Robot 6
An early glimpse of Morrison and Murphy’s Joe the Barbarian
From "Joe the Barbarian," by Grant Morrison and Sean Gordon Murphy
At DeviantArt, artist Sean Gordon Murphy reveals a stunning two-page spread from Joe the Barbarian, his Vertigo collaboration with Grant Morrison that the writer describes as “Home Alone meets Lord of the Rings.”
“I’ve wanted to do one of those Narnia-style worlds in a wardrobe-type stories but I didn’t want to do it until I had the energy and time to do it,” Morrison told Comic Book Resources in March. “It’s about a little kid who has diabetes, which makes you hallucinate if you don’t take your medicines. And something happens to him in his home.”
Murphy writes that in the above image, “The kid is in a dream state where he’s seeing all his toys come to life as they’re fleeing their village after an attack. It’s fun to create generic characters based off of existing characters, but to change them just enough to avoid legal problems.”
A quick glance reveals (obviously) Batman and Robin, plus dead ringers for The Transformers, the crew of the Enterprise from The Next Generation, G.I. Joe, Dick Tracy and … M.A.S.K. (?), among others.
You can see more pages here and here.
(via Sean Witzke)
8 Comments
Jim
June 5, 2009 at 7:06 am
Just that one picture makes me want to buy this series.
Ian A.
June 5, 2009 at 10:30 am
Murphy’s hit a hell of a stride. His recent output has been uniformly fantastic.
I can’t wait for Joe the Barbarian and his next batch of Hellblazer issues.
Joe
June 5, 2009 at 1:32 pm
I keep up with the guy on deviantart.com and while Hellblazer may not be my cup of tea, his art alone almost made me want to buy it. But I WILL buy Joe the Barbarian.
Nick
June 5, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Not sure about MASK (leastwise I couldn’t spot them), but there’s a Gundam at the far right of the picture, and possibly a ZOID by the jeep thing.
Chris Jones
June 5, 2009 at 2:47 pm
So does nobody care that the entire idea of a diabetic “hallucinating if they don’t take their medicines” is absolute fucking nonsense?
s1rude
June 6, 2009 at 6:02 am
A stupid, stupid Rat Creature! Snake Eyes!
What fun…like Highlights for ManChildren.
Jamie S. Rich
July 16, 2009 at 10:42 am
Did the pages get taken down? I’m getting a broken link when I go through. :/
Craig Cermak
July 17, 2009 at 7:33 am
Chris, it isn’t nonsense. I have a diabetic step-father and there were some really horrible instances where he was seeing things no one else did (and it was always frightening, since he was still walking around and talking, but in a different state of mind), and would tell us later that it was like a dream and he couldn’t remember all of it. I’m not saying it happens to all diabetics and I’m pretty sure that this being a comic book, it’s highly overdramatic.