Comics geeks know who this guy is already, but for the uninitiated I’ll simply note that he’s one of the most influential comic book writers of the last 25 years. In addition to groundbreaking work on titles like Doom Patrol and Animal Man, Morrison has been a part of some of the biggest names in mainstream comics — he’s penned Superman, Batman, and the X-Men at one point or another, and has generally succeeded both critically and commercially across the board.

He’s a big deal, on par with more mainstream-famous types like Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore. I’ve enjoyed his work for years, so when I discovered — a bit late, as it turns out — that he’d written a sort of combination memoir/history of modern comics, it went right into the to-read pile.

That book — Supergods, which is an awesome title — absolutely delivers, but it does so in a style I can best describe as well-meaning but chronically overwritten. Morrison never uses 5 words when he could use 10. He’s the anti-Hemingway here, and it drags the book down a full letter grade, unfortunately. Even so, for dedicated fans of the medium (and of his work), it remains great fun. I came away with a greater appreciation for the development of the modern form and better understanding of how the Silver Age/Bronze Age stories of my youth functioned as part of the greater whole.

For example, Morrison pulls together lots of sources to give a solid narrative arc to the Golden Age – Silver Age transition, which was mostly just confusing to me as a kid. Back then, reading only the modern, post-Silver Age books, I considered the Golden Age versions of heroes like the Jay Garrick Flash (i.e., the one with the tin hat), or the Alan Scott Green Lantern (the one with the purple cape), to be goofy knock-offs — a huge injustice, since in fact those were the originals. The ones you think of as normal — Green Lantern as a cosmic policeman using alien technology instead of a railway engineer with magic powers — were “re-inventions” done after the more or less wholesale collapse of superhero comics in the late 1940s.

The stories he’s able to tell — by virtue of having been there — about the changes in comics in the 1980s and 1990s are no less interesting, especially when he lays into the Image boys (“The dial was never turned to anything less than total bugfuck hysteria in any given Spawn story”). What he says of Rob Liefeld’s art is too longwinded to retype here, but I laughed out loud several times.

Supergods bogs down a bit in the last portion as Morrison delves a bit too deeply, perhaps, into his own weird occult thing, but in truth it’s a minor sin. It is, after all, his book, and that period of his life shows up on the page as part of The Invisibles, which I’m now meaning to re-read. (Great quote from this era: “By the time I realised I’d become semi-fictional it was too late to defend myself.”)

I can’t really say this is a book for everyone, but it’s definitely worth your time if you are, or have ever been, a devoted fan of modern superhero comics or of Morrison’s own work — which I suppose is par for the course with a memoir like this. Being both, I had a great time despite his sesquipedalian tendencies.