Kill Your Boyfriend/Vimanarama Deluxe Edition by Grant Morrison, Philip Bond & D’Israeli

That said, the “young lovers on the run, leaving a trail of mayhem in their wake” plot has come and gone. And in the context of Morrison’s larger work, it’s more of an outlier; much of the mayhem is handled in a tongue-and-cheek fashion. It’s occasionally hard to rectify this Morrison with the Morrison who dedicated an entire issue of his series The Invisibles to humanizing a henchman who is shot and killed early in the book. Whether he’s dealing in cosmos-spanning superheroes or otherworldly secret societies, Morrison’s humanism is what keeps his blessedly high concepts rooted. Kill Your Boyfriend reveals a different side of Morrison’s work, but it’s also where one of his strengths has been reined in.

Kill Your Boyfriend Interior Art by Philip Bond

A lack of humanism isn’t the problem with 2005’s Vimanarama, in which a young English man named Ali, awaiting the arrival of the woman he’s set to wed in an arranged marriage, makes a discovery that could cause the end of the Earth: a group of ancient would-be world conquerors. Ali is a low-key everyman protagonist, and over the course of the book he cedes space to future wife Sofia and the leader of the Ultra-Hadeen, a group of long-lived superhumans. Epiphanies abound, and nearly all of the characters must come to terms with their own insecurities in order to do battle with the entities threatening mayhem.

There are enough ideas in these three issues to make for a series at least twice as long, which doesn’t always work in Vimanarama’s favor. At times, the onrush of ideas in a Morrison-penned series can be headily compelling. (Consider Seaguy, his collaboration with Cameron Stewart—another artist who, like Bond, can tackle both physical comedy and ornately designed characters with equal precision.) Here, that balance feels a little off: while Ali and Sofia have a good rapport, the other members of Ali’s family feel less fleshed-out—which becomes an issue when the climax involves several of them making a psychic connection to save each other’s lives.

Vimanarama Interior Art by Philip Bond

Perhaps the highlight of pairing these two works is the range that they display. Bond does a fine job conveying the comedy and romance in Kill Your Boyfriend, as well as handling the more Jack Kirby-esque elements in Vimanarama with aplomb. Neither entirely reaches the heights of some of the work that Morrison and Bond have done elsewhere, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of worthwhile moments to be found in both outings.