Nameless, or, "Grant Morrison Just Wants to Watch Them Bleed"

What we all love about Grant Morrison is how resolved he is to make the traditionaly trashy or silly into something profound. Nothing new. Everyone wants to, and only a few are successful, and only one does it, effectively, with the calculated use of gigantic weaponized sperm cells.

Thus far, Nameless isn't that. From the three issues I've read there's not yet any attempt at philosophizing the esoteric references to current events, modernist architects, and ancient religions he slaps on every other page. Yeah, it's all there, that encyclopedic emesis Morrison loves to spew at you, and it's not unenticing to look into every bit of triviality, but it's so obviously not what's on display here. It's a vehicle for what ultimately feels like a gory sci-fi body-horror B-movie with culture. In short, it's pretty fun.

I honestly don't think Grant knows anymore.

The world, unlike a lot of Grant Morrison's settings, isn't a future filled with the noise of abruptly changing information structures, and no one is falling into their own mindhole and discovering glowing discs of knowledge that forever alters their world view. It may as well be set in the present, albeit a present where, for reasons not yet explained, lizard people and naga stalk the land and suburbs, making families happily massacre themselves, and hunting after our square jawed and stubbled protagonist, named Nameless (because names have power, he says) after he nabs a mystical key on behalf of his client.

Brave and handsome

Nameless is an occultist for hire. He's like a John Constantine in need of a long relaxing bath and some benzedrine. When we meet him he's recalling December, a "cunt of a month", when things started to get markedly Lovecraftian. None of Constantine's reflectiveness here; No philosophy. He needs money so he's doing this thing and now there's fish people trying to rip out his throat, then there's a fucking lady in a veil with a bulbous fleshy parasite on her face, and he knows her pretty well and he's so over her shit already, and it feels like just another fucked up day in his happy life. Nameless, through all three issues, retains this air of haggard wisdom, always knowing at least a bit about what's happeing, though not enough to save his or his company's asses.

The people who want the key, and who eventually get the key after some intense effort on the part of Nameless, turns out to be a secretive and privately funded corporation run by a billionaire named Darius. Darius, appearing only mildly Asian and generally smiling, wants to save the planet from a hulking fuck of a space boulder named Xibalba, after the Mayan underworld. He's at once an altruist and a capitalist and someone who uses his money to advance human knowledge. A mildly asian Elon Musk, in other words. Darius even floats around remotely from a base located on the dark side of the moon using a video-conferencing hele-drone, as we all know Elon Musk would love to do.

Xibalba's not just an asteroid. This thing is marked on a long flat side with a rune the size of a mountain. It's apparent that the asteroid does not simply intend to smash into the Earth like any amateur space rock: It has a payload, and Darius employs Nameless to find out exactly what the world is getting into, and how to stop it.

That's issue one. It's not much, to be honest. Issue two and three, however, is when the series begins hitting it's stride. Nameless and a team composed by Darius go to space to meet Xibalba headon and deploy drones with sensory equipment to explore what turns out to be an asteroid full of alien structures, "brutalist" in design and obviously not meant for children. Shit goes down, eyeballs with giant talons attack, and Grant Morrison smashes and reassembles the narrative in that special, and in this instance creepy, Grant Morrison way.

In a nutshell

Sometimes the art, done by Chris Burnham, feels like Quitely. Not to knock the artist, he's fantastic. There are some clever panel sequences, and the panels depicting the journey of the drones through that brutal alien architecture are done with a real sense for how massive and lonely celestial objects really must be. Xibalba seems not to be of exclusively extraterrestrial or supernatural origin, but a mixture of both, in a way that implies that maybe the two were one and the same all along (shades of The Invisibles here). Chris Burnham gets both across, with covers and splash panels alluding to creatures that reside in lonely H.R. Geiger space fortresses, but look like amorphous demons made of shapeshifting muscle tissue, and that do things to human bodies straight out of medieval Hell.

Whether the book will reach for some big-deal psychological or philosophical conclusion has yet to be seen, but I have a feeling Grant Morrison just wants to rip people apart and destroy civilization for a bit. Looks like Morrison's taking all his occult and science fiction training, and using it to make an irreverent, gory, AND clever monster movie. In Nameless #3 we get a glimpse of Xibalba floating on the horizon, it's ominous rune staring down at us all, and we just know it's getting ready to make life interesting in painful and horrifying ways. Honestly, can't wait.