In his dream state, Nameless is moving between shifting parallelograms where you almost feel like gravity could fail at any moment. As it’s being expanded by knowledge of the asteroid and its sheer scale, the panels literally expand outward like balloons. The first thing you’ll notice, besides Burnham’s trademark exaggerated realism in faces and body language, is how perfectly he’s matching the page layouts to that sense of Nameless’ consciousness.

If you loved Chris Burnham’s art on Batman Incorporated (and who the hell couldn’t have?), consider that the mild salsa compared to what we are getting with Nameless. What it is, however, is an incredible vehicle for artwork that could make your eyes bleed with holy tears, because Burnham and Fairbairn are producing pages you won’t believe until you see them. Books that are truly complex and blossom more every time you read them, but still have, at their heart, a story you get on first, second, or even third read. But with so many recent Morrison pieces taking this same underwhelming pace throughout their entire series ( Happy!, Annihilator, and Joe the Barbarian are recent examples), I don’t have the confidence that the next three issues will be any more illuminating.Īnd that’s really different than the books from Morrison that really, really work. If it was just a question of slow first issue set-up, that’s one thing. We encounter a freelance agent who is moving in and out of dream to acquire an object for… someone… while being pursued by four… someones… and by the end of the issue, we know nothing about him, his pursuers, his new compatriots, or the mission he’s going on (except that it involves stopping an enormous asteroid from hitting the earth. And that’s troubling - for math and for literature. It may be the right answer, but the writer here isn’t showing me how he got to it so that I can understand WHY it’s correct. It almost feels to me like trying to get to the solution of a mathematical equation without showing your work.

Take the terrible things that happen in the world and instead of trying to make sense of them - experience them in their sheer horror - through a combination of dream, surrealist fantasy, and the type of graphic narrative only a comic book can provide.īut it doesn’t quite work for the same reason a lot of Morrison’s recent independent work doesn’t: too many steps are being skipped. If Morrison’s name is on a project, it’s an auto-pull for me at the local comic shop. I own the complete Invisibles in three different formats - floppy, trade, and genital-crushing omnibus. I have at least two long boxes full of single issues written by the gent. I’m what you might generously call a Grant Morrison super-fan. Art by Chris Burnham and Nathan Fairbairn

Nameless morrison