Sebastian O

July 26, 2004 | Trades

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Sebastian O
Grant Morrison, Steve Yeowell
Vertigo/DC Comics
$15.25/$9.95 US (Paperback)
* (out of five)

There’s no denying the impact writer Grant Morrison has had on comics in the past 15 years.
His surreal take on super-heroes in Animal Man and Doom Patrol were sublime. His re-uniting of the ‘big seven’ super-heroes in JLA (Justice League of America) was a stroke of genius and his off-the-wall New X-Men tales have quickly become the stuff of legend.
But with great success come great accolades from critics and fans and the desire to label everything a creator has done as genius.
Well that’s simply not the case and Sebastian O is the proof.
The obvious joke is that this book’s title should have been Sebastian Y because the first question that will pop into your mind upon reading it is ‘why did they collect this?’
An extremely obscure three-issue mini-series from 1993, Sebastian O is a convoluted tale of a quasi-futuristic 1890s, featuring a well-dressed sociopath and his adventure to violently exact revenge for being wrongfully imprisoned.
One can only assume this series was compiled as a clause in Morrison’s contract, because there is no other explanation that fits. What makes reading this car-accident of a book more frustrating is knowing there is a much-better Morrison mini-series by the name of Flex Mentallo that has never been reprinted and is surely more deserving after receiving rave reviews over the years. Let’s hope there’s a clause that will see that one in stores soon, too.

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