Today is the release date for Supergods, a new work of non-fiction by Grant Morrison, author of The Invisibles, and numerous other comics.

Published by Spiegel & Grau (an imprint of Random House), Supergods bears the rather lengthy subtitle “What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human”.

Supergods explores the history and mythology of the superhero archetype. We’ve seen this before, notably in Our Gods Wear Spandex (my review here), but Grant Morrison’s likely to do it in a style unique to himself.

From the publisher’s description:

For Grant Morrison, arguably the greatest of contemporary chroniclers of the “superworld,” these heroes are powerful archetypes whose ongoing, decades-spanning story arcs reflect and predict the course of human existence: Through them we tell the story of ourselves, our troubled history, and our starry aspirations. In this exhilarating work of a lifetime, Morrison draws on art, science, mythology, and his own astonishing journeys through this shadow universe to provide the first true history of the superhero—why they matter, why they will always be with us, and what they tell us about who we are . . . and what we may yet become.

For more, see Scott Thill’s interview with Morrison in Wired.

Despite David Itzkoff’s mixed-to-negative review in The New York Times, I’m looking forward to reading this.

Saturday Signal: attempting to sift signal from the noise of the Internet’s occultural cacophony.

This has been a crazy week: camping on the weekend, end of another fiscal quarter at work entailing many late nights at the office, treated with a delightful time at Cirque du Soleil‘s Saltimbanco yesterday, and I now find myself playing Internet catch-up this weekend in preperation for another busy weekend come Labour Day. Continue reading »