The story so far:

Knight of the Fox

Son of the Knight of the Fox

Son of the Knight of the Fox - Part 2

I'd already planned to keep reading through Grant Morrison's bibliography, but wasn't planning on talking about any new books until Deltarune Chapters 3 and 4 drop. Then I realized if I do that, I'm going to be in for a shitload of work. I'd have to talk about Final Crisis, The Invisibles, The Filth, and so on alongside four chapters of Deltarune AND how all the previously read books parallel Deltarune Chapters 3 and 4 AND how the new information gleaned from Chapters 3 and 4 changes previous speculations, all while nursing the splitting headache I'm going to have if Chapter 3's secret boss really does turn out to be Christopher Reeve with a big bomb.

Sure, I doubt every Morrison book is going to be comparable to Deltarune, like I'm not sure how much there's going to be to say about Zenith and Klaus besides Klaus being a Santa Claus origin story and another name for Santa Claus being Kris Kringle (and since you're wondering, no, I don't believe Morrion's Klaus has anything to do with the Netflix movie about the postman who's basically Emperor Kuzco). And unless a future chapter of Deltarune features magic drag queens I will not be looking into Morrison's 2022 Luda novel. But I feel like I'm going to have my hands full enough just from The Invisibles. So fuck it, let's keep the Morrison train going.

I'm going to be doing something different this time; instead of reading a bunch of Morrison's books and dropping everything at once, I'll be updating this page as I go along. And if Chapters 3 and 4 release while I'm doing this, I can pivot right in.

Latest Update 4/27: Batman R.I.P., additional entries to More Odds and Ends

But first, a discussion I've been wanting to have for a while.

In the last two parts, I've occasionally brought up the term "apophenia." Appropriately enough, there's a meme of the Question explaining it.

In other words, it's when people form meaning in random nonsense. It's the thing that causes people to see Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich, sync Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz, or in the case of the Kimba/Lion King controversy claim The Lion King clearly ripped off Kimba the White Lion because of straw-grabbing bullshit like Kimba and Simba both having a love interest, or both frequently showing characters standing on cliffs. Because Kimba the White Lion is the only story to ever have a love interest and characters standing on cliffs prior to The Lion King.

By the way, that is not an animation error, the Question doesn't have a face.

As I analyze Grant Morrison and Toby Fox's works, I'm trying my best to focus on major themes and key story moments and not bog these articles down with inconsequential garbage and things that are clearly Morrison and Fox both pulling from common tropes. For example, in Joe the Barbarian the statue of the Iron Knight is holding a chain.

Yes, there is a minor mistake in that he's holding the chain in his right hand on the cover there, but in his left hand within the book. I'm not going to beat Sean Murphy over the head with it because he probably just had a brain fart over the cover focusing on the statue's reflection rather than the statue itself, and I can't even put penguins on blankets correctly.

And during the neutral Spamton NEO fight, he refers to Kris being a "heart on a chain."

But chains are a common symbol of imprisonment and control. The Iron Knight imprisoned King Death within the Hypogean Labyrinth years ago, and Kris is under the control of both the player and whatever entity makes them slash Toriel's tires in the ending of Chapter 2 (*cough*Toby Fox*cough*). And chains parallel the strings of a puppet, both being long, flexible, relatively thin items used to control the movements of something else. At most you could argue the chain of the Iron Knight parallels Kris being bound by the chain of the Roaring Knight, and Joe is standing directly under the chain on the cover art, but even that's a huge stretch. So unless a future chapter is going to have Spamton giving the kids a history lesson under a bigass statue of the Roaring Knight holding a chain, there's no reason to even suggest Fox got the idea for the "heart on a chain" comment specifically from the statue of the Iron Knight.

A mother-fucking telephone god that randomly talks in snippets from other conversations is a lot more specific.

I didn't even mention how the Telephone Avatar is kept in the depths of the Pentagon while the NEO Machine is kept in the depths of Pandora Palace, or how the first thing the Avatar says when it emerges is "It's for you." And yes, the Avatar is charging up a BIG SHOT there.

For another example, in We3 the armors of the three pets are colored blue, pink, and green, the same colors Deltarune uses to represent Kris, Susie, and Ralsei.

But red, blue, and green are the primary colors of light-based or additive colors (compared to red, blue, and yellow, which are the primary colors of pigment-based or subtractive colors). And because the colors of the armor sets are pastel, red becomes pink.

Some things are muddier, like how in the climax of Akrham Asylum Batman starts attacking the place with an axe which he then sets at the feet of the Joker, a clown based on the Joker card.

Susie uses axes for weapons and Jevil, a clown based on the Joker card, turns into a weapon for Susie - albeit a scythe - if you beat him violently. I can see how Fox could have pulled inspiration for Jevil from this moment, but I can also see how it's just me making connections where there are none. When I make observations like this, I put it into the "strange" category as opposed to "creepy."

A cartoonishly-dressed hypnotist name Jervis rambling about how everything is "just words on a page" is very much in the "creepy" category.

Likewise... okay, for people who aren't familiar with Doom Patrol, Cliff was a NASCAR driver who was involved in a hideous accident during one of his races, destroying his entire body except for his brain (again, in the comic. In the show he evaded the NASCAR accident only to be decapitated in another car accident). Caulder acquired the brain and put it into a robot body, so Cliff is a human brain in a robot body. But when Dorothy releases the Candlemaker it tears his brain out of his body and smashes it, causing his consciousness to be downloaded to a backup disc within his robot body. To override Caulder's catastrophe program, Magnus pulls the disc and pops it into the Think Tank.

You've already figured out where I'm going with "somebody being transferred to a removable disc in a robot body"

Though, yeah, Cliff's disc is in his chest while the NEO Machine's disc is in the head, but Cliff's head used to contain his brain.

Then there's the things I fully admit are amusing coincidences. I'd be very surprised if Fox got his old Internet handle from that one page of Animal Man, it's far more likely Mike was named after Mike Teavee from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory than the guy Peter Milligan made Buddy's wife have an affair with, and as bizarre as the whole Ruby Fox thing is, "ruby" just means "red" and red is the color most commonly associated with foxes (unless Toby Fox read Zenith and took Ruby Fox as another sign he was destined to become the Grant Morrison of video games, despite Ruby Fox being a woman).

When you cross-examine the parrot in the first Phoenix Wright game, there's a point where the Judge says "Once is a coincidence, twice is a pattern." That's the rule I'm trying to go by here; the more similarities something has and the more specific they are, the more attention I'm going to give it. Lennox getting into a robot to fight Buddy isn't anything noteworthy, happens all the time. Not even the fact Bugman is blue, they probably chose that color because blue is the closest color to steel out of the six primary and secondary colors, and to contrast his big red eyes. It's the fact Bugman is a big blue robot that shoots battery acid that makes him uncomfortably close to Giga Queen.

Once you set a foothold in the big things, like Buddy referring to the higher reality as "Heaven" and alluding to "Heaven" watching them, people "shambling aimlessly towards oblivion" and "lost eternally in an endless night" following the death of their dreams, the insane members of a facility with an alliterative name being the ones who are truly free, and, well, the entire plot synopsis of Joe the Barbarian, it becomes easy to wander off into the weeds of irrelevant, conspiracy theory bullshit that doesn't mean anything, like Agent "!" having a bird cage for a torso, which is where his heart would be if he had one instead of an airplane with legs, and Kris tearing the heart-shaped SOUL out of their torso and throwing it into a bird cage at the end of Chapter 1, or how you can rearrange "Lennox" into "Elnxno," and X is a wild-card letter, and Lanino - who looks a hell of a lot like Lennox - is named after the "Elnino" weather effect. Just... I'm trying to stay on the path here. I'll let you judge how successful I am.

And with our discussion of apophenia fresh in your mind, yes, "Final Crisis" does sound a little like "Final Chaos."

Final Crisis has got to be the most batshit of Morrison's books I've read so far, and when that includes Doom "One of The Main Characters is a Sentient Crossdressing Street" Patrol, that is saying something. In Supergods, Morrison talks about their thought process behind Final Crisis: comics are stories, and what better way is there for a story's reality to unravel than for the story itself to turn to complete nonsense?

And if it wasn't for that little nugget of information from another book, I'd have no fucking idea what was supposed to be going on at all.

My discussion of Final Crisis is going to differ from previous books because the story itself only had a single direct parallel to Deltarune that I caught. So far, anyway. Maybe more will pop up when we get to the Roaring, Final Crisis being about averting a world-ending catastrophe and all. But I don't have a crystal ball nor the means to drag Fox out into the street and demand answers at gunpoint, so I can't tell you if the Roaring is undone by Ralsei singing into a literal Deus Ex Machina.

It does, however, feed into Deltarune being a collection of infinite possibilities that exist together and what I said at the end of the original Animal Men/Deltarune essay, that a fanfic where baby Spamton buddies up with the kids after the NEO fight is no less real than Fox's official telling of the events.

So, what is Final Crisis about, anyway? There's this big baddy in the DC Universe, Darkseid (pronounced just like "dark side"), who rules over a planet of dark gods called Apokolips. Since I'm sure more people are familiar with Marvel lore than DC lore through the MCU, Darkseid is the Thanos of the DC universe although it's more accurate to call Thanos the Darkseid of the Marvel universe but let's not get bogged down with semantics here. If you recall those Animal Man cartoons I linked to where he's voiced by Weird Al Yankovic, the second one ends with Buddy flying by this big purple guy and muttering "Can you believe that guy?" That's Darkseid.

He's just won a war over the good gods of New Genesis and has his sights set on universal domination, but in the process is tearing reality itself apart. One of his tools is the "Anti-Life Equation" which is described as a mathematical proof that Darkseid is the true master of the universe, but let's just say it's a signal that brainwashes anyone who hears it.

And there's your sole direct link to Deltarune.

Final Crisis has two big big "what the fuck am I reading?" tie-in metastories, one for Superman and one for Batman. Morrison was able to explore metafiction with Animal Man because, to put it bluntly, nobody gave a shit about Animal Man. Superman and Batman have more lore, alternate continuities, and reboots to play with, but people tend to be a lot more, let's say, protective of them.

In an attempt to impress Lex Luthor and get him to pledge himself to Darkseid, Darkseid's prophet, Libra, organizes an attack on the Daily Planet that leaves Lois Lane fatally injured. A mysterious woman promises Superman an elixir that can grant any wish if he aids her, and intending to use it to save Lois' life, Superman agrees.

This elixir is called "Bleed" and the worlds of the Multiverse are said to form within it. The Multiversity calls the space between universes the Bleedspace, and because Bleed can alter reality and grant any wish, I choose to believe it's the water of the Dreamtime.

While recruiting Supermen from across the 52 universes, he ends up leaving the Multiverse entirely and crashing into Comic Book Limbo from alllll the way back in Animal Man.

Okay, stupid irrelevant question time: doesn't writing Limbo into a story remind everyone of these characters and bring them out of Limbo? Also, is fanfic enough to get somebody out of Limbo or do they only get out when an officially sanctioned monkey writes them out? Like if you wrote crossover fanfic of the Green Team and Scrooge McDuck teaming up against Montana Max and Rupert Murdoch - I dunno, maybe you lost a bet and have to, or you're completely smashed on cheap vodka and in your stupor decide that's something that needs to exist - does that get the Green Team out of Limbo?

Anyway, hoping to find the information they need to get out of Limbo, they get Merryman to lead them to Limbo's library, which only contains a single book. Except that book contains every other book in existence. Even Deltarune's design documents, I guess. So there you have it, folks, Deltarune is part of DC canon.

This side story ends with Superman being being combined with Ultraman into a giant, living story and having a kaiju battle with a giant vampire or something, seriously, Morrison gets so fixated on using Final Crisis to explore metanarrative and fiction as alternate realities that it gets in the way of the actual story.

By the way, one of those alternate universe Supermen Supes recruits? Nazi Overman. So, uh, Morrison brought him back prior to The Multiversity.

Batman, meanwhile, gets captured and strapped into a machine that allows some glob monster to sift through his memories disguised as Alfred to, I think, create an army of infinite Batman clones?

As they dig through his head, we're shown a montage of Batman in different costumes driving different kinds of Batmobiles while fighting different versions of his rogues' gallery. I admit, I don't understand what these two henchmen's literal plan is, but I get that it's a metaphor for the many variations of Batman that have cropped up through the years. His captors mention something about implanting false memories while they extract the real ones, including ones where Batman's parents were never killed and he became a doctor instead of a masked vigilante. But that's the point of this montage, isn't it. All these memories are real, just in different timelines. All versions of Batman are equally valid.

And just as the Superman tie-in story makes a callback to Animal Man with Comic Book Limbo, the Batman tie-in story makes a callback to Arkham Asylum. There, Ruth Adams made an observation on the Joker constantly recreating himself.

19 years is quite the long game, isn't it.

When I first read that I had a total brain fart and thought Batman was talking about himself. It still works, though; just as the Joker regularly reimagines himself, Batman too is being regularly reshaped by the ever-shifting waters of the Dreamtime. Is Batman a goofball, campily riding a bicycle with Superman or running around with a cartoon bomb? Is he relatively serious but not completely miserable? Does Superman regularly haul him to Japan so they can both gush over Japanese cuisine? (Oh, what's that? You think I making that up?) Or is he whatever the fuck Frank Miller was doing in All-Star Batman and Robin? Does he look like Adam West, or Michael Keaton? Or George Clooney, Christian Bale, or Ben Affleck?

Yes.

Deltarune's light world is populated by alternate versions of the Undertale cast as different from their Undertale counterparts as the Superman of the Fleischer cartoons is from the Superman of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Only Fox could tell you if he got the idea specifically from Final Crisis, but it's still the same principle.

And how about the wildly different versions of its own cast? I'm counting six canon Spamtons, the ones who...

... got beaten up in the alleyway.
... made the deal with Kris, then were forgotten about in their shops.
... got put on the NEO Machine's disc, then left in Kris' pocket.
... were turned into Spamton NEO, THEN beaten up.
... were turned into Spamton NEO and aided by the kids (well, an attempt was made, at least).
... helped turn the Cyber World into a frozen wasteland and had his own scheme to take over the ruins blow up in his face.

Then the fanon Dreamtime got its hands on him and out came baby salesman.

According to The British Invasion, Final Crisis along with a divisive X-Men run where Morrison turned Magneto back into a straight-up bad guy after years of Magneto being slowly worked into a sympathetic anti-villain or even an anti-hero got Morrison chased off the Internet by death threats and general bile, with one reader declaring Morrison will one day see "justice" for what they did to Superman and Batman. How anything Morrison did here is worse than All-Star Batman and Robin is beyond me. Even today Grant Morrison maintains only the barest of online presences.

Okay, there seems to be some confusion as to which Batman story got Morrison run off the Internet. The British Invasion says it was Final Crisis, but Supergods says it was Batman: R.I.P. Given the other mistakes Carpenter makes in The British Invasion I'm more inclined to believe Morrison, but here the confusion may have an explanation. The Final Crisis Batman tie-in story with the Clayface lookalike, "The Butler Did it," is also printed in Batman: R.I.P. or at least the version I picked up, so technically both books have the moment that set off the fanbase.

Heck, it was probably both of them and Morrison's handling of Magneto, which had its own twist that probably left a lot of detractors thinking "Oh, shit, maybe we judged this too soon," creating a trifecta of fan outrage. Again, Batman: R.I.P. hardly did Batman dirtier than All-Star Batman and Robin but maybe people give that a pass because of how unintentionally hilarious it is. I just hope people have chilled out over the years.

Anyway, Batman: R.I.P. centers around this band of villains called the Black Glove, a Devil-worshiping cult led by one Dr. Hurt, teaming up with the Joker to throw a grand "Let's kill Batman" gala. By passing off as a psychologist trying to help Bruce, Hurt implanted the phrase "Zur-En-Arrh" as a killswitch on Bruce's mind and decides now's as good a time as any to activate it. Think of it like the passphrase in The Winter Soldier that turns Bucky kill-crazy, only here the phrase was supposed to brick Batman. Unbeknownst to him, Bruce had planned for something like this.

Like booting a computer from a floppy disc after a critical error to the hard drive, Dr. Hurt's attempt to destroy Batman's mind instead turns him into the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh, a persona Bruce created to run if he ever "crashed."

Okay, so what the hell is "Zur-En-Arrh"? Way back in the 50s Batman traveled to a planet called Zur-En-Arrh where the atmosphere basically turned him into Superman. And on that planet was this scientist who watched Bruce's adventures from across space and was inspired to become, well, the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh. Because everybody was just throwing shit at the wall during the Silver Age.

Why did Morrison bring this Batman back for this story instead of, say, Zebra Batman? You'd have to ask Morrison, but Bruce's parents were killed as they were leaving the theater after seeing The Mark of Zorro, and just before Joe Chill opens fire his father told Bruce that Gotham City would "throw someone like Zorro in Arkham." Morrison seems to be retconning "Zur-En-Arrh" into a play on "Zorro in Arkham."

The original Batman of Zur-En-Arrh was a fanboy from another planet, but this Batman of Zur-En-Arrh is a violent whackjob who's somehow still not as psychotic as the Goddamn Batman of All-Star Batman and Robin. This Batman of Zur-En-Arrh is Batman without restraint or control. Batman without Bruce. Batman without his soul.

Just like how, without the SOUL, Kris becomes a violent, tire-slashing... *checks notes* pie thief who can only run on the programming scripts Fox wrote for them.

Next question! What the hell is that imp floating over Batman in the splash page, cosplaying as him? That's Bat-Mite, although this book spells it Bat-Might for whatever reason, a reality-warping imp from the fifth dimension like Mr. Mxyzptlk. For a while he hangs out with Batman to be his last shred of reason, but once they get to Arkham Bat-Mite is unable to enter with him because, as we established way back in Arkham Asylum, to enter Arkham is the pass through the doors of madness. Batman asks Bat-Mite one last question before entering, and gets the answer you'd expect from Grant Morrison.

Since you're probably asking questions after reading the words "imp from the fifth dimension," no, Mr. Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite are not based on the fifth dimensional space aliens that allegedly abducted Morrison in Kathmandu and write our universe, they existed long before Morrison worked with DC. Morrison may be using Bat-Mite as an analogy for their fifth-dimensional aliens here, but otherwise it's a coincidence.

And going back to the discussion on apophenia, yes, soulless Batman looking over his shoulder at Bat-Mite while holding a baseball bat looks like soulless Kris looking over their shoulder at the player while holding a knife. Again, I don't want to call out every single panel of a Morrison comic that looks like something from Deltarune for fear of devolving into "Pumbaa was based on some random-ass warthog that appeared in a single episode of Kimba the White Lion" bullshit. So you might notice something I don't talk about and ask "How did you not notice this??" The answer is, I might have but decided it was too vague to be anything more than apophenia, which means I may pass over things that actually have something going on. In some cases, I skip talking about something because it's way too spoilery, like another key moment involving Joe's front door at the end of Joe the Barbarian.

Likewise, Batman: R.I.P. keeps mentioning the Joker alongside the Devil, calling back to the villains being the Joker and a cult of Devil worshipers.

Can't say for sure this is where Fox got the idea for his own Joker-Devil, but given all the other weird parallels with Morrison's books I can't help but wonder. Also, I'll talk more about the frequent use of tarot cards in Morrison's books at a later date, but from what I've read the Joker card is not equivalent to the Devil card in tarot but rather the Fool, I guess because of luck, improvisation, and putting your faith in the whims of the universe.

Appropriately enough, the comic itself talks about apophenia.

At this point, I've spent so long in the asylum that is Grant Morrison's head that I'm starting to wonder if any of this makes sense.

The September 2022 update includes a .gif of a band made up of Tasque Manager, K_K, Sweet, and a Mr. Nobody-esque silhouette man playing a saxophone.

At first I thought that character wasn't literally supposed to be a silhouette and that he'd just been censored out. A little digging revealed, no, he actually is a silhouette. You pacify those enemies by literally knocking their socks off (click the image in that link, it's actually a video), and Mr. Nobody wears gloves.

Hands play a major role in the Flex Mentallo/Telephone Avatar arc of Doom Patrol. When Flex is digging through garbage there's a poster of a severed hand on the wall, the sugar tongs are shaped like hands, there's a subplot involving a squad of fighter jets that vanished under a ray of light in the shape of a giant hand, and multiple references are made to "the dead hand of the Telephone Avatar."

A theory I've seen is the secret bosses are based on things that are typically discarded; the Joker card is usually taken out of the deck before play, and everybody throws out spam mail. Going with that, Chapter 3's secret boss could be a shitty, widely dunked on superhero movie, essentially Deltarune's version of Batman and Robin or Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Such movies are usually returned to the store, sold, donated, dumped in a box instead of placed on the shelf people keep the good movies, or turned off when they run on television.

When you beat Jevil violently he says "Hell's Roar bubbles from the depths." Doom Patrol repeatedly shows the Think Tank bubbling.

When I was pointing out the significance of doors in Deltarune, I somehow totally forgot about the bunker.

To make the whole Ruby/Toby Fox thing weirder, Ruby Fox is the character's real name and her superhero alias is "Voltage." Up to now I've been dancing around Toby Fox's old Internet handle because I don't know if he's embarrassed by it (not sure why he would be, it's not like he went by "Xx_DemonSword666_xX" or "Cuntsmasher420" or something) or if he acknowledges he used to go by it and just doesn't want to be called it anymore, but it was "Radiation." Voltage and radiation are both linked to electromagnetism, and are both types of energy generated by nuclear power plants.

I decided not to dedicate sections to Sebastian O and The Mystery Play because those two are some of Morrison's most obscure and niche books, and I feel any similarities they have to Deltarune are overlaps in Morrison's philosophy rather than Fox pulling inspiration from the books themselves. At least for now, let's see if a future chapter has the Fun Gang attend a religious play that gets interrupted but the murder of the actor who plays God. One little detail I'd like to point out, though, is that when Sebastian escapes Bedlam, his captor, Theo, calls in a group of assassins called the Roaring Boys to take him out.

I'm sure it's supposed to be a reference to "The Roaring Twenties," the post-WW1 boom before the Great Depression. Also, I initially misread it as "Surely you're not thinking of summoning the Roaring, boys?"

Back when I was talking about the Doom Patrol show being self-aware, I speculated that was the show trying to combine Animal Man and Doom Patrol. Turns out, that might actually be from the Gerard Way run, which gets super meta at points. The first big fourth wall break comes end of Volume 2: Nada.

Later on, Cliff and a boy who fell into the comic from the real world have a conversation bizarrely similar to the one Caulder and Mr. Nobody have in the intro of Doom Patrol episode 2.

Yeah, Way himself probably got the idea from Animal Man. And yes, we're talking about the same Gerard Way who sings for My Chemical Romance and wrote The Umbrella Academy and yes, Gerard Way is a huge Grant Morrison fanboy. Toby Fox wouldn't be the first person to have his mind imploded by Grant Morrison.

The whole time I kept referring to Fox being the Knight while using "the Knight" as a catch-all term for the game's villain, I completely overlooked there are two vaguely defined antagonists looming over Deltarune: the Knight, and the Angel. If Fox is the game's big baddy toying with everyone including the Knight, that would make him the Angel. While Fox is the creator of Deltarune and by extension its God, he's but a single inhabitant of our reality. Our reality is Deltarune's Heaven, which would make Fox one of the angels of Heaven. Balzizras was a literal angel that split off to craft its own perfect world after seeing what happened to Earth, only to have the whole thing collapse into war between the Insect Mesh and the Hussites.

Man, at the beginning of all this I said that if you asked me to pick one non-web comic most likely to be responsible for Fox I'd go with Animal Man. If you asked me that question now I'd ask you to let me pick two, but if you insisted I could only pick one I'd actually go with Doom Patrol at this point. And I specify non-web comics because if we considered all comics, obviously it's be Homestuck.

I don't have screenshots because I only recently learned about this and I'd have to completely replay Chapter 2 to see it for myself, but if you find Onionsan in Chapter 1, then talk to him again in Chapter 2, he says something about hearing a song under the sea. Again, water is symbolic of creativity, and Highwater calls the Implicate Order, another name for the Dreamtime, a sea of potential. Likewise, the Think Tank is a pool of water with the power to do pretty much anything.

Deltarune, or at least the game's ending, is allegedly based on a "fever dream" Fox had in 2010. I swear to God this "fever dream" better not be "I was abducted by aliens from the fifth dimension who took me to the lab where they grow worlds in tubes."