Joe the Barbarian

Grant may be my favourite writer (who isn’t also an artist) in the history of comics, and this is one of his most completely satisfying works ever. It tells the story of a boy named Joe going into hypoglycemic shock, and his epic heroic fantasy quest to get to the kitchen for a soda, then to the basement to reset the surge protector, after lightning switched the electricity off.

This is of course not the subject for an eight-issue series: his walk downstairs is parallelled by an adventure in a fantasy world, with a companion inspired by his pet rat, and all sorts of other complex relationships to his mundane world, from seeing his action figures (superheroes, Transformers, cowboys et al) in the armies there to new waterfalls after he leaves a tap running. Joe is there known as the Dying Boy, some sort of prophesied saviour from the new reign of King Death. It’s possible to read all of this as just delusion brought on by his sugar levels dropping, though of course there are a bunch of times where one world bleeds into the other – nothing provative, given his mental state, but who cares?

It’s an immensely inventive and varied fantasy world, bursting with ideas, one of those stories that gives you the impression that Grant gets a hundred good ideas every day. I swear there are individual word balloons in this with more ideas than many writers manage in their careers, all limned with evocative names. I particularly like the dwarf pirates, the Death Coats and the scientists whose place in this world is like that of magicians, while they invent batteries and electric toothbrushes.

Part of the reason why this is more fully satisfying than many other excellent Morrison scripts is that he has often had poor or merely tolerable artists, but here Sean Murphy shines with a brightness comparable to and fully up to the script. He does an absolutely magnificent job of designing the home, giving it all kinds of believable detail, making it look both ordinary and a daunting journey for a sick boy. The first pages in the house are simply Jack passing through rooms and hallways to his attic bedroom, and are utterly gripping.

He does just as great a job in the fantasy world, helped considerably by the always wonderful Cameron Stewart’s perfect colouring, muted for the most part but giving an otherworldly glow and shimmer exactly when needed. Murphy’s fantasy figures and places are striking and memorable, whether the Victoriana of the dwarf pirates’ domain or the ragged flying Death Coats. The visuals are exciting and compelling all the way through this, from the opening scenes in our ordinary world all through the magical adventures.

This is terrific on every level. The close binding of the adventure to the crucial but mundane events in the real world means that as well as exciting action on the grand scale, in a world packed with fresh ideas, we care about the boy who needs his sugar fix, who is scared by the darkness – obviously the idea of the two parallel worlds is not a new one, but the way Grant ties them so closely together is fresh to me, and extremely effective on an intellectual and emotional level. Add in first-class visuals, and it’s certainly one of the best Morrison comics I’ve ever read.