Hey, it’s time for an actual review of a comic. It’s been a long time since I did one one of those, hasn’t it?

SEAGUY: THE SLAVES OF MICKEY EYE #1

AKA SEAGUY 2 OH SHIT ITS REAL OMIGOD OMIGOD

So yeah, Seaguy – The first Seaguy series was always one of those things that if you liked it I immediately judged you as an okay person. Is an easy line in the sand to draw -  metaphor-laden story, art that comics fans raised on highly representational artists would call “cartoony”, and deeply disconcertingly downbeat. It was also a comic that had Atlantis, mummies, and chessgames with death. It is fucking awesome, and along with The Filth it’s probably the best thing Grant Morrison has written this decade. Even more importantly, Seaguy was the series that introduced me to Cameron Stewart’s work. Stewart’s the thing that’s so amazing about this book, and always has been – it would be very difficult to see anyone else tackle this material and not drastically change the tone of the book. Even Morrison’s most talented collaborators – Frank Quitely, JH Williams, Phillip Bond – none of them could have done this book without pushing it completely into full-on bad trip existential horror. With Stewart you get to see that there is some appeal to living in this world, there is some joy in the characters dressed like goofy superheros, there is some wonder in the vistas of Atlantis and the Moon. And it’s also because of Stewart that it’s so unnerving – the design is so appealing that when the omnipresent hand of corporate evil seeps it’s so much worse. Because that’s what happens in real life, the companies that give us childhood cartoons are the ones that treat us like the empty headed cattle that we are.

The original Seaguy series can pretty much be summed up as a Philip K Dick tour of Disneyland – a fictionalized one, not the real one. Disneyland is one man’s idea of a perfect world, and it’s ultimately the greatest picture of fascism sold as entertainment that we’ve got. The idea isn’t new to Morrison – it’s there in the Assault on Weapon Plus part of New X-Men, in the Filth, the Invisibles – but it’s not special to Morrison either. The Prisoner, which Seaguy spends a lot of time visually approximating spent most of it’s time showing society as a theme park to distract and pacify us as we are co-opted and compromised not only through coercion but our own complicity. William Gibson has a great short story called the Gernsback Continuum where a perfect, glorious future of pulp science fiction magazines is shown to be nothing more than fascism in disguise. Ironically it was published in a pulp science fiction magazine. There was even a Venture Brothers episode, “The Incredible Mr. Brisby”, that came very close to the first Seaguy series in tone. We’re shown that the cartoonist-turned-entrepeneur-turned-megalomaniac wants several things: an artificial society that lives completely by his rules, total brainwashing of his underlings, a new clone body, and sex with a panda bear. We’re even shown a group that want to destroy Brisby-land and preserve their suburban California lifestyle – which is pretty much the same thing that Brisby wants, only in a giant beehive-shaped building. Really though, the first Seaguy is PKD does Disney – the eerie simulacra, the constant observation and surveillance, disturbing television, the amnesiac protagonist, myth being rewritten as commodity, and the ending where the hero loses by being happy and normal. It even has a magical manmade product that will either change the world for the better or insidiously undermine it. That’s not the only reading there, but it’s the one that clicked for me – Jog has a great read of it being Morrison fictionalizing his experience working on New X-Men. And that works really well – it’s about a superhero who’s been retconned out of being interesting and he doesn’t understand why, and going to look only damages him further.

But yeah, that’s all first series – this is the SLAVES OF MICKEY EYE. Morrison has spent the intervening five years writing superheroes for DC comics. While there he kind of broke even in quality, producing some of the best work of his career and some of the worst, including the definitive take on Superman, a 30-issue metacrossover that could be considered a masterwork, a Batman run crippled by a full year of shitty art, aborted attempts to revive the Wildstorm Universe, a weekly comic novel that didn’t work until halway through, and a nasty, exhausted piece of megacrossover hackwork that made me question if he’d lost it for good. Cameron Stewart spent the time becoming even better, becoming CAMERON FUCKING STEWART with another series with Morrison in the 7 Soldiers project, a pretty stunning turn on Jason Aaron’s debut comic The Other Side ( which was probably his great artistic leap forward), a Lynchian webcomic, and a manga digest size paen to awesome shit called Apocalipstix (which you should read if you haven’t). So it’s interesting to see what would happen when these two guys got back together – Morrison hasn’t done a creator owned book since the Seaguy/ We3/ Vimanarama triad was released, and his DCU work has had a feel of burn-out on it in the final year; and Stewart has done nothing but get better, develop his own definitive “style” even though he was adapting it to each project in subtle and brilliant ways. Which is what’s going to make this book great – Morrison, like Warren Ellis, works best when he’s got an artist who’s as good or better than he is. And yeah, Stewart is up to damn task.

Let’s Panel Madness this for a second, Death is the cutest character design in the entire book. That’s all you really need to know – Death is no longer death, he’s a funny cartoon skeleton. He’s dressed like a gondolier, both referencing and dismissing Charon. Death’s a joke, a Hanna Barberra design in a Disney world. Seaguy doesn’t move the entire page, but Stewart shows us how he’s bemused, sadden, hopeful and angry through tiny changes in his face. The layout is even designed to squeeze Death out – his establishing shot is the smallest on the page, and when he’s in panel with Seaguy he’s tiny, until he’s completely removed from the shot, and then removed from the park on the next page. Even the little details of Death’s chess set covered in cobwebs, this is all subliminal information regarding the story through smart decisions in-panel. It’s stuff like this that’s the big separation between what Stewart does and what say, Tony Daniel does. There’s no detail that isn’t actual storytelling. So there’s less lines on the page, but the double page spreads read as vista instead of BIG SHOT OF GUY NOW.

So yeah, let’s get to the story – Slaves of Mickey Eye #1 is something I’ve needed for five years, but I think I got distracted and forgot. It’s great comics, and I’m completely unbiased in saying this. So with that out of the way – the book really lines up with Jog’s take, only the second volume is Morrison walking away from the Final Crisis and Batman RIP clusterfuck instead of being rewritten following a fairly successful New X-Men run. David Allison described it as JG Ballard, which I can see. I’m not well-versed in Ballard but the divide between Seaguy 1 and 2 is the more desolate tone to the thing. If the first is PKD, overheated and dope-logical, Slaves of Mickey Eye is a lot more matter of fact in it’s atrocities. The weirdness is still here, though. And it is weirdness. The cop-out, rote way to write about Seaguy is to call it weird. And once again, as I say in every one of these columns, it’s a shortcut to avoid thinking. It’s writing off Morrison as a drug addict, or someone who uses “mad ideas”, instead of actually reading the damn thing and thinking about what’s going on. But that doesn’t mean it’s not weird. Pink Goo monsters that the hero pukes up – that’s fucked up. Dinosaur bones made into gyro-cars is fucked up. A hospital mental ward where superheros are all wearing onesies with mitten hands is fucked up. And it would be just as much of a slight to dissmiss this stuff as all symbolism either. Seaguy is weird in a way that Morrison’s other work isn’t. That doesn’t make it incomprehensible – the “Autoraptors” eating oil is a brilliant piece of reverse logic that would only work in a satire like this.

The final page (and cover) is clearly Morrison aiming sqaurely at the current state of Iron Fist and Green Lantern and Ghost Rider, all by writers I’m pretty sure Morrison enjoys and appreciates. But the multiplication of characters is a new technique for making corporate superheros interesting again, and Seaguy is nothing if not susceptible to the state of superhero comics. You might say he’s at their mercy. It’s kind of weird for me that this is Seaguy series two – because there was a lot of Seaguy in the Seven Soldiers Bulleteer series. Sure the main premise was different, but there was a similarity in tone that I don’t think (or don’t remember anyway) was addressed when that book came out. Mind Grabber Man was a very Seaguy character, don’t you think?

Outside of the comics metacommentary, the book is exactly what I said above – a satire. I think that’s why “incomprehensibility” gets thrown at the first series so much, because American comics in general isn’t that big a fan of satire – there’s a lot of literal takes on Seaguy that dismiss it for logic flaws, when it’s really damn simple. Seaguy is about the western world – run by corporate interests, oblivious to the environment as it deteriorates, brutal towards children, obsessed with entertainment, run by a faceless government, consuming shit, rewriting history for niceness’ sake, preferring to be treated like children than actually have to deal with awful reality. It’s about having a life that’s tiny and joyless and empty. And there’s really hot nurses.

And that’s all well and good. But the real important things here are that Morrison is writing real characters again, who seem to be worth caring about. Lucky El Loro might be an evil agent and a Speedy Gonzales accent, but Morrison gives him as much character development as he did Chubby Da Choona in the first issue of the first series. It’s great to see that Morrison still has the gift for characterization that made me a fan in the first place. Most importantly, as this is a comic and I don’t give a shit how well it’s written if Ethan Van Sciver drew it, it’s BEAUTIFUL.

Slaves of Mickey Eye is probably going to be the best looking book that comes out of DC this year, and that’s including those JH Williams Batwoman pages done in watercolor. It’s a comic that I was dreading, just because I had built up what was coming in my head. It was not the book I expected, nor should it have been. It’s great, and being great, it surprised me. That might be all I ask for in a comic: that it surprises me.  Or that Cameron Stewart draws it.

(Now that that’s done, go check out the Mindless Ones’ non-annotations of the first 16 pages. And Andrew Hickey’s take here. And David Brothers as-they-were-coming-out pieces on Seaguy #1 and #2)