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Post by rberman on Dec 29, 2018 7:15:49 GMT -5
I'm pretty sure that's a reference to Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott (yes, that's his name). The basic theme runs like this: Flatland is set in a flat land: the two-dimensional plane inhabited by straight lines, polygons and circles... No-one in Flatland has any notion of a third dimension; everything is limited to one big, flat plane.
In this well-ordered world lives the narrator, A Square, a professional gentleman and proud father of four pentagonal sons (for male children have a good chance of being born with one more side than their fathers). One day, the Square meets an alien: a being claiming to be a three-dimensional sphere from Spaceland!
It's a trippy book. And given its age, pretty cheap. Got my brand new copy in a bookstore for a dollar. Yes, Flatland doubtless loomed in Morrison's mind not only over this particular bit of dialogue but over every single discussion of higher dimensions in any of his work, which is quite a bit. Understandably so, since the difference between a 2D plane and a 3D object is the most intuitive way for us to analogize about what higher dimensions are like from our own perspective. Even the Phantom Zone was depicted this way in the Christopher Reeve "Superman" films. The analogy goes one step further for Morrison, who often depicts lower dimensions not just as a Flatland, but specifically as a comic book page whose characters may discover the ability to pop out. We've seen it already in JLA for instance when Asmodel talks about entering "the plane of the book" when he descended from Heaven to Earth. We'll be seeing it again in the Quisp segment of this story, and we've seen it already in reviews of some of his other work. It will be a couple of days before I can post the next review, though. Actually, you expressed what I was trying to say better than I did. There's more of this upcoming when Quisp adjusts his appearance so that GL can see him properly. Or when we get to discussing Final Crisis, there's the scene in which Superman has one red and one blue eye, as if he were wearing those cheap 3D paper glasses that allow one to perceive a 3D image from looking at a pair of flat images. |
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Post by coinilius on Dec 29, 2018 8:42:54 GMT -5
And the Superman Beyond tie-in to Final Crisis involves the use of 3D glasses as part of the story.
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Post by rberman on Dec 29, 2018 9:18:21 GMT -5
And the Superman Beyond tie-in to Final Crisis involves the use of 3D glasses as part of the story. Oh, you read the story wearing 3D glasses? That element is absent from my trade paperback. |
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Post by coinilius on Dec 29, 2018 18:51:14 GMT -5
Yes the original came with 3d glasses so you could read it in 3d, with the conceit being that the glasses you were given were made from pieces of Superman’s 4D armor from the story.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Dec 29, 2018 19:59:16 GMT -5
Just in case you're wondering.. Triumph was mostly created by Priest.. he can be found in the pages of Justice League Task Force. The story was he was a founding member that sacrificed himself to be forgotten, but then he comes back, but is still the same age as when he disappeared. Gypsy and Ray (along with the L-Ron version of Despero and Martian Manhunter as the leader) were the team. Not sure why he's so old looking here.. something else may have happened after the JLTF team ended. Gypsy looking like Jubilee is weird... I don't remember that at all! Triumph was not created by Christopher Priest. He says so on his site. I think most everyone associated with Triumph (who was created by DC Comics Group Editor Brian Augustyn, Mark Waid and Howard Porter) was taken a bit by surprise by the near-instant backlash the character received from the fans.Priest also notes -
DC staffers simply loathed Triumph and actively plotted his death (they got rid of him in some Persian Bazaar manner after Brian left the company). I'm assuming this refers to the JLA story reviewed here. Triumph got screwed over hard in the final issue of JLTF. You have to know the basics of the then-recent Underworld Unleashed to really understand it, and it can be argued that Triumph really, really deserved what he got, but it's still hard. As for Gypsy looking like Jubilee... well, that was the style that the Justice League Task Force dressed in back in those days. Just look at some of the covers, especially starting around issue #22. Take a look at the cover for #32 - does that look like Jubilee? I don't know enough about the X-characters to say. Huh.. I guess I just assumed since he wrote him in JLTF like it was his. I don't think he got screwed, I think it was a pretty logical end to his arc that ran through the book. I would say I'm a bit biased in that I HATE that sort of retroactive character insert (I hated Sentry and the one they just did in Avengers, too). They did switch to a Red and Yellow uniform for a while... Gypsy never really looked right in it (it was so different from her usual look, and she's meant to be stealthy), so it's not a huge stretch there. |
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Post by rberman on Jan 1, 2019 12:46:41 GMT -5
JLA #30-31 “Crisis Times Five” (June-July 1999) Parts Three and Four
Issue #30 “Worlds Beyond”: Battle rages between the Thunderbolts Lkz and Yz; they grow immense and threaten to hurl the Earth and moon at each other like snowballs. On the moon, Triumph beats up Steel, who is forced to abandon his armor and hide in the Watchtower’s ductwork. His plan is to let the battle between the Thunderbolts get really dangerous (as if it hasn’t already) and then swoop in to save the day, justifying his team as the true JLA. Green Lantern and Captain Marvel confront Qwsp (see below) in the fifth dimension and discover that he is behind all the mayhem on Earth, writing action stories to amuse himself. But how to stop him? Issue #31 “Part Four: Gods and Masters”: Green Lantern and Captain Marvel convince the beings of the Fifth Dimension that the pink and blue factions can merge into a happy, unified purpose instead of fighting each other. But how to convince the two Thunderbolts?  Returning to our dimension, Captain Marvel writes a message “Ylzkz” with clouds, large enough for immense Yz to read it. Yz says that word, and the Fifth Dimensional police arrive to take Qwsp into custody for causing chaos instead of merely “mischief” in the Third dimension.   On the moon, Triumph is defeated by Superman and Steel, with assists from Batman and Aquaman. Spectre and Zauriel argue whether Triumph should be executed or incarcerated; he ends up frozen in JLA cold storage, another statue in the trophy room. My Two Cents: Morrison is pulling out some obscure Silver Age material here, including Aquaman’s regular encounters with the extradimensional being Qwsp (sometimes spelled Quisp) beginning in Aquaman #1 (1962).  But this version of Qwsp is doing the most Morrisonian thing imaginable: He sits at home, drawing the superhero comic book which our heroes are experiencing as their lives.  The Fifth Dimension looks a lot like the “extreme fragmented close-ups” art style seen In the “animal vision” of Morrison’s We3 minseries and on the cover of Flex Mentallo #4.    Triumph is enraged at being excluded from the new A-list JLA; His disgust at being denied access to worthy super-villains represents Morrison’s own disenchantment with the petty JLA of the early 1990s. He symbolically destroys the statues of the JLA and JSA in his anger and then professes, “It’s not personal.”   Worlds within worlds motif: Sentinel and Zauriel, as beings from a higher dimension, can slow their own experience of time in Spectre’s world so that they see time rapidly zip through its entire celestial life cycle until Spectre is free. Similar altered time perception was a plot point in The Filth and the Qwewq story in All-Star Superman.
 Green Lantern refers to Captain Marvel as “The man the child in his eyes.” This refers of course to Billy Batson but also to a Kate Bush song by that name. Bush was a major pop star in the UK but saw more limited success in the USA.
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Post by chadwilliam on Jan 1, 2019 13:53:09 GMT -5
Green Lantern refers to Captain Marvel as “The man the child in his eyes.” This just reminded me of how Morrison once referred to Captain Marvel in an interview. "He's like a little kid's idea of what a grown up is like". I've loved that quote ever since. Oh, and while I'm guessing that he might have been off-limits, it bugged me that no mention was made of Bat-Mite during this storyline. Yes, Morrison would come up with his own version of the character down the road and I can't imagine that Denny O Neil would have approved the idea (though it does make me wonder how much control O Neil had or chose to exercise outside of the Bat-titles since he didn't like the idea of Batman being part of the JLA and yet, here he is) but fifth dimensional beings, a shout out to Mxyzptlk, appearances of Quisp and Johnny Thunderbolt's Thunderbolt, but no Bat-Mite? I think it would have been cool to see Morrison's Batman admit that there was a time when he was regularly visited by a magical elf in a Batman costume who would pull pranks on him during cases even if Bat-Mite himself never showed during the story. |
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Post by rberman on Jan 1, 2019 15:10:07 GMT -5
Green Lantern refers to Captain Marvel as “The man the child in his eyes.” This just reminded me of how Morrison once referred to Captain Marvel in an interview. "He's like a little kid's idea of what a grown up is like". I've loved that quote ever since. This is also exactly what Busiek does with The Gentleman, his own Captain Marvel stand-in.  {Spoiler: Click to show}He is a young psychic girl's projection of her idealized father. |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 1, 2019 15:43:37 GMT -5
chadwilliam ... I wished Grant Morrison had written Captain (Shazam) Marvel. He would had done a great job on it.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 1, 2019 15:45:35 GMT -5
This just reminded me of how Morrison once referred to Captain Marvel in an interview. "He's like a little kid's idea of what a grown up is like". I've loved that quote ever since. This is also exactly what Busiek does with The Gentleman, his own Captain Marvel stand-in. {Spoiler: Click to show}He is a young psychic girl's projection of her idealized father. The Gentlemen ... Busiek's, where this came from ... and what company was responsible for it. Got me intrigued. |
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Post by rberman on Jan 1, 2019 15:49:46 GMT -5
This is also exactly what Busiek does with The Gentleman, his own Captain Marvel stand-in. {Spoiler: Click to show}He is a young psychic girl's projection of her idealized father. The Gentlemen ... Busiek's, where this came from ... and what company was responsible for it. Got me intrigued. This is from the series Astro City by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson. Here is the beginning of our thread on it, which covered nearly 100 issues: www.classiccomics.org/thread/5214/kurt-busieks-astro-city-issue |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 1, 2019 15:54:24 GMT -5
rberman ... Silly me, I should had known that. Thanks.
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Post by chadwilliam on Jan 1, 2019 18:50:30 GMT -5
chadwilliam ... I wished Grant Morrison had written Captain (Shazam) Marvel. He would had done a great job on it. I like how he writes him here. A lot of writers portray Captain Marvel as a little kid driving around in an adult body, but Morrison writes him as an experienced adult superhero who achieved adulthood without ever going through that intermediary stage of adolescence. His innocence and purity doesn't come from naivety as other writers would have us believe, but from the fact that these attributes didn't get lost through the grinder of angst and cynicism most people go through during their teenaged years simply because Marvel skipped those years altogether. In other words, Morrison's character retains all those Holy Moley's and bashfulness around women that a child would have, but the intellect and even maturity that an adult with his responsibilities would hopefully have in this situation. It's interesting to note that in his exchanges with Green Lantern (where he can actually read Lantern's thoughts since they're spread out over the flat surface they find themselves inhabiting) it's Raynor who comes across and goofy and awkward while Marvel is the adult who establishes their priorities. |
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Post by berkley on Jan 1, 2019 20:14:44 GMT -5
I wonder what Waid has to say nowadays about that scene with Barda and Plastic Man, if anyone's ever bothered to ask him.
This has been an interesting thread. From a New Gods perspective, which is the aspect I'm interested in the most, I must say that it looks about as bad as it could get. The worst bits seem to come from Waid, but Morrison's use of those characters and ideas feel even more disappointing because I think that he should have known better.
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Post by rberman on Jan 1, 2019 21:05:13 GMT -5
I wonder what Waid has to say nowadays about that scene with Barda and Plastic Man, if anyone's ever bothered to ask him. This has been an interesting thread. From a New Gods perspective, which is the aspect I'm interested in the most, I must say that it looks about as bad as it could get. The worst bits seem to come from Waid, but Morrison's use of those characters and ideas feel even more disappointing because I think that he should have known better. Morrison does better by Kirby in Seven Soldiers and Final Crisis, which makes the lame Fourth World stuff in JLA all the more puzzling. |
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