Review – Nameless #2 (Image Comics)

Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist(s): Chris Burnham, Nathan Fairbairn
Release Date: 4th March 2015

Nameless is the Grant Morrison comic you’ve been waiting for.

It’s somewhat trite to say that everyone’s a Morrison fan these days, but the accessibility of some of his work can be limited – and where his work crosses genre boundaries, such as Doom Patrol and Animal Man, it can seem off-putting to some. Equally, there are folk who prefer his more cerebral, meta-textual comics all the way out to the likes of Invisibles and Filth.

And then you’ve got folk like me, who met Zenith aged 8 and have been a little bit obsessed ever since with the fusion of superheroes and Lovecraft.

Nameless, categorically, will appeal to all of us. It really is a staggering piece of work, an apocalyptic mythos mystery on the dark side of the moon – “The Exorcist meets Apollo 13”, as one of the characters observes.

Our nameless hero, Nameless, is a Glaswegian dreamer-for hire, a man who can enter Lovecraftian Dreamscapes in an all-too convincing present where cthulhoid creatures lurk at the edge of your vision, or at least hijacking the 44 to the Botanics. He’s been hired by the end of issue #1 to travel to an ark-like secret colony on the dark side of the moon (in an abandoned Russian base, no less) to help prevent an asteroid striking the Earth – an asteroid that’s both a portal and cyclopean, megalithic city.

Throughout, the art is rough, visceral and hypnotic; it pulls no punches yet seduces us along, compelling the eye to be drawn to things it doesn’t always want to see.

I’m being vague, I suppose, because I don’t want to give too much away, but for me this is the first must-have series of 2015; it is a testament to Image that they keep firing out original content that continues to push boundaries, and in Morrison and Burnham they have yet another compelling series in their roster. Buy it now, so you can say you were there at the beginning (then sneak out at get issue #1, no one will know, I won’t say anything…)