Grant Morrison Interview

STIC 3 (1) pp. 5–16 Intellect Limited 2012 Studies in Comics Volume 3 Number 1 © 2012 Intellect Ltd Interviews. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.3.1.5_7 interviews Jeffery Klaehn University of Strathclyde Grant Morrison Interview Grant Morrison is highly regarded as one of the most original and inventive writers in the comics medium. He has been recognized as one of the top writers in the comics industry for over two decades and is acknowledged as one of its most imaginative storytellers. In his time in comics, Morrison has contributed ground-breaking and best-selling runs of popular stories for the major companies, including DC Comics – Batman, Superman, Action Comics, JLA, Doom Patrol, Animal Man – and for Marvel Comics the best-selling monthly, New X-Men, as well as Marvel Boy and Fantastic Four 1234. He has created a number of revolutionary original comic series including We3, The Invisibles, The Filth, Zenith, Sebastian O, Marvel Boy and the cult classics Kill Your Boyfriend, The Mystery Play, Sea Guy and Seaguy 2: The Slaves of Mickey Eye. His graphic novels and comic book collections have been translated into over a dozen languages and are sold worldwide. In 2006 Morrison wrote two Eisner Award winning series, the 30-part epic Seven Soldiers and the critically acclaimed All-Star Superman, and he also gained a further three Eagle Awards in the United Kingdom, including one for Lifetime Achievement within the comics field. In 2007, Morrison won 5 STIC 3.1_Klaehn_5-16.indd 5 8/6/12 10:57:27 AM Jeffery Klaehn another Eagle Award for All-Star Superman in 2007. 52, the first weekly comic book series, was released by DC Comics in 2006 through 2007, with Morrison as one of the team of four writers; this series was an overwhelming success, selling up to 180,000 copies per week. Morrison wrote Batman for DC Comics from 2006 to 2010 and his tenure led to the successful launches of two new Bat-titles written and helmed by Morrison – Batman and Robin (2009) and Batman Incorporated (2011). Morrison also wrote the Final Crisis seven-issue miniseries for DC Comics in 2008. Joe the Barbarian, Morrison’s creator-owned miniseries, was published by DC Vertigo throughout 2010 and 2011. In July 2011 Morrison published a study of comic history and superheroes entitled Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero. At present, he is writing Action Comics and Batman Incorporated for DC Comics. What initially drew you to the comic book medium and what particular influences coalesced to make you want to become a comic book writer? Comics were always in my life. My parents encouraged me to read, write and draw from a very early age. Comics combined all of my interests. I have strong memories of reading Marvelman when I was 3, so I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by them. I started making my own comics when I was a little kid. What sustains your creative interest in the medium? The immersive, hypnotic qualities of the interplay of words and pictures. Were there any particular comics and/or creators (writers or artists) who were major influences on you at the outset of your career? John Broome, Jack Kirby, Len Wein, Jim Starlin, Steve Gerber, Don McGregor and Chris Claremont all directly influenced the way I tell comic book stories but the biggest and still the most obvious influences on my style came from outside comics – Dennis Potter, Alan Garner, Tolkien, J. G. Ballard, the Beats, David Sherwin and Peter Barnes – from lyricists like Noel Coward, Syd Barrett, Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Neil Innes, Dan Treacy, Paul Weller, Pete Shelley and Morrissey; poets such as Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Jeremy Reed and Peter Redgrove; and from artists like Warhol, Picasso, Duchamp, and Gilbert and George. What draws you to work in the superhero genre? I enjoy the freedom to work with colourful primary archetypes that speak directly and boldly to our greatest fears, deepest longest and highest aspirations. They’re about as far from social realism as 6 STIC 3.1_Klaehn_5-16.indd 6 8/10/12 6:18:53 PM Grant Morrison interview you can get but at their best superhero stories allow us to deal directly with ‘mythic’ elements of the human experience. We’re all superheroes in our own stories and in comics we get to see our heroes wrestle with guilt, fear, commitment, love, loss, in very direct, imaginative and entertaining ways. Superheroes deal with primal human emotions on a Paul Bunyan scale and because of their very nature as ‘unbeatable’ ideas they tend to suggest powerful methods of overcoming difficult emotions or coping with hard times in our lives. At their best they help us to confront even the deepest exis- tential crises. They have a strong ‘pagan’ religious or psychological dimension which I find rich, fascinating and filled with potential. A comic book ‘universe’ such as DC, with its cosmic backdrop of multiple universes and godlike characters, provides one of the few canvasses upon which we are permitted an exuberant day-glo examination of big issues of good and evil, being and non-being, free will and destiny. Those lofty themes appeal to my imagination and I like the irony of being able to explore or present sophisti- cated philosophical notions in the pages of a trashy superhero comic. Take us back to the early to mid-1980s. How was your career evolving throughout this window in time? What was happening? My career was growing like knotweed – from a few shoots at the start of the decade to Arkham Asylum at the end. In 1980, I was on the dole, playing in a band and writing space opera adventures for Starblazer comic and by 1990, I was the wealthy, féted writer of Arkham Asylum appearing on TV and writing award-winning plays for the Edinburgh Festival. My life had changed completely. The UK industry was filled with talented, forward-looking creative people and it seemed as though anything could happen and very probably would. It was a real party time – we were all in our 20s and the media loved us. We anticipated a world where we could get rich writing hugely successful comic books about any subject that interested us, not just superheroes or science fiction. We were sadly mistaken. The mainstream media turned its back on comics for a long, long time, the opportu- nities to make a living wage doing fresh or original work diminished rapidly and most of the prom- ising writers from the UK ended up servicing US superhero books. Animal Man conveyed strong, progressive ideas relating to animal rights. Did you set out to write stories that would be relevant in this regard, or did the advocacy simply arise from the unfolding narrative, the stories you were interested in telling then? I set out deliberately to use Animal Man as a way to express my outrage at the treatment of animals. I’d just seen The Animals Film, which turned me into a vegetarian for many years. I was helping my mum feed 25 stray cats. I’d lost a beloved young cat – the first real and painful bereavement I’d known in my life. All those feelings and attitudes went into Animal Man. 7 STIC 3.1_Klaehn_5-16.indd 7 8/6/12 10:57:28 AM Jeffery Klaehn Doom Patrol. You began writing this series with #19 in 1989 and you took this title to places that were unexpected, in a fusion of unique ideas and storytelling innovations. Were you given total creative freedom on the title and how important was this to your overall creative approach and what you were ultimately able to do on the title? The title was dying so they let me do what I wanted and it paid off. I approached Doom Patrol the way I do all my ‘revamp’ projects – what is it about? What was the intention of the original creators? How can that intention be revitalized with contemporary concerns and made to speak to a new generation of readers in words they’ll understand? Given that the Doom Patrol characters were described as ‘the World’s Strangest Superheroes’ and that the team was intended originally to have been called ‘The Legion of the Strange’, I felt it was essential to really honour those origins in the arena of the bizarre and freakish – it was the thing which set them apart from other teams – and so my own idea for The World’s Strangest Heroes was to expose them to ideas and images I found strange, edgy or unusual. My approach was derived from surrealist ideas, philosophical concepts and fringe science. Arkham Asylum also released in 1989 – any reflections or thoughts you might share? Partly, I was reacting against the then-vogueish ‘superheroes in the real world’ approach, so my idea was to do the opposite and write about a Batman who was not a man in tights but a pure symbol in a world of symbols. I wanted it to be more dreamlike. Batman directed by Cocteau and Svankmajer. The ‘darkness’ was the ‘lunar’ darkness of the unconscious. To what extent were you influenced (if at all) by Frank Miller’s take on Batman in The Dark Knight Returns (1986) limited series? To the extent that it was, in many ways, Miller’s Batman I was psychoanalysing – the angry, repressed, pain-obsessed ‘soldier’ from The Dark Knight Returns here laid bare on the couch. You wrote another Batman story that was published in 1989, ‘Gothic’, which was published as issues 6–10 of the Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight ongoing series.

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