Embedded Files
Invisible Man – Interview with Grant Morrison
(NOTE: this interview took place in 1999)
Comic writer Grant Morrison is the author responsible for The Invisibles, a monthly ongoing series published by DC Comics that has proven itself particularly difficult to describe. Combining elements of magic, mythology, UFOlogy, conspiracy theory and popular culture, it tells the story of a group of “secret agents” whose assignments involve the confrontation of radical world-views and theories about the very nature of reality itself. It’s a dense comic, a complicated comic, but above all it’s a hell of a ride and perhaps even slightly addictive. Of late, Morrison has also been writing Justice League of America, one of DC Comics’ superhero titles that features the adventures of a group of superheroes including Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Batman, Aquaman and Plastic Man. It is his success in reinvigorating the tired genre of superhero comics that has brought a new level of notoriety to Morrison’s name.
What prompted you to decide to write comics in the first place?
Well, I was writing books when I was a teenager, bedsit books, that stuff you write, fantasy novels with tortured young men trying to get off with the fairy princess. And I was doin' that stuff, and I just wanted to write. I always wanted to write. And I was a comic reader, I knew the form, I knew how it was done, and when I was eighteen I got involved with these guys at Near Myths, which was an undergroundy kind of thing and they said "We'll let you do something for ten pounds a page." And I thought, "There's money in this? I get paid for writing?"
So I did this stuff and I did some stuff for DC Thompson, a real mainstream publisher who did the Beano and the Dandy. They were doing little space fiction comics because Star Wars was successful. So I figured I could do that, I'd seen Star Wars, I could imitate space fiction. And they were payin' me five hundred pounds to do one of these little digest-sized books. And that was it, I thought "There's money in this. I can't make money doin' the books." I had an agent, but there was nothing going on. Suddenly there was money in comics.
Then Warrior came out and I saw what Alan Moore was doing, V for Vendetta specifically, and it was just as serious as anything I might do in a film or a book, and I just figured I'd do comics, because people were getting paid to do it and they get to do the kind of work they're interested in. I wouldn't have done it if comics had just been superhero comics. I couldn't express myself like that. So I got into that and it was nine years of poverty anyway! I'm bangin' on doors and tryin' to get work... One or two things would get published, but you'd go by for a year and nothing would get done and then I'd do a little thing, but I wasn't working, I was on the dole. It was desperation, sheer fuckin' desperation. I got to the point where I had no money.
I was in bands, but guys always fall out in bands, so I thought "I've got to do something that only I can do, that I can do with my own resources and I don't need to rely on anyone." And that's when I decided it was comics. I just started bugging 2000AD, but like I said it took nine years, I was 26 until I was able to earn money and get off the dole.
And you got picked up by the American publishers in that "British Explosion" thing...
Well, they'd seen the Zenith stuff I'd done with 2000AD, and it was because it was superheroes. Neil Gaiman was comin' out at the same time, and Jamie Delano was gettin' some work, it was just the right time...
It's funny what you said about superheroes - you only got into comics because you saw an alternative to that, and now your main bread and butter is superheroes. Has your attitude changed towards them?
No, I always liked them. I didn't want to exclusively write them. And back then superheroes weren't as interesting as it is now. Superhero comics were pretty dull back then. There'd been some really great ones in the seventies, when people like Englehart and Don MacGregor were doing things for Marvel comics unedited, they were gettin' away with some amazing stuff, but that kinda died. Comics were shite, you know? Seventies comics were some of the worst comics in the world. So there was nothin' there you'd want to do, there was no way you'd do that Superman who was around in those days, or that Captain Marvel, or that Fantastic Four. But I think now because you've had people like Alan Moore and Frank Miller changin' superheroes, and people like me takin' a different way about it, it became interesting again. And it's just... I like doin' it. The money's there, and that's great as well. But one thing I want to do is go back and start doing things for kids.
We've done all these Vertigo comics and all this adult stuff and we've completely lost a generation, and no-one is buying the stuff. It's because we're not doing comics for kids, we're doing comics for adults, but there's only a limited adult audience, and these guys are gonna die. We should be looking at the kids and getting them into this. The real motivation for doing Justice League of America was to do a kid's comic that had some imagination and some madness about it that might get them excited and get them into the adult stuff...
So you were trying to re-capture the good things you remembered about superhero comics when you were young?
I didn't want to do the comics I'd read, because kids now aren't interested in that. Kids now have got an attention span of three seconds, or whatever, so I'll do a comic that's constant plot-plot-plot and ideas - a hundred ideas a page, and it's like a video game. There's no real characterisation, there's just bits that make you think it's characterisation, but it's about the speed, about the constant input of information, and that's what I thought kids would be into. And, you know, it sells, and the only people who complain tend to be the older readers, who want it to be more like the old days.
More like the soap opera thing where you can track everything down...
Yeah, and that's crap. I don't care, I just want to see big images, I want to see big colourful people hittin' other big colourful people and blowin' things up! Have some weird ideas in there, too.
That's what I remember about comics, someone asked me once "why do you still read superhero comics?" and the only reason I could come up with was the colours. "I really like the colour of Superman's costume..."
That's what I'm saying, you know that cover of Justice League with Superman and Captain Marvel? That image never fails! A big red guy hittin' a big blue guy! It always looks great!
The way that I see your writing career is that The Invisibles is the serious stuff, and then you've got this really sweet job doing the fun stuff on the side. What's it like being more known for the fun stuff? The difference between being a mainstream property and an alternative, cult property?
Well, I would have thought there'd be a big difference in the audience, and then I come and do conventions, and there's rarely kids in the audience. I think the kids read the stuff, but they don't care about this world that stands round about it. And that's why I don't ever trust any of the letters I get, or what's on the Internet, because those aren't the readers of JLA. The hundred thousand kids who read JLA don't write in.
The people at conventions tend to be the literate, more adult end of it. I'm only talkin' about JLA because they're relating it to what I do in the other stuff. I don't think the audience for the mainstream stuff comes to those things at all. The audience that comes to those things is as I say, a literate, thinking audience, and they want to talk about it in the context of stuff like the Invisibles.
What did you think of Steve Shaviro's book, Doom Patrol? Did you see that?
No...
He wrote this book about postmodern theory...
Oh, yeah! I did! Somebody showed me that one, that's right!
What did you think?
I just remember readin' it and I cannae understand it! (laughs) I hate postmodern theory because it's just gibberish! The jargon is so dense...
That's interesting, because I was explaining hypertime to someone last night after hearing you explain it, and they were like, "Hmmm... very postmodern..."
(laughs)
The idea reminded me of Flatland.
Well, that's what I was always interested in; I keep finding things that I can relate it back to. My base idea, since I was a kid, is that this is a made-up reality.
This is a projection from a higher space that we've forgotten about and when we wake up to it, something's gonna happen. I intrinsically believe that.
The theory incorporates some way of contacting these people?
Yeah, completely, I want to get one of them out here, see if I can do it.
See, I've got this thing worked out, I was going to do this Challengers of the Unknown thing as part of the whole hypertime thing, I was gonna do this thing called "Hypercrisis" which actually delved into the real big meat of it. I wrote this whole thing about the Challengers of the Unknown, but it was called Challengers Beyond the Unknown. It's them gettin' to the end of the comic book universe and actually lookin' out and lookin' up at us. And they're sayin' that the whole continuum is tremblin' and they're detecting these massive life signs out there, but they don't know where "out there" is. And I'd actually put in hypnotic commands that would make you go back and look at things. I had the whole thing worked out. You'll do certain things if you're told in the right language, so I had this thing worked out where you had to go back to page twelve, and I knew the reader would do it, and when they go back there's a message waiting for them that they hadn't noticed before. I was trying all these tricks and I was thinking "how close can we get to touching these characters?"
And then try to incorporate that into this reality...
Yeah, and see where does it go from the first level up?
Speaking of literary interpretations, this is just a bug inside my own head at the moment, but do you see any parallels between the Hindu pantheon of gods and superheroes?
I never really did. I think the Hindu pantheon's so specific.
Not really direct parallels, more the heroic stories and the...
Oh, certainly. The whole Mahabharata and the Vedic things, with Vimanas flying through space, that's like atom bombs being dropped on cities, it's like a superhero story. With the Justice League it was more specifically Greek, because you get the twelve Greek Gods and twelve Justice Leaguers and they map perfectly onto each other. On the same subject, me and Mark Millar are working on this movie about superheroes, just a different take on it, really. But what I did, was I went back to the first pantheon of all, the Mesopotamian pantheon, and I developed superheroes from them, and you get a whole different crew, a completely different type of crew. That's like the Indian thing, because they're different areas that they deal with. There's one thing that I realised, is that nobody in any superhero pantheon now has a scribe! And that'd be great, a superhero writer, what would that be like? I came up with this notion of this girl who sits at a fantastic morphing computer thing, and what she does is she plots the adventures they go on, so she's like the controller. And whenever they're in trouble they call her and say, "What comes next in the plot?" and she works it out and tells them. But I've never looked at the Hindu gods, because... Shiva's like a billion different things, you couldn't have Superman as a destroyer and a creator, because you'd lose what makes him Superman. But to take them and make up new ones based on what they represent, that'd be interesting.
You've said that in the last couple of years, the story of The Invisibles has become the story of your life. I was wondering of you could expand on that?
It started from, as I said, I set out to do a magic sigil that was a sigil extended. A sigil's a condensation of desire into a visual form that you can use to do magic. I thought, okay if I condense the sigil into the form of a six-year long comic, it's still a sigil, but a different type. It's a moving sigil, it's a dynamic sigil that has different effects. And I quite blithely did this. I came to New Zealand and bungee jumped with the sigil, threw it down, got myself into this state, and I thought I'd see what happened. The next thing, when I give King Mob the horrible shamanic experience, he think's his face is being eaten, his lung collapses; Sir Miles is torturing him... Three months later, my face gets eaten - there's the scar - and my lung collapses and I'm thinkin' "This is what magic's about, you better fuckin' watch it here." (laughs)
And I was doing the magic - the John Lennon thing that happened in the first issue, I got John Lennon's head and I wrote this song and it was channelling John Lennon. We recorded it and everyone was like "It's a Lennon song!" Then I did this stuff with scorpion magic, that was voodoo stuff, that was part of being ill as well, just getting over these voodoo entities that were the scariest shit I've ever seen in my life, real bad, bad news. But I put it onto King Mob. They told me I had to have a scorpion tattoo at the base of my spine, so I gave it to him - there's no way I'm gonna obey these giant scorpions tellin' me to put a tattoo on! And slowly I started really thinking about what I was setting in motion, how I was getting involved in the situation. Suddenly I was sick and I thought, let's see if I can make this work in a different way. So in series two King Mob's really healthy, he's diving off the diving board and he's shaggin' Ragged Robin. After the whole illness thing I'd lost my girlfriend and everything just collapsed, and I was in the abyss. So I gave him a good time and the next thing I know I'm in America, goin' out with a girl with green eyes and red hair, exactly like Ragged Robin. It worked! Now, if I put people in the comic, I meet them a couple of months later. Anyone I want to meet, I put them in the comic and I meet them! So like, Helga, in the latest one, I made this crazy girl up she makes films and she's full of mad shit, I meet the girl! She makes the films; I was in a film she made recently.
That reminds me of a couple of stories I've heard - Alan Moore claims he once saw his character John Constantine in a coffee shop, and Neil Gaiman met a demon character from one of his stories.
I think it does happen. That's my area of interest, the crossover between fiction and reality. The Invisibles is about breakin' down the walls until everyone's living in the world they want because fiction and reality become interchangeable. The Invisibles magic works for me, but if it works on a wider scale, very soon we're gonna see that happening more and more.
So do you think people are picking that message up when they read the comic?
Yeah, of course they are. Look at every movie they're making! As I've said, The Matrix is The Invisibles. Every movie that's coming out at the moment is about being trapped in a projected reality that isn't real, this Gnostic idea. Think of The Truman Show, Pleasantville, Dark City, all these things are all about waking up to the true reality, and it's getting into the culture and morphin' and mutatin' it. As I said in the last Invisibles, the world's gettin' the way I wanted it to be when I started the series. The world I used to live in wasn't very colourful, it's not that long ago - ninety-five, and suddenly everything's colourful, burgeoning out in every direction, like a fractal, weirder and weirder.
How optimistic are you about the whole Terence McKenna 2012 thing?
Well, we'll see what happens. I think it's a great theory, I think information is getting faster and novelty is increasing, so far it's working. It's so wild. Well, he was right. I looked at the time-wave chart and in 96/97 there's the biggest drop towards zero novelty that we're gonna have until we hit it in 2012. In 96/97 we had Dolly the sheep, we had reports of teleporting photons, we've got all this new technology...
Levitating frogs...
Exactly. I haven't heard anything about this stuff since, but it's out there and it's getting worked on.
You know what's weird? The green glowing mice that they're talking about now were reported in the Fortean Times eighteen months ago, and it's only now making news headlines. You've gotta wonder what they've been doing in that time, between the FT writing about it and deciding that it's okay for people to know about it.
Well, what they've been doing is making glowing people, and we'll probably see them soon enough.
I remember doing that, two years ago - I typed in "supermice" on the Internet, for no good reason. I thought there was no way I'd get anything about supermice, and that was what came up, some Indian doctor was working on it.
Wonder what the connection with the mouse with the ear on its back is? I've got this idea that the glowing mouse and the ear mouse would team up together, rebel against their creators...
I actually feel that it was almost going that way, when I was doing the Flex Mentallo book; it was about superhumanity trying to get through into this world. And I see it in the Human Genome Project, which will be complete in 2005, and they're also talking about life extension. I believe that my generation, your generation is gonna have a lifespan of at least 130. Superhumanity is creeping through the back door, there's a ton of superhero films comin' out right now, and there is a sense of restless mutation around.
What did you think of the fact that Flex Mentallo was almost reprinted, and then it wasn't?
I was so mad; it's one of my favourite books, that's my autobiography. Everything I do that I really like doesn't get reprinted, but all the bread and butter stuff does.
It was interesting, because Kill Your Boyfriend got reprinted, and that's seditious in its own way, and I thought if KYB got reprinted, then FM would have to.
It was Charles Atlas! The Charles Atlas people rang up and told us we couldn't do it. I just thought that tons of people have done parodies of Charles Atlas; it's one of the most famous ads in the world!
No-one's done the "Hero of the Beach" thing the way you did, though...
That's what they complained about, because he's got "Hero of the Beach" floatin' above him.
But they never complained when Flex first appeared in Doom Patrol?
They didn't notice it then. Somebody'd obviously brought it to their attention when the series came out. It was so annoying, because the series didn't sell. All of three people bought it; I think you're one of them. But I think now there'd be more of an audience for it, now that I've done the Justice League, because that's where all that thinking came from.
Are you actively trying to capitalise on this heightened publicity? Are you saying, "OK I'm fan favourite at the moment, can we get this happening?"
I've tried, but it's like a stone wall. It doesn't matter if you're fan favourite. They don't care. I'm just another disposable cog in a huge machine.
Was it like that working for the British companies?
It always ends up like that. It tends to be you move in and you've got friends in the business and they let you do stuff, kind of experimental stuff. At 2000AD I was gettin' away with anything. But me and Mark Millar did the 2000AD Relaunch, we were doing this strip called Big Dave, which was like South Park before its time, real non-political stuff and they were letting us away with it, and then this new regime came in and I'm blacklisted at 2000AD for no reason! It's the same at DC, you've got friends there and things are experimental and then suddenly they clamp down because DC is now the market leader, and the market leader's frightened, they don't' want change, they want to keep it in that position.
But they use you to become the market leader.
Exactly. Justice League is now the franchise. It is to DC what X-Men was to Marvel. But interestingly, now the experimental stuff is coming out of Marvel, because they're in the second position. They can try anything to get back on top. Marvel have got some top DC writers going over to them.
How do you feel about this reputation you get where people get scared of you and blacklist you for what you do? This reputation as the frighteningly weird intense comic guy?
I feel like a perfectly sane person. The people I speak to and who understand what I do also seem perfectly sane and rational. But I'm dealin' with children. I'm dealin' with people who think like children and respond to things emotionally - if you say you don't like their work, they'll hate you forever. If somebody says they don't like my work, that's because they don't like my work, it's as simple as that! Not everyone's gonna like what you do.
You find yourself dealing with really unusual people you wouldn't get on with in normal life. It's comic nerds. It's boys who got severely beaten up at school and they're suddenly running the company. And I look like the kind of guy who used to beat them up! So these emotional, reptile brains of theirs take over and it's got nothing to do with what's rational, it's "Oh, my god, it's a skinhead! We're in trouble!"
Well, you're not from America, either. The whole Trainspotting thing...
Oh, I get that a lot. And they think I'm on heroin constantly, and I'm carrying a knife. But that's away at home! (laughs)
You were saying yesterday that you were having trouble dealing with artists - what is it that you have trouble with?
It's not trouble, I just can't be bothered. I don't have time for them. I've been doing thirteen hour days for the last few years. It's this really intense thing. I haven't got time to see my family, let alone talk to artists. It just hasn't worked. I'll do my bit as well as I can, and I hope they do their bit as well as they can, but I don't want them to call me. I'll speak to Frank Quitely, who lives near me, but that's about it.
And this leads you into the six month break from comics and the move into novels?
I just thought it was time I did it. I've been so busy. I'll always do comics - I love the form, I love what you can do with them, but it was getting onerous. I'm thinking I should be doing other stuff, people have been getting in touch with me and saying will you write this movie, will you do this, and I was losing interesting avenues to explore. So I made this decision that I'd made enough money off JLA to do other stuff that I've been putting off. So I'll do the books and I'll do the films and then that will give me a new buzz, because it's a different way of working and I can bring something new back to comics.
A friend of mine wanted to know about the time you wrote yourself into the Animal Man comic - was that some kind of bid for immortality?
No, no, it was the whole theory again. I was doing the same thing, trying to get into that world. Back then I had this notion that I could go in and talk to the characters, but I went in as myself. I've been really refinin' the notion since then. What I thought I could do, was I could go in as anything, 'cause it's me who's making them talk. So I can go in as Batman and say something to Superman that's totally unexpected. I developed the concept of fiction-suits, and you can go in wearing fiction-suits. So if we can go in there as characters, who's coming in here to tell us stuff, and who are they dressed up as?
Getting back to that hideously-intelligent-comic-guy-who-shoots-up-heroin-and-carries-a-knife thing, do you ever feel like you're expected to dumb it down, or that someone misses the point entirely?
That happens all the time, yeah...
How do you feel about that?
For me it's not dumbing-down. If I'm not communicating, then I'm trying too hard. I should be trying to communicate. That's what I'm saying about postmodern theorists. It's a great theory, brilliant ideas but it will not communicate. I've got to get this to a point where I can walk into a pub and explain it to anyone, or else I'm not communicating.
The Invisibles has been a gradual refining of very bizarre ideas. In the first book, I had to explain it in high-falutin', floral poetic, very scientific ideas, but by the third book I'm getting it down to where you can say it in the pub. I wanna concretise the vision enough that it makes sense in general conversation. I've found the best way to do that is through analogies and connecting it with other things. It's parables, it's what Jesus did (laughs), he got very difficult ideas and he tried to get it to where he could explain it to a child.
I didn't really get any sense of dumbing down, I was just wondering if you'd ever been asked to do that.
People are constantly telling me they don't understand, no matter how hard I try to make them understand. I don't have anything to say to those people. I've just decided I'll only talk to people who get it.
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