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Superman mourns Batman's death in this exclusive first look at the hardcover jacket for Final Crisis, due in June. Image courtesy DC Comics
From mind-warping revisions of comic book heroes in All-Star Superman, Batman R.I.P. and Final Crisis, to pop-cultural and philosophical exegeses like The Invisibles, The Filth and We3, brainiac graphic novelist Grant Morrison is a master of the Gordian-knot narrative.
Grant Morrison talks comic books and movies at Comic-Con International in 2008. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Armed with an intellect and curiosity rivaled in comics only by Watchmen author Alan Moore, Morrison tackles M-Theory and brane cosmology, psychedelia and fascism, continuity and catastrophe while churning out comics that push the envelope well past the point of breaking. In his books, reality and narrative collide and sometimes disappear into each other without a trace.
"I’ve been trying to make superhero comics which draw attention to that aspect of participation and collusion between character, creator and reader," the 49-year-old virtuoso explained in an e-mail interview from his home in Scotland. "I’d love to see more comic book work which was aware of its real-world context."
Mission accomplished. All-Star Superman Vol. 2, released last month in hardcover, concludes a spectacular series that takes the Man of Steel through the looking glass, humanizing and deifying him in equal measure. Final Crisis, due in hardcover in June, does the same for most of DC Comics' timeless heroes, culminating in one of the most brutally catastrophic narratives ever written. By the time it was over, Morrison says he needed to lighten up.
"I spent months immersing myself in the thought processes of an evil, dying God who longed for nothing less than the degradation, destruction and enslavement of all of DC's superheroes," he confesses, "along with every other living thing in the universe and beyond!"
But he's not taking a break; far from it. From cinematic adaptations of his cyborg animal series We3 to games, TV shows and a Batman and Robin
series filtered through the iconography of David Lynch, Morrison's plate is packed. Wired.com caught up with the prolific genius to chat about the aforementioned and much more, including continuity, deconstruction, M-Theory and humans' obsession with the sexy apocalypse.
All-Star Superman explores a timeless hero without catering to humanity's darkest nature. Image courtesy DC Comics* *
Wired.com: All-Star Superman exploded the narrative possibilities of the Man of Steel.
Grant Morrison: I tried to be true to the concept of Superman as I understood it. It seemed fairly significant that the more threatening the world has been made to feel, the more this concept of the superhero has bled from the margins into mainstream consciousness, onto screens and T-shirts and into political speeches. That seemed worth exploring via the original superhero, Superman. He seemed the perfect subject for what became an attempt to make a mainstream, adult superhero comic that didn't rely on ultraviolence, or superheroes swearing and getting their dicks out.
Wired.com: He seems to be one of the pure heroes left standing in the 21st century.
Morrison: We've deconstructed all our icons. We know politicians are lying assholes, we know soap stars are coke freaks, handsome actors are tranny weirdos and gorgeous supermodels are bulimic, neurotic wretches. We know our favorite comedians will turn out to be alcoholic perverts or suicidal depressives. Our reality shows have held up a scalding mirror to our yapping baboon faces and cheesy, obvious obsessions, our trashy, gossipy love of trivia and dirt.
We know we've fucked up the atmosphere and doomed the lovely polar bears and we can't even summon up the energy to feel guilty anymore. Let the pedophiles have the kids. There's nowhere left to turn and no one left to blame except, paradoxically, those slightly medieval guys without the industrial base. What's left to believe in? The only truly moral, truly goodhearted man left is a made-up comic book character! The only secular role models for a progressive, responsible, scientific-rational Enlightenment culture are … Kal-El of Krypton, aka Superman and his multicolored descendants!
So we chose not to deconstruct the superhero but to take him at face value, as a fiction that was trying to tell us something wonderful about ourselves. Somewhere, in our darkest night, we made up the story of a man who will never let us down and that seemed worth investigating.
Artist Frank Quitely draws Superman in a way that humanizes the alien from Krypton definitively, Morrison says.**
Image courtesy DC ComicsWired.com: So the goal was to humanize the most popular alien of all time?
Morrison: Our goal was to put Superman and his familiar cast at the heart of science fiction fables that anyone, of any age, could read and understand, even though they'd all, hopefully, take different meanings from the stories. If you just lost your dad, maybe you'll read what Clark Kent says at his dad's funeral and feel some sense of human community. If you want to feel what it's like to be a teenager, look at Frank Quitely's incredible drawing of the young Superman on the moon, with his faithful little superdog, Krypto, beside him. Superman is us, in our dreams. He lives our lives but on an epic canvas. That's how we chose to approach him.
Wired.com: The series seems to carry as much sadness as it does comedy and action.
Morrison: I think the best Superman stories have an edge of sadness and loss. This is a man who has lost an entire planet, after all! But, like all our lives, a good Superman story also needs comedy and drama, fear and wonder. There's something particularly poignant about the fact that no matter how strong or fast or good-looking he is, Superman can still have his heart broken and his head twisted. He can still suffer guilt, loss, confusion and grief, which is where I find him instantly relatable.
Wired.com: How would you explain his death spiral in conjunction with Lex Luthor's? Their shared mortality produced some the most hilarious and exciting moments in your series.
Morrison: I saw Superman/Luthor as a classic pair of opposites, complementing one another like the two sides of a coin or an argument. Lex is, of course, convinced that if there had been no Superman to stand in his way, he'd be the beloved leader of a scientific utopian culture. I don't agree and think the flaws in Luthor's character would have always held him back. If he didn't have Superman to blame all his failures on, it would be someone else's fault. His decision to become Superman's archenemy is a way of inflating his own sense of importance to cosmic proportions.
Wired.com: How would you describe the evolution of their rivalry?
Morrison: If Superman is us at our best, Lex Luthor has to embody the worst traits of humanity. And so, while Superman sees the potential for good in Luthor and is constantly, vainly, trying to appeal to his better nature, Luthor, who sees only the worst in everything, believes Superman is as devious, untrustworthy and arrogant as himself. Then we decided that Luthor really likes Clark Kent! Clark's self-effacing humility and shabby physicality make him everything Superman is not. Playing out that dynamic added a new spice to the relationship between the two.
Wired.com: Bizarro has often been used as a punchline, especially in the Superman and Justice League animated series. But your series used him as a way to take Superman through the looking glass into Bizarro World. Which is the real Bizarro World? Ours? I'm beginning to wonder.
Morrison: When we laugh at Bizarro World, we're laughing at ourselves and that's the genius of the concept. So yeah, I'd say the Bizarro reality is always our world as seen through a shattered window pane. When you've got creatures who represent the "opposite" of human culture, they can only show us how arbitrary, pointless or ridiculous many of our own customs or thoughts are. We chose to make Bizzaro world into a kind of cosmic sewer of meaningless, nightmarish, imbecile activity in the face of looming apocalypse. Superman, with no powers, must harrow Hell and find a way home.
My favorite bit is the reverse "Stars-And-Stripes," when the Bizarro people sing: "Under land of no free, am us home cowardly."
Wired.com: Zibarro, Bizarro World's own Superman, was a misfit riot.
Morrison: Zibarro was the Morrissey Bizarro. The sensitive outsider on a world of lunatics. He was great to write.
Wired.com: This series takes place outside of continuity, but so have some of comics' coolest series. More and more pop culture exercises are experimenting with slipstreams, time travel, discontinuity and metafiction, so worrying about continuity sometimes feels like a nostalgia trip, especially with scientific discoveries claiming our reality might just be a giant hologram.
__ Morrison:__ I used a lot of this M-Theory, brane multiverse stuff in Final Crisis. Doug Mahnke did a great 3-D drawing of an inter-brane corridor in the Superman Beyond segments -- and it ties in fine with how I see things operating on recursive, isomorphic scales, or dimensions. I'm ready to accept that our entire lives are playing out across a 2-D film as thin as soap bubble skin, since -- as above, so below -- we already have our own examples of such branes in the form of movie and TV screens, the pages of books and of comics.
Wired.com: Should we abandon continuity? Or does it still serve a vital purpose? Is continuity obsolete, or is it inextricable?
Morrison: Continuity in comics takes the place of what we call "space time" in the real universe (or multiverse!) and is something that's under constant revision by diverse hands across decades of duration. Comics' time is clearly not much like real time as we know it, since none of the major characters age, although their sidekicks often do. And yet it's a kind of time that exists inside our own. These characters I write were having adventures long before I was born and will continue to have them when I'm dead. The Fantastic Four met the young Beatles. The Fantastic Four are still having vigorous adventures while only two old Beatles remain alive. I've done my bit but tomorrow, other writers will be forced to think like Superman, to do and say things only Superman would do and say, even though technically, he is not "real" and his writers allegedly are. Imagine being possessed by a meme that uses writers and artists to sustain its existence before moving into the next host, the next generation!
Wired.com: What are your thoughts on working with your Glasgow crew Frank and Jamie on We3 and All-Star Superman? Their work provides the perfect amount of restraint and explosiveness needed to make Superman fly off the page, or through a robot's head.
Morrison: I think it's somehow appropriate that the most successful take on Superman in many years has been created by three Scots. Frank Quitely's Superman is definitive, I'd say, and he nails the differences between Clark Kent and Superman's posture in a way no other artist has ever grasped. Then Jamie colors the whole book to look like some lost, gorgeous, 1930s, sci-fi Disney version of Superman. It was a perfect collaboration, oddly rooted in the convolutions of post-WWII history.
Where I currently live is a few miles from the former U.S. naval base at the Holy Loch. And it was here my dad was arrested for protesting against the presence of Polaris nuclear missiles in the '60s, and here where comic books arrived on our shores, in bulk, along with the U.S. service personnel. The first British comic book store as we'd recognize it today –- The Yankee Book Store -- opened in Paisley, just outside Glasgow. Just as early R&B and rock ‘n' roll records sailed into Liverpool to inspire the Mersey generation of musicians, American comics arrived in the West of Scotland. It's no real surprise we have an affinity for this material.
Wired.com: While we're on Glasgow, are you a fan of your countrymen Mogwai? I think they make the perfect soundtrack for a reading of All-Star Superman.
Morrison: Mogwai are very cool. But I haven't tried them with Superman yet!
Wired.com: Speaking of We3, any update on the film? That would be simply incredible, if it jumps off.
Morrison: The We3 movie is still churning its way through the Hollywood machine. John Stevenson is still attached as director, the animal effects have been costed and apparently some concept and poster drawings are being done this week. I try not to think about it, in the hope it'll all just finally happen one day.
The upcoming Final Crisis filters catastrophe through fringe science, with fearsome results. Image courtesy DC Comics* *
Wired.com: Like All-Star Superman with the Man of Steel, Final Crisis pushed apocalypse and deicide to the outer limits of narrative possibility. What are your thoughts on that series? Taken together with The Filth, is it the heaviest series you've ever written?
Morrison: Final Crisis was much heavier, much harder to write than The Filth, which at least came with massive doses of surreal black humor to sweeten the bitter pill of the subject matter. On Final Crisis, I spent months immersing myself in the thought processes of an evil, dying God who longed for nothing less than the degradation, destruction and enslavement of all of DC's superheroes, along with every other living thing in the universe and beyond!
To get into his head, I had to consider people like him in the real world and there were no shortage of candidates. The emissaries of Darkseid seemed to be everywhere, intent on crushing hope, or shattering human self-esteem. I began to hear his voice in every magazine headline accusing some poor young girl of being too fat or too thin. Darkseid was there in the newscasters screaming financial disaster and planet-doom. It was that sick old bastard's voice terrifying children with his hopeless message of a canceled future, demanding old ladies turn off their electric blankets to help "save the planet," while turning a blind eye to corporate ecocide.
Up against that, all we had to offer were the wise words of Pico Della Mirandola and Superman singing a song to break your heart. I had to grind America's superheroes down so hard there was nothing left but diamond in the dark. Everything was falling into a black hole, even the story structure ... and fans on message boards were going to war over the thing, screaming "genius" and "gibberish" at one another. It was quite unpleasant to be at the heart of all that but also strangely exhilarating.
I like Final Crisis a lot now that it's all over. I think it's the closest I've come to creating the type of DC superhero comic I most want to read.
Wired.com: Like continuity, is crisis itself becoming obsolete? Disaster scenarios seem to just get heavier and more mind-blowing, but they also are becoming more ubiquitous. Are we too inured to apocalypse and crisis these days to be scared of it anymore?
Morrison: I don't know if we're so much inured to apocalypse as almost sexually obsessed by it. We could only love apocalypse more if it had 4 liters of silicone in each tit. Think of all those videogames where the Earth's overrun by insect-aliens or there's been an atomic war and we're stumbling in the ruins with a gun we stole from a zombie. We should be grateful that we live in a culture so insulated from true horror it can afford to play with fear as entertainment.
Batman and Robin, Morrison's follow-up to the popular Batman R.I.P., is a bizarro treat. Image courtesy DC Comics* *
Wired.com: What's next on your radar?
Morrison: Right now I'm working on the new Batman and Robin book which is out this summer. Bruce Wayne is gone so we'll be seeing a new Batman and Robin team in action together for the first time. This is continuing the story from Batman R.I.P. and the pitch is "David Lynch directs the Batman TV show."
Wired.com: Classic!
Morrison: That's the only DC Universe book I'm doing this year. After Final Crisis, I needed a break from the spandex set. So I'm back with Karen Berger at Vertigo doing what I prefer: Creating new books and characters. I've just finished Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye, the second volume in the Seaguy trilogy with artist Cameron Stewart. The first one comes out in April and if you don't buy it, you'll die never knowing!
Wired.com: Well, that won't do.
Morrison: That'll be followed by an eight-issue series that's a new take on the "world in a wardrobe" fantasy story, drawn by Sean Murphy, who's the Next Big Thing in comics, they say. Then there's The New Bible, the final title for the project I'm doing with Camilla D'Errico. And I've been talking on the phone to Rian Hughes about doing a "graphic novel" -- a proper coffee table one -- together. So that's what's next with the comics for the next year or so.
Wired.com: Any non-comics activity you'd like to share?
Morrison: Outside comics, I'm working on a game, a TV show and some more movie biz stuff. The work that actually comes out is the tip of a gruesome iceberg of toil. There are about 30 projects on the go at any one time and most of those never get further than pitch meetings or the ideas stage. We just bought a house in Hollywood to help keep up with this side of the business, so it's not all bad.
The late Patrick McGoohan's 1960s British TV show The Prisoner influenced Morrison's world view and writing. Photo courtesy ITV
Wired.com: Finally, any thoughts on the passing of Patrick McGoohan. You've sampled The Prisoner before; any thoughts on its influence on culture and politics?
Morrison: My sympathies went out to McGoohan's family when I heard about his death, but I only knew him from the TV screen, where Number 6 can never die. His influence lives on as long as light spreads. That's as good as it gets. McGoohan was one of the great heroes of my childhood and adolescence, as well as a continuing influence, via The Prisoner, on all of my thinking.* The Prisoner *was probably the first example I ever encountered of the ergodic storytelling method I've aspired to perfect ever since.
I hear there's a film version on the way and I hope they have the balls to make it properly psychedelic and open to interpretation. And it would have to be Christopher Eccleston, as Number 6, the only British actor truly intense enough to follow the mighty, all-conquering, beetle-brow of McGoohan.
See also:
- R.I.P. Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner's TV Visionary
- The Prisoner Reboots the Panopticon for 21st Century
- Review: Watchmen Film Straddles Line Between Loyalty, Heresy
- Watchmen's Clockwork Origins Span Comics, Quantum Physics
- Legendary Comics Writer Alan Moore on Superheroes, The League and Making Magic
- Archaeologizing Watchmen: An Interview With Dave Gibbons
