Grant Morrison’s latest creator-owned project is a violent, almost sordid affair, saved by a flying blue horse.

Happy!
Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Darick Robertson
Publisher: Image Comics

WHAT a weird book this is. It starts out as a violently hardcore, foul-mouthed crime story, and just when you think it is getting drearily predictable ... POOF! Say hello to Happy, the flying blue cartoon horse!

Grant Morrison is a brilliant writer, there is no doubt about that. All-Star Superman remains one of the best Superman stories ever written. Ditto Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On Serious Earth for Batman. The Invisibles reads like a fascinating drug-addled trip through a psychedelic version of the 1980s, while his run on Animal Man is one of the most groundbreaking superhero comics ever written.

However, Morrison is also the guy who came up with the sordid mess that is DC’s Final Crisis, which ended in the so-called “death” of Bruce Wayne, and led into the awful Batman: The Return Of Bruce Wayne ... so yeah, he’s not perfect.

With Happy!, it’s rather hard to pinpoint which side of Morrison is writing this. It’s got hints of Joe The Barbarian’s childlike innocence mixed up with some Invisibles trippiness, with a heavy dose of Mark Millar-esque hardcore gore and violence.

There are times in this book when the only way you can describe what you’ve read is to use the phrase his protagonist uses when he sees Happy for the first time: “The f***?”.

Morrison’s main man this time is a former dirty cop turned hitman called Nick Sax, “adrift in a stinking twilight world of casual murder, soulless sex, eczema and betrayal”, according to the book’s synopsis.

After a hit goes wrong, Sax finds himself in a hospital with a bullet in his side, wanted by both the cops and the mob. At this point, the book was getting really, really dreary and depressing to read. Nothing seemed to be happening (besides a lot of swearing and people getting killed, of course), and Sax is so unlikable a character that it was becoming a chore just getting through the first few pages. Sure, he gets shot and ends up in the hospital, but I felt no sympathy whatsoever for him. In fact, I was hoping he’d die, just to make things interesting.

Then, just when I was about to give up on the book, along came Happy the talking blue flying unicorn.

It’s hard not to like a comic book that has a flying blue unicorn called Happy, it really is. Not even when it’s in a book where heads get blown off every other panel and the swear words seem to outnumber the polite ones.

Happy turns out to be the bright blue ray of sunshine that helps turn this book around. To paraphrase him, Happy represents hope – all-singing, all-dancing hope – and is merely doing his best to “brighten up the old graveyard” while the rest of the characters continue on in their dreary, violent and extremely foul-mouthed way.

The rest of the story seems almost incidental, as Sax goes on the run while struggling to deal with the fact that there is a flying blue horse talking to him, trying to convince him to save a little girl from a perverted Santa Claus.

Having drawn the stellar Transmetropolitan, as well as the extremely violent Garth Ennis-penned The Boys, Darick Robertson is no stranger to comic book violence. His artwork here is everything you’d expect it to be – gory and graphically explicit, but strangely clean and expressive at the same time. However, it’s the contrast between the gritty “real world” panels and the bright blue ball of Happy fluff that flits around within those panels that stood out the most for me. Sax could be blowing someone’s head off in one panel, but when Happy shows up in the next, you just can’t help but grin at the absurdity of it all.

Perhaps that’s what Morrison wants us to get out of this book. After all, with so much sex, violence and gore prevalent in graphic novels these days, sometimes all you need to help cheer you up is a talking blue flying horse named Happy.

Happy! is available at Kinokuniya, Suria KLCC.

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