Glasgow Herald Magazine - The Secret Heroes

THE SECRET HEROES

Flesh-eating diseases, sun-god pop stars and pre-empting 9/11 . . . as they reinvent Batman, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely know the truth is weirder than any comic book they could ever create

By Teddy Jamieson, 06 June 2009

Splash page: Interior. Two men sit on a sofa on the top floor of a Glasgow tenement. One is bald, suited and booted. There is a tiny scar to the left of his mouth. He is a comicbook writer. The other - glasses, hair, jeans, looking vaguely studenty - is a comic-book artist. Behind their heads are examples of the latter's work, featuring an almost naked woman drinking blood from a carton and a young man lolling on a giant tongue. Pop art.

If this were a comic book, perhaps we could sketch in the energy fields that surround the pair. The artist could be coloured a serene, laid-back blue. The writer, though, would be encased in a zig-zag storm of lines, a kinetic blur of movement caught in pen and ink, a visual attempt to encapsulate the blizzard of ideas and thoughts that buzz around his shaved head and out of his mouth when he talks (and he likes to talk).

His ideas are bizarre, sometimes baffing, sometimes brilliant, but always entertaining. He talks about comics; he talks about life; he talks about death and near death (principally his own); he talks about the humanity of superheroes; he talks about Robbie Williams as a sun god; he talks about growing up in the shadow of the atomic bomb; and he talks about the closer-than-you-think relationship between real life and comic books.

The artist has less to say but s just as juiced on the potential of the comic strip. Together they engage in extended bouts of comic-book formalism, discussing the way time works on the page and what that can mean to the reader. "Time moves from left to right in a comic, so reading a comic is an active process, " says the artist. "It means there is greater scope for suggesting things either through symbolism or just relying on people to maybe put more interpretation on it than in movies, which is a much more passive form."

The writer takes up the baton. "I came up with the idea - and it's actually gained ground, so there might be some validity in the notion - that with comics you're getting a full-brain experience because your right brain is processing the art and your left brain is processing the words simultaneously so it's better than reading a book. It's better than watching a movie. You're doing two things at the same time and so it seems to give some kind of holographic brain experience which makes comics better than any other medium ever."

That's a very comic-book piece of phrasemaking, isn't it? A brazen example of overthe-top, slightly dubious excess that is at the same time a little silly and yet deeply thrilling. You can find the same dichotomy in the duo's comics They take careworn, pulpy ideas and redeem them, renew them, make them shine. Next up, it's Batman's turn.

First though, some introductions. The writer, Grant Morrison, is 49, likes My Chemical Romance (who are, in turn, fans of his), lives in Scotland and Los Angeles and writes comics. Frank Quitely is a comic-book artist who has a secret identity. His real name is Vincent Deighan. He is 41, married with three kids and lives on the outskirts of Glasgow. He listens to Radio 4 as he works. Together they are creating a new comic called Batman and Robin. The first issue is in the shops now.

The gist of the story is: Bruce Wayne has gone. Robin has grown up and is now Batman. And Wayne's evil son is the young Robin. "He's a 10-year-old who's been trained by ninjas all his life to fight against the good guys and who has now decided to come to the side of the angels and help his father's crusade, " Morrison explains. "It's quite an easy high concept." What it is not, clearly, is social realism. But then, sometimes real life isn't either. We'll get to that later.

Before Batman, Morrison and Quitely had a go at Superman and The X-Men. The results were award-winning - and best-selling - comics. They've also worked together on some of Morrison's wilder efforts, including We3 and The Invisibles, Morrison's anarchist, situationist, gender-bending sci-fi rebel rant (think The Matrix but smarter - indeed, Morrison has always claimed the Wachowski Brothers drew on his work an awful, awful lot when they came up with their movie).

"I get asked in pretty much every interview, why is my work with Grant better than anything else I do?" says Quitely. Because, perhaps, Quitely's precise, clean artwork cools the superheated idea frenzy of Morrison's writing. They fit well together.

It's been like this since they first met, back in 1993. "I'd seen some of Frank's art - am I calling you Frank or Vin in this? - in Electric Soup, a comedy underground magazine produced in Glasgow, and I just thought he was the greatest artist I'd ever seen. There were elements of [DC Thomson's] Dudley D Watkins and classic artists like Windsor McCay. But also he had this real modernity and sexy grubbiness. He can draw anything. When we started, he was drawing stuff straight out of my dreams and he had it exactly right. It looked like the stuff of my dreams."

What were their first impressions of each other ?

Morrison: "He knows nothing about superheroes."

Quitely: "I thought I was hiding that quite well."

Some 16 years on, how would you describe each other? "That's a hard one, " says Morrison. "It's like that guy out of Shameless [he means Quitely's namesake Frank Gallagher] but he's drawing your comic."

"How dare you." "We've been working together so long we understand each other's stuff. It's like the Two Ronnies.

"Terry and June." "We're kind of in that phase. The old married couple."

The flashback sequence: secret origins. Tell me a story about your childhood, I ask Frank Quitely and Grant Morrison as they sit laughing and joking. "I had loving but strict Catholic parents, " says Quitely. "Down in Millport during the summer I would always get a comic from the ice-cream shop on the way back from Mass.

"My dad was a PE teacher and he was a big sergeant-major type. He was a really, really great big guy. He had a bow he got in the forces and he brought home a box of aluminium arrows from school on loan, so he could teach me and my sisters how to use a bow and arrow. And he took us to Strathclyde Park and he was giving us a lesson. Until the parkie came." He stops and apologises, saying it's a story without an ending. But look at it again. Superbeings (in the shape of God in this case), faith, comics, weapons. That's comics in a nutshell.

Morrison complains that his "origin story" is "so bloody obvious" when he thinks about it. "My parents were anti-nuclear activists so when I was a kid the big guest in the room was the bomb. No matter what, they couldn't defeat the bomb - and my dad was a soldier. He was a tough guy. But he couldn't defeat the bomb and he would get arrested. He was always in sit-downs and marches. So I kind of grew up with this horror that the bomb existed and it could obliterate us at any time."

He would dream about that. "Constant dreams of these blasted landscapes." Superman saved him. "I discovered Superman comics and Superman could take the bomb on his chest and laugh it off, so suddenly I found an idea that was stronger than the bomb. No wonder I ended up doing this. Everything was there. It was handed to me as a kid."

He wanted to go to art school but failed to get in to Glasgow School of Art. He tried to start a band and then he was on the dole. By the middle of the 1980s, encouraged by reading the work of Alan Moore, he returned to writing comics, fi rst for British publishers (causing controversy with his comics about a young Adolf Hitler and a boy who sets out to assassinate Margaret Thatcher) before graduating from 2000AD to write for DC Comics in the US.

Quitely, meanwhile, did get into Glasgow School of Art . "It was a dream come true . First year was everything and more. You were really encouraged to try a bit of everything." He breaks off laughing "Within the curriculum, of course, " he adds, not entirely convincingly. "And then you had to choose what department you wanted to go into. I had an idea that I'd like to illustrate children's books and I joined the drawing and painting department. Shows how much I'd been paying attention If I could capture the expressions they had when they found out I wanted to illustrate children's books - and then my expression when they chucked me out." It wasn't your choice? "No. It wasn't one of those cool, I'm-too-good-for-this-place kind of things. It was you've-not-done-enough-workand-you're-probably-not-suitable."

After the chucking-out he was on the dole for a couple of years, then started working as a freelance artist . "When I started drawing for Electric Soup, it was just messing around. It was only through going to [comic] marts that I met other people who said I should send off samples, and I did." Soon after, he met Morrison and, despite his lack of superhero knowledge, they became a team.

In this issue: the death of a hero (well, almost).

The last time I met Morrison was in 2000. He taught me how to do magic and told me about a kind of alien abduction experience he had in Kathmandu. At the time he was whippet-thin, dressed in black and wearing Frankenstein boots to complete a look that was half-rave, half-goth. He looked like King Mob, the central character in The Invisibles The similarity was deliberate. "The big idea I had when I started The Invisibles was that Gilbert and George had these ideas of doing their life as art. And I thought, why not try to do my life as comic art? I'd split up with my girlfriend, who I' d been with for eight years. I was primed to go mental. I'd been reading Rimbaud and I wanted to be a writer and go mad and find myself in the South Seas out of my face on opium. The Invisibles became part of that. What would happen if I made myself into the central character? I shaved my head to look like him, made him look more like me. Whenever he would visit Australia or Indonesia I'd buy a ticket and do the same kind of thing he was doing. Except I wasn't fighting interdimensional monsters."

He was doing a lot of ritual magic at the time, a bit of voodoo and a lot of hallucinogens. "There came a point when the main character's been tortured by the bad guys. They make him believe that the words he reads are reality. So they show him a thing that says his face is diseased and he believes he's got a necrotising fasciitis bug eating through his face. Within three weeks I've got this bug eating through my face. You can still see the scar. The whole year I was getting sicker and sicker I didn't know what was wrong with me. And the comics started to refect this. It was about this viral attack from beyond, bizarre echoes of what was happening to me. The character went through this whole storyline where he's in real trouble. The bad guys have got him, his lung collapses, he's in a bad way. Shortly after my lung collapsed, I discovered I'd got massive blood poisoning, and I found myself in hospital with two days to live."

Rather than rely on the NHS, he decided to write himself out of trouble. "I started trying to make contact with the illness, so I was talking to it, I was writing it out - 'If you let me live I'll put you in the comic as these extradimensional conquerors. You'll get to have a really good time. You'll be big!'" It worked. He recovered. "I'm still trying to figure out everything that happened, but certainly after that experience I came out and thought, 'This guy is going to have a really good time.' So for the second book of The Invisibles I made him superfi t, he gets the sexy girlfriend and his travels become even more fun. And it all started happening to me, to the point where I was living like James Bond. I had these great couple of years where everything I'd ever wanted seemed to be happening to me, and there seemed to be some definite correlation between what was going into the comic and what was surrounding the comic and the people that were entering my life. If I wanted to meet a certain girl I would write them into the comic and end up getting called or have some photographs sent to me by some girl from America who'd dressed herself up as the character. The comic became life and life became the comic. I couldn't tell them apart for the six years that I was working on it."

After that it settled down, he says. Even so, writing Superman, he kept seeing sun-god symbolism everywhere. In the stained-glass window in the house he and his wife Kristan bought in Dunoon. In being asked to work with Quitely on a set of tarot cards for a Robbie Williams album, and going to meet the singer to find the "modern equivalent of the sun god, this kid sitting there surrounded by things he couldn't imagine and didn't know how to deal with".

Morrison says that both he and Quitely were "going through a slightly bad time in our lives" when they were doing Superman You can tell from reading the comic. The story allowed them to talk about the bad time "in a way no-one really recognised until you study these images of cosmic sewers and broken worlds and ruined people, and then you might get an understanding that the people behind it were having a bad couple of months As I always say, these things have a therapeutic benefit if you use them properly."

"Looking over the work we've done in the past, " Quitely says, "there's often more honesty of the embarrassing kind in the work we've done together. It's like showing somebody your poetry or your diary entries ."

It?s an intriguing idea, so I press for more details of the bad times. "It's family stuff, " says Morrison. "It's people's real miserable lives. We've all gone through it. Moments in your life where everything seems to be going to hell. The idea was to take those feelings and transform them into something our readers could understand and connect with. That's what Superman was all about. It was about being human. It was about a guy who's like us, although his life happens on this gigantic scale . Superman goes through what we all go through, but on a cosmic scale.

"When my dad died, it went right into Superman. When Clark Kent's father died, the eulogy that Clark delivers basically shows that everything his dad taught him was the creed of Superman. But it was just me trying to deal with that. " They both believe work and life co-exist, can even coalesce. Given that he practises magic, it's not really a surprise when Morrison takes this notion further. "Weird things do happen. When we were doing The X-Men together, in the months before 9/11, there were maybe six or seven comics that actually showed the image of the two towers broken. Our X-Men comic, published the week before, has this image of a jetliner mashed and folded to look like a fist punching through a skyscraper. [Writer] Garth Ennis had a comic that had 747s plunging towards two towers, and there was a Superman comic that month which had two towers in Metropolis in f ames. It was really bizarre. Things go on that seem inexplicable and I think it's kind of what Vin says: if you're working fast, you're pulling in your infuence from everywhere. There's a certain unconscious level to the way you're processing information. Maybe you're able to discern patterns. Events like 9/11 also have echoes back through time. I don't think there's something supernatural that goes on anywhere in the world: I think there's just things we haven't explained that happen doing this kind of work. You get people's pure process on the page."

This kind of harum-scarum collage of ideas and energy is what makes Morrison a messy but hugely entertaining writer. He's also an optimist. This is why he doesn't write social realism. He believes the world is improvable.

"We're living in a world where every time we turn on the news we're told that if the paedophiles don't get the kids then the melting ice caps are going to get them. Imagine being 15. It must be terrible. Everything seems to be out to get you. There's a kind of gloom and I blame the media for a lot of it because it makes for better stories.

"I've come to believe we do live in the stories we tell ourselves. If you continually say we're a doomed species heading towards extinction in a couple of generations, then God help us, we'll make it happen . Why can't we just build the Starship Enterprise? We could do it. But we don't.

"Comics are a bulwark against that. Partly the reason I like superheroes and have stayed with them is because they're one of the last utopian images of our future potential that we have left Everything else has been deconstructed. We know politicians are useless, we know all our comedians are going to turn out to be alcoholics or depressives, all the models are bulimic. Every role model has been trashed, but no matter how hard you trash superheroes they get back up again. t's something humans have created in their own imagination. God made the universe. We made Superman. We're better than God because we made something better than us. That's why I love them. There's something beautiful about that. These are the last little shining examples of the best we can be."

There you have it. In Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's world, superhero comics are a utopian belief system. There are worse things to believe in.

Batman and Robin by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely is published by DC Comics.