Joe the Barbarian #8

Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Sean Murphy

While it's nice to see that Morrison and Murphy's hallucinatory epic has finally finished, I think the wait between the seventh and eighth issues was long enough that I more or less stopped caring about this title and its characters.

The series has always been a little strange.  It's about a boy named Joe who, in a hypoglycemic episode, has imagined his house as a strange fantasy world where his pet rat and his toys take on mythic proportions, and the spectre of King Death looms over everyone.

The story has been pretty conventional, and this issue is no exception.  It reads more like a young adult comic than anything Morrison has ever written, and when taken in that sense, it's very good, but when read as a Grant Morrison comic, it feels a little lacking (there is no reason why this should be labeled a 'mature readers' comic.

The strength of this title has been Sean Murphy's artwork.  His designs of the house and the mythical world of Hypogeia are fantastic, as is his figure work.  This comic would have been a lot less impressive in the hands of another artist.