On The Cheap: Get Pretty Much Everything In Comixology’s Grant Morrison Sale, Especially Aztek

This week, Comixology has a huge sale on Grant Morrison's work for DC and Vertigo, and as much as I like writing these columns and helping to turn people on to some good stuff, this is one time where I don't really feel like I can give a whole lot of direction. As you may already know, Morrison is pretty good at writing comic books, and his collaborations with artists like Frank Quitely, Howard Porter, Rags Morales and Richard Case has produced some of the best classics of the modern era.

But as tempting as it is to just say, "Hey, just because you love All Star Superman, that doesn't mean you'll really like The Invisibles" and call it a day, there is one thing that you should definitely be on the lookout for: the complete collection of Aztek: The Ultimate Man, one of the most underrated, under-appreciated superhero comics of the '90s, can be yours for five bucks.

Aztek, written by Morrison and Mark Millar back when they were still occasional collaborators, with art by N. Steven Harris and Keith Champagne, is one of those rare comics that's simultaneously a product of its era and years ahead of its time. It's exactly the kind of strange, compelling and complicated superhero story that the entire industry would be built around by the mid-2000s, focused on a section of the DC Universe that had never been seen before, but still feels like it has a history that mirrors the changes the superhero genre had seen as it moved from the optimism of the Silver Age to the grittiness of the '90s.

Even as the story was embracing that grittiness, Aztek was on the leading edge of Morrison's well-known desire to bring back the weirder, more fun pieces of comics history, too, and the conflict between them makes for a compelling story. Plus, if you're a fan of Mark Millar's work, you can see the formation of a lot of his signature quirks here in a story that doesn't quite have the mean-spiritedness towards the genre that you'd get later.

Getting the whole run for five bucks isn't the best deal in the sale --- that honor would seem to belong to those big JLA collections being knocked down to $5 from the cover price of $16.99, something you should definitely pick up if you want to see the real end of Aztek's story --- but it is something that a lot of fans have overlooked that's well worth checking out.

But really, this is a sale where there aren't a whole lot of ways to go wrong. Just make sure Aztek goes in your cart first.