promising but disturbing.

[chronovore]

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These images are all generated automatically from a single image. I have waking nightmares where I'm living in a world where everything has been reconstituted in a manner similar to these structures. Like the end of A.I. gone even more wrong. They creep me out.

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[chronovore.livejournal.com]

When unfettered by editorial constraints, Grant Morrison tells the kind of stories you'd hear from Stephen Hawking if he had the DTs. Mixing complex scientific concepts with ancient mythological tropes with probably a few shots of absinthe, Morrison always provides new insights into classic characters and familiar plot progressions, like watching a sitcom through a kaleidoscope. This issue, Funeral In Smallville, tells the story of the death of Jonathan Kent, or rather the alternate universe Jonathan Kent. In an obvious imitation of Marvel's Ultimate line, the DC All-Star series exists outside of regular continuity, allowing creators to do as they please with some of DC's most iconic characters. The potential here is enormous, and Morrison is using it to the fullest. Only he could tell a tale of time travel and tragedy, stick Krypto the Superdog in it, and still succeed. A group of strange farmhands arrive at the Kent household, just as Clark is looking for direction in life, and the Kents are thinking of moving on. The addition of a time eating monster, dueling concepts of fatalism and temporal paradoxes, and the aforementioned Krypto help create a chaotic story that barely holds together. But in its delicacy lies a certain poetry. It's an insane poetry, beat rhymes from a hallucination, but it's a poetry nonetheless, one that creates an impressive emotional impact by the last panel. The pacing, and in particular the way in which information is disseminated to the reader, is masterful, always just on the verge of being confusing, but still on the right side of the line separating nonsense from mystery. It all builds to such a complex pinnacle it seems impossible for the story to be contained in just one issue. But that's to be expected from Morrison, and sure enough, everything ties together just when it seems it's about to collapse.

I see what you did there.