Interview: Andrew Hickey

Andrew Hickey's An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers is due for release tomorrow (Sunday 10th July), and to mark the occasion he kindly agreed to be interviewed by Deep Space Transmissions about it. Taking in subjects as diverse as quantum information theory, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Pygmalion and black and white minstrel shows, Andrew's book is, like Seven Soldiers itself, both erudite and entertaining in equal measure.

You can join Andrew down the Seven Soldiers rabbit hole by buying his book, as a download or old-fashioned paper-style, at an eminently reasonable price from Amazon or Lulu. While you're there, you should buy a copy of his Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! book too, covering as it does fictional 'canon', Grant Morrison's concept of Hypertime, parallel universes and Harry Potter fanfic.

Since completing the book, Andrew has also been asked to join the internet's premier crew of psychedelic comic-book Brainiacs, The Mindless Ones. Keep an eye out there in future for more of his incisive funny book commentary.

And now, on with the show, good health to you...

Firstly and perhaps most obviously, why Seven Soldiers? And why now, four years after its conclusion?

Because Seven Soldiers has more depth to it - and more to write about than any other comic I know about (with the exception of Cerebus, which is a whole different level of difficulty). I've written bits and pieces off and on ever since it was published (there's a few bits in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! for a start) and I know that if I didn't just get as much as I could about it out on paper, I'd just

keep writing those bits forever.

Why do you think Morrison chose a work for hire corporate setting for this incredibly dense and allusive story rather than the, perhaps more fitting or more 'obvious', creator-owned route?

Obviously that's for him to say, but I suspect for much the same reasons that the writer Lawrence Miles writes in the Doctor Who universe - they're his mythology in the way that the Bible was Shakespeare's, or the Greek gods were Homer's. There's a whole lot of cultural baggage that comes along with setting a story in the DC Universe - a lot of resonances and allusions that can add to your story that just aren't there if you write something in your own setting.

On the surface there doesn't seem to be much of a thematic link between the main characters of Seven Soldiers, drawn from all eras of comic-book history and from a qualitively wide array of creative talent. Why do you think he chose this particular bunch and not any others, or indeed invent his own characters?

Well, of course he did invent some of his own characters, but actually if you look at them pretty much all the characters he uses are strongly associated with either Jack Kirby (Klarion, Mister Miracle, The Guardian) or Len Wein (Zatanna, Frankenstein, Shining Knight). Wein of course also was the first one to revive the Seven Soldiers, in the early 70s, and was Alan Moore's primary editor at DC - and Moore also looms large over all of this.

One of Morrison's stated aims of Seven Soldiers was to gift DC with seven 'new' characters that could be freely exploited after the series' conclusion. Barring Jeff Lemire's upcoming Frankenstein series this hasn't happened. Do you think other writers are intimidated with having to follow Morrison on these characters or do you think the blame for their lying fallow lies with DC Editorial's inability to see these characters' commercial potential?

I think a bit of both, but blame also has to lie with comic readers. Superhero comics readers are a conservative bunch, and if what they want to read is GEOFF! JOHNS!!! doing Marv Wolfman's greatest hits with added ultraviolence, then that's what they'll get.

At this point I think it's fair to say that Seven Soldiers is considered one of Morrison's major works; one of the most written about and yet paradoxically one that most people feel they still don't have a solid grasp upon. How do you think it compares to his other major works such as The Invisibles or Animal Man?

Personally, I like it more than pretty much anything he's written. The Invisibles is obviously the work he'll be remembered for, but I don't think it's dated terribly well - there are parts that are just astoundingly good, but other parts where my main thought is "Yes, I've read Robert Anton Wilson too". It's his Sgt Pepper, in many ways. Seven Soldiers I think is his most interesting work, because the philosophical/literary/scientific things he's discussing are properly integrated into the narrative. While parts of The Invisibles seem almost adolescent, with this sort of literal-mindedness, Seven Soldiers integrates these things so well that it takes serious effort to even realise some of them are there. That's more interesting to me.

(That's not to discredit The Invisibles as an achievement. It's just that I think Morrison has done better work).

You seem more concerned with 'authorial intent' in your essays than, for instance, amypoodle from Mindless Ones is. To what degree to you think the stuff you're talking about is "really there"? Do you put any stock in Morrison's accusations of apophenia, levelled at the 'Who Is The Black Glove?' crowd during his Batman run?

I'd disagree that I'm especially concerned with authorial intent. I think possibly that's just a function of our different audiences. While Poodle (who I admire enormously) is writing for a comics blog where the entire audience can be expected to be familiar with the work (and increasingly also for TCJ, where the audience can be expected to have some understanding of modern critical thought), I'm writing for the people who read my blog. Of those people, I'd say only 25% or so are comics people, because I also write about music, politics, and various other things. That means that as well as critiquing the work, I have to simultaneously justify that what I'm saying is valid - that there is something there worth criticising - because on the face of it Frankenstein or Mister Miracle don't *look* like important works.

As for the main thrust of your question... I think the main thing is just that I don't (as Ian MacDonald said of Charles Manson) "cross the line between textual analysis and mass murder". Parts of what I'm talking about are explicitly, blatantly there in the text (the Pilgrim's Progress references in Klarion, for example). Others are things Morrison has referenced in interviews, like the stuff about Jaynes' bicameral mind hypothesis. But I'm absolutely sure that some of what I'm saying wasn't put there by Morrison - and I'm probably missing quite a lot that *was* put there. And I don't think that's a problem. Morrison is deliberately playing with things that have much, much wider cultural resonances than can be encompassed by one work - or even one mind. The question isn't whether he intended those specific connections to be drawn, but whether he intended *that kind of connection* to be drawn. And I think the evidence is that he did.

Some specific connections - for example the Douglas Adams stuff in the Klarion essay - may be just because of authors with similar reference points playing in the same pool. Others - like maybe the stuff about quantum information theory - there's every chance Morrison didn't intend. But enough of it's in the text that I think one could justify the broad sweep of my arguments by authorial intent if that was necessary. But any competent piece of criticism isn't about what the author put in. Its about what the critic got out.

You're clearly a very well-read person, with the book encompasing quantum physics, Jewish folklore, 17th Century English philosophy and much more besides, and yet at its heart its about a 'simple' superhero comic. Do you think superheroes, and Morrison's work in particular, are worthy of 'academic' attention?

I'm not a well-read person; I just play one on the internet.

I've had to rephrase my answer here several times... What I don't want to do is come across as one of those horrible geek populists who acts like those ivory-tower academics are oppressing him (it's always a him) with their 'standards' and their 'taste' and their 'liking things based on the qualities those things possess, rather than just brand names'. But I'd argue that superhero comics are, as a medium, neither more nor less worthy of critical attention than, say, pop songs or cartoon shorts. George Orwell wrote some of his best critical work on the Billy Bunter stories and seaside postcards. And Morrison I consider one of our most important writers, someone capable of at least intermittent greatness and real ambition.

Clearly there's a point in Morrison's career where he moves from fairly transparent stock storytelling to the kind of work that warrants a book like yours. What do you think inspired this shift and do you think there are any other works that deserve a book-length analysis?

See, I disagree with this. Morrison himself says, for example, that his work on the children's toy tie-in Zoids for Marvel UK in the mid-80s was a precursor of everything he's done since. And I think

that, say, Zenith or Doom Patrol have a huge amount of depth to them. Other than The Filth (which David Allison has more than comprehensively covered) and The Invisibles (which I believe there are

a few books about) I can't think of many individual works which deserve this much attention - but if you take a few works together (say look at Animal Man and Doom Patrol together, or JLA and New

X-Men, or his bunch of Vertigo minis from the middle of last decade) you could easily do it.

Do you perceive much 'Real Life' influence percolating through to the work? Morrison has often mentioned in interviews that he was in a pretty dark place personally and, with his Marvel contract coming to an end under a cloud, professionally at the time he began writing Seven Soldiers.

I don't know that much about Morrison's personal life. I'd be willing to bet that his father's death in 2004 had a profound influence on some of the themes in Seven Soldiers - the whole thing about creator-Gods that runs through the whole story - but it seems a far less personal and more intellectual work than, say, The Filth or Seaguy from the same period.

As well as your Seven Soldiers book, you've also written books on Doctor Who, parallel worlds and fictional canon, The Beatles and The Beach Boys, as well as an upcoming book on The Monkees. To finish on a lighter note, who's your favourite Monkee and why?

The Monkees book is only 'upcoming' in a fairly long-term sense - I probably won't start work on it for several months. With that in mind, though, my favourite Monkee is Mike Nesmith, because more than any of the others he pushed to turn them from an (excellent) manufactured boy-band into something much more innovative and different. Tracks like Writing Wrongs or Tapioca Tundra are pointers to whole new musical directions which have never properly been explored. Plus he had a good hat.