition of Inge. He writes,

“Critical study of these alternative comics and graphic novels begs certain historical

questions: What conditions have allowed for the creation of such extended, formula-

defying comics? What cultural and commercial circumstances have enabled the growth

of alternative comics and the recognition of comics as a distinct literature?” (Hatfield 3).

For Hatfield, this kind of study involves independent comics, or non-Big Two comics.

Big Two means Marvel and DC Comics, who produce the superhero books, the most

popular form in the medium. He focuses on self-published works, such as Jamie and

Gilbert Hernandez’s Love and Rockets, as well as on the rise of Harvey Pekar and R.
 17

Crumb in the pages of American Splendor. Most of the work is spent positing that

alternative comics, or “underground comix” gave the form new literary power that drove

the advent of the graphic novel, the first example of which is Will Eisner’s A Contract

with God.

Eisner is considered the “father of the graphic novel.” Even though the term

technically means s a longer-form comic book, usually upwards of a hundred pages, the

graphic-novel form is still regarded with some disdain by comics’ authors. Novelist and

Sandman writer Neil Gaiman once said on the difference between a comic book and a

graphic novel, “I felt like someone who’d been informed that she wasn’t actually a

hooker, she was a lady of the evening.”

The central issue that invalidates quite a bit of comics studies is the stigma

Gaiman touches on. A lot of time is spent justifying the discussion of the medium

because of the stigma that shadows American comics art. The term comic book suggests

something not serious. Paul Lopes, a sociology professor at Colgate University, discusses

why this issue exists in American comics. In his article, “Comics and Stigma: Popular

Culture and the Case of Comic Books,” Lopes uses Erving Goffman to articulate why

stigma attaches itself to popular culture and lowers it into a lesser class. This is an

interesting piece in that it examines why comics are associated with lower-class culture.

For example, “the framing of popular culture as enmeshed in a hierarchy of cultural

distinctions seems inadequate in delineating the difference between stigma and low

status” (Lopes 387). The stigma of comics, Lopes reasons, began with the medium’s

being regarded as having a lower standard because the art was thought to be simplistic

without devoting much attention to important things such as anatomy, and because the
 18

writing seemed over-hyped, with an air of phoniness. Let’s be honest: at its inception,

this labeling of comics was correct. Much of the work was unsophisticated, but today

comics have reached new levels of literacy and artistic prowess -- so much so that the

stigma should no longer be lingering. Comics have become tools for learning, expression,

imagination, and an effective way to encourage enthusiasm for reading among children.

The connection with children has been a two-edged sword. Lopes writes, “The most

interesting aspect of the stigma experienced in the world of comic books in North

America was how the stigmatization of comic books as sub literate and a children’s

medium prevented this art form from evolving into more adult genres similar to those in

the field of popular literature.”

This basically confirms that in order to study comics seriously, we must first

engage against the stigma that preoccupies these essays, which many of these scholars

spend pages are trying to combat. Lopes covers this issue extensively and asserts that the

stigma no longer exists:

The market for graphic novels has continued to grow over subsequent
years, with Japanese manga representing around two-thirds of the market in 2005.
Even mainstream book publishers are no beginning to recognize that comic books
can present sophisticated narrative and visual art, and engaging adult materials.
And the general press, from Entertainment Weekly to the New York Times, now
reviews graphic novels. With the recent success of graphic novels catering to both
children and adults, and the success of film adaptations of comic books, perhaps
normals have finally discovered that the American comic book is a unique and
complex art form. (Lopes 411)

Lopes’s conclusion is that many academics have accepted this stigma; however,

most recently things have changed because of cultural deconstruction. “I would

emphasize that putting stigma front and center is not simply cultural politics, that is, not

simply an ideological battle over cultural distinctions, but is a critical politics that
 19

addresses the ‘real’ negative effects of discrimination against cultural forms and

practitioners.” (Lopes 412).

Essentially, this is a diagnosis of something that really started when Frederic

Wertham wrote his damning book Seduction of the Innocent, which all but killed the

medium in the 1950s. The argument was that comic books breed juvenile delinquency,

present horrifying violence, and pedophilia--the very same argument we’ve heard today

with regard to video games.

However, scholars like Hillary Chute fight against this stigma. Having worked

extensively with Art Spiegelman on the archive edition of Maus, collecting the materials

that went into putting together his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, she has also

written for PMLA and many other publications. Chute is currently a junior fellow in

literature in the Harvard Society of Fellows and recently edited, alongside Art

Spiegelman, MetaMaus, an archive of his references to Maus. She makes the argument

that in the modern study of comics we should focus on non-fiction work. The article,

titled “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative,” calls for a new kind of

discourse, with a focus on the form of “A comics page [which] offers a rich temporal

map configured as much by what isn’t drawn as by what is: it is highly conscious of the

artificiality of its selective borders.”

Chute is a formalist, referring to the space between the panels—what makes a

comic a comic—the gutter. This approach adheres to the principle introduced by Lopes

that critical scholarship of comics focus on the form and its practitioners. Chute also

believes the best form of literary comics come via non-fiction.

 20

“Some of the most riveting books out there—the ones waking up literary critics—

represent often vicious historical realities…For instance, three of today’s most acclaimed

cartoonists, Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, and Marjane Satrapi, work in the nonfiction mode.”

(Chute 457) Chute goes on to say that those books are about war and that is what brings

legitimacy to the form; Spiegelman on World War II, Sacco on Palestine, and Satrapi on

Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

For Chute, in nonfiction comics there is a style that calls for “formal grammar

[that] rejects transparency and renders textualization conspicuous, inscribing the context

in its graphic presentation.” This means that the style of the comic forces the reader to

engage with it on multiple levels; that one cannot just break it down for the text itself, one

also must analyze from an artistic perspective. Within this complex perspective, the

comic presents itself as its own medium.

Douglas Wolk in his Reading Comics develops this approach even further and

goes deeper into the themes Chute discusses but includes superhero alongside non-fiction

comics. This work not only talks about where comics stand as a cultural medium in 2007,

but also creates solutions to problems raised in A Comics Studies Reader by discussing a

method in which we can understand why comics work as a literary medium and by

specifying who is doing the best work in every one of its genres. There are individual

chapters dedicated to self-published creators like the Hernandez Brothers, Dave Sim, and

Charles Burns, to the recent classics like Alison Bechdel and Art Spiegelman, and to

superhero auteurs like Morrison and Alan Moore.

The central thesis of Wolk’s book is to show the diversity of the medium as well

as to use the book as an entrance point for non-comics readers to understand the form.
 21

Wolk sensibly argues that one cannot apply any established form of literary or cinematic

criticism to comics, because the medium has its own rules. Even though it is a marriage

of many media (art and literature), it cannot be strictly defined as aligning itself with one

form or the other. It is, distinctly, its own thing, which is to say: “comics.”

Comics are not prose. Comics are not movies. They are not a text-driven
medium with added pictures; they’re not the visual equivalent of prose narrative
or a static version of a film. They are their own thing; a medium with its own
devices, its own innovators, its own clichés, its own genres and traps and liberties.
The first step toward attentively reading and fully appreciating comics is
acknowledging that. (Wolk 14)

This is the central standard that runs throughout Wolk’s book, and it is the line

that I will be following throughout this thesis. Wolk also says the hallmarks for Grant

Morrison’s writing are present in “reality-bending metafictional freakouts dressed up in

action-adventure drag; metaphors that make visible the process by which language

creates an image that in turn becomes narrative.” (258)

We will take this description a bit farther. Since his first major work, for the

following twenty-five years of his career, Morrison has written more creator-owned

books than any of his contemporaries, and has provided memorable runs on the biggest

corporately-owned superhero characters in comics from the Justice League, to Superman,

Batman, and the X-Men. His work has been so intriguing that he has been the focus of

three academic works and a documentary. University of Massachusetts at Amherst

English Professor Timothy Callahan’s book, Grant Morrison: The Early Years,

establishes a discussion of the Scottish writer’s early work and how it grew from the

pages of 2000AD and thrust him onto the American comic book shore with his best-

selling Batman: Arkham Asylum and Animal Man. Callahan takes us right up to

Morrison’s career in the mid-1990s where Patrick Meaney picks up the ball and runs with
 22

it in his book Our Sentence is Up, which studies Morrison’s masterpiece The Invisibles

on an issue-by-issue basis. Both Meaney and Callahan’s works give us a view of

Morrison’s talents, but the critical narrative previously ran out with Meaney’s work,

which only focuses on The Invisibles, a series that ended in 2000.

What this essay will do is pick up where Meaney left off and discuss Morrison’s

twenty-first century work, specifically focusing on his seminal run on All-Star Superman.

We will do it with a focus on Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,

whom Morrison discusses at length in his autobiography Supergods as a seminal

ingredient in all of his work. My intent is to show how Morrison uses the principles of

Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man in his current work. Callahan brings us the early

stages of Morrison’s career, where he largely worked with lower class (serf-like)

characters like Animal Man and the freakish team of biological rejects called the Doom

Patrol. Meaney examines Morrison’s most celebrated work, The Invisibles, which

establishes the model that Morrison likes to work with. Following the end of The

Invisibles, Morrison goes on to write forty-two issues of X-Men from May 2001 to March

2004, and provides what is largely seen as the best Superman story of the twenty-first

century in All-Star Superman which ended its twelve issues in 2009. His artist is Frank

Quitely, who is known for a high level of detail. We will conclude this chain in his

historical autobiography Supergods and his rebooting of the comic that started the

superhero movement, Action Comics, in September 2011.

Pico and Morrison in Supergods

The point of this thesis is to connect the study of comic books, specifically

superhero comics, to something that has deep philosophical roots. These roots give new
 23

meaning to a literary and philosophical renaissance currently taking place within comics,

spearheaded by Morrison. By saying Pico’s Oration is a major influence, Morrison is

bridging the gap between a seminal piece of Renaissance thinking and a modern form of

expression. Morrison opens the floor to discussion of Pico in conjunction with the study

of graphic narrative and so includes the entire medium. In the conclusion to Supergods,

Morrison writes that he drew his work from Pico.

Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man is still regarded as the foundation

stone of the “humanist” movement that strove to cast off the manacles of Church
dogma, locked in place since the founding of St. Peter’s Basilica in AD 324, but
for all its status as a humanist manifesto, the Oration is without a doubt urging us
to reach far beyond the human, into the realms of angels and gods. It asks us to
accept the superhuman as an undeniable fact of our nature, and the goal of our
future evolution as people. (Morrison 414)

What Morrison is talking about, the push he makes in All-Star Superman, is the

capability of a human being to live up to the highest ideals and to raise oneself to a higher

order. The journey Superman goes on in the book is about his living up to his ideals and

trying to permanently affect the lives of the people he has sworn to protect, even after he

passes away. By living up to the highest humanistic ideological standard, Superman

stands as a symbol for what humans are capable of if we live up to our core values. To

live up to our ideals, which implicitly come from something higher than ourselves, means

we attain the ability to become better. Superman does this with Lois Lane, when he gives

her a potion and a suit that allow her to mimic his abilities for twenty-four hours, thus

giving Lane the ability to see the world from his unique perspective. He does this again

with Lex Luthor at the end of the series. This is the central theme within All-Star: that

humans can ascend to a higher plane of existence if they embrace their core ideals.

Morrison believes that Pico’s Oration details the core of Renaissance thought. In comic
 24

books, we can imagine whole worlds and build relationships amongst extraordinary

beings and connect with them on a human level, and by creating these things we are able

to do what God did.

The number of similarities between Pico’s beliefs and Morrison’s is large: both

believe in magic that enhances man’s dignity and strengthens his will; the Oration

provides a model for mankind’s ascent to a higher level of being; a higher consciousness

is central to Morrison’s themes. Both are heavily influenced by Kabbalah; Pico is

regarded as a syncretic, and, in a way that is parallel, as a comics writer Morrison is

known for his style that is perfectly in step with his varied artistic partners. In this way,

he never lets his tendencies as an individual get in the way of art, and by association the

art tells the story he is attempting.

Scholars generally see the Oration as an introduction to Pico’s beliefs. M.V.

Dougherty recently edited new essays on Pico, and has renewed interest in the

philosopher since the 1960s. A reason for this has to do with the state of political

discourse. Dougherty writes that the new significance of Pico has quite a bit to do with

the work of Erasmus, Machiavelli, Kepler, and Voltaire. He also cites Milton, Donne, and

Shakespeare. “Without doubt, therefore, Pico has long been recognized as an important

figure in Renaissance thought, although some historians have debated whether Pico is

best viewed as a representative intellectual from an age replete with intellectuals or as an

exceptional figure deserving of particular admiration.” (Dougherty 2). For many Pico

scholars, including Dougherty, the Oration creates a complete and sufficient basis for the

discovery of all human knowledge and a myth that we can ascend in the chain of being;
 25

Pico’s work is now the focus of a collaborative commentary hosted by Brown University

and University of Bologna.

There has appeared a series dedicated to editing and translating the

volumes composing Pico’s Kabbalistic library collection. Additionally, the
appearance of philological studies on Pico, as well as historiographical accounts,
suggests that the present state of studi pichiani is a healthy one and that interest in
this Renaissance thinker will continue to grow. (Dougherty 4)

Pico’s work began when he was studying Aristotlelianism at the University of

Padua. He was already proficient in Latin and Greek, and began studying Hebrew and

Arabic under the Jewish Averroist Elia del Medigo. It was here that Pico adopted the

philosophy of Islamist Ibn Rushd, who came to be known as “Averroes.” He interpreted

Aristotle to mean a few things: First, there is only one truth, but you can get it through

two ways, philosophy and religion. Second, the world is eternal. Third, the soul is divided

into two parts: one is individual, and the other is divine, but the individual soul is not

eternal, and all humans share the same intellect at the basic level.

After studying at Padua, Pico went on to do postgraduate work at the University

of Paris. It was probably in Paris that he began his 900 Theses of which the Oration is a

defense. The speech and the theses form the first example of humanist syncretism,

because they combine many religious and philosophical schools, among them Platonism,

Neo-Platonism, Aristotelianism, Hermeticism, and Kabbalah.

Morrison combines many of these things as well. Platonism sets forth the Theory

of Forms, which says that sense objects -- always being engaged in situations of perpetual

change like touching, smelling, and hearing -- are never genuine and always up for

reinterpretation. In Morrison’s comics, speech patterns and visual cues are never

explicitly stated to be what they appear to be. There is always a deeper level of symbolic
 26

and meaning in his comics. He emphasizes this, paradoxically, by working with detail-

oriented artists.. He needs that artistic detail to balance the abstract notions he is trying to

convey. For example, Frank Quitely his artist on We3 and All-Star Superman comes from

the artistic school of French comics pioneer Jean Giraud (Moebius) and Japanese Manga

creator Katsuhiro Otomo. Phil Jimenez, from The Invisibles, has a very fashion-conscious

and streamlined American pop style, and Rags Morales, the artist on the Action Comics

reboot, presents motion in a static medium coupled with un-paralleled character emotion.

The characters seem alive in Morales’ art. Overall, every detail in Morrison’s comics,

from character to background to action, has an underlying meaning that differs from what

is explicitly depicted. That doesn’t mean that the surfaces presented are not genuine, but

that there is another layer of significance to the art. Readers recognize this depth, and

Morrison’s works are frequently annotated online; Callahan and Meaney’s books testify

to that, and websites like Comics Alliance annotate his current run on Batman,

Incorporated.

Kabbalah is really the system that we can sink our teeth into regarding Morrison

and Pico. Sheila Rabin, in Dougherty’s text presenting new essays on Pico, explores this

idea. “Rabin carefully explores Pico’s views on the relationship between natural magic

and Kabbalah, examining Pico’s explicit claim that magic requires an annexation to

Kabbalah [in order] to be efficacious.” (Dougherty 9). Pico began studying the Kabbalah

form with Marsilio Ficino while in Perugia, and it helped to complete his syncretic

thought in the sense that it was always his intention to approach a topic from many

different angles.
 27

Laura Sneddon, a University of Dundee Comics Studies student, interviewed

Morrison for the United Kingdom magazine, The Independent. There, he admits that he

used the Kabbalistic symbol of the lightning bolt while writing Supergods.

I embedded even deeper in it this Kabbalistic thing, where the whole

metaphor of the lightning bolt began to be really significant because I noticed that
in every age of superhero comics, throughout the transformation of superheroes,
there’s a hero with a lightning bolt. You know, if it’s not the Flash, it’s Marvel
Man, it’s connected to the original lightning bolt motif and the lightning bolt is
the same thing that the Kabbalah talks about, this thing called the lightning flash
which is the magician’s path along the Kabbalistic Tree of Life structure. And,
put simply, the lightning flash is the instant connection between the divine and the
material. And so I thought, there’s something here, about how comics work and
the idea of these energies that once would have been called Gods but are now
dressed up like Superman and the Flash and Iron Man and that notion of the flash
of lightning. His whole book has this embedded structure of the lightning flash
touching each of the ten sephiroth of the Kabbalah. (Sneddon,
http://www.comicbookgrrrl.com/ 9.29.11)

Not to wander into too much territory that Bukatman would sneer at, but the

allusion Morrison is making is on the surface level a distinction that super heroes are

mythological gods reinvented. Superman is Apollo, god of Sun; Batman is Hades, god of

the underworld; Wonder Woman is Athena, and so on. However, Morrison gives us a cue

to delve further into Kabbalah and how it relates to Pico in the ten sephirot. In Kabbalah,

the ten sephirot are beings that the Creator dispatches in creating the universe. They exist

to distribute the will of the Creator, according to Yechiel Bar-Lev (The Song of Soul 73).

The Kabbalistic Tree of Life that Morrison is referring to, which takes the form of

the lightning bolt, becomes an instant allegory for the symbol The Flash wears. For each

of these ten sephiroth, we can cite examples of superheroes. While that can set us up for

the criticism that we are treating superheroes as religious allegories, that notion is in fact

there, and Morrison utilizes it in his autobiography and in his history of the medium. The

Kabbalistic principles are just the beginning of the similarities that confirm Morrison as a
 28

syncretic. Frank Borchardt, in his article “The Magus as Renaissance Man” writes about

Pico’s relationship with Kabbalah:

Since Pico was one of the handful of other Christian Hebraists and
Cabalists active at the time, we can safely assume that their [Johannes Reuchlin]
common interests played some part of the in the meeting. Reuchlin, in any case,
knew and profoundly respected the works of Pico and cabalistic writing which
Pico had translated from the Hebrew. (Borchardt 62)

Morrison decorates his house with passages from Kabbalah texts, texts that Pico

probably translated. In a Rolling Stone interview, Morrison’s house is described as being

a part of the “millionaire row,” a suburb of Glasgow (Hiatt, www.rollingstone.com,

8.22.11)

“The latter implies that a magus, the moment he applied his knowledge to

conjure spirits or predict the course of events or try to influence them, forfeited his

credentials as a Renaissance magician.” (Borchardt 60) Morrison is an idealist, but his

forays into magic are for the sake of creation, to create a symbolic meaning that he

integrates into his work. On the surface, this practice appears selfish, but not because he

is using this formula to gain a higher understanding; by putting it into comic book form;

rather, he is creating an alchemical literature that introduces the reader to a higher form of

creativity.

The method Morrison uses that conjures prediction is derived from an article in

the futurist magazine Towards 2012 written by Iain Spence, which gives a brief overview

of his book entitled the Sekhmet Hypothesis: The Signals of the Beginning of a New

Identity. Here we enter very speculative territory. Morrison writes, “Sunspot activity

follows a twenty-two year cyclical pattern, building to a period of furious activity known

as the solar maximum, then calming down for the solar minimum. Every eleven years,
 29

the solar magnetic field also undergoes a polarity reversal.” (301) It’s because of this

change that cultural trends shift, “like a desert wind carving the shape of its passage into

the dunes of fashion, art, and music.” As we shift between the two maximum states, we

go from one pole --say, a punk character-- to its opposite—say, the hippie.

“In 1955, when our planet was bombarded by cycle-19 solar magnetic waves,

young people in the West responded like needles in a groove with rock ‘n’ roll.” (302)

This gave way to the Silver Age of comic books with crew cuts and “chemicals and

lightning that could have been a song for a band. ” Morrison attributes Barry Allen’s

transformation into the Flash to this moment in history. Eleven years later, things tipped

the other way, towards the cosmic and psychedelic: “In 1966, the cosmic wave entered

the comics, to bring with it the gods of Thor, villains like the Anti-Matter Man, and John

Broome’s psychedelic Flash stories. The new heroes were anti-establishment ‘freaks’ and

mutants.” (302) What Morrison is talking about here is in the sunspot activity that shifts

every eleven years; cultural trends change between the orderly crew-cut nature at the

dawn of the Silver Age of comics. The embodiment of that age was Barry Allen, the

Kabbalah-like Flash who is blond-haired, blue-eyed, and a police scientist who could run

faster than the speed of light. When things changed in 1966, Stan Lee’s socially aware

Marvel Comics grew in popularity alongside the civil rights movement. These were the

anti-establishment “freaks and mutants” as Morrison says, like the X-Men and Iron Man.

How does this astrological indexing of cultural history connect with the teachings

of Pico della Mirandola? Borchardt writes that magic has always been a part of popular

culture,

Every indication suggests that conjuring and prognostication have always

been a part of the European scene, as they are of most cultures, that fortune tellers
 30

and potion brewers as a class have very much more in common with their
counterparts in other times and places than they have unique and specifying
characteristics. (Borchardt 61).

This concept of conjuring and fortune-telling is something that has been handed

down through the European generations and has a rich history from at least as far back as

Pico.

In this case, Morrison, as a humanist, reinvents ancient wisdom to be redeployed

in his art, something Borchart says is important in Pico’s Renaissance magic: “What

makes Renaissance magic a Renaissance phenomenon is, at least in part, its share in the

humanists’ compulsion to return to the sources, the claim to have rediscovered, restored

and drunk at the lost and forgotten spring of ancient wisdom.” (62).

This comes through in Animal Man, the very first series Morrison worked on in

American comics. In the fifth issue, a kind of Prometheus-myth allegory, “The Coyote

Gospel,” we open on a Wile. E. Coyote-type character as he falls off a cliff after being

foiled once again by the Road Runner, but this time the coyote falls into “our” reality

smashing end from end against the cliff, breaking limb after limb and even settling with

the trademarked dust cloud upon landing on the ground. In this issue a few things change:

Morrison goes from aping Alan Moore’s style of storytelling, which usually focuses on a

real-life issue (in this case: animal rights) and makes use of grave-narrative captions and

internal monologues. In the fifth issue, Morrison moves away from this manner of

storytelling, replacing Moore’s style with an omniscient narrator; and even though the

tone is very serious, the pictures within the book are absurd. This gives Timothy Callahan

the idea that Morrison is an absurdist, and engages against Alan Moore who is an ironist

(Callahan 70).
 31

This change of approach adds pathos to the Coyote character, and it certainly tied

into a Moore-like animal-rights theme of the first storytelling arc5, but Morrison goes in

another direction entirely. In this single issue, Crafty the Coyote, confronts the “God” of

his universe, “[whom] we see only parts of: gingham pants, short-sleeved shirt, wrist

watch, and paintbrush. Crafty challenges this ‘God’ to end the suffering and violence in

his world and offers his own life in trade for the peace he desires. The bargain causes

Crafty to be reborn in Buddy Baker’s world as a flesh-and-blood creature.” (71)

The story is basically one of Crafty wandering around in Animal Man’s world,

wrapping up with a trucker who witnesses Crafty in all of his cartoonish glory and thinks

the coyote is a demon of some kind. So the trucker crafts a silver bullet from his crucifix

to gun down the hapless cartoon character. The trucker shoots Crafty just before Animal

Man arrives on the scene. There is Crafty, arms outstretched in a Christ-on-the-Cross

figure, being held by Animal Man, and he gives him a note, entitled “The Gospel

According to Crafty,” which says, “While he lived, there still remained hope that one

day, he might return. And on that day overthrow the tyrant God. And build a better

world.” However, Buddy can’t read the note—all he sees are lines of gibberish with no

words, and as we pan out of the death scene we see in the final fourth panel--the hand

that paints the scene with a brush.

This is just the beginning of Buddy Baker’s journey to meet his maker and realize

his place in the universe. By the end of the series, Baker meets Morrison and asks him

why he’s been putting the character through this terrible ordeal, just as Crafty the Coyote

did. Animal Man #5 is the first instance of the Morrisonian trope that would make him

5
A comic book “story arc” is usually between four-to-six twenty-two page issues.
 32

popular among readers; the commentary on the creation meeting the creator and the

creator himself or herself becoming a part of the fictional world, creating an internal

magic of the self made into a fiction suit. A fiction suit is something Morrison often

refers to as a way a writer puts himself into the story, essentially making the writer a

character within the fictional narrative. The idea behind it runs similar to an astronaut’s

space suit (Morrison 117). Morrison uses this concept of the fiction suit on a regular basis

in his seminal comic book piece, The Invisibles.

The other magic that Morrison makes use of, along the positive idealistic

principles championed by Pico and his contemporaries like Trithemius and Agrippa, is in

his process for sigils, which I will explain further down. “The magical system” Borchardt

writes, “even at most idealistic among the Italians before Trithemius and certainly at its

most hazardously practical in the writings of Agrippa before him, proceeds ‘positively,’

‘affirmatively.’ Study leads to knowledge and, by stages, to power and miracle.” (69)

Positive magic is something that Morrison exemplifies at every turn. The practice he is

known for, for actualizing creation, is in sigils. The process is, well, eclectic.

In Our Sentence Is Up by Patrick Meaney, we get an explanation of sigil magic.

The sigil is something Morrison has borrowed from chaos magicians Austin Osman

Spare and Phil Hine. A sigil is a magical symbol that represents a desire. To create a sigil,

Meaney explains: “Essentially, one writes down one’s desire, then takes its letters and

scrambles them into a witchy-looking glyph, which one then charges with energy when

your mind is a blank state. Although there are a variety of ways to get one’s mind to this

state, one of the easiest (and most popular) is to charge the sigil at the climax of

masturbation.” (Meaney 11)

 33

The big key to this syncretic and magic-based comparison through Pico is in

Morrison’s concept of the Super Context, which is a universal being towards which

everyone’s soul ascends. Attaining this level is the goal of Morrison’s main characters in

his seminal work, The Invisibles. “If one knows the true name and character of this

planetary spirit, that influence can be turned by force, to one’s advantage.” (Borchardt

74)

This theory verifies many things Morrison touches on in Supergods, that our

creation and reinterpretation of the old Greek mythologies, the alchemic nature of

comics, and our pure creative imagination can all be unleashed through the medium,

creating a delivery system that has no limits. This syncretic notion seems harmonious

with the whole system of Pico’s thought.

“The order and necessity which govern nature in particular and creation in general

are made to govern the supernatural and the creator. At that moment, magic is no longer

so pious, for it implies a coercive power in the hands of humanity that can finally be

imposed on God. And that impiety retroactively demolishes the entire system.”

(Borchardt 74)

Meaney says that the concept of the Super Context works as a philosophical idea

that we can apply to our world,

One can also think of the Supercontext as a comment on what happens to fiction

after it’s been read. The main character [from] The Invisibles, Jack, says just

before ascending: ‘I’ve said my bit and it’s your go now.’ The story proper is over

and the characters’ universe is flooded by white. Now, the characters will exist
 34

inside our heads, living on in the living on in the larger-dimensional bioships we

know as human beings. (Meaney 281)

The idea is that once these ideas lived in Morrison’s head, and now that we’ve

read them, they exist in ours too, and that gives a whole new picture of reality. The

Invisibles, one might say, is ur-Morrison: from everything here, we can draw a line

through his twenty-first century work.

The Oration on the Dignity of Man and All-Star Superman

Paul Oskar Kristeller’s introduction to the Oration in the book Renaissance

Philosophy of Man, speaks of the level of work Pico went through to prepare the speech.

“The range of Pico’s learning is not only extensive; it assumes additional interest from

the fact that he was able to absorb so many different ideas and traditions that most of his

contemporaries would have considered incompatible.” However, Kristeller notes that the

“oration was printed only after Pico’s death, when his nephew included it in a

posthumous edition of his uncle’s collected works.” (218).

So Morrison got it wrong, Pico never actually gave the speech. “In December,

1486, Pico published in Rome his nine hundred theses, inviting all scholars interested to a

public disputation in January, 1487. The disputation never took place. Pope Innocent VIII

suspended it and appointed a commission to examine the theses.” (218) Pico never was

able to give this speech as Morrison supposes. This is just one instance where Morrison

gets his facts wrong, and throughout the book he frequently makes other errors: names

and years and creators on particular books, as well as other events, but those are

peripheral things. More central is this point, which Morrison understands quite well:

The true distinction of man consists rather in the fact that he has no fixed
properties but has the power to share in the properties of all other things,
 35

according to his own free choice. Yet since man has this power of choosing what
form and value his life shall acquire, it is his lot and duty to make the best
possible choice and to elevate himself to the life of the angels. (219)

The second sentence is crucial to understanding Morrison, because of the way he

presents himself as an optimist, a character dressed in all manner of outfits, and--most

importantly--in his work. “The Oration is without a doubt urging us to go far beyond the

human, into the realms of angels and gods. It asks us to accept the superhuman as an

undeniable fact of our nature, and the goal of our future evolution as people.” (Morrison

414).

This belief comes through his comic book work, specifically the way that he

articulates his characterization. Morrison bases his stories on character and on the life that

a character wants to attain, and most of all he changes that character’s perspective

through extraordinary means. Eventually this figure attains a higher level of

understanding. This is what happens to Lex Luthor in All-Star Superman, the best work

Grant Morrison has done in the twenty-first century. In this book, Superman is at the end

of his life, and the entire series is about Superman’s going through twelve labors, similar

to those of Hercules, while being the best man he can be, given his abilities, and leaving a

lasting legacy behind him. Lex Luthor in the series is bitter because he blames Superman

for being in the way of allowing Luthor to gain his full potential as the smartest man on

the planet. He blames Superman’s very existence for having kept him from doing real

good for the human populace. He has fixated on killing the Man of the Steel, because, in

his mind, Superman has been stealing the stage that was meant for Lex Luthor. Superman

calls him out on that just before they send Luthor to the electric chair. He chastises

Luthor for this fixation because it shows that he couldn’t stand the idea of someone’s
 36

being better than him, that he has an egotist’s mentality; in fact, the only thing stopping

him from doing anything that would have been good for the human race was himself.

After getting the chair, Luthor--through some siphoning technology given to him by the

sun-eating computer Solaris—has gained Superman’s powers. After a battle with

Superman, Luthor finally sees things the way that Superman does, and it blows him

away. As a result, Luther understands the strain the average human goes through on a

daily basis to be the best possible person, right down to the microscopic level, and

through this vision Luthor understands why Superman does what he does--he can’t help

himself, he exerts himself in a way that is the nature of his abilities--to be the best

possible man he can be.

This is a truth in the spirit of Pico della Mirandola. “Pico’s notion of a universal

truth in which the various thinkers and schools all have a part obviously belongs to this

same tradition. It has been suggested that Pico’s conception may have had some

connection with the Averroistic doctrine of the unity of the intellect.” (Kristeller 220).

This section really solidified my notion of Morrison’s being a twenty-first century

philosophical follower of Pico. “Ficino’s doctrine of natural religion and to his attempt to

reconcile Platonic philosophy and Christian theology... However this may be, Pico’s

‘syncretism’ differs from ‘eclecticism’ and modern ‘perspectivism’.” (Kristeller 220) The

reason Morrison is a syncretic in the tradition of Pico comes through in his comic work,

because if Morrison can tell a story in the simplest manner, through his script work and

art direction without getting words in the way of art, he will do it. That is the nature of

comic books: they demand a synchronicity of two different artistic styles that we’ve been

convinced do not work together, when in actuality they can do so. Similarly, the mission
 37

of the Oration and the 900 Theses was Pico attempting to combine many religious

philosophies that were seen as incompatible to create a new humanist thought.

“The notion that man owes his distinction to his freedom and that he is

emancipated from the hierarchy of being is further developed and emphasized in Pico’s

Heptaplus.” (220). More than anything else, it seems Morrison’s attitude can be reflected

in Pico’s philosophies, the attitude being that man is not fixed within the hierarchy of

beings, that man himself is capable of anything; and it is Morrison’s belief that we are

capable of creating worlds much in the manner of divinities. This is a singular line in

Pico’s Renaissance thought, and it gives Morrison a philosophical connection with this

seminal thinker.

Conclusion

Religious allegory is an obvious element that comes into play when discussing

superheroes, and that is especially true when one looks at Pico in relation to this tights,

flights, and fisticuffs medium of contemporary culture. The question that follows this

examination must be: what does this say about the reader, the creator, or scholar working

with comics? For Morrison, it is about love and reaching a higher level of the self. For

the scholar, it is about the depth and complexity of comics.

For Grant Morrison, the primary theme that runs through All-Star Superman is

Superman’s love for his adopted home. This makes him a Christ-like figure, but unlike

the Christ of organized religion, Superman is unwilling to impose sanctions on what to

eat on certain days, shaming a person’s sexuality, or proclaiming that one is doomed as a

human being if one does not accept a desert wanderer as one’s savior. Superman is a

Jewish hero; specifically he is like Moses, and as Ben Saunders writes in his book, Do
 38

The Gods Wear Capes? “Superman is not Jesus at all, but Moses—a savior-figure who

escapes deadly peril as a baby in a floating capsule, to grow up gifted with great powers

and burdened with great responsibility.” (Saunders 16)

In Morrison’s All-Star Superman, virtually every action the Man of Steel makes

in this twelve-issue series is out of love for his adopted home world and its people; to

make it a better place after he’s gone. The last words he utters before flying into our

wounded yellow sun6 is to Lois Lane: “I love you, Lois Lane, until the end of time!”

In the reboot of the comic that started the superhero genre, Action Comics,

Morrison writes a younger Clark Kent who has lost his adoptive human parents at a

young age and is forced with scattershot memories to make his own way in the world.

This younger Kent is Superman at the beginning of his career, as Morrison has said in

numerous articles covering the beginning of the publishing reboot, whereas the All-Star

version is the hero at the end.

The distinct difference between this younger Superman and the All-Star one is

that Clark Kent is less a disguise in his reboot, more a human extension of Superman’s

will. The two represent sides of the same personal element: Superman is the physical

actualization of Clark Kent’s down-and-dirty-reporting personality. Superman is the

muscle, and Clark is the brain behind the operation, because Kent protects the

downtrodden through his job as a reporter. In the first issue of Action Comics, Kent

relentlessly pursues the rich and powerful Glenn Glenmorgan, he exposes his illegal

sweatshop factories that overwork the poor for a pittance. In order to get a confession out

of Glenmorgan, Kent’s t-shirt-clad, fire-eyed alter ego threatens the elderly crime boss by

6
Our sun was damaged in the battle between Superman and Solaris.
 39

lifting him over his head with one hand and threatens to drop him from his penthouse

apartment.

By the end of the first arc, in which Superman encounters the knowledge-

collecting Brainiac, Glenmorgan goes insane as a result of his ordeal. In issue eight, Kent

is congratulated by his editor for tireless undercover work to build an expose against

Glenmorgan. The inevitable Superman question arises: who is Kent really? Is he

Superman or Clark? Following the discussion with his editor, Kent is confronted by his

landlord, who figures out his secret in the melee of the last couple of issues. She asks:

“So are you Clark pretending to be Superman, or is it the other way around?” Kent

replies, “Why don’t we talk about the rent. You can always check me out on TV

tomorrow.” I added the italics for emphasis, because this is a signal phrase because we

come to realize the modus operandi of both identities in the following scene.

On TV, Superman is accepting the key to the city after saving it from Brainiac.

Morrison writes Superman saying, “I’m here to stand up for people when they can’t stand

up for themselves and I’m here to help out and make things better any way I can.” The

young Kent in his baggy clothes puts the “man” into Superman. They are extensions of

each other. Kent is not the cipher that hides the soaring boy scout in plain sight, they are

one being, and like every other human being there are two sides to the coin. There is the

man and his beliefs that he puts forth in his work, and the physical presence that makes

them possible. The belief that combines the two, that equalizes them, is this: they are

there to help people better their circumstances. Clark Kent, the man, is the human thought

process of making things better, and his high-flying alter ego—Superman—is the Pico

humanist of ascending to a higher order—a super being.

 40

Ben Saunders writes that this idea is central to human’s ideological obsession

with superheroes. The superhero is about wishing the world a better place; because of

their gifts, these characters feel an enhanced responsibility to make the world better.

Saunders writes: “I have simply tried to approach superhero comics as fantastic,

speculative, and distinctly modern expressions of a perhaps perennial human wish: the

wish that things were otherwise.” (Saunders 3)

This is a natural extension of Pico. His idea that things could be better from a

humanistic theological perspective is the leading question in his Oration. The syncretism

in Pico’s work was an attempt to gain a unified thought on God and the nature of our role

in the world in relation to higher order beings. This is precisely what Morrison and

Saunders are trying to do: provide a link to a fantastical being that enriches our everyday

lives, and pushes us to show our talents.

The interesting aspect of Saunders’ book is that he conducts close readings of

superhero books before the modern era of comics; he says these books were seeds

Morrison and Alan Moore grew out of to do their ground-breaking work. He writes:

I believe that the ethical and existential questions that inspire so many of

our philosophical and theological inquiries are also constitutive of the super-

heroic fantasy. I believe that we hear and respond to the urgency and power of

those questions when we are swept up in the experience of a superhero comic.

(15)

One could probably write a whole other thesis on this book, but Saunders gets to a

truth. It is love of these four-colored adventures of high imagination and worlds unseen

that inspires readers, creators, and students. People who spend time with comics not only
 41

are in touch with childhood, but because of that they love to spend time talking about the

medium and interacting within the community it engenders. A desire is bred out of these

works to share and forge a path to enhance the medium in areas it does not get to

normally. This desire is displayed in constant, sometimes annoyingly evangelical,

exuberance to get other people into comics, because of a want to get new readers to enjoy

something new and refreshing.

This love drives people like Saunders. This is also the root of Morrison’s creation

and his exploration of Pico in his widely read and celebrated memoir, Supergods. As

Pico’s Oration was about the dignity of man to ascend to a higher plane of existence, it is

the beauty of this medium that makes it a continuation of his Renaissance thought. The

thought is this: the human mind is capable of reaching a level of existence and

imagination if we do what we love, if we give into our ideals and in turn become the best

possible person we can be, and superhero comics are the best testament to that

enlightenment belief. As Harvey Pekar, the Cleveland-based writer of the independent

comic American Splendor, said: “Words and pictures. You can do anything with words

and pictures.”
 42

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