Joe the Barbarian, by Grant Morrison

Of the big names of comic writing, I always struggled to get into Grant Morrison's work. I remember when I was reading a lot of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, giving his best-known books a try. I enjoyed Arkham Asylum but felt the writing was a little haphazard and overly concerned with being edgy in an attempt to seem terribly grown-up. I read a fair chunk ofThe Invisibles but just couldn't engage with any of the characters. So while it was Morrison's name that made me pick up Joe the Barbarian in the comic book store, it also made me cautious. Opening it to a random page near the end, though, and seeing the intriguing image of Joe and his two companions standing in front of an army that included Robin sitting on top of a (ahem, very much non-DC) Transformer while Superman hovers above and some sort of battle-scarred Care Bear cowered in the background, I was intrigued. 

As it turns out, the presence of these sort of cameos is minimal, but the comic itself is quite brilliant, easily my favourite of Morrison's works and actually one of my favourite limited comics overall. It has been optioned for a film, and it would make quite a brilliant one. 

The set-up is a simple one that allows for the full flow of Morrison's imagination. Joe is a young teen with diabetes, and when some unfortunate events around him visiting his father's grave lead to severe hypoglycaemia, he begins to hallucinate - and getting down from his attic room to the refrigerator in order to get a soda and then find the fusebox to get the lights back on becomes an epic fantasy populated by his toys and the people in his life who seem to represent the difference civilisations he meets in the world that struggles against King Death. 

It's a classic multiple-levels-of-reality story, recalling Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, with the various civilisations found in different parts of the house reminding me of Terry Pratchett's The Carpet People, but that angle of low blood sugar leading to hallucinations and the constant interpolations of reality that remind us that this is a serious medical situation that could lead to Joe's death, as well as the obvious abandonment issues he has, give layers of urgency and grit that take it away from being twee and keep it thoroughly modern. 

In his hallucinated world, Joe's pet rat seems like a huge warrior and becomes one of the best companion characters in this style of story I've ever seen, brave despite his reputation as a coward and a fine guardian. Together, they travel via the bathroom - populated by toilet dwarfs - down the vast mountains of the staircase, battle a monstrous dog that has wandered through the open door, receive aid from cowardly scientists, become tempted by the comfortable warmth of the hearth that is of course only a distraction, to the waters of life, but then before they are drunk, down into the basement where King Death dwells - in the clothes Joe's father left behind. 

It's consciously an archetypal hero's fantasy, and driven in part by the laziness of the ancient prophecy (of the 'Dying Boy'), but that is a large part of its charm. The presence of toys and various real-world interpolations are fun, and Joe himself is very likeable - he is bewildered by the world around him, trying to impress on these fantasy figures that there is a greater reality in which they don't really exist, with his square-jawed, wide-eyed design keeping him feeling grounded and ordinary rather than romanticised. 

This is perhaps something that a lot of other writers have done before. But it's done so well and with such exuberance - something I don't really associate with Morrison - that it's hard to resist. Highly recommended - and I certainly hope a film adaptation will eventually come.