Broken Frontier

What could be worse than not knowing what the person you’re destined to marry looks like? Well, for starters, inadvertently jump-starting a war among  the most devastating gods imaginable.

It’s an important day for Ali. The 19-year-old son of a successful grocery store owner, he’s having big-time jitters about meeting 18-year-old Sofia, to whom his marriage has been arranged. Though he comes to his brother Omar’s rescue after he falls through the floor of one of his father’s stores, Ali, having never met his bride to be, is much more obsessed with whether she is ugly, stupid or boring, any of which - if true about her - he takes as a sign that God hates him. Sofia, however, turns out to be a real cutie, but of greater concern is what lies beneath the floor of that grocery. Once Omar is safe, the space is casually written off as an abandoned mine, but Ali and Sofia discover that it is something much more—a vast cavern within which gods of life and death, creation and destruction lay dormant. 

The immediate appeal of VIMANARAMA is the effortless skill with which Grant Morrison crossbreeds genres, formats and styles while also spinning out a fun, entertaining story. Disregarding boundaries between East and West, Morrison injects elements borrowed from Bollywood musicals, The Arabian Nights, Alice In Wonderland, sitcoms like “Friends,” any romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant, and super-team comics into a basic boy-meets-girl story in which anything that can be tweaked is. The result is both unpredictable and hilarious at times and so seamlessly re-mixed that Morrison comes off more like a dj than a writer. The analogy isn’t far off the mark when one considers that, just like a dj, Morrison’s style is distinguished as much by its subversiveness as by its playfulness. The subversive Morrison of THE INVISIBLES, THE FILTH, and WE 3 makes a cameo appearance—his characters ethnically true instead of being white faces beneath dark skin, his Ultra-Hadean challenging stereotypes in the same way, while also reminding us that today’s superhero was yesterday’s god.

This subversive Morrison, however, takes a back seat to the playful, irreverent Morrison of SEAGUY. This Morrison knows the funny like his subversive alter-ego knows the middle finger and every character has a humorous edge without being reduced to buffoonery. The opening exchange between Ali’s father and Omar is a riot, as are Ali—still obsessed with Sofia’s looks—and Sofia—thinking of shopping—at the moment when they’ve stumbled upon what might be the beginning of the end of the world. Add to this the amount of room Morrison has to play with (32 pages for $2.95) and there’s plenty of time for VIMANARAMA to introduce main characters and conflict, set the tone and mood, and make readers want to come back without rushing a thing. Exactly what any good first issue should do.

Philip Bond’s Kirby-influenced style—thick-lined and horizontal, with an emphasis on movement and emotional expressiveness—is an apt compliment to the playful Morrison’s hybrid storytelling. On the one hand, Bond’s characters have an appealing realism about them, such that the reader takes this burgeoning love-story seriously. Plus, he knows how to drive the narrative with no-frills panels and action sequences that engage the reader. On the other hand though, some of his images—such as the double splash pages, particularly the first one spanning pages 2 and 3—are simply a joy to look at, full of as much energy and tone as detail. Also worthy of note are the off-kilter panel constructions, their jagged shapes being non-verbal cues to the reader that nothing here will happen as expected. And when combined with Brian Miller’s sometimes vibrant, sometimes luxurious colors, VIMANARAMA’s artwork is thoroughly impressive.

With such a strong first issue, if VIMANARAMA actually gets better, Vertigo will have one of the best mini-series it has released in a long time.  

- Dexter K. Flowers