The Unpublished Grant Morrison - UK Titles
THE PEOPLE OF THE ASTEROIDS (1968)
"A brave captain and his Irish sidekick go off and fight some weirdos on asteroids..." Morrison's first long-form work, written and drawn for his mum when he was 8. As revealed in Supergods, other characters from this period included The Blue Phantom, Superchimp, and simian supergroup The Chimpions.
If the current comic-book marketplace is anything to go by, expect a Kickstarter-funded 50th Anniversary Deluxe Hardcover of The People of the Asteroids sometime in 2018.
LORELEI: ARMAGEDDON AND RED WINE (1977-8)
Published in Morrison's school magazine, The White Tree, 'Armageddon and Red Wine' ran to 16 pages across 4 issues, all of which featured covers by Morrison. One issue also included a Morrison-penned interview with author Alan Garner. Though technically 'published', its unlikely that more than a handful of copies of The White Tree were printed, and even less likely that more than one or two of each issue survive today.
MONAD (1976)
Morrison had numerous story ideas rejected, though given publisher D.C. Thompson's cutthroat commisioning policy, its doubtful any of them made it past an initial pitch to full script. One rejected proposal featured a pacifist doctor as the protagonist, another, recounted in Graham Kibble-White's Ultimate Book of British Comics, was rejected because the hero was black.
According to Kibble-White's book, Morrison also half-heartedly pitched a tale of an Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman heading off to 'batter Hitler' to Starblazer's long-running 'big brother' title Commando. It wasn't commisioned.
Named for the Gnostic concept of "'the One' or 'Absolute' God, the first being and the totality of all beings", Monad ran to 25 pages, written and drawn by 16 year old Morrison and admired by then-Marvel UK editor Neil Tennant - later to find fame as one half of the Pet Shop Boys. Monad was secretly Ian Kincaid, a marine biologist working on the west coast of Scotland, whose fantastic powers were dependant on his emotions. Inspired by Don McGregor's Black Panther, Morrison tuned into the comic book trend of age - gritty social realism - and pitched Monad against the Northern Irish Troubles. Morrison further explored 'real-world' superheroics, a genre that arguably reached its artistic peak 25 years ago but is still going strong, in his Captain Clyde comics strip and later still in Zenith.
To counter all of the socially-responsible hand wringing, Morrison mentions in Supergods another strip from this period that he sadly didn't finish, "in which a sexy, alien warlord disguised herself as Hitler and attacked the world with space Nazis.". Other teenage creations included Lugh (or Luch) of the Long - named for the mythical Celtic warrior who would later have a cameo, via Jack Kirby's Fourth World, in the 'secret history of man' segment of Seven Soldiers #1 - and Hellhunter, a super-hero priest who fought against shadowy agents of the dark side.
NEAR MYTHS (1980)
The concluding chapter of The Checkmate Man was scheduled to be printed in the never released Near Myths #6. From Michael over at The Unpublished Moore;
"per conversation with Morrison, he planned to have the main character travel back in time and assassinate Adam & Eve, retroactively ending all human life on the planet … it's also possible he was kidding .."
Gideon Stargrave in The Entropy Concerto, featuring a Jerry Cornelius-esque 'second version' of the character, was also originally intended to appear in this issue.
STARBLAZER (1980)
GIDEON STARGRAVE (1981)
After the demise of Near Myths, the further adventures of Gideon Stargrave were all set to appear in psst.. magazine, a doomed attempt to replicate deluxe French bande dessinee magazines in the UK. Inevitably psst... was cancelled before the Stargrave strip, which featured the ghost of original Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe, was published.
Morrison, replying to a reader's letter on his old website, toyed with the idea of putting the strip online but, as with his unpublished Kid Marvelman strip, never got around to it before his withdrawal from the internet in the early noughties.
The star of "dozens of unpublished comics and prose stories", post-Near Myths Stargrave only managed a two-page appearance in Gary Millidge's 1986 Food for Thought charity one-shot before his final bow in the 'Entropy In The UK' storyline from volume 1 of The Invisibles.
SICK BUILDINGS (1989)
A "forthcoming graphic novel" mentioned in the author bio in Arkham Asylum, Sick Buldings was a Situationist prank, a story that was never published because it never existed.
ANDY WARHOL (1989)
Mentioned most prominently in the Arkham Asylum author bio, Morrison’s comic book interpretation of the life story of Andy Warhol was, like Alan Moore’s Fashion Beast, a project that seemed to hover on the periphery for many years without ever reaching fruition. "The Andy Warhol thing which Trevs - sorry, Woodrow - Phoenix and I are doing, deals with Warhol's life and work in a way which I think is quite unique and inventive." said Morrison in a 1989 interview, "As far as I know, nobody else, in any medium, has written about Warhol using Warhol's own methods."
On those methods, Morrison went on to say, "I had this idea of holding a party, getting people to talk about Warhol, and taping it, then just transcribing everything that's said and using that as the dialogue for the book. I like the idea of that kind of utter charlatanry, and obviously it would remove most of the work".
Morrison and Phoenix finished 6 pages or so and pitched it to Fleetway's Crisis, who flatly rejected it as it didn't have any 'action' in it. The project fell by the wayside as Morrison and Phoenix started on other work. Thanks to Woodrow Phoenix for the additional info!
During an interview with Paul Gravett at the ICA in 2003, Morrison mentioned an idea Brendan McCarthy had pitched unsuccessfully to 2000AD, 'Robot Andy', essentially Robot Archie from 1960’s boys’ weekly Lion, and latterly Zenith and Albion, restyled in the image of Andy Warhol, found each week by a different character and reshaping their life, often for the worse.
FOREVER ENGLAND (1989)
A four-part tale of an indie band on tour originally intended for Trident Comics' anthology title, Morrison and artist collaborator Paul Grist jumped ship to Fleetway's more prestigious 2000AD-for-adults Revolver when it was announced in 1989. Feeling obligated to provide Trident with something, they gave them the more low-key St Swithin's Day, serialised over the first four issues.
Forever England, a seemingly uncanny precognition of the whole 'Britpop' ethos fve years ahead of it's time, was intended to run in Revolver after the conclusion of Morrison and Rian Hughes Dare. When Revolver ceased revolving with issue 7, it never saw print. I asked Paul Grist about it and he recalled that the scripts, which Morrison was very happy with, were lost in a computer crash. No artwork was completed for the project before it was abandoned.
Morrison on Forever England - "It's going to incorporate a great many of the things that delight me about British culture: St Trinian's films and fabulous 1970's sitcoms like On The Buses, Love Thy Neighbour and the criminally neglected Casanova '73 with Leslie Phillips - that whole Carry On world of platform boots, hotpants and sex maniacs..."
Thanks to Paul Grist for the additional info!
W (1990)
Commissioned by former Captain Britain writer David Thorpe for Macdonald-Futura books, W was intended as a high-end, bookshop-friendly graphic novel concerning a poet seeking death who obsessively traces a 'W' in the air (probably inspired by an account of the dying hours of the German playwright Goethe). Artist Bill Koeb, whose comic book work has a painterly Bill Sienciwicz-esque quality, took a unique approach to generating the artwork -
"As for my part in it, I tried my best to understand what Grant was aiming for in a sketchbook of images I created by using what can best be described as randomness to get to an image. I would begin by creating seemingly disparate elements on a page without a plan or design and then try to find ways to relate them to each other and the theme. I was very intimidated by the project and was very shy about showing anything to Grant. I felt like nothing lived up to my ideal of the goal he had set. This was 20+ years ago and I was a lot less confident than I am now."
Part of Robert Maxwell's media empire, Macdonald-Futura, like many of Maxwell's businesses, was thrown into financial disarray following his unexpected death in 1991. Eventually acquired by Time Warner, the graphic novel line - which was planned to include work from literary heavyweights Doris Lessing, Angela Carter and Kazuo Ishiguro amongst others - was cancelled by the publisher. Only Lessing's Playing The Game, a collaboration with a young Charlie Adlard, saw print, years later in 1995. As for W, no artwork was completed before the project was cancelled.
Thanks to Bill Koeb and David Thorpe for the info!
DOCTOR MIRABILIS (1990)
"...which I'm writing, drawing AND self-publishing... The actual content is a little difficult to describe so I don't know if I should bother". Doctor Mirablis (meaning 'wonderful teacher') was a name legend has bestowed on Roger Bacon, a 13th century friar and Europe's first true science pioneer, commonly perceived as a Faust-like sorcerer. Bacon as Mirabilis appears briefly in Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, as the occultist architect’s mentor, a role he also plays in Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose.
Doctor Mirabilis was to intended to be published by Snobbery With Violence, a seemingly stillborn self-publishing collaboration between Morrison and Forbidden Planet Scotland's James Hamilton,. Darren Shrubsole's Morrison bibliography at www.timemachinego.com notes that there might have been a self-published version of Dare sold in Glasgow in the early 90's under the Snobbery With Violence label, but the licensing wrangles associated with the Dan Dare character (not to menton the official reprints from Fleetway/Expresso and the 4-issue series from Fantagraphics/Monster Comics) make this seem unlikely. Regardless, any trace of it, and anything else Snobbery With Violence may have printed, has yet to surface in our digital age
MR. SMITH / SCHOOL FOR FOOLS (1990)
A one-shot with art by Brendan McCarthy based on the pair's own experience of severe public schools and most likely inspired by this 'Artoon' by McCarthy from 1988. Morrison told Amazing Heroes in 1990 that the script was written but, due to McCarthy's busy schedule outside the comics field, no artwork appears to have ever been completed.
WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD (1988)
A sci-fi short with art by Tony O'Donnell. Two pages of finished art can be seen on O'Donnell's DeviantArt page.
According to a March 1989 interview with Warren Ellis in Speakeasy #96, Morrison and artist Tony O'Donnell (Abraxas, Starblazer) completed 'Where Angels Fear To Tread' in 1982, and originally intended to publish it in Near Myths before it folded. A couple of years later the pair managed to re-sell it to Never Limited's highbrow Pssst! magazine, but it too went under before they managed to publish it. Finally in 1989, plans were made to publish it in Steel Rain, an anthology curated by Ellis under the banner of the Roadside Art Collective. Harrier Comics were due to publish Steel Rain but - you guessed it - went out of business just as it was about to go to press.
Ellis had originally wanted either Abraxas (see above) or Gideon Stargrave for Steel Rain, but was told by Morrison and O'Donnell that neither strip was finished and ready for publication.
FANTASTIC ADVENTURE (1985)
A fortnightly comic for boys to rival Fleetway's 2000 A.D., proposed to Eagle publishers IPC by David (V for Vendetta) Lloyd. Lloyd's conceit was to base the magazine's content on then-popular licensed TV and movie properties without actually licensing anything. Morrison was assigned three strips for the title; Johnny O'Hara (loosely based on Indiana Jones) with art by Modesty Blaise and Look-In alumnus John Burns; Nightwalkers (based on Ghostbusters) with art by occasional 2000 A.D. artist Ron Tiner, probably better known today for his art textbooks; and The California Crew, a sci-fi take on The A-Team wih art by Steve Yeowell.
A fourth strip, a super-hero epic created by Morrison and titled Zenith, was also earmarked for inclusion, though in a significantly different form than how it eventually appeared in 2000 A.D.. As conceived for Fantastic Adventure, Zenith's tone was much closer to Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen; and the parallel-earth superheroic lineage angle, explored in depth in Phase III, seems to have been much more to the forefront. Morrison was keen to tie stylistic elements of comic-book history to their respective era in the story, so for the elements set in the 1940's, the characters were modeled on Seigel and Shuster's Superman, for the 1960's Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's early Marvel Comics, and for the 1980's the prevalent Alan Moore-esque grim and gritty 'realism'
Eventually, the whole publication was scrapped by IPC in favour of a title based on the MASK toy line.
THE LIBERATORS (1986)
A far-future continuation of Dez Skinn's Warrior-verse (including Big Ben and, in Skinn's mind at least, V for Vendetta) with art by Morrison's Doctor Who collaborator John Ridgway. Skinn launched the series himself alongside Ridgway with 'Death Run' in Warrior #22, before handing the scripting chores to Morrison for his first mainstream comics work.
'Several' episodes were completed by Morrison though only one, 'Night Moves', saw print during Warrior's original run, in it's twenty sixth and final issue. It was reprinted with a new splash page alongside a previously unpublished installment, 'Angels and Demons' some 10 years later in the 1996 Warrior Spring Special/Comics International #76 flipbook.
The Liberators was one of the strips Skinn intended to repackage and reprint for the American market via Quality/Eagle as a a six-issue limited series, alongside Moore's Marvelman and Lazer Eraser. It was lost in the shuffle when Skinn began selling the rights piecemeal to the Warrior material and ceased publishing the magazine from which much of the material had been sourced.
According to Michael at The Unpublished Moore, Dez Skinn has confirmed that no scripts were completed beyond the initial two episodes, though Morrison's series pitch may still exist in Dez's basement somewhere.
KID MARVELMAN (1986)
Morrison's solo Kid Marvelman tale was intended to appear in Dez Skinn's Warrior magazine as a placeholder for Alan Moore's Marvelman strip, then on hiatus due to Skinn's legal wrangles with Marvel Comics over the Marvelman name.
Dez Skinn, speaking in George Khoury's Kimota! - The Marvelman Companion:
"... Grant did submit a Kid Marvelman story, about a discussion between Kid Marvelman and a Catholic priest, and it was quite fascinating because Kid Marvelman argued a very good case against organised religion. Nobody was flying, no beams from anyone's eyes, but a bloody clever script, clever enough that I sent it to Alan Moore for his opinion. Alan's reply was, "Nobody else writes Marvelman." And I said to Grant, "I'm sorry, he's jealously hanging on to this one." Grant did have an answer, but again, I shouldn't really speak for him."
Moore had a similar response when Skinn proposed the idea of Morrison taking over the Marvelman strip after Moore threatened to leave the strip over the planned name-change to Miracleman, recounted in Patrick Meaney's Grant Morrison - Talking With Gods documentary, though this may be a simplified varaition on the story related above.
Though Morrison's Kid Marvelman script was long rumoured to have seen publication in issue #4 of Hugh Campbell's Fusion fanzine, It turns out that 'The Devil and Johnny Bates' from that issue was actually an in-depth character study of Kid Marvelman by one Jim Clements. Clements, a legendary figure whose published output amounts to one 6-page Future Shock in 2000 A.D. Prog 713, was cited by Morrison in the 15th Anniversary Arkham Asylum introduction as a big influence in his formative years. Morrison goes on to say that essentially he wrote the book entirely to impress him.
HAWKER (1987)
Originally written and drawn by Steve Yeowell in an anthology called Totally Alien, Morrison wrote a six-page Hawker strip entitled 'The Missionary Position' and plotted a second. "It's about corrupt priests and the bizarre sex rituals of an alien race", said Morrison in an interview with UK comics fanzine Arkensword in 1988. Probably intended for a Harrier Comics Hawker title that was never published, neither of the strips has surfaced anywhere else.
BYRON & SHELLEY (1988)
A Ken Russell-inspired comic biography of the Romantic duo, in collaboration with Brendan Mccarthy and set in a "bizarre cross between the early 19th century and today". Byron and Shelley are cast as comic strip writers, mirroring Morrison and Peter Milligan's later Bizarre Boys, another title that never saw publication.
Morrison later employed Byron and Shelley as characters in the 'Arcadia' arc of the first volume of The Invisibles. He would also go on to use a steampunk style modern-day Victorian setting for his Sebastian O mini-series, published by Vertigo in 1993.
ABRAXAS (1988)
A grand science fiction epic set in an alternate 1985, written by Morrison with art by Starblazer collaborator Tony O'Donnell. Originally intended as a 100-page SF epic involving "galactic conflict, Gnosticism, sexy girls and nasty aliens", Morrison had the whole story mapped out but, due to O'Donnell's perfectionism, only three 10-page prologues were completed, in an intricate style similar to "the colour work of Frank Bellamy on Thunderbirds".
The first two prologues eventually saw print as back-ups in Harrier Comics' Sunrise, albeit in black and white. Harrier went bust before any subsequent installments saw print.
An unpublished page from the third prologue went up on O'Donnell's DeviantArt page back in 2012.
Interestingly, despite Morrison’s frequent, and deserved, lauding of McCarthy’s work and character designs on Zenith and Doom Patrol, the pair haven’t managed a single published collaboration.
THUNDERHAWKS (1995)
Tony O'Donnell mentioned in a 1997 interview with comics fanzine Vicious that Morrison had completed a script for Beano publisher DC Thompson for a "proposed X-Files type magazine which may feature a revival of some old DC Thompson characters done Manga style!". No further news of the project surfaced until 2015, when John Freeman of the excellent Down The Tubes site ran an article on Renga, a proposed (but ultimately abandoned) action-adventure title intended to compete against Fleetway's 2000 A.D., commissioned by Beano publisher D.C. Thomson and packaged by Tony Luke back in 1995.
On Twitter, I asked John if maybe Tony O'Donnell was referring to Renga in his interview and wondered whether anyone remembered Morrison doing any work on the title. Via John, Tony Luke recalled that Grant had indeed done some script work for a a never-published second dummy issue of Renga. Written as a more action-packed ‘development’ of a strip included in the first dummy by Alan Mitchel and Les Spink, Morrison's 'Thunderhawks' featured various DC Thomson superhero characters (including The Smasher, a giant robot from D.C. Thomson’s 1970’s Bullet title) in a ‘JLA-style adventure’. It’s not clear whether any art was completed for Morrison’s strip or whether the plan was to re-use the art already drawn for the first go-round.
Published in February 2017, Chris Murray's book The British Superhero gave a fuller account of Morrison's plans -
"...two years after the dummy comic was produced, Grant Morrison submitted a script to DC Thomson for something that was obliquely referred to as Project X. It involved another script for Thunderhawks, a group bringing together DC Thomson's superheroes, which suggest that the plan to produce a comic for older readers continued long after the Renga! project was abandoned. Morrison's script features William Range (aka Billy the Cat) and his cousin Katie, a schoolgirl, whose superhero costume is described as a "fetish Catgirl outfit with pumped up breasts and thigh boots." Other heroes include Captain Hornet, described as "a self-made, working class superhero," as well as Brass Neck and King Cobra
The story opens with what is referred to as "Akira style disaster imagery" when the huge robot Smasher attacks London. As the robot destroys the capital city, the Thunderhawks bicker, with much of the attention being focused on Katie and her revealing costume. Billy spend much of the early part of the script stealing glances at his cousin and wishing that they were not related. When Katie says "I wish we just had our old costumes," Billy replies, "Don't be daft Katie, think of it like the sort of clothes you'd go clubbing in ... anyway, we have to move with the times to compete with the American superheroes. It's all about image these days." This is arguably a reference to Image comics and their brand of hypersexualised superhero comics such as Gen 13, which was extremely popular at the time. When King Cobra appears, he also seems to be sexually obsessed with Katie. The Smasher turns out to be a time machine designed to make raids on the past but which has lost its pilot. As they attack the rampaging robot, the Thunderhawks rescue civilians. However, even the people whom Katie rescues (described as "Dad's, young men and coppers") stare at her lustfully. Needless to say, and in spite of Morrison's fame, DC Thomson did not accept this proposed script, though it would have been a startling and noteworthy development had it been possible to make this work somehow. The script reads like a parody of the Image comics of the time, with a joke at the expense of DC Thomson's tame characters who had changed so little since the 1950's. There were similarities to The Invisibles, too, but the tone was a little too aggressive and the parody too perverse to work for DC Thomson."
Thanks to John Freeman, Tony Luke and Chris Murray for the additional info!
If this was intended as a 'Dredd vs. Dracula' tale it'd be thematically in keeping with some of Millar and Morrison's other Dredd-verse efforts, specifically 1993's 'Book of the Dead' (essentially Dredd vs The Mummy) and Millar's 'Frankenstein Division' from 1994. Just a werewolf story to find and we've got the set...
Former Megazine editor John Tomlinson's is quoted in David Bishop's Thrill Power Overload talking about another aborted Millar Dredd story featuring a war between Mega City One and the Chinese Sino City, though it's not very clear whether this was a solo Millar effort or whether Morrison would've been involved as co-writer. Trailed via a dream sequence in Millar's one-shot 'War Games' story in 1993's Prog 854, the thread wasn't picked up by either writer in their subsequent Dredd stories, or by John Wagner when he returned to Dredd in early 1994.
Thanks to Chris Weston and David Bishop for the additional info.
PROFESSOR SPACE (1992)
About to embark on the final Phase of his Zenith series, Morrison, clearly disillusioned with the comics business, said in an interview with Warren Ellis in 1991's Speakeasy #120 that he was quitting comics for good following the conclusion of his Doom Patrol run, but would "probably turn up in three months writing Batman, cos I've got a gas bill to pay or something. Or, because Stuart is at this very moment promising me some of this brown acid Bryan Talbot has surreptitiously handed him beneath the table, I'll be collaborating with sexy Glyn Dillon on Professor Space for Blast!"
I asked Glyn Dillon about this one and he had no memory of it at all, so it's probably a joke.
2000AD SUMMER OFFENSIVE (1993)
In the hype surrounding Morrison, Mark Millar and John Smith's takeover of Fleetways's 2000AD in 1993, numerous projects were mentioned that never saw the light of day.
Spare Parts; Baron Saturday (A play on the name of the voodoo loa Baron Samedi and a track from the Pretty Things original psych-rock opera, SF Sorrow); Juggernauts; Brian's Magic Car (A Television Personalities song title and most likely a pitch by fellow Summer Offensive writer John Smith. There’s a joke reference to it in the final arc of Morrison’s New X-Men, when the Proud People face certain death at the hands of the Crawlers, one of their number, Brian, appears in a magic flying car to save the day. He is killed in the next panel.) and Sleepless Knights.
All were mentioned as potential future strips by Mark Millar in a joint interview with him and Morrison to promote the Summer Offensive. Sleepless Knights is certainly a Morrison pitch and became a movie proposal/script some years later. Guilermo Del Toro was attached to direct this tale of a team of ghostbusting homeless folk who help a group of kids save the world from a perpetual Halloween, though the movie was long-ago consigned to 'development hell' after Morrison's script was heavily revised by other writers.
JUDGE DREDD: LEGENDS OF THE LAW (1995)
A three issue serial for DC Comics' short-lived and out of 'official' continuity Judge Dredd: Legends of the Law monthly, co-written with Mark Millar with art by Chris Weston. Mentioned in both DC's editorial presentation for 1995 and in an editorial in the Millar-written Swamp Thing #157, at least some of the art for the first issue was completed by Weston before Legends of the Law was cancelled with December '95's issue #13 due to the box office failure of the Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd movie earlier that summer.
Some time later, the story was re-purposed (most likely by Morrison) for 2000AD as the Janus serial 'Faustus' - which ran in 1997's 2000AD Progs 1024-1031 - shortened to 48 pages from the original 72, with painted art by Paul Johnson. The one Chris Weston page I've managed to unearth from the original Legends of the Law story (featuring Weston's redesign of the Brit-Cit judges) suggests that the first Brit-Cit set third of the story was ditched entirely in the published version, which begins with Faustus' capture in Mega City One in what likely would have been the opening of the second issue.
The appearance of the cargo ship 'Demeter' in Weston's art suggests an intriguing 'Faustus as Dracula' angle that unfortunately wasn't really explored in the story that eventually saw print.