I think Morrison's exceptionally creative and talented, but he's had his head up his own ass for a very long time. He's obviously very pleased with himself, to hear him talk about his work and his "process." Lots of comic book readers think Grant Morrison is a certified genius, but Grant Morrison is 100% certain of it.
I "Like" to "Love" most of his stuff I've read. Like Johns, he's a master of reintroducing characters and/or concepts that have become forgotten or dismissed for being "out of fashion" or otherwise undesirable, and making them work so well that you wonder why nobody else ever did ____ so well before he did. That's a skill and a talent. Consider, the ONE time that Electric Blue Superman wasn't a complete and total sh*tshow, it was in an issue of Grant's JLA. He was the only one who even bothered trying to make that concept work; it didn't, but his take was far less insipid than anyone else's! He's good at stuff like that. Or taking a tiny background character from a Batman comic from 50 years ago, and turning him into a major important character in the present. You can read a Grant Morrison comic a hundred times and see something new every time, some detail or joke or hidden reference. And if there's something so over-the-top or abstract or outlandish that someone insists "simply can't work", he'll somehow make it work. He works hard, and he really is a sharp dude, and his work is very clever.
He's not anywhere near as clever as HE thinks he is, though. Often during one of his books, I'll reach a scene where I can just picture him giggling while writing it down, utterly self-satisfied with being just such a cheeky bastard. And that gets a little bit grating. And like Johns, often his retcons will skirt pretty close to flat-out burying other people's ideas, which also comes off as smug. He breaks the Fourth Wall too often and relies on deus ex machina's and anti-climaxes as a resolution to a frustrating degree. I mean, having characters in-story constantly say things like, "Batman is going to win because he's Batman, it's his only function", or, "Superman is going to save the day because it's the entire reason he exists" is a little bit cute but also heavily eye-roll-inducing. Having Final Crisis end by, literally, "Superman wishes on the Miracle Machine for a Happy Ending", and then ALL the Good Guy characters magically show up at once and just sort'a magically "wish away" the Bad Guy? We were just talking about Geoff Johns writing stories like a little kid playing with toys... well, Final Crisis ended the exact same way my living room action figure "wars" did when I was 6.
And I really, REALLY like Final Crisis, I'm just saying that it's kind of broken.
He also leans WAY too heavily on the Silver Age stuff. Like, I totally understand and even enjoy when he puts those kind of things in there, as long as they don't become too intrusive or distracting; but did Bat-Mite REALLY need to be in "Batman: R.I.P"? I thought the story was fine otherwise, but that seemed a little (or a LOT) self-indulgent. And since I'm a Superman fan, everyone insists that I must love All-Star Superman, and people are forever gushing about how it's "The Greatest Superman Comic Ever made." You know who says that? People who NEVER read a Superman comic, then read that one, and said "Oh, okay, this is fine." I personally think that book is "Okay" but f*cking masturbatory as hell. I do NOT Like Silver Age Superman (generally speaking; things were already getting kind of cleaned-up for the better around 1980 or so); I think the entire Crisis happened solely to provide a chance to re-create Superman "properly" for the first time, which Byrne and Ordway managed to do. But then This Guy comes in all like, "Well, I grew up in the crazy 60s and 70s and I loved it when Superman could see to the other end of the universe and farted fairy dust! I drop acid and so I think stuff like Jimmy Olsen: Turtle Boy is f*cking brilliant! I don't like seeing Superman portrayed as a three-dimensional human being with human thoughts, feelings, and emotions, because that's too 'sad'; I liked it better when he was Santa Claus in a Cape, and he had EVERY super-power plus infinity and was smarter than a thousand Albert Einsteins! THAT's the way my Superman comic is gonna be!"
And it's like everything after 1986 was meaningless, instead of The Only Time Superman Has Ever Been Any Good. It's like anything he grew up with is Good, and anything anyone did to "change" the character(s) afterwards is Bad; Geoff's been guilty of it, too.
Both Grant and Geoff basically want the entire DCU to look like the Super-Friends poster they had on their walls as kids, and are using their own work as a way of passive-aggressively getting back at all the writers from the 1980s and 1990s who "ruined their childhoods". Their styles are totally different but they honestly do pretty much the same things every time they get on a book: just jigger things around until it looks almost exactly the way it did when they were 10, or in some cases, the way they wished it did when they were 10. It's "fine", but when they do it as often as they do it gets noticeable and a little irritating.
I agree that Grant's dialog can be very stiff; his characters don't speak the way real people speak, but I think he's trying really hard to ape Jack Kirby with that. Like the way people will seem to shout increasingly-bizarre things at the top of their lungs for no reason, often while aggressively pointing, or shaking a fist in the air, when that sort of bombast seemingly is not situationally necessary.
That's a thing Kirby used to do constantly and since he's Grant's hero I have to think it's an homage, rather than just being bad at writing dialog. Doesn't make it read any smoother, though!
Clunky. Grant's dialog is clunky.
And I tell ya, I SWEAR sometimes the man is just being weird for the sake of being weird; just to see how far people will "allow" him to push things. And since he's Grant, nobody will actually tell him No, and so even his most ridiculous ideas still see print, because he doesn't have the audacity to admit that he was trolling people.
It's gotta at least partly be that; the alternative is that he's 100% sincere, and that's... deeply troubling.
To be clear, though,
I do like Grant Morrison. But I'm not one of his fanatics. I LOVE Batman: R.I.P. and Final Crisis - MOSTLY - but in both cases I had to read them beginning-to-end several times to fully "get" it. Not to enjoy them more deeply, not to look for more Easter Eggs... no, I had to re-read them front-to-back several times just so they'd make SENSE. And they made sense for ME, but I know many people who couldn't make sense of one, the other, either, or both after trying like hell, and at some point, I have to say that reading comics shouldn't require so much "homework". Final Crisis, especially; I have an informal "DC PhD", so to speak, so there's not much I don't know about, but the average person reading Final Crisis wouldn't have a chance in hell of following it. It's the most NON-New Reader Friendly thing I've ever seen. It's not that Final Crisis doesn't make sense; it DOES make sense, and once it does, it's actually pretty brilliant, but it takes serious WORK on the reader's part and that right there is why it didn't sell and killed the line off, "requiring" the New 52 reboot.
To this day, I can't help but wonder where we'd be if Geoff Johns had written Final Crisis, and Morrison only consulted on it. For better or worse, Johns is the writer with the more "populist" style; his FC may not have been "better", but at the very least every single person who read it would know exactly what was going on. When the book's biggest criticism is, "It's impossible to understand", and its failure tanked the entire line... well, I don't have a time machine, but I simply can't help but ponder, "What if...?"
But yeah... Grant and Geoff, Geoff and Grant. Two guys whose work I greatly enjoy but won't hesitate to pick apart. They've each written some of the absolutely most brilliant AND most "WTF?!" stories I've ever read. Neither one is my all-time favorite, but if their name is on a book, I'm probably going to at least read it. Some people vilify them, others put them on a golden pedestal. All said... I'm glad they're around.
They both could use a good smack once in a while, though.