An odd couple for the 21st century

[arbre_rieur]

HAPPY!, Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson's new Image Comics project, debuted this week.

One's a grim 'n' gritty hitman scumbag, the other's... not.

Comments

[greenmask]

I expected Happy the Horse to be cuter.

[captainbellman]

So it's Z-E-A Batman and Bat-Mite all over again. *Shrug*.

[shaperofworlds]

What's Z-E-A stand for ?
I get the Batman Batmite reference but was curious about what preceded it

[icon_uk]

Zur En Arrh

[halloweenjack]

Why the hell not? Most of Millar's and Waid's creator-owned projects have featured expies of Big Two characters.

[captainbellman]

I just think it's a lazy well to keep drawing from. Or at least, they should be creative enough to go in a direction that distracts or disguises the fact that they're expies. Mark Waid's "Superman Gone BAAAAAD" will always be inferior to Alan Moore's "Captain Marvel's entire life was a virtual dreamworld, he grew up forgetting that fact after the government tried to kill him off, and as it turns out his powers were derived from aliens, and the knowledge of all this alongside Mary Marvel's turning evil and unleashing Hell on Earth is what caused him to adapt humankind into the perfect interstellar paradise".

Or, to put it mildly, the difference between a shoddy thief and a great writer is that the writer covers his tracks. This is why, having read "The Worst Witch" as a child, I never really got into the Harry Potter series.

Also, it only just occurred to me that Morrison ripped off "Miracleman" by making Mary Marvel turn irredeemably evil in "Final Crisis". If you asked him, of course, he'd probably say he was just making a homage...

[arbre_rieur]

I think it's safe to say the only people who'd draw a connection between Sax the nihilistic, balding hitman and Batman are people who have Morrison's Z-E-A Batman on their mind. Certainly, no one would call Sax an expy.

[captainbellman]

I'll admit that I was kind of segwaying into a discussion on the nature of using expies at all.

Although this just comes back to my original point, that Morrison has done the "Psychotic Tough Guy Teams Up With Cutesy Yet Sinister Cartoon Character That Only He Can See" storyline before. It's underwhelming now.

[sadoeuphemist]

But Mary Marvel didn't turn irredeemably evil in Final Crisis? She was possessed by an evil god and freed of his influence by the end of the story. If you're calling that a rip off then you're probably seeing tracks all over the place.

[captainbellman]

Given that she ends that series swearing to never again say her magic word again, I think "irredeemably" might apply. And I'm calling it a ripoff because Kid Marvelman was a character specifically based on her, and the idea of her becoming a mass-murdering, remorseless monster was done already with him. In FC they even have Mary Batson hugged in Billy's arms the same way Johnny Bates was in Marvelman's arms after his killing spree.

Even the 'possessed by Desaad' thing leads back to Kid Marvelman and Johnny diverging into different personalities, one of which was tormenting the other - and the entire point of Moore's final chapters of Marvelman were about superheroes using their powers to become Gods.

[sadoeuphemist]

Again, this is so broad that I wonder how you enjoy any fiction whatsoever without being bothered that it's a rip off. The idea of a pure, good-hearted character becoming corrupted is not some unique idea that no one is capable of thinking up independently.

A superhero becoming a god is not the same as a superhero becoming possessed by a god, it is sort of the opposite. An internal compulsion towards destruction is not the same as being taken over by a completely external force.

[freezer]

So... Sin City meets Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends?

[shaperofworlds]

Lovin your gif btw...

[kd_the_movie]

I guess Morrison saw all of the shit tons of money that Millar was making by creating these indie properties that scream "MAKE ME INTO A MOVIE DAMMIT!!" .......

cuz this would make a great movie.

[his_spiffynesss]

Yeah, the lead guy kinda looks like Bruce Willis too doesn't he?

[amaresu]

Maybe I was too hasty in rejecting this? I don't know.

Honestly?

[bewareofgeek]

I was bored with it. It read less like Morrison, more like a mediocre Garth Ennis riff.

Re: Honestly?

[filthysize]

Guess I'm not the only one. There's potential, but you can show these pages to someone and say it's by Ennis and they'll probably believe you.

Re: Honestly?

[whitesycamore]

That's exactly what it's like.

Re: Honestly?

[halloweenjack]

Rich Johnston's take on it over at Bleeding Cool seems to be that it's Morrison taking the piss out of Ennis and other tuff-guy writers.

[beoweasel]

Was I the only one expecting Happy to look more like Rainbow Dash?

[silverhammerman]

According to an interview, that is actually what Happy looked like in the preliminary stages, but neither Morrison nor Robertson particularly loved the look, and they were both much happier when Robertson settled on this.

[bruinsfan]

It's giving me flashbacks to The-Thing-that-Cannot-Die from the old Etrigan series a decade or more ago.

[darkblade]

I was thinking Pinkie Pie. Either way it probably only a pony because of FiM being so strangely popular.

[grazzt]

Oddly, there's a Naoki Urasawa manga with the exact same title, including the exclamation mark. Urasawa's was about tennis and gangsters, instead of a cartoon horse and gangsters.

[sharky_chan]

Can I assume that it, like everything else Urasawa touches, is amazing?

[grazzt]

Haven't read it yet. There's a review here though:

http://www.punkednoodle.com/champloo/2006/08/22/01-happy-by-naoki-urasawa/

[silverhammerman]

This looks to be kind of off to a slow start, but I think that's pretty standard for Morrison's non-superhero stuff, and I like that Happy the Horse looks utterly ridiculous, it's endearing. I don't think I'll be buying this in single issues but if I hear good things I'll definitely get the trade.

[blackruzsa]

Frightens me, that horse.

Still, seems interesting. The comments on this post are all putting me off it, though.

[indy2012]

The image of the literal horse feathers brings to mind Morrison's use of horse feathers in his Zatanna and Shining Knight series. In that instance, horse feathers were being used as a way to say "Bullshit" in terms of comic stories being objectively ludicrous and somewhat silly to take so seriously. This makes sense in that Morrison, as a previous poster put so eloquently, loves "taking the piss out of" the grim-dark characters and creators.