Joe the Barbarian #4

I enjoyed reading this issue.  There were some nice moments in it, some clever dialogue, a bit of that meta stuff that Morrison likes to do (which I think may be what he's actually best at).  I'm not sure what to say about it though.

Instead, I want to talk a little bit about Morrison's writing style.  As I said before, for years now, Morrison's stories have been very difficult to follow, and this one's no exception.  So I wanted to try to figure out why that is.  What is it about the way he writes that makes you constantly wonder what's going on?  Is he doing it on purpose?  Is it a good thing?

As I also said before, it makes more sense on the second read than the first.  I think the reason for that is that there are lines that don't make any sense unless you've read the whole story.  A lot of writers do something similar.  It's the whole Chekhov's gun thing.  You set things up early in the story, and then they pay off later on.  But a lot of the time, Morrison does this with lines that seem like random nonsense when they're said.  And because they seem like random nonsense, you've completely forgotten them by the time they pay off.  Or at least I have.  My brain just tosses out random nonsense right after I read it.  If I don't comprehend something, I don't remember it.  So when these things pay off later in the story, it just seems like more random nonsense to me, and at the end of the story, I feel like I've just read a whole bunch of random nonsense.  The second time through, I remember the payoff when I encounter the setup, and I go "Ohhhhh."  I'm not sure if this is really effective storytelling.

I think another thing that makes it difficult to follow is a general lack of exposition.  This is a problem in a lot of comic books today.  When the story spans multiple issues, the reader has often forgotten what has come before.  Sometimes a recap is provided, but often it's not.  It's almost never provided in Morrison books, and his are the ones where it's probably most needed.  I think he often writes with the intention of the whole thing being read at once after it's finished, but that's not how it's released.  I often feel like I should just wait until Morrison's stories are collected as trade paperbacks and buy them then.  Of course, I did that with Invisibles and I still couldn't follow it, so who knows.

But in addition to the lack of exposition given to the audience, there also often seems to be a lack of exposition given to the characters.  A lot of the time, it seems like the characters don't even really know why they're doing what they're doing.  They're just doing it.  Or maybe it just reads that way because I can't follow their dialogue.  It often feels like Morrison's characters are speaking some other language.  They're talking to each other, and they seem to understand each other, but if I was part of that conversation, I'd constantly be going, "Wait, what?  What did you just say?  What does that mean?"

But another thing I said before is that I think Morrison's style is better suited to this story than it is to some of the other stuff he's written, and I still feel that way, and I think it's part of why I did enjoy this issue, and am going to keep buying the book.  It's about the hallucinatory fantasy world of a diabetic kid in hypoglycemic shock, so it doesn't really have to make a whole lot of sense.  It would still be nice to be able to follow the story on the first read though.