I think Morrison’s insistence on toiling in the world of monthly superhero serials is what’s keeping him from breaking out into wider recognition. Partly for the cultural reasons Duncan mentions, but that’s not the whole story (look at what DKR and Watchmen did for Miller and Moore). He just hasn’t produced that one massive standalone work that can get passed around to non-fans and lauded in Time and made into blockbuster movies. The closest he came was Arkham Asylum, and that work was always undermined by its own excesses. He’s just one great 200-page graphic novel away from the big time, but he tends to work in three-issue miniseries or forty-issue runs that are so mired in continuity they’ll never fit the bill. (We3 might do the trick if it ever hits the screen, because that book is damn near perfect.)

As to why I like Morrison more… that’s an odd one. I can remember a time when it was Alan Moore contributing huge building blocks of my identity and Morrison was just this guy producing interesting, entertaining oddities over in Doom Patrol. In the end it may just come down to timing. Moore stepped off the field for much of the nineties just as Morrison was hitting his stride, so the newcomer got to add the next layer of building blocks. (And yet Moore will always be down there at the foundations.) With the brief exception of ABC, Moore has receded further and further from comics while Morrison has taken on more and more work.

Much as I can’t wait for Morrison to drop the Dan DiDio assignments and start working on that killer graphic novel, I also wouldn’t mind if Moore decided he was not too perfect for his medium and wrote a goddamn monthly comic book again.

(I’d personally not want to choose between the two, as their relative strengths and weaknesses are so different, almost complementary. I’d probably give a slight edge to Moore over Morrison, but Morrison is more *fun* than Moore. That’s another reason actually why he’ll never be as rated. )

I was actually reflecting today, as I do often, on why I like Morrison that mcuh more than Moore and why he’ll never be recognised as strongly as a visionary and so on – it’s partly to do with range and so on, and the fact that Morrison works still in a subset of the medium that’s, in business terms, pretty venal and culturally particularly derided. I think it’s also because Moore is certainly a more consummate and far less elliptical storyteller, but it’s this ‘completeness’ that I find offputting, even somewhat hectoring. Really, I don’t think I’ll be pulling Promethea back out anytime soon because I can pretty much hear the droll Northants accent telling me about “the world according to Alan Moore”, via some occasionally fairly tortuous dialogue in the Kaballah arc particularly, and it’s wearying – Zatanna #1 (and actually Morrison does this all the time – I’m obsessing over Earth-2 as you can likely see from the post; rereading, the line delivered by a distinctly Nite Owl-alike Batmanalogue, “What was all that pirate drivel?” finally struck home,) was such a successful pisstake, as well as being a vastly more entertaining and allusive comic in its own right, that it only served and continues to serve to highlight what an onerous task it’d be to (me to) go back to Promethea.