SEAGUY
Grant
Morrison and Cameron Stewart
DC Comics/Vertigo
A breezy Utopian landscape with a perverse secret. A wondrous new foodstuff that looks like candyfloss sperm. A world of heroes, lost without adventure. And a lissom warrior-maiden, her beard as graceful as her sword-arm.
This is the world of Seaguy, the latest graphic novel from the creator of The Invisibles and The Filth. The book follows the eponymous hero as he struggles against the ennui of his apparently perfect society, in which all evil has been vanquished, and the entertainment comes in the form of TV shows and theme parks dedicated to the cheerfully sinister Mickey Eye. With his ever faithful pal, Chubby Da Choona, by his side, Seaguy sails from Atlantis to Antarctica, righting wrongs, stealing chocolate and pulling back the skin from the soup of the world.
Seaguy is a fantastic stream-of-consciousness romp, set in a world where people tend to exist in a state of utter terror or mild concussion, depending on who you ask. Seaguy himself is a delightfully unassuming character, a bright, earnest superhero that can keep his cool, even in the face of a moon-meteor shower. However, even superheroes are vulnerable to a broken heart, as Seaguy discovers when he gets too close to the truth behind Mickey Eye.
A wonderfully fast-paced book, full of hilarious concepts and superb dialogue, Seaguy can also be read as a broad satire of globalisation and the monoculture, and anything that seeks to act as the opiate of the masses. Morrison paints a world in which the few people who have the power to change things are numb to the peril that surrounds them.
Cameron Stewart�s artwork is second to none: he casts Seaguy as a young Peter O�Toole, and the rest of the book employs that same dichotomous aesthetic, all clean lines and ballsy grit at the same time. Morrison�s script calls for Stewart to cover a lot of ground, leaping from scene to scene to location to location, almost every other page. The amount of pre-production design work that has gone into Seaguy would stagger the average movie producer, but it all fits into Morrison�s TV-addled, infantilised world, giving the novel the weight of years.
Seaguy is a first-rate graphic novel, which hides a chilling political message behind a fa�ade of delicate lunacy. And while the novel is complete unto itself, the end of the book paves the way for a sequel. I promise that once you�ve read Seaguy, you�ll be as hungry for the next instalment as I am�
Review text (C) Matthew Craig
Originally published in the pop culture magazine Robot Fist