Tag Archives for Grant Morrison

GRANT MORRISON interview by Jay Babcock (Sci-Fi Universe, 1996)

(This article was originally written for Sci-Fi Universe magazine. After it was published there, a revised version was housed online at the now-defunct CrashSite. Here, pretty much, is the original SFU text. — Jay)

INVISIBLE(S) MAN

Or, Grant Morrison: The Man With the Post-Hypnotic Trigger Finger on the Throbbing Pulse of a Millennium-Long Battle for Control of Your Mind

by Jay Babcock

“The idea of comics is like sitting in front of your TV with a channel changer… Perception is a cut-up,” Grant Morrison said once.

As if to lend credence to his own statement, Morrison has been playing with our preconceptions of what comics published by the House of Superman could be about since he burst on the American comics scene with the hallucinatory Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum. As part of the late- ’80s, post-Alan Moore new wave of British mainstream comics writers that included Sandman’s Neil Gaiman and fellow neo-psychedelicist Peter Milligan (author of DC’s Shade, the Changing Man), Morrison quickly made a name for himself by following up Arkham Asylum with several miniseries and one- shots, and an acclaimed, controversial run on DC’s Animal Man.

But it was with Morrison’s radical revamping of DC’s Doom Patrol that he really hit his stride, explicitly incorporating ideas historically foreign to mainstream superhero comics. Influenced by the work of Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, filmmakers Kenneth Anger and Maya Doren, mathematician Douglas Hofstadter, Morrison took what had been previously been billed as “the world’s most bizarre superheroes” at its word, giving the “heroes” real mental disabilities and sending them into strange new dimensions and situations that included encounters with the painting that ate Paris; evil Scissormen who speak in cut-up (“Defeating breadfruit in adumbrate” was a typical Scissorman sentence); the villainous Cult of the Unwritten Book; the Pale Police, who spoke exclusively in anagrams; the unforgettable Danny the Street, an extradimensional, sentient location with the spirit and sensibility of a transvestite; the Men From NOWHERE, “normalcy agents” whose mission was to “eradicate eccentricities, anomalies, and peculiarities wherever we find them”; and The Pentagon, which was seen, as one critic noted, as “headquarters of a bizarre supernatural conspiracy aiming to institute worldwide standardization and puritanical repression.”

It was a beguiling, bravura headrush, a seemingly improvised work of genius that spun further out of control each month. Morrison’s most amazing, hilarious creation in his three-plus years on Doom Patrol, though, was the Brotherhood of Dada, a villainous group that “celebrated the total absurdity of life” and campaigned against “consensus reality” in favor of “liberation, laughs, and libido.” The Brotherhood of Dada was headed by Mr. Nobody, a hilarious hipster prone to taunting the book’s heroes with statements like “There! We have now taken over the world. What are you going to do about THAT?” and asked, pointing to his team, “Are we not proof that the universe is a drooling idiot with no fashion sense?”

More than one Doom Patrol reader caught him or herself thinking the Brotherhood of Dada should have been the good guys. And, with his next major project, The Invisibles, Morrison essentially granted those fans their wish.

The Invisibles are a secret society devoted to subversion in all its forms, a group of revolutionary mysticist secret agents that includes characters codenamed King Mob (a bald assassin into the “fetish subculture”), Jack Frost (a teenage hooligan the group’s newest member, who is able to tap into a devastating psychokinetic power), Fanny (a transvestite witch), Boy (a female martial artist and former cop) and Ragged Robin (a psychic).

“Although we have a core group of characters, anyone can belong to or oppose the Invisibles,” Morrison explained in an introductory outline of the series. “Various ordinary and extraordinary folks [will be] drawn into a web of conspiracy that extends from the back streets of your hometown to the dark blue-green planet circling Alpha Centauri and beyond, out past the horizon of the spacetime supersphere itself, giving me the opportunity to tell stories ranging across time and genre, stories that will eventually come together and be revealed as one large-scale, shimmering holographic tapestry. This is the comic I’ve wanted to write all my life-a comic about everything: action, philosophy, paranoia, sex, magic, biography, travel, drugs,religion, UFOs… you can make your own list. And when it reaches its conclusion, somewhere down the line, I promise to reveal who runs the world, why our lives are the way they are and exactly what happens to us when we die.”

Ahem. Whatever his intentions, Morrison’s opening story arc was a stunner, chronicling the initiation of Jack Frost into the Invisibles by Tom O’Bedlam, a streetbum/magician who imparts wisdom like “There’s a palace in your head, boy; learn to live in it always” to Jack. In an interview with Sci-Fi Universe, Morrison talked about the source of inspiration for the pivotal sequence in which Jack is taught to “see” differently.

“When you’re a kid or teenager, you go on these long walks,” the Glasgow native says, “you just kinda drift off and wander through the city, and make these sort of mythological connections in your head. I’d been doing that, and I think most people do, but the Situationists [a loose group of ’60s radical intellectuals and artists] identified that as a revolutionary act, and that feeds straight into The Invisibles: the idea that you can make a ‘temporary autonomous zone,’ by impressing the imagination on the world in such a way that you create [it anew]. You’re walking through the city and if you want to see it-as Raoul Vaneigem says in The Revolution of Everyday Life, my favorite Situationist text-as ‘some fabulous city of dreams,’ all it takes is a way of looking.”

For Morrison, this act of imagination is intensely political. “I really think the ‘political process’ doesn’t work and always leads to the same thing, which is the mountain of heads in the Enlightenment, which we explored in the first book of The Invisibles,” he says. “I think that there’s not much in the world that I can actively, effectively change, except what happens within the boundaries of my own skin [which I do] through whatever, by following magical processes or obscure therapists like Wilhelm Reich.

“I really believe if you do change yourself, then it has a vital effect. If you put out good ideas instead of bad ideas… good connections instead of bad ones.

“I get kinda of evangelical about it, sometimes,” says Morrison, laughing, “but it can work.”

Despite the anarchist underpinnings of The Invisibles, the series’ opening story arc attracted the attention of BBC Scotland, who have commissioned Morrison to adapt that arc into a six-part, three-hour TV series intended for broadcast on network television in late 1997 or 1998.

Meanwhile, The Invisibles comic has continued in typical Morrison style. Plot and stylistic twists seemed to issue from the writer’s fevered brain in torrents. If the stories seemed to run on a logic of their own, becoming an occasionally indecipherable catalog of ’90s zeitgeist with a plot that was almost a meta-deus ex machina, we didn’t care-we were just happy to be along for the dizzying, delirious ride. Allusions to The Prisoner, A Clockwork Orange, and the work of transgressive Italian filmmaker Pier Pasolini and techno-pagan-neo-Learyite theorist Terence McKenna came fast and often; historical figures like Lords Byron and Shelley and the Marquis de Sade appeared-and co-starred-with the team; and the stories were filled with voodoo priests, reform houses, magical signs of the “dark emperor Mammon,” the enemy’s special agents called Myrmidons, “psychic early warning systems,” post-hypnotic triggers, cyphermen and gnostic engineers.

With a radical storyline and even more radical storytelling, The Invisibles was bound to be a challenging read, and eventually the series found itself at the brink of cancellation due to dropping sales.

“We confused a few people with the first book,” Morrison now admits. “Also, it seemed to turn off the American readers because it was set in Britain for most of the time.”

So, The Invisibles-Volume One ended, and on Christmas, 1996, Volume Two debuted, complete with a new cover artist, fan favorite Brian Bolland, a new interior art team (Phil Jiminez and John Stokes), and, at least for the opening story arc, a new setting-the American Southwest-and a more straightforward storytelling style.

“I’d planned to do this anyway in the second year, but when we came to it, I thought we should take this opportunity to start a second volume,” explains Morrison. “The first four issues of Volume Two are this complete ironic version of The Invisibles for America. Because they’re in America, we’re getting a whole different version of the Invisibles. But in issue five, we actually see the reality of it. There’s a big time-travel story that’s going on within this… and that leads into more of the stuff that people are familiar with from the first book. I think hopefully if we can drag in some more of the casuals with the sex and violence at the start, then we can lead them up to the more sophisticated stuff.

“I can’t really do The Invisibles the way I did it before because ‘Arcadia’ [a complex, time-travel story arc involving the Marquis de Sade and the French Enlightenment] just didn’t work. That’s when everyone jumped off the book. And I had to be forced to admit that there’s certain things that the general comics audience just can’t handle. I have to downscale from that, slightly, so there won’t be those same kind of complex historical things again.

“Still, starting in issue seven, there will be a three-parter which explain all the things that came up in Paris in 1924…and so that will be the whole Futurist thing and Dada. So hopefully, I’ll be able to sneak more of the historical stuff in.

“And I’m still into some real, real, real weird far-out stuff being done by some of the magicians in America. I’ve got something called The Voodoun Gnostic Workbook and it’s by a guy Michel Bertiaux, he’s the head of this cult in Chicago. It’s science fiction stuff and they’re doing it, they’re living it, y’know, they’re doing all kinds of things to mutate themselves into a post-human species. It’s the furthest out stuff I’ve ever read in magic and I want to get into a bit more of that. But I do have to keep [everything] a bit more straightforward, I think, because I lost everyone.”

“The core thing everything comes back to, again, is that if you change yourself, you can change reality. And that’s a stupid ‘New Age’ idea, but…[it’s also] ‘as above, so below’-the hermetic philosophy thing. The character that runs a thread right through The Invisibles-who’s the core of it-is Jack Frost. He starts off as a completely rough kid, he’s nothing, and we follow this guy as he develops into a future buddha, and we see how that affects the entirety of everything.

“I’m trying to do something with a kind of fractal, holographic effect, and even the tiniest parts of The Invisibles refract the whole shape of it.

“I have it all mapped out. I know what happens in the last one. It will finish in the year 2000, which is where it was meant to, maybe a little later in the year than I expected. I think that after that, it won’t work. I’m tapping into all of these currents [aliens, conspiracy, paranoia, mysticism, millennialism], but I think once we get past that year 2000 threshold, and even slightly before it, I think we’ll be where the modernists were at the end of the last century. And what we’ll get is a completely different spirit and these apocalyptic, millennial spirits will transform really quickly into something else. So I don’t want to still be doing the apocalyptic digest paranoid conspiracy book when there’s a new current out in the world. I want it set up so The Invisibles will end, so I can come up with something new that will hopefully embody or whatever the forward-looking spirit we start to get.”

As anti-conventional as Morrison’s comics are, sometimes they seem to pale in comparison to the very public lifestyle he has led over the last few years-one marked by world travel, partying with Britpop bands like the Boo Radleys, massive hallucinogen ingestion, self-education in the arts of various magics, and, last year a frightening brush with death involving blood poisoning, a severely infected lung, and a (temporary) stress-related giant abscess on the side of his face. All of these experiences have made their way into his adult-oriented comics work.

“The last issue of the Doom Patrol was written on mushrooms,” Morrison says proudly,” and I did an entire 64-page story for 2000 A.D. on Ecstasy. I did it cuz it was kinda what the strip was about, it was a ‘two people getting off and taking drugs and going to a rave in the future’- sort of thing. And I thought I wanted to get into that a bit, so I took a couple of Es and just wrote the whole thing out.

“There’s a trip scene in issue two of The Invisibles where they’re up on a mesa. That’s actually real and the dialogue is taken from a tape-recorded conversation.

“And I’ve done automatic writing, trance writing and I always write down my dreams,” he adds. “But I don’t do it as much now. I think I’ve just gotten better at shutting down the conscious personality and letting the comics write themselves, so it’s become even more fun for me. I can take a backseat and know that this stuff generates itself almost. I’ve been doing it long enough now that it’s kinda easy.”

Morrison’s interest in music -“I listen to music all the time when I’m working, and I even put lines in if I happen to hear a line and I’m writing a script”, he says-was combined with his love for comics, musclemen and hallucinogens in 1996’s Flex Mentallo four-issue DC miniseries, a work of probable genius that weaved multiple mobius loops of narrative logic involving superheroes, has-been rock stars, nostalgia, creativity, mythology and mind-altering drugs, beautifully rendered by Frank Quitely.

“That was one of my favorite things that I’ve ever done, it sorta summed things up for me, but no one bought it,” says an obviously disappointed Morrison. “It didn’t sell, no one knew about it, it was really badly promoted, no one got to see the art before it was released. It was a whole catalogue of disasters, really, cuz I think it was a great comic, but it was one of those great comics that no one really has a feel for. So that kind of put me off from doing that kind of thing. That was as far out as I’m likely to go with superheroes.”

Of course, Morrison is still doing superhero comics, but, like Alan Moore, Morrison now segregates his “adult” work [The Invisibles] from the “kids” work [DC’s Aztek and the phenomenally successful Justice League of America] he does that actually pays the rent.

“What I’m doing with JLA and Aztek is going back to the kind of stuff I liked when I was a kid and trying to do an updated version of it for kids’ now,” Morrison explains.

“But my main focus is The Invisibles. I’m not really trying to do anything for the ages,” he says modestly, “I’m just trying to reflect the immediacy of these times and put it out to other people and make that connection and hope that then maybe they’ll do something and send it back to me, and create a network of good ideas.”

“One Nervous System’s Passage Through Time”: GRANT MORRISON interviewed by Jay Babcock (Arthur, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur Magazine No. 12/Sept. 2004

“One Nervous System’s Passage Through Time”: Magic works, says genius comic book scribe GRANT MORRISON, and he would know—he’s been exploring it for 25 years. He talks with Jay Babcock about what he’s experienced and What It (Maybe) All Means.

Cover illustration by Cameron Stewart.

Although he has claimed to be an heir to an immortal space dynasty who stays cheerful by imagining that aliens “will probably be turning up to rescue him any day now,” Grant Morrison was in fact born in 1960 to a pair of liberal activist Earthlings. Growing up in the slums of Glasgow, Scotland, where he was brought up by his mother while being “barely educated” in public schools, Morrison developed an early enthusiasm for all things pop and fantastic: rock n roll music, science fiction and fantasy literature, mythology and the occult, punks, mods, beatniks and, of course, foxes and cats.

But the early love that would bear the most fruit was for comic books, which he began writing and drawing as an adolescent. Foregoing higher education and living on his own in a Glasgow ghetto from age 19, Morrison gradually built a career as a comics writer of prodigious imagination, armed with a sense of humor: the title of his first published story was “Time Is a Four-Lettered Word.”

After years of toil writing in the British sci-fi comics world while making psychedelic mod-pop with his Glaswegian band The Makers, Morrison landed work at American publisher DC Comics, where his deeply unsettling Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum, illustrated by Sandman cover artist Dave McKean, was published in 1989. It remains Morrison’s bestselling work but in the wake of his work since then—his two-year run on Animal Man, in which the lead character, refashioned as a superpowered animal-rights activist, gradually becomes aware that he is a character in a comic book; four years of Doom Patrol, a deeply Surrealist four-color romp starring a superhero team of mental patients; shorter works like the multi-meta-superhero comic Flex Mentallo and the controversial-for-obvious-reasons Kill Your Boyfriend; The Invisibles, an epic for would-be technoccult anarchists; and The Filth, a seriously dark and bizarre 13-issue series, discussed at length in this interview—it seems relatively minor.

“You don’t get much time on Earth to do stuff, so I like to keep busy,” Morrison told one interviewer last year, and so he has: in addition to the aforementioned work, Morrison recently completed a 40-issue run on New X-Men and Seaguy, a picaresque three-issue series drawn by this Arthur’s cover artist Cameron Stewart; an original screenplay for Dreamworks; and scripts for two more three-issue series debuting in the next few months, We3 and Vimanarama.

Recently returned from a wedding honeymoon that included a week’s stay in Dubai (where “they’re building the 21st century out of sand,” he says), Morrison spoke at length by phone from his Glasgow home about the whys and wherefores of his work, his life and the Present Situation in Our World.

Arthur: Did you see the news about the super-strong German toddler? I was reminded where you were saying your run on X-Men was a set of fables for the coming mutant, which you thought might already exist or be on their way.

Grant Morrison: I figured even within 50 years we’ll probably have quite a few superhumans on the planet. There’s something about the superman idea that’s pushing itself closer and closer to reality, to the real-life material workaday world that we can touch. The supercharacters began in the pulps and then worked their way through comics, and they keep moving to more and more extensive mass media. Now it’s everywhere, and it’s become the common currency of culture. I said, way back, almost joking, that I thought the super-people were really trying very hard to make their way off the skin of the second dimension to get in here. They want to be in here with us. They’re colonizing people’s minds, and they’re now colonizing movies, so the next stage is to clamber off the screen into the street. I think what you’re starting to see, with things like this weird kid, and also the experiments that are going on with animals, the cyborg experiments and genetic manipulation that is now possible, is that pretty soon there’s gonna be super-people. You’ll be able to select for superpeople: “I want my kid to have electric powers.” That kind of thing.

And when supermen do come along, what are they gonna want to find? A role model. Like everyone else on the planet. We all want to find people who’ve trod our path before, who can suggest some ways to help us feel significant. So the idea behind a lot of what I was doing in X-Men and really all of my comics is to give these future supermen a template, to say “Okay you’re a superhuman, and maybe it feels a little like this. I’ve tried really hard as one of the last of the human beings to think what it might be like in your world.” Rather than bring them to us, which is what a lot of superhero fiction in the past has tried to do, I’ve tried to go into their world and to understand what’s going on in the space of the comics, and to try and find a way to make that into a morality, almost, or a creed, or an aesthetic, that might make sense to someone who has yet to be born with powers beyond those of mortal man. I think we have to give them images of rescue and ambition and cosmic potency, rather than images of control and fascist perfection.

Arthur: Can a cartoon code of ethics really deal with real-world subtleties?

In a sense it is a cartoon code of ethics, but these will be cartoon people, having to live in a real world. And I think the cartoon code of ethics stands up as well as anything Jesus came up with. Don’t kill. Don’t let bullies have their way. Use your powers in the service of good. I think we should be focusing towards that, rather than providing images of destruction or of despair.

Purely on a conceptual level, the Justice League were created to solve every possible problem, right? [chuckles] That’s what they’re there for. They never fail. These are things that the human imagination has created and put on paper and they exist – they have a more than 40 years’ lifespan. Still existing, still clinging to life, these images. So I think if we’ve created something in our heads that’s so beautiful and so strong and so moral that it can solve all our problems with justice, intelligence and discrimination, then why don’t we use it? Tap into it a little more and understand what these images mean and what they can do for us beyond the obvious. Why was Superman created? That’s the really important thing. What kind of imaginative need was being served by that? And to access that again, to make it vital again, to empower the fiction again, I think, would help our culture deal with some of the implications of its own future.

We have to hang onto the immense power of that imaginative world. Every creed, every weapon, every invention or symphony began as an idea in someone’s head. We’re very good at making insubstantial ideas into physical artifacts or systems of conduct—which is magic, of course, humanity’s greatest skill.

Yeah, you can imagine that the first Aryan superman will probably crawl out of his test tube and want to subjugate us all with the hammers of his fists, but by using the power of imagination right now maybe we can provide his mighty brain with something better than conquest to think about.

Continue reading →

GRANT MORRISON AT ARTHURBALL…

From The Gardner Linn Fan Club:

FORCED INTO A CONFRONTATION WITH HIS LIMITATIONS AS A SCREENWRITER

While the rest of the comics world is in New York, getting turned away from their own convention, Grant Morrison appeared in Los Angeles last night to give a talk as part of the ArthurBall in Echo Park. He’s just as entertaining in person as you’d imagine from reading his interviews. A few random tidbits:

He opened his talk by reading a surrealistic short story that, as far as I could tell (Morrison’s Scottish accent takes some getting used to, plus he was practically shouting into the microphone), was about Lee Harvey Oswald traveling back in time to tell a crowd at a poetry reading about why he was going to shoot Kennedy (something about a bullet impregnating Kennedy and growing to riflehood or something) . It was exactly the kind of thing you’d expect to read in, say, Shade the Changing Man in 1991, what with the Kennedy/Oswald stuff, plus guest appearances by Baudelaire and Buzz Aldrin. But it was chock-full of quotable lines, which I would be quoting if I could remember any (see the title, above, for one), some good jokes, and one instance where Morrison took everybody by surprise by screaming something about angels of the apocalypse. Good times. And the setup was ultra-dramatic–just him with a small spotlight on a C-stand illuminating his manuscript (from which he ripped the pages and threw them to the ground as he finished reading each one) and casting his shadow on the blank white wall behind him.
Q&A followed. He talked about his “alien encounter” (which he qualifies as being more of a perception shift than an actual encounter, though he did say it was “more real than this,” by which I guess he meant his current waking life and not specifically the Jensen’s Recreation Center in Echo Park) and the time he met Superman in San Diego, both of which are old news to anyone who’s read a few interviews with him, but no less interesting to hear about in person. He also talked about how The Invisibles was a hypersigil, and how his life and the fictional life of King Mob started to blur as he was writing it. This is important a few bullet points later.
Morrison said his next big project for Vertigo is called Supertrendy Young Doctor, inspired by someone asking him, as he rushed in a cab toward his dying father in a hospital, whether he was a doctor, and his subsequent thought that it must be really cool to be a doctor, always rushing off in taxis to perform brain surgery. He said it wouldn’t be a long series. No word on an artist, or whether he joking.
He’s “channeling” Batman for his upcoming run on the title, running up some huge hill behind his house every morning in single-digit-degree weather to get in the proper mood. His Batman “likes to fuck girls, has a dark sense of humor, and looks down on everybody else.”
Yes, someone asked if Flex Mentallo is ever going to be collected. No, Morrison doesn’t know. Yes, someone asked how to break into comics. No, it wasn’t me.
A young woman asked if he believed in faeries (I’m guessing, but you just know she spells it with an “e”), and his answer was basically that if you take enough drugs out in a marsh, you’ll probably see something more-or-less fairylike, so sure, he believes. Though, he said, “I don’t believe they’re out there spinning cobweb dresses for me.”
According to Morrison, the next big trend in pop culture is “goth psychedelia.” Order your corset and get in on the ground floor now.
I asked if, since he’s met Superman, and since he’s already a character in the DC Universe thanks to Animal Man, if he had considered doing an Invisibles-style hypersigil series about himself in the DC Universe, to try to imprint that reality onto our own, particularly considering his own statements that the DC Universe has achieved sentience. Though I didn’t ask it quite like that–I just made some stupid joke about “Superman’s Pal Grant Morrison,” and he said he’d thought about it but not in such an obvious way, and then joked that he’s actually the “Unknown Superman,” which I guess is coming up in All-Star Superman, so spoiler, maybe?
Anyway, if you take his “channeling Batman” statement seriously, then maybe his Batman run will be a sort of hypersigil, and the line between Morrison and Bruce Wayne will start to blur. He’s still in his late-period King Mob/James Bond mode (shaved head, dark suit, flashy tie), and it wouldn’t be too far of a stretch for that to become Bruce Wayne, especially considering his girlfriend was all decked out in punk-Catwoman leather.
I kind of jokingly considered that maybe he was Lex Luthor, but he squashed that idea. But if you consider that he remade himself physically to resemble King Mob, then it’s not too much of a stretch to think that Professor X in his New X-Men run was also an authorial stand-in (note that many of the changes Morrison wrought upon X-Men were also wrought upon the X-Men by Professor X). And now he’s writing another series with another bald supergenius? You’ve gotta consider the possiblity, at least.

…

Anyway, it was an enjoyable evening, and if Grant Morrison ever comes to your town for a reading, I heartily recommend you go.