In praise of soft sci-fi and all things Grant Morrison.

I've been drinking comics knowledge from the trough of the excellent comics blog, Mindless Ones, and was impressed by a piece posted last month by Amypoodle on Grant Morrison (a favorite writer of mine) and the unfettered imagination of his comics. It's mostly a piece on soft vs hard sci-fi, with Morrison falling mostly on the soft side. Amypoodle also explains why the DC Universe is superior (kinda like Apple and Nintendo in their realms), takes a few jabs at some sacred cows (she calls Mark Millar banal), and lays out just why Morrison rules.

"Soft SF is by its very nature a post-modern medium, in that it posits science fiction as just-another-narrative, refusing to afford it the privileged status of the realistic. It ditches the vanity of the Jules Verne school of SF and asks, ‘Of what is this genre made?’, or, ‘What does it feel like?’, as opposed to, ‘How would Nemo put together a fully functioning Nautilus?’ And Morrison knows full well what the super-hero is made of..."

"Mutants are the Marvel-verse equivalent of conventional SF’s aliens. There’s nothing wrong with the idea in theory, but Marvel have leeched all the life out of the fucker."

"Recent hard SF seems so wanky in comparison, what with its fetishistic obsession with the operating manual and what lies beneath the pants of the futuristic societies it slavers over. It also feels terribly stuffy and conservative. Vanilla."

Read it here. And check out her more recent posting on Jim Woodring and his Frank creation. Jim is to Fantagraphics what Grant is to DC, for me. Of course, Fantagraphics is a pond swimming with crazy fish, so the analogy might not be entirely apropos. Grant Morrison may shine like a crazy diamond because he chooses to work for companies where he is in the minority. Fantagraphics is full of batshit lunatics.

Thanks to Comics Should Be Good for hipping me to Mindless Ones. Check them out for their recent 100 best comic runs feature, if you're feeling canonical.