Explaining Happy! (And Grant Morrison)

What is “Happy!”, well take the Jimmy Stewart classic Harvey, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, any Quentin Tarrantino movie and a heap of commentary on the state of Superhero comics, filter it though the views and philosophies of Grant Morrison and thats “Happy!”. 

So brief synopsis of the book and the Syfy (or in the UK Netflix) series. Happy! is the story of Nick Sax (whose name should really be spelt Sacks to keep with the Christmas theme of the story), a disgraced cop turned mercenary and high functioning alcoholic and drug addicts reconnecting with his estranged daughter (Hailey) by rescuing her from being molested by “Very Bad Santa” whose been hired to do such things by the mob as revenge for Sax killing an extra family member (he was hired to kill 3 and killed 4). The bonus one having made a deal with Mr Blue (the main gangster) to split the money they where hiding between them, but with him dead, Blue has no access to his ill-gotten gains. Sax’s only ally in rescuing his daughter from not so jolly Saint Nick is Happy a blue horse and Hailey’s imaginary friend. Happy is 1-2-3-4-5 grades higher than a hallucination but only Sax can see him, Happy is also in stark contrast to Sax. Happy is everything you’d expect a child’s imaginary friend to be, loving, caring and very excitable. Now as Happy was originally published as a 4 Issue mini-series by image comics for a full length TV series things had to be added, unlike many other adaptations Grant Morrison did write the pilot episode and the finale of Season 1 and only the opener to Season 2. Additions to the book include Sunny Shine a prima-donna children’s TV presenter who owes his success to aiding in organised crime and a pact with the “Wishees” (another addition from the book) parodies of the Teletubbies that are secretly Lovecraftian elder gods that feed off of misery.

Now nothing by Grant Morrison is just a story, Morrison writes about his own life in a distorted way. He uses a method that he calls a “Fiction suit” to incorporate himself into the story; in Animal Man he became the character the writer, in the Invisibles he was King Mob, in All Star Superman he was Lex Luthor, during his run of X-men he was Professor X and in Happy he is Sax. Other people also get fiction-suited into his stories, Mark Millar was Kid Omega in his run on X-men and Morrison’s father was Flex Mentallo (in his eponymous series) and Superman in All Star Superman. In Happy! very bad Santa is Frank Miller and Alan Moore. Very Bad Santa only exists to pervert and distort something innocent and harm children, much like how these two started the Dark age of comics which lead Superhero comics to become more dour and depressing and Hailey is the innocent children who won’t look up to Superman or the Flash because they read Watchmen or any piece of crap written by Frank Miller. Even though Miller and Moore have drastically different political views (Moore being an Anarchist and Miller being an Anti-Feminist and self proclaimed Fascist) they both created comics intended to be deconstructions of Superheroes but are really just Adolescent trash that think they’re deep. Now Sax is no saint and Morrison in his post-Marvel work is more reflective and realising that he is also guilty of this but Sax like Morrison changes his way in the story and does what he can to protect his daughter even if Sax had abandoned her before she was born. Mr Blue is of course the editorial staff of DC (in the series he’s played by an actor who looks a lot like Brian Azzarello a contemporary comic book writer who worships and tries to emulate both Moore and Miller whenever he can), and DC seem to have sold their core audience of wide-eyed innocent children who aspire to be Superheroes for Miller and Moore fanboys. DC’s practice can also be described as predatory, a very good example of this is Harley Quinn, Harley was an innocent character with the mind of a child and the victim of the Joker but now she’s a fetish, licking phallic objects like baseball bats and sleeping with all the male heroes when they guest star in her comic.

What about Happy the eponymous character, how does he fit into all this criticism of DC comics. Well he doesn’t, Grant Morrison has certain theories about how the universe works. Happy is 5 grades above a Hallucination because he’s from the Fifth Dimension. Now stay with me on this, humans are fourth dimensional beings, we can fully perceive four dimensions (height, width, breadth and time), Comic book characters are one dimension below us, which puts them at the mercy of Four Dimensional beings, writers and artists craft their whole world, we change how they act on a whim, this is how Batman can be both Adam West and the version from Dark Knight Returns. His whole personality is defined by his creative team, he can be an angry loner or be part of a team of super pals. Now beings from the Fifth Dimension can affect us, but we can’t perceive them just like how Spider-man has no idea that Stan Lee is making him fight Doctor Octopus again. When we come across beings from the fifth dimension we can only imagine what they are and handily the fifth Dimension is to us Imagination. With Imagination we can create new worlds but we can’t exist in them we’re stuck with the four we have, to master imagination is to become akin to godhood. Happy as an imaginary friend is created by Hailey through the Fifth Dimension (which is imagination) and has become a native to that world, and with this he is all powerful but due to him being made by a child has no grasp of his powers (these ideas where alluded to in the second season of the TV series) and while Happy is a benevolent Fifth Dimension inhabitant others like the Wishees are not so nice and only wish to mock and toy with lesser beings on our plane of existence.

And if you can wrap your head around all that well done you now understand most of Grant Morrison’s back catalogue.

Fixing the Stan Lee Girls

Fixing the Stan Lee Girls

Comics from the 1960’s weren’t enlightened on their portrayal of women. It’s just a fact, no two ways about it. Sure it was a genre aimed at young boys written and drawn almost exclusively by men, but under a modern lens the early Marvel comics don’t hold up very well in this regard. To quote Professor Marsden when asked to weaken Wonder Woman (his creation) “How are young boys to grow up to respect women if we don’t show them examples of strong women”. Now the Stan Lee girl is a variant on how women (who weren’t Wonder Woman) where written in this era. The Stan Lee girl is young glamorous and has all the personality of day old dish water but is also very important to the male protagonist(s) of the Superhero book. Not all characters that fit this mould are Stan Lee creations, like Saturn Girl from the Legion of Superheroes or Elasti-Girl from the Doom Patrol, but Stan and his tendency to put his name on every book produced by Marvel (even if he had nothing to do with it) makes him synonymous with the trope.

Now that’s explained why not continue reading this as I explain how 4 of Stan’s creations became well actual characters not just “oh gosh isn’t she pretty”. I will not explore every female character that has a Stan Lee creator credit or I’d be writing a 200 part piece on the subject and Black Widow has been omitted because she wasn’t actually created by Stan and in no way fits the profile being first introduced as Iron Man’s Archenemy and not his love interest.

Sue Storm

The first woman of Marvel Comics (assuming the Fantastic Four haven’t lost their status as the First Family) and master of running away. Sue in the early comics is really good at getting kidnapped, especially by Doctor Doom or Namor. She brings antagonists to the Fantastic Four, while Doctor Doom uses her as bait for the other 3 members of the team out of convenience, Namor is to be the other rival to her husband Reed Richards. Prince Namor tries to lure her to be his queen, always unsuccessfully, because for her to be actually tempted to turn evil would imply some form of personality. Susan is actually so notoriously useless that in a weird Meta issue (Fantastic Four 11) the F4 read letters sent to them by “Fans” and Sue bursts into tears because all the letters get call her useless. This of course outrages Mr Fantastic who invokes the name of Abraham Lincoln to defend his future wife. 

Fantastic Four 22 is when the attempts to make Sue better started, before this issue Sue could only turn invisible and hide, this issue gave her the comics code classic Telekinesis. Telekinesis is one of the girliest superpowers in comics (not that it’s effeminate but it’s mostly held by female characters) because it can easily adhere to Comics Code Authority guidelines about violence between men and women. The female hero using Telekinesis can fight back without actually hitting the super villain or henchman and with this at least Sue could fight back and didn’t need her sign saying “kidnap me” as much anymore, although Dr Doom might still do that because “expediency often outweighs originality”. 

Sue’s next biggest developments were marriage and motherhood. Side note it’s officially canon that their son Franklin was conceived after the first time the F4 saved the earth from Galactus which makes me ask the question after the earth was safe did Mr Fantastic give The Thing and The Human Torch some of their pocket money to go the cinema. But the change from teams eye-candy and damsel in distress to motherhood really suited Sue as she pretty much filled that role in the team anyway. The Fantastic Four are a squabbling family who often fall out and Sue is the under appreciated peace-keeper and emotional support for the boys. With Franklin added well she just has another child to look after but this one shouldn’t know better than to be an immature show-boater, I’m looking at you Johnny Storm. 

Sue’s last real moment of characters development comes from Fantastic Four 280, where the villainous Psycho-man (kind of an obvious villain name), turns Sue into Malice; Mistress of Hate. Now with a name like that she’s obviously an enemy to the rest of the Fantastic Four who she proceeds to beat the snot out of (once and for all proving she is actually the strongest member) which to many fanboys is the most important thing. But this has to end abruptly by Mr Fantastic realising its Sue and declaring “Susan stop acting hystericaly” which somehow (plot contrivance) snaps her back into her old self.

The Wasp (Janet Van Dine)

Unlike most female characters from silver-age Marvel, Jan started with some semblance of a personality. She was the plucky rich girl who was Hank Pym’s fan-girl and really wanted to join him on his scientific adventures. Jan seemingly relegated to the sidekick role by the virtue of being a female character even if Ant-man was dependent on her because she paid for all of his scientific equipment. But I’m ignoring the elephant in the room, their relationship is just the fucking worst. Panel to panel all these 2 do as a couple is squabble, Stan Lee once while tried to decipher why Ant-man was never a colossal hit like The Hulk or Spider-man. Now I’m going to go out on a limb and say young boys reading their superhero comics for a little escapism from their parents arguing don’t want to read about the male hero in the comic declare “Get in the kitchen” and his girlfriend/sidekick say “no I bought the kitchen you go in it”.

The lack of popularity lead to the cancellation of all Ant-man books and the duo became stalwarts of The Avengers where they kept trying to rebrand Ant-man because “he has a silly name” so he took on names like Black Goliath (despite being neither African American or wearing Black) Giant-man and finally after a mental breakdown Yellowjacket. Dr Pym became the joke of the team and his team mates often made fun of his mental instability and the fact that Jan was better at superheroing than him. In a last ditch effort to stay on the worst Superhero team of all time (1970’s Avengers are just terrible) Dr Pym created a fake Ultron attack that would prove his worth. This is when the infamous slap panel comes from (the slap is actually an artistic flub and was intended that he pushed her out of the way). After this incident Hank and Jan divorced (despite the fact they never should’ve gotten married in the first place), and also Jan became the leader of the Avengers and while she occasionally stumbled with her confidence she lead the team admirably even if she did keep changing costume every other issue because she was a “fashionista”.  

Scarlet Witch

First appearing in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, Wanda was manipulated by Magneto’s magnetic personality (not a joke actual reason), into joining his terrorist organisation. This is a strange trend that still exists with female villains, Marvel did it with Medusa when she had amnesia and joined the Frightful Four and DC currently have the Cheetah (Wonder Woman’s Archenemy) being manipulated into crimes by Lex Luthor. Comic writers have this strange idea that women can’t be mastermind villains, they have to be arm candy to the big bad, female villains are still rare even when they’re not arm candy, Batman’s Poison Ivy is often portrayed as more of an Anti-hero than a true terrorist or Catwoman as a criminal with a heart of gold. 

Scarlet Witch and her brother Pietro (aka Quicksilver) where rescued from their life of crime by Captain America who had them enter his new team (the second ever line up of Avengers) nicknamed Cap’s Crazy Quartet with the fourth member being former Iron Man villain Hawkeye. As time went on Wanda stopped spending so much time telling her brother “the whole world doesn’t hate you” despite the fact he is a complete and total jerk. Avengers and the few X-men comics she appeared in focused more on her bizarre back story and this is truly a sign of gender equality because most of the male Superhero characters don’t have much in the way of personality traits but they have extensive adventures.

Wanda’s history includes being raised by a mutated Cow named Bova (with her brother), previously mentioned manipulations by Magneto, training under Agatha Harkness in witchcraft, marrying a robot, being unable to have children with a robot, magicking up her own babies (that turned out to be demons), blowing up Avenger’s mansion, rewriting all of reality, travelling back in time and being persecuted for witchcraft, getting engaged to Doctor Doom and a search to find out who her father is. With all that, it’s not surprising that she hasn’t developed a personality, with that much back story you try having some hobbies.

Gwen Stacy

How did modern Marvel fix Gwen Stacy? They created a whole new character of course. Gwen’s initial storyline was a love triangle with Peter Parker (secretly Spider-man) and Mary Jane. Mary Jane was the more fun of the two girls, she was a party girl, she was the hip cool one who talked in Jazz lingo while being completely oblivious to the fact her name was a slang term for Cannabis (but what do you expect this was a funhouse mirror look at youth culture written by a middle-aged man to an audience of 13 year olds). Gwen was a more quiet studious girl whose ideal evening was curled up on the sofa with a good book and drinking hot coco. Marvel’s writers wanted to end the love triangle but they couldn’t have the notoriously indecisive Peter pick between one of them, so the next logical choice was made to have her be dropped off a bridge by the Green Goblin.

Gwen was now treated as a what if to Marvel writers, whenever Peter was too down on his luck or fighting with Mary Jane something might happen to bring Gwen back. Most notably her Biology teacher cloning her in an attempt to get revenge on Spider-man (yes it is as confusing as it sounds).

In the 21st Gwen was made cool, the drummer in an all girl punk rock band, with a cool new costume. The Spider-Gwen comics actually make you realise something about Spider-man comics which is we only care about Peter Parker because he is Spider-man.