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Post by rberman on Mar 22, 2019 22:55:23 GMT -5
Seaguy #1 “Run, Xoo! Run” (July 2004) P.1-6: Meet our protagonist Seaguy, dressed for a day of snorkeling but seated dockside, winning a game of chess against Death, a skeleton gondolier who complains that the deck is stacked, upturns the table, and stalks off. Death is said to be blind to black and white, which is all well and good when collecting souls but not so useful when playing chess.  A nearby diner, closed, advertises delicacies such as Deep Fried Koala. Seaguy’s sidekick, Chubby da Choona, is a cigar-chomping, levitating fish like a haggard version of Ariel the Mermaid’s pal Flounder. Nearby, She-Beard the maiden warrior dares any man to challenge her; no one does.  P.7-10: At the Grubstop grocery store, Seaguy sees ads everywhere for a new foodstuff called Xoo which comes in all sorts of forms. Sure, we’d love to try some! Passing a statue commemorating the fallen hero Technostrich, he recalls the battle in which Anti-Dad was defeated and evil vanquished from the world. But all is not quite well; meteorites are falling from the moon to Earth, some bearing Egyptian hieroglyphics. One falling stone slays the horse pulling Seaguy’s carriage, forcing him to walk home. He’s not too perturbed, though. Everything is always fine.  P.11-15: As he sits at home watching everybody’s favorite cartoon “ Mickey Eye,” Seaguy resolves to do something heroic to get She-Beard’s attention. But what? The evening news briefly shows some apocalypse in progress. That’s no fun. Back to cartoons! And pass me a can of that Xoo Cola. Mmm, yummy.  P16-24: At the Mickey Eye amusement park the next day, Chubby sees something sinister down the sewer grate. It’s not a clown, either. But his curiosity is dispelled by a sudden storm of moon-meteorites, including one carrying the American flag. Seaguy runs into his idol, retired Doc Hero – retired because there’s no evil left to fight, right? Here Doc, have a can of Xoo Cola.  P25-32: Seaguy vomits up his Xoo Cola, which has become a sentient bubble gum creature. Instantly cops appear from everywhere, demanding the return of the Xoo. Instead, Seaguy and Chubby race with the Xoo to his boat, the Bumble-B, and roar out to sea.  My Two Cents: This series, released just before the techno-pet story We3, is by far the most whimsical Grant Morrison story I’ve read yet, but dark forces are clearly at work in this world in which everyone shrugs off all evidence of suffering and danger that might interfere with their Disney-saturated lives. I’m surprised Morrison got away with calling the corporate cartoon/theme park monolith “Mickey Eye.” Will Xoo be the agent of Seaguy becoming “woke”? We’ll see!
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Post by rberman on Mar 23, 2019 7:20:21 GMT -5
Seaguy #2 “The Wasps of Atlantis” (August 2004) P.1-5: Seaguy successfully hides from the eyeball cops among the smoking statues of Easter Island, disguised as a lunatic wearing a Texas flag and a baseball glove.  P6-16: The sentinent glob of Xoo leads Seaguy to its home, a filthy floating factory. The workers there try to feed Seaguy some xoo to make him forget his mission, but he’s rescued when his sentient Xoo runs amuck and dives into the main xoo vat, making it all a huge sentient beast.  P17-21: A signpost leads Seaguy underwater to the lost city of Atlantis. He undertakes an incongruous climb up a submerged mountain (climbing, not swimming, though he is wearing flippers) and finally reaches a pinnacle temple poking above the waves, though this somehow was not visible when he was on the ocean surface previously.  P22-32: Seaguy’s non-swimming sidekick Chubby is already at the temple, stirring a nest of clockwork hornets which sting him fatally; Death comes on his gondola to collect Chubby as a new shower of meteorites rains down from the moon.   My Two Cents: There seems to be a lot of dream logic, or perhaps drug logic, at work in this story. Morrison presents so many preposterous elements (a South Pole coated in chocolate, smoking statues, a fish that hates water, etc.) that we’re clearly supposed to roll with the experience instead of questioning it. Some people’s suspension of disbelief may stretch further than others.  I suppose Europe has a “dark chocolate surplus” because xoo has supplanted it as a delicacy. Or perhaps asking such “why” questions misses the point that nothing is supposed to make sense. The amnestic effects of xoo suggest that it’s “the opiate of the masses,” one of the tools that Mickey Eye uses to keep society oblivious to the horrors that are still out there for those who are paying attention. The forces of industry don’t want the populace at large to know that xoo can become sentient. Exploitation is easier to stomach (literally) in ignorance. As in Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle, this is a world where evil has triumphed. But the crowning achievement of its triumph is that evil has made it seem like good has won, so nobody bothers to fight.
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Post by rberman on Mar 23, 2019 18:57:52 GMT -5
Seaguy #3 “Mummy on the Moon” (September 2004)  P.1-9: Seaguy half-successfully fends off seagulls from devouring the corpse of Chubby. That night, buckets lowered from the moon disgorge jackal-soldiers which seize Seaguy and carry him up to an Egyptian city.  P10-17: In a lengthy flashback, Pharaoh Aten-Hut (get the joke?) recounts how he built the moon 5,000 years ago as his tomb, and then launched it into orbit with millions of firecrackers, creating a shockwave that sank Atlantis in the process.  P18-25: Aten-Hut wants to turn the moon 180 degrees so that his palace faces out to space instead of always gazing at the Earth. He’s looking for heroes to help make that happen, but failing that, he makes a deal with Mickey Eye's butterfly agent, ceding the moon to corporate control in exchange for a prime spot for himself at the upcoming lunar theme park. Seaguy is overwhelmed by mechanical scarabs and falls unconscious…  P26-32: Seaguy is forced to watch Mickey Eye cartoons until he forgets all about his real-life adventures. He’s deposited back on the dock with a new parrot sidekick to begin the whole story all over again with a chess game against Death.  My Two Cents: The lunacy (ha) continues, and we wouldn’t be surprised if Seaguy woke up out of a dream and was in a totally different circumstance than we’ve seento date. At this point, the story has become a chilling allegory about how corporate interests keep us sedated and distracted so they can pursue their own designs. There’s no telling how many times Seaguy has made this circuit of revelation and amnesia, unable to affect lasting change against forces beyond his control, force-feeding him stupid entertainment while a much more interesting world is out there for the taking. Seaguy thinks he’s making important choices – in this new chess game, he’s playing black instead of white – but only within the limits careful circumscribed for him. Even the kindly old Sea Dog is revealed to be Lotharius, an agent of Mickey Eye, operating out of a giant geodesic dome within an EPCOT-esque theme park.  A word about the logo on the cover. Grant Morrison is known for giving attention to logo design, and I like the “three bubble” motif that makes up the letter “g.” Just one of those little things.
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Post by rberman on Mar 24, 2019 7:09:56 GMT -5
Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #1 “½ Animal on a Stick” (June 2009) P1-7: Seaguy peers into his aquarium, Morrison’s favorite device to remind us that just as we watch the worlds within our world, so also our world is under the gaze of eyes on a higher level. (In this case, Mickey Eye.) See also the aquaria in Flex Mentallo (image below) , JLA, The Filth, etc.  Looks like Seaguy has been away from home longer than he realized. His pet fish is dead, and the skeleton in the fish tank reminds him of something. We know he’s thinking of Chubby, but he can’t remember that because of his brainwashing last issue.  P8-11: She-Beard won’t pay the rent to Sea Dog unless he bests her in a duel. No matter; she can live rent free as long as she doesn’t look too closely into the influence that Sea Dog’s secret master Mickey Eye is exerting across New Venice.  P12-15: Strolling through the Mickey Eye theme park, Seaguy encounters Death, who reminds him about the forgotten Chubby. Eye police cart Death away before he can say more, but this gets Seaguy thinking. Didn’t he used to have a boat? The theme park starts to seem repetitive and boring. His parrot Lucky, another secret agent of Mickey Eye, tries unsuccessfully to change the subject.  P16-20: Doc Hero introduces Seaguy to former villain Professor Silvan Niltoid, a bald Sivana-type (dressed like Morpheus from The Matrix) who has been trying, with partial success but a lot of confusion, to reconstruct the past out of the evidence remaining today.  P21-4: Lucky the parrot confesses to being an agent of Mickey Eye. Sea Dog reveals his true identity as Lotharius, head of Mickey Eye security, and then he bludgeons Lucky to death.  P25-32: Seaguy is taken to a sanitarium and force-fed Xoo Pie to restore his amnesia. The sanitarium’s other patients are other costumed heroes who confirm the existence of Chubby Da Choona. The ghost of Chubby appears, but before he can deliver the all-important exposition we’ve been waiting for, Lotharius floods the sanitarium with knockout gas. Three more Seaguys break in to rescue our original Seaguy, as depicted on the cover.  My Two Cents: The story of Seaguy was apparently plotted in three segments of three issues each. I guess Morrison and Stewart were busy on other work, given the five year gap between this issue and the last one. Or perhaps the first one didn’t sell well, and Morrison had to bide his time and earn the right to resume publication despite the weak sales. This installment is the least outlandish so far – no moon mummies or chocolate glaciers – and mainly builds on concepts elaborated in the first three issues. As such, there’s not a lot else to say except that Professor Niltoid’s brainbow is a fun idea, and his haphazard attempts at forensic science caution us that the whole may not be easily discerned from the sum of its deconstructed parts. Morrison hits on that theme in Multiversity: Pax Americana when Captain Atom’s disassembly of a dog yields disappointing results. 
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Post by rberman on Mar 24, 2019 18:47:17 GMT -5
Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #2 “Viva El Macho!” (July 2009) P1-9: Seaguy’s trio of rescuers are identified as Treeguy (who can grow tall), Peaguy (who can shrink), and ThreeGuy (who along with the other two is basically Triplicate Man, but he has no other power of his own). Taking refuge on Octomariner’s mechanized squid-ship, Seaguy learns that he is now Public Enemy Number One. We get some exposition about the Dad Age, back when supposed villains like Octomariner fought supposed heroes like Sea Dog. Octomariner offers Seaguy a secret identity as El Macho the matador.  P10-11: Lotharius oversees the next phase in his plan to sedate the public with pablum that makes super-heroes irrelevant: toy merchandising!  P12-18: In the Spanish city of Los Huevos (“the eggs”), El Macho (Seaguy) faces off against Monstro the bull, defeating him by dressing him up in women’s lingerie until the bull submits. This sport is apparently known as “bulldressing.” Leave it to Morrison to find a transvestite angle.  P19-24: El Macho’s girlfriend feeds him food of forgetfulness (presumably Xoo) to keep him from thinking about the sea. He rescues an old man on the street from bullying by rival matador Cortez, and the old man (revealed as former hero Buzzy of the Blazing Bee) gives Seaguy a secret warning to flee from his senorita’s clutches. She somehow becomes instantly eight months pregnant to convince him to stay.  P25-26: Lotharius’ goons force Doc Hero to miss a ride at the amusement park, driving him mad. He’s carted off to the sanitarium for treatment, a Mickey Eye crown thrust upon his head. The cleanup of the superheroes has begun. Who needs real heroes now that we have action figures? P27-29: During the next bulldressing match, Cortez steals El Macho’s bag of lingerie, so El Macho is forced to remove his own dandy clothing and use it to dress the bull. An enraged Cortez charged into the ring brandishing a negligee and is gored by the bull. Seaguy dons his scuba suit and dives into the ocean. His girlfriend Maria del Muerto reveals her pregnant belly as just a spherical eye-creature hiding under her blouse. She releases it to chase Seaguy.  My Two Cents: If Maria was an agent of Mickey Eye distracting Seaguy from his aquatic destiny with a new life in Spain, then I guess Octomariner was as well, since it was he that set Seaguy on the matador’s dangerous path. At the moment the whole issue feels like a detour, as if Morrison wanted to tell the “bulldressing” story and was willing to expend an episode of Seaguy to do so. Perhaps time will tell if there’s more to it than that.  The real story in this issue is the brief one about action figure merchandising, and how it eclipses the heoes themselves. This is a real thing.
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Post by berkley on Mar 24, 2019 23:39:53 GMT -5
Very under-rated series, I always thought. Did he ever bring the whole story to a conclusion?
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Post by rberman on Mar 25, 2019 7:46:13 GMT -5
Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #3 “Burn, Mickey, Burn!” (August 2009) P.1-6: At Mickey Eye Park, a child rejects the cult of fantasy consumerism and wishes for its death. He’s immediately taken into custody by a crowd of eyeballs which will joy him into compliance so he can join the rest of society in mindless consumption of sanitized media.  P.7-9: Lotharius unveils his plan for internet media culture and Big Brother-style conflict conclaves to replace amusement parks as the opiate of the masses. If everyone spends their time pleasurably interacting on screens, societal control will be assured. Doc Hero is a shell of himself, mindlessly consuming Xoo Beer. Even She-Beard has shaved her face and conformed to a more conventional role as Lotharius’ fiancée.  P.10-22: Posing as a carnie fortune teller, Seaguy feeds She-Beard a Forget-Me-Pie to break Lotharius’ hold on her. Seaguy, Professor Niltoid, and Doc Hero disrupt the wedding and, after a big fight, prevail. P.23-32: Lotharius’ butterfly ally, seeing that fortune has turned against him, strikes the final blow, blinding Lotharius, then offering Seaguy to assume Lotharius' job in an allegedly new regime which is clearly just the old regime operating under a new name. Seaguy wisely declines, deciding that “reforming a bad system from the inside” is a losing proposition. The butterfly desperately tries to co-opt Seaguy with various lures of vengeance and vice, but fails. Seaguy also declines the offer to join Doc Hero and Professor Niltoid on their new Super Set hero team. Instead, he duels She-Beard (still beardless) to a standstill, impressing her enough to win her love.  My Two Cents: Kinda makes you think, don’t it? That’s the mark of a good story. Morrison is taking aim at some American sacred cows, declaring that seeking happiness can be a way of playing into the hands of soulless entities which we ought to be resisting. Even the old superhero paradigm is declared unfulfilling. But what replaces it? That’s the real trick. Morrison will betray his own premises if Seaguy finds his fulfillment in romance with the now-conventionally-attractive She-Beard. Indeed, he has already betrayed his own premises in publishing this “can’t change the system from within” story through a subsidiary of media giant Warner Brothers. He is Seaguy, accepting the job offer from the evil butterfly.  This is the end of Seaguy’s tale, for now. It wasn’t supposed to be. There are still three more issues promised. But it’s been almost ten years now, and the third part has never materialized. Did Morrison lose faith in his concept? Did changes in his life and the industry obsolete the story he wanted to tell? Did a “don’t buy this story” story just sell too poorly? Was the story suppressed by his corporate overlords? One can draw connections from the themes of Seaguy to The Filth, in which a team of troubleshooters finds their own organization as problematic as the evil they were supposed to be fighting. There’s also thematic overlap with the Starro dream plot in Morrison’s JLA. And of course The Invisibles has a lot to say about the forces of societal conformity which seek to make us sedated cogs in the machine, “smooth in the brain, smooth between the legs.” The bulldressing issue was a mistake. That space should have been used as the first several pages of this issue were used: To give us a big picture understanding of this world so that we could see what instead we're only told about through Lotharius' extended monologue in this issue. Show us the diary rooms of the Big Brother apartments. Show us the toy stores. Show us more than one panel of the vast citizenry zombified by merchandising. Etc. Maybe that was all coming, in the third installment of the series which at this point seems like it's never going to happen.
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 25, 2019 12:02:26 GMT -5
I never really 'got' the humor in Seaguy, which saddened me as I'd typically been a Morrison fanboy. On the other hand, in between the two arcs I saw him at Wondercon, and when he talked about what he had planned for arc two I was nearly rolling in the aisles. I think the series ought to have been a standup routine rather than a comic.
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Post by rberman on Mar 25, 2019 12:19:24 GMT -5
I never really 'got' the humor in Seaguy, which saddened me as I'd typically been a Morrison fanboy. On the other hand, in between the two arcs I saw him at Wondercon, and when he talked about what he had planned for arc two I was nearly rolling in the aisles. I think the series ought to have been a standup routine rather than a comic. Hm. How did his description of part two match what was actually published? |
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Mar 25, 2019 18:33:56 GMT -5
I liked the first series A LOT but I never thought it was funny. Kind of surrealistically whimsical in a really dark way.
Totally missed the second series! I need to get around to reading it. I don't think it ever came out in trade.
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Post by rberman on Mar 25, 2019 18:57:50 GMT -5
I liked the first series A LOT but I never thought it was funny. Kind of surrealistically whimsical in a really dark way. Totally missed the second series! I need to get around to reading it. I don't think it ever came out in trade. Correct, there is no trade of the second series so far, nor of the combined first and second series, which I guess speaks to the poor sales that Morrison implied in Supergods. I happened to come across a bagged set of the second trio at an LCS recently; hence this review thread. |
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Post by berkley on Mar 25, 2019 19:19:01 GMT -5
I liked the first series A LOT but I never thought it was funny. Kind of surrealistically whimsical in a really dark way. Totally missed the second series! I need to get around to reading it. I don't think it ever came out in trade. Yeah, that was more or less my reaction, from memory - intriguing, but not a lot of laughs.
The second series is just as good as the first. I imagine the back issues shouldn't be too expensive, if you can find them.
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Post by berkley on Mar 25, 2019 19:20:58 GMT -5
I liked the first series A LOT but I never thought it was funny. Kind of surrealistically whimsical in a really dark way. Totally missed the second series! I need to get around to reading it. I don't think it ever came out in trade. Correct, there is no trade of the second series so far, nor of the combined first and second series, which I guess speaks to the poor sales that Morrison implied in Supergods. I happened to come across a bagged set of the second trio at an LCS recently; hence this review thread. Sorry to hear about the sales. It would be nice if Morrison could finish the story somewhere else if Vertigo doesn't want it, but I have no idea how these things work, as far as owners' rights go and all that kind of thing. |
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Post by mikelmidnight on Mar 26, 2019 13:22:13 GMT -5
I never really 'got' the humor in Seaguy, which saddened me as I'd typically been a Morrison fanboy. On the other hand, in between the two arcs I saw him at Wondercon, and when he talked about what he had planned for arc two I was nearly rolling in the aisles. I think the series ought to have been a standup routine rather than a comic. Hm. How did his description of part two match what was actually published?
My memory isn't that clear, but he only discussed the first issue and I recall it as fairly accurate. But just listening to him describing the bulldressing, for example, was a lot funnier than actually seeing it on the page.
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