Mindless Ones

Nick Spencer and Joe Eisma

Late to this party but so, probably, are a lot of you.

Like the fella on the Internet says, Morning Glories is very much of the Lost school of storytelling where mystery is all. Four issues down and everything is still pretty much up for grabs at Morning Glory Academy: who are these kids? Why do they all have the same birthday? Why on Earth are the faculty terrorising them? How the heck are they going to get out? Cultists!?! Who’s gonna do it with who? Morning Glories is one big question mark that keeps getting bigger and that’s it’s primary appeal. Not to say that Nick Spencer – a writer who seemed to come out of nowhere last year but has since thoroughly stormed DC ramparts with his work on Jimmy Olsen, T.H.U.N.D.E.R Agents and Supergirl – doesn’t make the comic work in other ways, the characterisation is whedonesque in it’s clarity, the plot is multi-laced but easy to follow, and the book is surprisingly fast paced, action packed, compelling and dramatic for a title where interpersonal dynamics (i.e. talking heads) are front and centre.

If I was to have a dig, there’s maybe a bit too much going on, too many elements in play, and as a consequence the book does risk becoming just a bunch o’ stuff, but on the whole the central characters have ju-u-ust enough gravity to hold the whole thing together. A stronger criticism is the way Morning Glories sometimes lapses into total unbelievability. No, I don’t buy Casey’s willingness to do anything other than scream and rage and weep post the revelation that her parents have been murdered, or any of the kids willingness to do anything other than whimper when it becomes apparent that their teachers are brutal lunatics willing to drown the lot of them.

The counter argument is of course that serialised fiction often has to juggle the realities of constructing ongoing drama with character plausibility, and that character often loses out in the equation, and I’m happy enough with that as far as it goes, after all Lost wouldn’t have worked if all the Losties spent the first few months sobbing for their less than ideal but better than being stranded on an island with a monster and hostile natives old lives, like, you know, would actually happen in real life. People need to keep going and behave in something approaching an orderly fashion is pretty much the bedrock of dramatic storytelling, but I can’t help feeling that Spencer has pushed some elements of Morning Glories just a little too far. Even Buffy, another obvious touchstone for this series, got a whole episode devoted to grieving her mother. Casey gets a neary a panel.

Perhaps the biggest problem with I have with the book doubles one of it’s commercial strengths. School as battlefield is a setting we’ve seen countless time before, it’s populated by characters who while well realised fit into well worn types, and hot girls in hot school uniforms vs hot sadistic authority figures, including nurses, ain’t exactly unusual given that those elements constitute the landscape of every young man’s wank fantasies. It’s calculated to appeal to the eternal teenage stiffy, the bit of us that watches shows made by Joss Whedon, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, and it’s all delivered via the kind of reasonably articulate if extremely dull art that specialises in cheesecake and looking a little bit like telly. Morning Glories is boring to look at if you don’t usually read comics with your hand down your pants, or want want your comics to ape the gogglebox, basically, and it’s aesthetic weaknesses work in tandem with it’s over familiar iconography, concept and storytelling methodology to produce a comic that sometimes feels a little flatter than perhaps it should given the unusually high quality of much of the writing.

I award this comic 3 brains and your wet willy.