I remember the day when I was a young man - perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old - that I got a really severe fever for the first time. While I recall only in the vaguest of terms being kind of achey and sore up to the point where I went to sleep, I remember the dreams I had that night with a terrible kind of clarity. In my dream, I was perhaps an inch tall, in a dream-version of my own bedroom, which was to its normal scale. This is to say that I was unimaginably tiny and my furniture was mountainous and titanic in scale. In this dream, there was a tiny little racetrack on my bedroom floor, weaving in and out and all about my furniture, built to such a scale that cars for people my size could navigate them. The substance of this dream basically revolved around my being in a race with a bunch of other drivers, zipping and zooming all over the floor of my room.

It was by far the most terrifying experience of my life.

Not because there was anything innately frightening about the dream itself; it was quite innocent and care-free, really. But in my feverish state, my emotions were all mis-firing, the familiar and comfortable became unreal and terrible, and I couldn't understand a damn thing that was going on. My brain, in short, was not prepared for the experience of living my life, and I was gripped by an agony of horror. I woke up and wandered around my home in a daze. At one point, sitting on the toilet, I remember seeing mathematical equations hovering, ghost-like, in the air before me. I couldn't make sense of them, but nor did I question their reality or existence because the world was such a confusing and un-natural place for me that this was no more off-putting than the floor or the sink themselves. I recalled that my math textbook had the answers to all of the questions in it at the end of the book, so that students might check their own work, and so I wandered off in search of it so as to be able to solve this phantom equation. I spent an hour lost in the impossible labyrinth of my eight-room house, trying to find the book in vain.

This is what reading Grant Morrison's Seaguy is like.

Let me back up a bit and tell you about Grant Morrison. Grant Morrison is a revolutionary comic book writer. So revolutionary, in fact, that most people do not know how in the world to deal with his shit. He has done, and continues to do super-hero work, and my main exposure to him came some nine or so years ago when he took over writing X-Men for three and half years or so. The X-Men books had been a stagnant swamp for years; crippled by a desire to maintain a comfortable status quo, they'd become tedious and dull. Morrison came in and basically broke every rule, slaughtered every sacred cow and kicked over every bucket. By the end of his run, the series was no longer ABOUT what it had been when he showed up, and every writer of all of the other seven or so X-Men books which then existed had to scramble madly in order to catch up with what he had done. But it re-vitalized them and reinvigorated the entire franchise. It was a work of beauty. He's presently doing the same with the Batman books for DC; during his multi-year run on that book, he's introduced Batman's murderous, nightmarish illegitimate son named Damien, killed off Batman, and had the original Robin - Dick Grayson - take over as Batman, with Damien taking over as Robin, thus inverting the old dynamic, since we now have a smiling, light-hearted Batman and a scowling, serious, dark-hearted Robin. Few writers would be given the latitude that Morrison is given, and the reason he's given it is because he's so monstrously imaginative and can create stories which no normal mind could produce.

But that's what he's like when he's writing a mainstream book like X-Men or Batman. That's what happens when he enters the sandbox at the public park and has to play with the other kids and share their toys. Even then what normally happens is that he tries to play nice but scares off all the other kids anyways because they don't understand what the fuck he's doing. It's an old adage that no character Morrison has ever created or had any large role in defining will ever be used by any writer again because they know full well that they DO NOT UNDERSTAND these characters, and do not know how to write them. Some years ago, he took seven obscure DC characters and wrote a bizarre series called "Seven Soldiers of Victory", where even the story structure itself was almost beyond human comprehension; seven individual stories starring seven unrelated characters which weave in and out of one another's paths, all dealing with the same events as one another without ever meeting each other. It was his effort to write a team of super-heroes who never met and did not know of one anothers' existence. After some friends of mine and I read it, I recall a conversation we had where I said something to the effect of the following : "No, you see, when that guy 100,000 years in the past threw his spear forward in time to defeat the time-travelling menace he was fighting, this other girl had to BE the spear in the present world and impale the bad guy in the present day in order to save the world in the past!" This is the sort of thing that happens when Morrison is given free reign to write the way he wants to. I went on to say "You may have SMOKED Grant Morrison before, but this series is like fucking injecting it right into your fucking arm!" Virtually nobody has made any attempt to use these characters for any purpose since then, for the familiar reasons.

This having been said, Seaguy is like injecting Morrison straight into your carotid artery, so it is carried direct and undiluted into your brain.

As of this moment, it's a three-issue limited series, conveniently collected into one trade paperback from Vertigo. It is apparently the first in a trilogy of volumes Morrison has in mind, with two more on their way now. By mid-way through the first issue of this first series, I was moaning in agony, clutching at my head at the intellectual agony of the experience. It felt like I was wandering through my labyrinth of my house again, with familiar things made horrific and bizarre by the fact that my brain DID NOT HAVE THE ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND IT. It was like going insane. Or perhaps, more accurately, it was like I was sane, and perceiving the fruits of a brain which existed in some non-sane state. Some hyper-sanity or such, in which information was processed differently than the way the human brain might, and presented for the consumption of same. If I'm right, any hyper-sane person could read this and have it make perfect sense to them. This is the hallucinatory fever-dream of the comics-reading experience. To those of us with merely human brains, it's a confusing ordeal of madness and uncertainty. Morrison has called this work "his Watchmen", in the sense that where Watchmen was the ultimate and perfect expression of Alan Moore's creative abilities, Sea Guy is that for Grant Morrison. I can easily believe it.

Rather than attempting to explain the substance of the series itself, allow me to present seven pages from the first issue and let them speak (in some alien and incomprehensible tongue) for themselves. 
 

The series becomes less-grounded and more hyper-sane as it progresses, such that by the end of this first part of the trilogy, I felt like I wanted to scream or something. None of which meant that I wanted to put it down or stop reading, and none of which prevents me from wanting to expose myself to the cancer of the soul which I'm sure volume 2 will be when it comes out in a few months' time. Because an imagination like this is a spectacle to behold, regardless of whether or not you can really absorb all of it in one go. Or ever at all.

In conclusion: Read Seaguy.

I call it THE CRIMSON CROWN CONFIGURATION. 

Like the very early Flyclops designs, this one employs a visor array with multiple openings which can be opened independantly. Unlike the original design, which would have an optic blast ineffectually blasting the ground behind his feet, this one has eight small openings atop his head in a crown-like arrangement, from which this design derives its name. These openings point upwards in eight different directions, each of them directed into a large adamantium bowl which is itself affixed to his visor array.

As his optic blasts are directed up into the bowl, the force of his blasts pushes the bowl upwards, and as individual openings are opened and closed individually, he is able to fine-tune his movements forwards, backwards, left, right, and degrees between these. The optic blasts then ricochet off of the inside of the bowl, and here we see one of the primary innovations of the Crimson Crown Configuration; a large ruby-quartz ball suspended from the roof of the bowl, which intercepts all ricocheting optic blasts and thus negates them. In this way, the Crimson Crown negates one of the primary faults of earlier Flyclops designs; no stray optic blasts spraying all over the place and raining death down upon team-mates and innocent bystanders.

As the bowl is lifted upwards, a sturdy chin-strap and a second strap around the back of his skull prevents the visor array from flying off the top of his head. As such, he is carried upwards into the air along with the bowl, allowing him - as is common to all Flyclops concepts - to fly. In that this design would see his entire body weight supported by his neck, an additional feature is included: adjustable hand-grips on the two grips on either side of his head, allowing him to hold on while in flight and thus support much of his body weight with his arms.

Landings are of course a problem in that he would not be able to look downwards while descending, since he would need to manage his descent with short, controlled bursts in much the same manner as a hot air balloon operator. However, this design presents the significant advantage that if he should wish to accelerate in any direction (other than downwards) quickly, all he needs to do is tilt his head in the direction he wants to go and open all eight points of his crown at once.

On an aesthetic level, this design has the added advantage of not only providing him an imposing and distinctive silhouette, it also resembles a crown closely enough that it makes the bold visual statement that "I am Flyclops. King of all mutants. Bow down before me and pay me your tribute", which is appropriate for such a magnificent individual.

I posted this earlier today on 4Chan. The idea was warmly embraced, and the following art was produced by someone else there in response: 



It pleased me as you can never know.