Comiquando #24 - Reportages: Grant Morrison

Originally published in Comiquando #24, 1996 (translated from Spanish by DST and Google Translate - Read the original version here)

FEATURES: GRANT MORRISON

by Andres Accorsi

FOR THE SECOND TIME IN FIVE YEARS I HAD THE GREAT PLEASURE OF CHATTING WITH THIS STRANGE COMIC BOOK CHARACTER. BORN IN SCOTLAND 36 YEARS AGO, GRANT MORRISON, BEHIND HIS RETRO LOOK AND TACITURN MANNER, HIDES A HURRICANE OF IDEAS THAT KEEP HIM AT THE TOP OF THE INDUSTRY. GREAT AND INNOVATIVE TO SOME, TWISTED AND CRAZY TO OTHERS, THIS IS THE MAN IN THE DRIVING SEAT OF THE NEW ALL-STAR JUSTICE LEAGUE COMIC.

AA: How did you start writing comics?

GM: I was still at school and fell in with a group of hippies in Edinburgh, Scotland. These guys were putting together a magazine and told me they'd pay me £10 a page, script and art. I was 16, and £10 pounds a page sounded fantastic, so I started working with them. After that, I sold some science fiction stories to a Scottish publisher named D.C. Thompson, and from there I went to 2000 AD, where I did the Zenith series, a kind of pop superhero. And in '87 I was contacted by DC and started working for them.

AA: Your first job in DC was Animal Man?

GM: Yes.

AA: That was crazy, very different from your previous work. How did you get the okay to explore the concept of a hero who discovers that he is a comic book character?

GM: It was a very experimental period. DC were riding high on the success of Watchmen and wanted to experiment a bit more. They were looking for material that didn't resemble what had gone before. My story seemed good and they let me do it. Also, Animal Man was a character that didn't matter to anyone, obviously I couldn't have done that with Superman or Batman. Animal Man was a very minor character, so I could do whatever I liked to him. It was influenced by old DC comics, the Julius Schwartz-edited Flash in particular, combined with something that I like a lot, which is the Latin American magical realism.

AA: You really like Borges, right?

GM: Very much so. And that was the approach that I wanted to take to the story. Address the issues of the character who becomes aware of what he is, that challenges the environmental categories in which he is put. It's not easy to do, but I think it worked because something like it had been done in the '60s, in The Flash and others.

AA: And with the success of Animal Man, DC gave you the Doom Patrol, a group you completely re-created ...

GM: What I set out to do was return to the roots of the characters, the basic concept with which they were created. The Doom Patrol's tagline was "The World's Strangest Heroes", but in the late '80s, this was no longer the case; the Doom Patrol was a kind of a cheap X-Men knock off. And I returned to the initial concept. I said "If these are the world's strangest heroes, let's see how I can make them stranger." But I made them bizarre in a modern sense. I couldn't do it the same way it had been done in the '60s, however much it had influenced me. I brought in other influences, like Surrealism and all that stuff. There were people who didn't understand, but it was a very linear superhero comic. In every issue, they came together, fought against a threat to the universe or reality and finally won. It was simple really, the kind of stories (Jack) Kirby was telling in Fantastic Four.

I think the '60s was the peak of imagination in comic books. Then they lost much of that strength, that imagination. The old Superman stories, for example, were very creative. In one issue he would turn into a caveman, the next into a giant floating above Metropolis and no one complained at all. But when I did the Doom Patrol, some people didn't like it, because they were used to seeing nothing but the same old stuff. I feel sorry for them.

AA: With both Animal Man and Doom Patrol, you gave advance notice that you would be leaving the series. I guess DC would have preferred you to stay, no?

GM: Yes, they wanted me to stay. But that's not the way I work. When I start a project, I think of the ending first and then everything else works toward that ending. For a story to satisfy me, it has to end. Having the ending clear in my mind, forms a sort of continuum, everything closes. I don't believe in open endings. My finales are final. I knew what issue the end would come in, wrote it and and left the magazine, because that was the end of my story.

AA: You're a kind of founding father of Vertigo. What do you think of the Vertigo 'style'?

GM: I think at one point Vertigo was in danger of stagnating, of becoming a genre. Luckily now it's becoming increasingly diverse. I think after the success of Sandman, editorial were pressing writers for more things like Sandman, but now that's changed, because Sandman has finished and Preacher, a comic that is nothing like Sandman, is the next big success. Vertigo's current policy seems to be "A good series is a good series, whether it has elves, dreams, or whatever." I think that pressure to be like Sandman is gone. You have totally different titles like Preacher or Flex Mentallo or Vertigo Verité, and they're nothing like Sandman. That seems very positive.

AA: I was going to ask what's going through your head when you sit down and write The Invisibles, but I guess that would be too long an answer. How would you describe The Invisibles to someone who'd never read it?

GM: The overarching story of The Invisibles would be that the world has two great opposing forces. One force wants the order and control, and the other wants freedom and creativity. These forces have been at war since man learned to think. The forces that want to enslave us are so powerful and so advanced that we no longer realize it. And the Invisibles are an activist group fighting against these forces, just as an excuse to give the comic its fair share of violence and shootings. But the truth is that my real intention with The Invisibles is to start a revolution. I don't mean a revolution with guns and bombs, mind you. For one thing, these are the tools of the enemy. I believe in the revolution of ideas, ideas like a virus. If the ideas are good, they soon take root in other people and they expand. Any idea, experience, thought or way of seeing the world that is a little different can help us see how they control us. And my idea is that a guy who reads the comic in Iowa, or Guatemala or wherever says. "Yes, I get it," and does something instead of going off and working in a bank. I'm trying to flood the world with good ideas. Those good ideas will defeat the bad ideas. That's what I do. It's very dense.

AA: How do people respond to The Invisibles?

GM: The response from readers is great. Readers are fabulous, but the issue of having different artists for different arcs has hurt sales a bit. I think people want a comic to have the consistent visual look that comes with a regular artist. Every month you get my writing, but the artist was always changing. Towards the end sales improved, and now we're putting together the second of three volumes. For this new series we'll have Phil Jimenez on art, because he was the most popular artist in the first volume. Hopefully that will put us in a better position, sales wise, because the reader already knows that every month you'll get some fantastic work by Phil, who is a wonderful artist, very complete.

AA: In one of The Invisibles' letter columns you say you took part in various magical rituals and actually managed to produce real magic. Is this real, or all part of the story?

GM: No, it's true. It's something that always interested me, but I was very skeptical. When you're skeptical and unbelieving, the best you can do is try and if it doesn't work, okay, don't believe it. But if it works, you rethink your schema. And I tried, feeling sure it would be nonsense, but it wasn't. When I did it, things happened. It opened my eyes - I saw strange things, I saw demons ... I don't know, I can't explain. I think a central theme of The Invisibles is how to explain these things. Everything is much more complex than it seems. I think things are happening, that there is a sense of the world, a sense of the universe that we don't understand. I think we're like ants in an anthill. Ants build cities, whole societies, live their life not knowing that humans exist, until they turn up and kick the anthill. They've been here for millions of years and dont know that we're here. We believe that we dominate the world, but what if there is something much bigger, so obvious we can't see it, but that is everywhere? The Invisibles is my way of investigating all this. I'm creating the schema to allow me to explain everything that's happened to me that I can't explain.

AA: Along with Mark Millar, you're launching a new series, Aztek. Is he a 'normal' superhero, or something a bit more far out?

GM: A combination of both. Our idea was to start the series as if he were a traditional superhero, a good guy, strong moral and right. Clearly establish him in the DC Universe, in the worst city in the universe. Aztek has to try to do good in the city before the city does bad things to him. That's the story arc for the first four issues. With issue five, we're going to be passing it on to a new creative team that drops all of the above and it gets intense, not too crazy, but philosophical, and without neglecting action because we want this to read by the kids. All this emphasis on adult comics left an entire generation of kids with nothing to read. Actually, I have no idea what kids read today, but with both Aztek and JLA I intend to do something interesting and imaginative for the kids, to get them reading comics again.

AA: Speaking of the Justice League, what are your plans for this series? Who decided that the new Justice League would be made up of DC's main characters?

GM: I decided. As I said, I wanted to do something less realistic. The characters are all a bit more 'classical' and, except for Batman, I haven't written any of them before. I had my Justice League proposal, but I thought "DC will never give me it." Fortunately, at that time, sales were down and DC wanted to try something new. They saw my proposal and gave me the green light. The first thing I suggested was to get rid all the lesser known characters, Fire, Nuklon, Obsidian, Ice and the others. I said "That's not going to work". The Justice League has to be mythical, the greatest in the world, like it was before - Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, all the others. You have to try and write them on a larger, mythological scale. These are the myths of the DC Universe, the pantheon. These are the stories that mothers tell their children. And DC went for it because the comics were selling really badly.

AA: Do you find it difficult to write characters who are under the control of other editors and other writers?

GM: It is difficult, but there are ways around it. That's one of the reasons I mentioned the similarity to mythological stories. In classical mythology there was the concept of the Dream-Place, existing outside of time and space, where all the heroes meet and the great stories always happen. The idea was to deal with the stories of the Justice League outside of the normal continuity, and DC went for it. It is difficult, but I wanted to write a comic that focused more on the stories. We can't rely on the relationships between characters in Justice League - like they do in the X-Men, for example - because everybody has their own comic. So we're going for the larger scale. These are the stories of the gods.

AA: Do you plan on adding more characters to the initial line-up?

GM: Yes, I'm introducing a new Hawkman, because the previous version had nowhere left to go. So through the Justice League we're going to launch a new Hawkman, completely different from the previous ones.

AA: Don't you think there are already too many Hawkmen?

GM: Yes, but none of them works. Today no one knows who Hawkman is. The last Hawkman, who came out of Zero Hour, wasn't bad, but nobody could decide who he was or what he represented, so we're ignoring him. We're creating a new character, with a different origin and a different motivation, just with the same name. I'm also bringing in Plastic Man, a character that everybody knows. Everyone's heard the name "Plastic Man", but nobody does anything with the character. And I'm bring him into the League because he's very different from everyone else. He'll bring some Jim Carrey-like humor with him, so, natrurally, Batman is going to hate him, and that's part of what makes it interesting. The clash of personalities will be one of the major dynamics of the new League.

AA: Why didn't you stay at Marvel, after your brief foray there with Skrull Kill Krew?

GM: They didn't treat me too well. Mark (Millar) and I proposed a lot of ideas that later appeared in other people's stories, which we believe were stolen. And I don't have such a passion for the Marvel characters. I can live without writing them. Also, working at Marvel is like a constant earthquake - it's such an internal mess you can't concentrate on what you're doing. They fire the editors, then take them back, it's all very unstable.

AA: What do you think of the comic book industry in general?

GM: We're at a good time. We're trying to get out of a slump and the glory days of the late '80s and early '90s are over. And luckily, most of the crap that was being published has gone too. Only the very best survived. In addition, the big movie studios are turning to superheroes, which I think is very important if we are to get kids back into reading comics. Although they're selling less than before the crash, on a creative level comics have never been better. There's never been so many different, diverse titles.

AA: What comics do you usually read?

GM: The things my friends write, Mark Millar and Peter Milligan, Mark Waid's Flash ... any superhero stuff has to make me feel cheerful and optimistic. I prefer the classics of my childhood: Superman, Batman, that sort of thing. If I want to read something serious, I'll read a book.

AA: Do you have any other projects out there?

GM: Yes, I am well underway with the TV adaptation of The Invisibles for the BBC. In terms of comics, I can't manage much more than The Invisibles, Aztek and Justice League. That way, I can get into something else.

AA: Well, thank you.

GM: You're welcome, it was a pleasure. "

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