5 out of 5

From the books that first grabbed me – Slaughterhouse Five, Catch-22 – to the movies that similarly stuck out and shaped my tastes – Re-Animator, Die Hard – I think I’ve always been attracted to more of the cynical or questioning view of the world; later, when I’d springboard off of these fledgling tastes to the wide and wooly world of whatever, I’d discover that the deeper something dug, the more I’d side with it.  In general, yes, we seek out views that support our own, and so I would get invested in those views that embraced the inherent hopelessness of being living, conscious beings.  Not that I could necessarily form that thought, initially, but I would recognize my disappointment when a text or film wouldn’t “go all the way” with something.  A glimmer of possibility would exist.

Early on in Morrison’s career he wrote Lovely Biscuits, which dabbled with some Lovecraftian – Lovecraft being the grandaddy of fear of the unknown, of course, which is very much in line with that hopelessness I enjoy giving myself grief over – horror, but when his comic career got a’going, he would take this seed and apply some Morrison chaos magic to it to make for his Unified Everything writing style, where the universe is just a layer of a layer of a layer and it’s all connected.  It took him a while to nail this formula, but early on it provided some masterful explorations of it – Invisibles, Filth, even JLA – but they all got a bit twisted in their intentions, despite my general acclaim of that stuff.  And by twisted, I just mean that Grant was still using his “formula” to explore his life at that point, thus Invisibles felt like a tour through his take on the world, and Filth was him using that take to process some personal drama.  JLA was using it to show his love for the big and bold world of comics.  But he got a reputation, and got multiple opportunities to refine what he was doing, leading to the last, like, ten years or so of rewriting all of (DC) comic history via Superman, Batman, and etc.  (Yes, I’ve covered this process in other reviews, sorry for the repetition…)  After fairly exhausting that tact by unifying eras of comic history… what to do?  And so it seemed that Mr. Morrison started to experiment with genre.

Happy was a noir attempt.  Annihilator played at some horror elements but was really a study of the writing process, so something perhaps autobiographical in that sense.  Throughout all of these works, the ghost of Lovecraft’s unknown has been there, but Morrison would know it and put names to it and define it by the end of his runs, even if at first glance it seemed impossibly confusing.

Fittingly, then, Nameless is the first time he hasn’t defined it.  He’s chosen cosmic horror as his genre, and it’s what I’ve wanted to read from him ever since his JLA blew my mind as to what I could expect from a Big Two book.  Telling much about it is telling too much, but we have a nameless protagonist, an occult specialist, who’s hired to assist a team to explore a mysterious meteor in space.  And if there are echoes of every Event Horizon-like film there, then yes, but that’s only your starting point.  In typical Grant style, the story keeps “restarting” at various point, but in not-typical Grant style, it all actually adds up… And it’s to something horrifying.  (In the sense that it satisfies my desire for exploring hopelessness.)  It’s like Grant just read Thomas Ligotti and then went through a break-up; it’s like he got tired of trying to unify everything and decided to let it fall apart instead.

Or perhaps an undeniably skilled and inventive writer just wanted to try his hand at cosmic horror.  Whatever the case, he knocked it out of the park, every issue, every page.

Chris Burnham is still a bit sketchy for me at times; he has Quitely’s ornateness, but Frank uses clean linework at points that solidifies his panels, whereas Burnham always has a bit of jitter to his figures.  But: I do think he’s an ideal match for Grant, as, like Weston on Filth, he seems to have a clear idea of the ideas Grant is trying to bring across visually, as well as working with whatever insane paneling the page demands.  The art is impressive, and appropriately grotesque.  It’s perfect for the book, I’m just not a full-on Burnham fan yet.

Nathan Fairbairn’s colors are magic, imbuing the art with plenty of richness without undercutting the horror or isolation of the space scenes.

In short: the book looks great.  The design of the title still looks a little hokey to me, but otherwise, Rian Hughes’ design work sets the right off-kilter tone for the series.  Lastly – after listening to a podcast on 2000 AD letterers, I’ve been trying to pay more attention to Simon Bowland’s work, but it somewhat lacks character to me.  I have to admit that his bubble placement and tail direction is pretty perfect, but maybe its just the buffer around his words or something, his lettering just seems sort of floaty to me, I dunno.  Over analyzed.  I’m just jealous ’cause I want to be a letterer anyway.

Besides that half-compliment / half-nit, the only negative thing I have to say is that I was getting prepared to save money on some books and write Grant off (gettin’ outta touch with his medium, like Garth Ennis), but Nameless means I can’t do that.  CURSE YOU, MR. MORRISON!