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

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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

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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.

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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. Drawn by Klaus Janson (c/a), the issues were visually arresting, very moody, and to my mind the art fit the story perfectly – it was a moody story, one that could, I think, be read as a straight up Batman adventure, or as a horror story or sorts. What was your approach to Batman here, compared to way you wrote the character in Arkham Asylum? After Arkham, I wanted to remind readers and myself that I could also do a traditional Batman story. I was becoming typecast as some left-field weirdo and it became important to me to make it clear

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that I was a commercial writer capable of adapting to different styles. Working backwards from my obsession with the Romantic poets, I was reading the Gothic classics – like Castle of Otranto, Melmoth the Wanderer, The Monk, etc. – at the time and the story makes no secret of its debt to that period and that type of writing. Gothic was intended to read as a collaboration between Lewis and Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams.

Were you always interested in Batman? I’m fascinated by the character of Batman/Bruce Wayne. I can recognize in myself a lot of self- assurance and arrogance that defines Batman for me. My family didn’t have much money but we were always immaculately dressed and encouraged to think of ourselves as special so I can under- stand how it feels to transform yourself into something you didn’t start out as.

Like Animal Man and Doom Patrol, your work on The Invisibles has (also) been hailed as highly innova- tive and ground-breaking. Many feel this series represents your most important work. When you think of The Invisibles what are your thoughts and impressions now, in retrospect? Anything you might share … The Invisibles still feels like the centre round which everything else I’ve done revolves. I can’t imagine ever being able to surrender myself so totally to a story again … and the secret of the universe, and the knowledge and conversation of Your Holy Guardian Angel arrives only once in a lifetime prior to death, so that series was a big flag planted at a very important and profound moment in my life – I almost died half way through, I went around the world twice on my own, and also travelled exten- sively with friends, I had three incredibly important romantic relationships and numerous other flings that helped change my entire outlook on life. All of that rapid personal transformation informs The Invisibles.

How did you come to write JLA? I was asked to write JLA by the editor at the time, the irrepressible Ruben Diaz, after getting in touch with editor Eddie Berganza about doing Teen Titans. I wanted to do mainstream superheroes and Ruben was looking for a writer to revitalize the Justice League.

Did you achieve what you’d set out to do on the series, looking back now? Pretty much. I was feeling the lack of imagination and verve in mainstream superhero books and wanted to show what could be done with a little extra thought. After JLA, other writers felt a bit less inhibited about exercising the wilder side of their creativity again, I think.

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I thought Howard Porter’s artwork on the series was outstanding and suited the grandeur, power and sense of adventure that the stories themselves conveyed. How important is creative synergy between the writer and artist? How does this relationship work? Does it change from project to project, depending on the artist(s) and particular circumstance(s), and was your experience on JLA typical? Ruben Diaz brought Howard and I together and it was an inspired pairing. As I say, Ruben was a very energetic, forward-looking editor. I had a longer and closer relationship with Dan Raspler who succeeded Ruben as editor but I have to give Ruben the props for selecting the team and realizing we could do something big with the book – he kick-started the revolution that brought the so-called ‘Dark Age’ of comics to an end. ‘Creative synergy’ is like ‘on-screen chemistry’. Sometimes there are artists I just have a particu- lar rapport with and I think it shows.

Did you consciously set out to do a definitive run, as it were? I always set out to do a definitive run. I can’t see another reason to do a book.

What was the inspiration for the JLA Watchtower and for the idea of locating it on the moon? The lunar Watchtower was part of the attempt to make everything bigger and grander and more ‘mythic’.

Your stories created the sense that the JLA was firmly situated within a broader DC Universe that was/is truly alive, given to endless wonders and possibilities. Was this intentional on your part? Yes, I wanted to emphasize the scale and scope of the world the JLA inhabited so I deliberately tried to bring in parts of the DCU that were rarely considered for story settings at the time, like the 5th Dimension, or the Anti-Matter universe of Qward.

Batman, within the context of your JLA … The ultimate human, the self-made demigod who is allowed to sit at the table of the immortals as a result of his superhuman dedication to his own self-improvement and protecting the lives of others.

John Byrne has told me he feels that Batman and Wonder Woman are ideally suited for each other as romantic partners …

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I agree. It was something I suggested back in the JLA days and I think Joe Kelly played with it for a while when he was writing the series. I figured Batman is the only guy who wouldn’t be intimidated by Wonder Woman’s aristocratic nature or her immense power. In fact he’d relish it.

What was it like working on Marvel’s most popular superhero team, the X-Men, after your tenure on JLA? Here again you ushered in a range of fresh ideas and brought an infusion of energy. You also brought order and sensibility to the series through your narratives, which focused heavily on character development. Your tenure on X-Men gave fans an unfolding narrative that (again) constantly moved forward and you also set up old school shocks that seemed to me to have a classic Silver Age sensibility to them. What were your goals with the X-Men, and how much fun was the series for you to write? It started out as a lot of fun – there was a real sense that we’d broken into the headmaster’s office and taken over the running of the school. Unfortunately, I found myself having too many creative disagreements with Bill Jemas and wound up somewhat soured on Marvel and its characters.

I really liked what you did with Emma Frost – had you been a fan of the Claremont/Byrne Hellfire Club stories beforehand? Completely! X-Men was my favourite comic when I came back to reading them in 1981.

Your All-Star Superman project was a huge critical and commercial success. In your view, what elements define Superman? And why is Superman still relevant today – over 70 years after Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created the character? Superman is simply the representation of how most men (according to a recent survey) want to be regarded by others – strong, fair, beloved by women, respected by men – the best Superman stories aren’t about superpowers, they’re science fiction fables about the might and majesty, the power, the responsibility and the baffling inconsistency of trying to be a decent man in a wild world.

When you think ‘definitive Superman’, what creators, particular stories, ideas or possibilities immediately come to mind? There have been many good Superman stories. My favourites range across the character’s entire history, but the ones I always return to with the most fondness are the Weisinger era stories from the 50s and 60s. I only started reading Superman at the beginning of the 70s, so most of the real Silver Age material was new to me when I started doing my research. The stories are warm and

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human, weird and personal. They really draw you in and the clear, simple artwork gives this era of Superman a fairy-tale feel. Before writers decided that superheroes behaved in certain ways, there were these crazy little tales of love and jealousy and fear which were designed for a very wide audience.

Why are projects like All-Star Superman and All-Star Batman so successful, creatively and also from a publishing point of view, in your opinion? They’re successful because they don’t shackle themselves to the long-running, ongoing soap opera known as ‘continuity’ in shared universe stories. They’re attempts to synthesize many decades of interpretation into one ‘definitive’ portrayal, aimed at an audience more familiar with these charac- ters from film and TV.

How did Final Crisis develop? What was your thought-process in terms of story development? When I started Final Crisis in 2006, I decided this story about gods, parallel universes and ‘The End of The World’ should aim to be a myth about Now, about the way the world was feeling five years after 9/11. I was responding to a definite sense that the future had been cancelled, even that evil had ‘won’ during those years, and I think many of us were aware of a kind of sombre, heavy, ‘end of civiliza- tion’ mood and a retreat from progressive values into a kind of reactionary witch-hunting Puritanism. I was watching our young soldiers dying in the Middle East while our ‘emo’ kids back home took to cutting and slashing their own flesh with razors as some bizarre, inarticulate response to the whole looming Zeitgeist … and I saw correspondences there and things worth responding to with this kind of fiction. For me, Final Crisis was about the type of guilt-ridden, self-loathing stories we insist on telling ourselves and, especially, our children – about the damage those stories do and about the good they could do if we took more responsibility for the power and influence of our words. Narratively, it was inspired by the big ‘end of the world’ stories from mythology and the Bible – the Norse Ragnarok, Revelations, the Mahabharata, etc. It was about events, ideas and conse- quences, rather than characters, in that respect, but hopefully it encompassed struggles we all understand and tackled some big ideas in a new way.

In what ways were you influenced by Jack Kirby? With the Kirby material I was trying to find a way to refresh his concepts – which were created to be relevant to a post-war, Vietnam 60s baby boomer generation – for a contemporary audience.

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Kirby was a great mythmaker in the William Blake mould and his big archetypes of the modern age, his gods of science, surveillance, information and industrialization, lend themselves well to reinter- pretation in a War on Terror context.

What do you think makes the superhero concept so appealing to audiences so many years after most of the most popular characters, such as Superman and Batman, were first created? People like superheroes, particularly in stressful times, because there are very few fictions left which offer up a utopian view of human nature and future possibility. I suspect that’s some part of the appeal. The superhero is a crude attempt to imagine what we all might become if we allowed our better natures to overcome our base instincts. If we are not a race of predatory monsters intent on murdering ourselves with toxins and famine and war, then the superhero is the last, best shot at imagining where we might be headed as a species. The superhero occupies a space in our imagina- tions where goodness and hope cannot be conquered and as such, seems to fill what I can only describe as a spiritual hole in secular times.

How do you feel the superhero concept has changed over the decades? Immeasurably. Superhero comics, like all pop trash art, tend to function as reliable barometers of cultural change. You have only to look at the different versions of Superman in each decade since his creation – the ferocious, feisty socialist reformer of the Depression years became the upstanding law-abiding super-cop of the 40s, then the cosmic-suburban ‘dad’ of the 50s, the endlessly shape- changing ‘LSD’ Superman of the 60s, the troubled seeker of the 70s, the confident yuppie of the 80s … each step of the way matching, reflecting and, in some cases, even predicting social change. In recent years, we’ve seen the superhero as celebrity and as super-soldier, tool of the Military Industrial Complex. The coming wave is more escapist, more psychedelic in tone. The Hero home from the War. The superhero always mirrors the emotional needs of his audience, and comic book creators adapt – sometimes quite unconsciously – to provide the kind of protector and role model each age demands.

In what ways has the comics industry changed over the past quarter century? It’s lost a lot of its scuzzy, near-porno atmosphere and become a little more accepted by mainstream culture, mainly thanks to the movies. We haven’t quite been invited to the feast yet but at least they’re acknowledging our pinched little faces pressed up against the window. In its attempt to appeal to a wider demographic, however, comics storytelling has unfortunately become more

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conservative and imitative. In an attempt to appeal to Hollywood, most comics writers appear bedazzled by the ‘screenplay’ approach to storytelling. The Hollywood three-act structure and the whole Robert McKee ‘Story’ approach – which is really just a helpful template for ‘writers’ who lack the innate ability to construct satisfying narratives on their own – seems to have displaced the quirkier and more unique elements of comic book plotting.

Has fandom changed along with the industry? How would you define ‘comic book culture’ today? The readers I meet at conventions have always tended to be smart and friendly but, sadly, the Internet has allowed people to vent their unpleasant personal frustrations in public who would never dare or dream of being insulting to me or anyone else in person, and that’s been a bit of an eye-opener. The levels of resentment, jealousy and ignorance I encounter on comic book websites are staggering. The lack of basic manners, the volume of hatred and personal abuse directed against people doing their jobs is overwhelming. If you spoke to someone on the street in Glasgow the way some posters speak on the Internet you’d be going home with your balls in a bag. ‘Comic book culture’ was more fun when it was confined to a few fanzines and conventions.

How do you envision the future? I see the monthly books as something that’s aimed at the enthusiasts, allowing them to see stories ahead of everyone else. The collected trade editions in the bookstores are at the leading edge of making comics more widely accepted however.

The visibility of superheroes within the wider pop culture has arguably never been higher … As yours truly predicted back at the end of the 90s. It was obvious that the development of CGI technology would lead film-makers towards source material that would allow them to play with the new toys – comics and fantasy.

I’ve read that you’re also interested in the video game medium? I love playing them and I’ve written a couple but there’s not much freedom to do the kind of inno- vative work I’d like to do, sadly.

What creative possibilities do you think video games afford? And what types of video game projects are you most interested in working on in the future?

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I think they’re the most important development in entertainment since the creation of the movie camera. Unfortunately they’re more controlled than any previous artistic technology. Until we get a ‘punk’ phase where the tech gets cheaper and people start making really good indie games which can compete with Tomb Raider and GTA, the games industry will remain trapped in a predictable ghetto of shoot em ups and platforms. There’s just so much more you can do. What about murder mysteries? Build a whole English village and wander round solving clues and buttering scones. Or do the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a game and work towards achieving genuine enlightenment. I’d love to do and have a huge pitch for the Citizen Death game I devised. Let’s hope someone is enterprising enough to take a chance on something new. It’s usually a good idea to trust smart, creative people and to let them do what they want.

Back to comics proper – what types of stories are you most interested in telling now, and in the future? I usually write about how I’m feeling, where I’ve been and the people I’ve met. It’s hard to predict what I might want to say next but I have a list of stories I’ve still to get around to, so I suppose it’ll be whichever one of them seems most appropriate to the times.

I want to close out this interview with a question devoted to something I read several years ago – your idea to cast the DC Universe as a ‘living entity’. What can you tell me about this? I’ll need more than 15,000 words to explain this theory! This was a diabolical notion I floated after reading Steven Johnson’s book Emergence a few years ago. Crudely, emergence theory says that the more information you put into a system, the more complex it becomes, the smarter it becomes too. One bee isn’t particularly clever on its own but a hive of bees is a complex interactive system and so on. It’s worth reading. Anyway, I’m sure everyone is aware of the idea, almost a cliché, that there often comes a point in a story where the writer is moved to say, ‘It was as if the characters came to life and started doing things I didn’t expect …’ or ‘the story started writing itself’. In my own experience, this is quite a literal phenomenon. Characters will actually begin to behave in unexpected ways, or resist changes I’ve planned in my notebooks. Rather than ignore this fascinating aspect of life, I wondered if it could be illuminated by the concept of emergence; might it be possible for a story and characters to achieve a complexity sufficient to generate a rudimentary self-awareness? Could fictional characters then ‘think’ for themselves and communicate with their ‘author’ in such a way as to change the direction of their own stories? It occurred to me that a fictional universe, added to by many generations of imaginative labour, and 70 years deep, might be capable of the kind of complexity that would produce ‘intelligence’. The

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DC Universe, that two-dimensional world, is real place, a real continuum where things happen on paper and have their own consequences. As I always say Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and all the others have been around a lot longer than me, are known by more people than will ever know me and will outlast my time on Earth. I’ve devoted years of my life to ensuring their continued survival. They’re more real than I am. If nothing else, the relationship of real people to the lower dimensional worlds of fiction is always fascinating food for thought.

Jeffery Klaehn has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be iden- tified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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