Oh my! Oh my! Comixology is having a Grant Morrison sale! For a mere 99 cents a piece, you can pick up several of Grant Morrison’s finest DC/Vertigo comics, including Doom Patrol, Batman, All-Star Superman, and more.

What’s the catch? Well, let’s get into that. Barely any of the comics on sale will provide you with a full story. While you may be teased by the mention of Batman R.I.P., Batman and Robin, and Batman Incorporated, the first thing you need to realize is that this isn’t the entire run. If you’re not reading Batman and Son or Club of Heroes, then the rest of this run won’t make any sense. But beyond that, the entire run of Batman and Robin that leads directly into Batman Incorporated is not in this sale. If you want to do that, you’re going to want to buy the regularly priced Batman and Robin #10-16. So, if you’re wanting to check this out, I really suggest you go back to Batman #655 and start from there and keep going. You won’t regret it, it’s one of the finest runs on Batman, for sure.

The film rights for Grant Morrison and Shawn Murphy‘s Joe The Barbarian comic book have been picked up by Thunder Road Pictures, according to Morrison, who broke the news today exclusively to Robot6.

Thunder Road Picture is the studio that put out the 2010 Clash of the Titans remake.

Joe the Barbarian, which is published by DC/Vertigo Comics, is a fantasy set in the mind of a boy who is having some very real world problems, and a film adaptation is going to need an intelligent use of subtlety to capture the brilliant nuance of this fantastic series. I almost cannot image the majority of Joe the Barbarian to be adaptable, as the fantasy plays almost like a kid’s movie, while the grounded-in-reality segments can be terribly depressing. And the concept is even harder to buy into since Morrison is not writing the screenplay himself.

Joe the Barbarian #5 (of 8)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Sean Murphy
Colors by Dave Stewart
Letters by Todd Klein
Vertigo Comics
Release date: May 19, 2010

Grant Morrison delivers yet again in Joe the Barbarian #5. In this issue, Joe and company are still diligent on their quest to find the light, but along the way they run into terrible monsters and an ever-growing darkness that seems to be consuming the entire world. This story is a fantastic look at the mind of a young boy, who is literally walking the edge of fantasy and reality.

I absolutely love every panel of this book, and have been more than pleased with the entire mini-series. Morrison is doing a fantastic job of telling an incredibly, albeit complex, story of a lonely young boy who is very apparently crossing realms of imagination and reality and is having a harder and harder time distinguishing between the two. The story itself is powerful and intriguing, but the sheer genius of Grant Morrison is shown through his ties between fantasy and reality. For example, in the fantasy world we see a powerful river that is running down a mountain, but in reality we see that this river is an overflowing sink that is going down a flight of stairs. This is just one example, but Morrison also likens a demonic appearing monster to a dog, and the ever-growing darkness is mirrored as a house with a blown fuse, or simply that the power has gone out. Morrison also does a wonderful job with his characters by writing Joe and his gang in a manner that makes you truly feel compassion for them.

Joe the Barbarian #3
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Sean Murphy
Colors by Dave Stewart
Letters by Todd Klein
DC/Vertigo Comics
Released March, 17 2010

I picked up the first two issues of Joe the Barbarian mostly because of writer Grant Morrison‘s name on the cover, because anything he writes is at least worth checking out. What I found after reading those first two issues was that I should have paid more attention to the other name on the cover, artist Sean Murphy.

The first two issues have been feasts for the eyes, but the story of a boy venturing to a fantasy land populated by his toys has left me fairly cold. With this Issue #3, Morrison steps back on the crazy amount of info thrown at the reader, and it results in the best issue of the series so far. There were a lot of names and places tossed out to the reader without any context to place them in, so we were left with a story I’ve seen before. This issue focuses on a few characters, explains more of what is going on, and made me appreciate the first two issues more. It’s something that you have to deal with in a lot of projects that Morrison works on. A lot of times, he will flood the first few issues of a story with info that is important later, but you have to wait for that point where everything becomes clear. I finally get what this series is about, and I’m now very excited to see where it goes.