In 1999 I had the pleasure of interviewing Grant Morrison for about an hour or so. He was at the Armageddon Pop Culture Expo in Melbourne, along with Warren Ellis. On the Saturday they held separate Q&A sessions, and on the Sunday they shared a session during which they drank some champagne on stage and riffed off eachother. After this session, Warren went off armed with a range of local and imported beers, and Grant hung around signing autographs (including my copy of Doom Patrol #19) and we sat down with some chips and mineral water for a bit of a chat about things which had been touched upon during the Q&A.
Many of the references to 'current projects' are, of course, out of date now, but such distractions aside, Grant says some interesting things about the industry, other writers and artists, and his own writing.
S. In the early days comics writers were anonymous and regarded as hacks, and indeed regarded themselves as hacks. There’s an article I read recently on Neuman in which he says “If you read it, I probably wrote it.” Later, DC was advertising Alan Moore’s scripting style in an in-house advertisement, specifically his language. It hit me then that the profile of writing was changing for the audience and the industry. What is your impression of writers working for a conglomerate such as Time-Warner. What does it mean to you as a writer personally and professionally?
G. I always wanted to be a writer. When I was five years old I knew I wanted to write. The only other thing I ever wanted to be was a cowboy. I knew what I wanted to do and from then on it was How does this work? How do I get to do this? Back in the seventies I was writing in a bedsit, fantasy novels, whatever. I got some work doing comics because I knew the techniques, I understood the form...
S. And you mean people can’t if they haven’t grown up with it...
G. Yes, as strange as it is... and I thought, ok, I’ll do comics because they paid me, and this was a way to make money. I was still trying to do the novels, I had an agent and I was trying to get published, and then Warrior came out which had V for Vendetta, they were doing the type of novels and type of tv shows and films I wanted to do, but it was in a comic. I thought this means I can do adult stuff, I don’t have to do comics for kids if I don’t want to, and I just started pursuing that as an avenue, to make a living from it, and as you say, you’re dealing with conglomerates, with Time-Warner, but Time-Warner doesn’t even realise that they’re publishing The Invisibles, which criticises Time-Warner.
The only time we had problems with that was when this guy wrote this fantastic letter saying “You’re part of the conspiracy because you’re working for Time-Warner, and I put it in there and they spotted it and they wouldn’t print it, so there is censorship there, but in comics, I can reach this mass audience. If I was doing serious novels, I’d be lucky to be selling a few thousand copies, and that would be it, and it would take me two years to write another one. With comics, even the most avant-garde one can sell 3- or 4000 a month. That’s amazing...
S. That’s an amazing readymade audience, especially considering that, as you say, Time Warner/DC Comics aren’t even interested in broadening their audience or even sales, they’re just interested in keeping alive their trademarks, their vacant properties. The impression of your readers is that writers such as yourself have clout, but what you’re saying is really the opposite of that...
G. You don’t have it. And you believe you do. It’s the same as what Moore and Miller were saying back in the 80’s, that we’re doing this stuff, and it’s cutting edge, and it’s selling well, why don’t you let us do more? And they always say “No!”.
S. They all thought that Dark Knight was a great Batman comic but...
G. Yeah... but with Dark Knight, they never even believed it was going to sell. These guys, they just don’t understand. It’s always the same, it’s not just Time-Warner. As writers, we have to know what’s going on, because our lives depend on it. Y’know, I get paid by the script. If I don’t do any scripts, my whole life falls apart, we have to keep writing. And we have to keep being aware of what the pop culture is saying. It’s not even a conscious thing, but you’re in there, you know what’s going on, you know what’s going to sell, you know what kids are interested in. And editors don’t, because they’re getting a salary, they don’t have to care. They’re set up, they’ve got their pension funds, so we actually know how the stuff is done. We know what people want. And you suddenly come up against this wall, the Company, and the Company won’t exist if they don’t have the trademarks, and as you say, they’re not interested in a new version of Superman, the old one’s just fine as long as they make a movie every ten years. That’s it, that’s all we need.
S. Then you wonder why they want Grant Morrison or Garth Ennis to take on a particular title or character, knowing that your name will bring your audience along, but they don’t want you to do what you do. They’re commodifying your name, your style...
G. But they don’t want us to change. It’s like McDonald’s, this is what you’ll get, with Garth Ennis you’ll get the desert, or with Tarantino you’ll get guns. If you get me, you’ll get wierd shit. If you get Warren (Ellis), you’ll get lots of swearing.
S. Warren was saying how you do get cliques, how you’ll get, say, for Gaiman, a Caitlain Kiernan hired to do a Sandman-related title in the Gaiman style, and that becomes a new house style.
G. That’s happening the same on JLA. It took them years to realize that it was successful, and all I was doing was thinking of what the JLA was about, big science fiction ideas, y’know, time travel stories, other dimension stories. But once people learn the language - like Quantum and Hyper that Warren said I always use - everyone’s doing it, I may as well do something else. ‘Cos they can just hire other guys to do those sort of scripts. They can ape the style. But what you’re not gonna get from that is anything new. That’s the way it works. They get something successful, but they don’t want to do anything different. Whereas I’m convinced the next idea will be even more successful, and I keep trying to convince them, give me Superman and I’ll sell you a million, no problem, I’ll do it: “No, we don’t care, we don’t want to sell a million, ‘cos you don’t get scripts in on time.” And that’s when you realise how the process really works.
S. It seems that when something does arrive that’s fresh and innovative, that in the eyes of the editors, it’s not perceived as a positive for the industry or for promoting comics per se, but rather that there is another novel way of milking the existing audience. Is that the sort of thing that you see....
G. (nodding)
S. Yeah?
G. Completely. Y’know, there was no JLA comics for years, nothing was successful. This one’s successful. And now everything that DC’s putting out is the Justice League.
S. But when I read Justice League I don’t feel I’m getting... I’m getting a good superhero comic, but I’m not getting a "Grant Morrison" comic. When I first read Animal Man and Doom Patrol - a guy in the shop just recommended them to me, I’d never heard of you before - I thought: “I’m following this writer”, and I would go ahead and buy comics - for the artists as well - but largely according to the writers involved. It seemed to me then that if I thought that way, there must be a whole lot of people doing this, buying comics based on who’s writing it. And that’s why I say that if your editor comes up to you and says “Grant, we want you to do this title or resurrect that title”, why get you to do something that’s not what you want to do, which is what you were doing in the first instance, rather than saying “We want another Dada comic”, or another self-conscious superhero comic...
G. They don’t understand it. The best success is when your creative people are doing what they feel. That’s always the best success...
S. Because you’re also surprised as a writer when you read that stuff as your working on it, aren’t you. There’s that sense that you discover something yourself, something is revealed, something comes off the page at you....
G. The feeling I’ve always got when I’m writing, sometimes when it’s not working, I can’t do it. I can sit there and technically do you a great Justice League comic, but the stuff I like the best is something like The Invisibles, which is a different thing altogether, it’s more like what I want to do. Even when I’m working for kids, or whoever writing this stories, there just comes a moment when it’s like... I always describe it as a click in the head, when you suddenly hit on a way of doing it. For instance, when I was doing the “Rock of Ages” storyline, the last one or second last one with the zombie factory on the moon and the death of Darkseid, when I wrote that, I just thought it was dry, and the click suddenly came when I decided to do the story from the point of view of the Black Racer - Death - and then it’s Death that starts narrating the story. It comes around to the end of the story and you finally find out who’s talking and it’s Death, and that was it, that was the click, because it was something I hadn’t done before. And that was what made the story work for me. And if I don’t get that click, if I don’t get that file that gets opened, the thing doesn’t work.
S. And you can trust it because that’s what comes through to a reader as well. You know when you find yourself trying to explain the levels or many meanings available, for example, in Arkham Asylum, I‘ve always felt that that was... When a writer has to go to the effort of pointing that out, when it’s not happening ‘organically’, whatever you want to call it... I found it interesting that what you didn’t like about Alan Moore’s work is that it’s reductive, which I assume by that you mean that it’s overdetermined, that it’s too dry and schematic. I actually think he is also surprised by how his method reveals things to him because it’s process work...
G. Yes...
S. It actually works specifically as comics...
G. To read Alan Moore’s work, it’s so beautiful and architectural and everything about it is great, but for me, that fire of creativity isn’t there in it, and I’m not fooled by it. I read Promethea last night, and I thought, “This is Doom Patrol, I don’t care, there’s nothing new for there for me here, but it’s so beautifully constructed, I wish I could do this kind of thing...
S. ...immaculate objects...
G. ...yes. It lacks the transcendental, it lacks the soul. And even last night, I was talking to Warren, The Authority’s like Justice League, but to me, what I find in that is this voice coming out, that to me, Warren’s got this voice of this new whatever generation it is that’s coming up where there’s all this violence and black humour, and that’s why I love it, because it is a thing with fire coming out of it. I don’t get that with Moore’s stuff, I just get this brilliance.
S. But I think there’s an appeal to that which is to do just with how comics are read, and I reckon that when Moore’s doing it, he’s actually surprised by the connections that are made. You know when you said that he synthesises...
G. Yeah, that’s right...
S. ...his work is a process of synthesis. I think he is surprised when he sees the connections and analogies between the salt shaker and the Chrysler building, for example...
G. ..yeah...
S. ...and even when he talks about being surprised by the coincidences in it, that this art work on the poster was the same as the... whoever was doing the Yes covers...
G. The Roger Dean stuff...
S. I was thinking about how you were saying with Arkham Asylum, Dave McKean was doing more collage, and you had structured it as a very clean, articulate, spot-the-shadows-behind-the-object...
G. Even more than that, I wanted it schizophrenic, because schizophrenics look at the world where everything’s objectified, where things don’t mean other things, because the whole story already had multiple angles, I didn’t want that to be in the art at the same time. I wanted everything objectified. The cup of coffee is a cup of coffee when you’re a schizophrenic, there’s no meaning in it.
S. Have you read Cages?
G. I read the first few, but I lost interest, to be honest. It just went on too long...
S. Yeah, it does have to be read in the one sitting. There’s writers who do communicate their stories very visually, and he’s one of those, like Sienkiewicz. Do you read much of the independent comics? Have you read Chris Ware?
(another interruption by announcer’s voice overhead)
S. There’s always someone up there, isn’t there?
G. Yeah... (laughs)
S. And it’s always a white male voice.
G. I really like Chris Ware formally, he’s formally brilliant. The black humour is at a pitch where I can enjoy it just for the sheer nastiness of it, the black depth of it. But what worries me is that there’s so many of those American guys - and I have this problem with the Fantagraphics books, not all of them, but most of them - is that there’s a lot of really bad ones, I think.
They live in the most privileged, the most wonderful country in the world, and they keep writing about how shitty their lives are, and I’m sorry, I come from Scotland, I come from a place where no one’s got work, no one’s got money, and I’m reading these Americans in California telling me that life is shit, and it’s like, Get Therapy, y’know, I don’t want to read your comics, ‘cos you’re boring bastards. And there’s nothing fun, there’s nothing empowering or useful in that. You know, I love Dan Clowes’ stuff, when he was doing Velvet Glove, and Ghost World, but when he writes that stuff, this is who I hate, because Dan Clowes walks in and says “I hate that kid over there because she’s got a big arse, and I hate that one... it’s like, shut up, shut the fuck up, keep it to yourself, that means nothing to me, it’s just attacking humanity for no good reason, do something. And the good thing about him is, he does, but a lot of these Fantagraphics guys do nothing but “I hate this!”, nihilistic, pointless... But like I say, these guys are living in California...
S. It’s their audience as well, isn’t it...
G. ...I suddenly realised how adolescent that is ‘cos when you’re 17 you are nihilistic and you do think everything is shit...
S. ...well, you’d wanna be...
G. (laughs) Yeah, it’s the way people think. That’s why people are into death when they’re 17. Once you get past a certain age you don’t want anything to do with it, y’know?(interrupted by an autograph hunter)
S. What about Love and Rockets, have you read that sort of thing?
G. I read it when it first came out but then it no longer seemed relevant after a certain point.
(a female announcer’s voice interjects this time)
S. Somebody else got a shot at it! (laughter). Just getting back to being a comics writer, having a certain audience - you mentioned the letter columns and the immediate response. There’s no doubt comics are a pop medium with the immediacy, and you know your target audience is going to be turned over every five years or whatever... How did getting rid of the letter columns affect you? It seemed to be a significant theme for you in the panel session.
G. When I came to make the Invisibles I was communicating with these people and the whole idea was that there was a lot of ideas that inspired me when I was young, certain films, the Sex Pistols, F, and the Lindsay Anderson films, all this anarchic stuff, and I began to realise that all that is is handing on the baton, it goes right back through the beatniks, back to the Romantics, there’s this thread that kind of runs through this counter culture thread, and I always felt that I identified with that.
But for me the comics became a way of expressing that again, getting to a big audience. Byron was writing poetry and he had this gigantic audience all across Europe and there were all these young men and young women reading his stuff and I just thought, novels don’t have it, poetry certainly doesn’t have a big audience anymore, but we can do comics that have poetry in them, like Alan Moore, it’s brilliant, you can do poetry and sell vast amounts which is unheard of, certainly in the Western neck of the woods, and that’s what it’s about. We’re using this medium to say the things I wanted to say.
S. You were saying how you thought it was things you said in the letter columns that they’d edited out and then said “Well, we’re not giving it to you any more, we’re giving it over to advertising space”.
G. The whole thing with the letter columns was that on the Invisibles I was handing on the baton. I’ll do this calling, I’ll send out signals and try to connect every one on Earth who liked the Invisibles, and that was the idea. And suddenly I started getting the letters in, and all these people are saying “Well. I’m gonna bootleg this”, and “I’ve got cd’s, you should hear this”, and they were sending me all this stuff and everyone was doing the same work, but expressing it in their own way, but it was always saying, like, the same currents people were reflecting in different ways. and I found that suddenly this international community was beginning to emerge that I’d only dreamed of when I started doing the book, but it’s what I imagined the Invisibles would be. And it got more and more real to the point where I created a shamanic transvestite character and the next thing is, this shamanic transvestite sends me photographs and letters and tells me how to throw molotov cocktails.
And then I meet - you know, I’d keep getting all these letters and the whole thing became this fantastic ferment of people, and the letters column for me was at the centre of it because I could respond directly to people, I just ran with the things I was thinking that day, and we created this energy, this force, you know, and they deliberately took that away, and you can see a community of a different sort emerging through the other columns, like Transmet, it was all different, but the people it attracted would create this fantastic stir, they wanted their ideas involved, they wanted to comment. I was getting things that people would write to me - the whole Ragged Robin thing in the the second book of the Invisibles came up because this 16 year old girl sent me these fantastic photographs of herself dressed up as Ragged Robin, and then she sent me this story she’d written which was all about this girl writing this story which included the Invisibles, and that just fed directly into it, that became part of my story as well.
S. That turnaround of response, the immediacy is amazing...
G. But they did it deliberately to all of us so we’ve lost that sense of community, where you can go to the back page and it’s like looking through the door of the clubhouse and be involved in the discussion and debate. It’s gone, and to me it was deliberate and it was brutal, and it does affect me, I’m working in the dark again.
S. So what did you do to Charles Sperling?
G. (laughs) What’s Charles Sperling doing to himself? (loud laughter) You know, I’m going to write him a letter, and just say, Charles, you’ve got to stop reading comics, ‘cos you don’t like them anymore. That’s the problem, you’ve stopped being interested in these things, but you’re reading them out of nostalgia, and you’re too old for it!
S. Warren was saying he refuses to print one of his letters! There was this other guy, too. Do you remember T. M. Maple? - that was his pseudonym - every time I read his letters, I thought, someone’s got to write a short story or a novel based just on a series of letters written to a comic, and it would have this whole pathology, because it was moving stuff sometimes...
G. ...yeah, because they’re writing so much, they’re actually folk writers as well, these guys and it becomes like a badge of honour... Y’know, Sperling, he writes to every single comic, every month. How much time must that take, I mean there’s all these references to “F. Scott Fitzgerald said this...” and it’s completely irrelevant to the story!(laughter)
G. I’ve met some fantastic people throught the Invisibles, people that are real friends, people I know in Melbourne I’ve met who are really good people.
S. The cynical view is that the comics audience is ghettoised, it’s so invisible, and what you’re saying is that there’s another aspect to it which is Yes, I work for a conglomerate, Yes I’m hampered by this and that, but despite all that there’s this energy that comes through this sort of work, there is this connection, and Yes, I’m a pulp writer or a popular writer, but what you’re saying is that with pop writing, we don’t need to spend a year working on the novel...
G. Exactly...
S. ...and you don’t need the official culture or beauracracy or official channels of applause...
G. Because it doesn’t matter. One of the great things with comics is that generally the culture isn’t looking, and no one sees what’s going on in the Invisibles, so we can get away with stuff. It’s getting harder and harder, but in comics you can get away with stuff you can’t get away with in novels or film because they’re too public, and there’s something about comics, this disdained form, this despised sideways up form that gets overlooked and because it’s getting overlooked a lot of very interesting people go there to work because they can say things that they wouldn’t be able to say anywhere else.
S. I see that as a very recent thing in mainstream comics. Of course there was the undergrounds which were very consciously anti-establishment...
G. The funny thing is that the underground scene is a really wierd one because I notice that it’s always the underground cartoonists who always survive best. All the guys from the 60’s have huge benefactors, like Crumb is really rich...
S. ...Shelton...
G. ...Shelton lives in Paris where he has a benefactor who’s a millionaire who just pays Shelton to do stuff. Look at Curt Swan, the guys who worked there on the frontlines of superhero comics, and they have more money than them (the superhero artists) and they’re actually cooler than these guys who worked hard. These guys have all worked out how to make money. And the guys at Fantagraphics, they’re all doing, like, posters for beer adverts, so they’re the ones who actually end up successful. The so-called alternative culture is more successful.
S. So all you get now is Crumb sketchbooks...
G. ...lavish versions of that stuff...S.
I just saw the ad for Crumb’s compilation of his favourite jazz records from his collection, and he gets to write the liner notes...
G. (laughter) Peter Bagge’s the same, they’ve just got a whole bunch of them, everyone’s favourite records are being put out on cd’s. And those guys are making a fortune. But no one says to Steve Ditko What’s your favourite records? So I actually think the real heroes in all this are the people doing mainstream comics, just because there’s no kudos in that, nothing but hate from the general culture.
S. And your Swan's and Ditko's were effectively in a production line sweatshop environment. That’s what I started off saying, that our impression as readers is that with the higher profile of writers having come into comics in the last ten years the audience has also changed, and writers having been recognised as scripters rather than writer/artists have really brought a different influence, and the audience is there waiting to be found, so that when you do the Invisibles or when Swamp Thing was done, or when the all the clever things in Watchmen is found, there’s an audience there for it...
G. Because the audience is literate, that’s one thing to remember. These are people who like to read, and that’s like only 10 per cent of the American population, and that’s what’s important, they’re actually reading. Anyone who picks up a comic is literate because they want to read. Comics have become more literate along with the audience as well. Because it used to be like, you could sell 4,000,000 Superman issues a month, to G.I’s and little kids on the corner, but what we’ve got left is a really intense reading audience.
S. And it’s not an uncritical audience either. The conventional view of comics audiences is of 14 year olds and less reading superhero comics, but the audience that grows and stays may get smaller, but is intense and critical. When you say there’s these 40 year old editors that are going to be there forever and they won’t give you the freedom you want - there’s always this positive-negative thing in the comics industry...
G. We have the enthusiasm, you know, I’m so enthusiastic, that’s why, with doing Justice League I’m doing this positive, forward-looking thing and after 7 years, as the years go by I’ve been ground down to the point where I’m angry and I’m spitting fire at the company, and it’s terrible and I should still be excited by this stuff instead of being worn down by it.
S. I guess that writers have been taught two other lessons, that even if you’re big enough like Alan Moore, you won’t be able to take your audience, because you can’t administer Mad Love or whatever, and the other thing is like Rick Veitch, where you take the principalled approach and say “I’m leaving”, there’ll be growth in the industry after that where printing stories with Jesus won’t be an issue, but he’s lost his livelihood.
G. Since Rick Veitch we’re not allowed to use any form of cross or Christian imagery. You don’t really notice this. But we’re able to do good stuff despite that.
S. And when obscenities are allowed that articulates another audience, it identifies another group...
G. It’s sad, because there you’ve got like Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon with the project they’re doing after Preacher, and they’ve gone and said “We won’t give you this unless you give as an assurance we can use the word ‘cunt’”, and I thought Is that really the basis of...
S. That’s what I’m saying, that you get away with that, and suddenly that will be marketable and they’ll say “We want the Ennis swearing, but not that swearing...”.
G. Yeah, and we’re fighting over the word ‘cunt’ but we should be fighting about other things. There are certain restrictions which are in place...
S. What about other things for yourself such as having had access to The Face, and I saw some years ago when I was in London and the Invisibles was coming out, and there was a writeup in Time Out. That to me seems like genuine crossover acknowledgement...
G. I haven’t got the time ‘cos I’m working all the time but when the Invisibles came out I had the time and I went out and did all the press...
S. You did it yourself?
G. Yeah, I went to them and if you say “This is a comic” they go “My God, this is a comic, it’s so great, and look, it’s got swearing, it’s got real life situations in it”, and they love it.
S. So you promoted it yourself...
G.The companies will not promote one. They don’t want the world to know it’s out there. So what I do - when I have a new project - is I send it out to everyone in the media, and they’re always interested because it is interesting. But they don't promote the Invisibles, or they don’t promote Preacher or Transmetropolitan, they don’t want them to sell, because it might attract bad light onto these things.
S. Everyone will see what they’re up to?
G. Everything about the company is there to keep hobbling the creators, and that’s what we’ve discovered.
S. They’re protecting their demographic but their demographic isn’t what they think it is. They think they’re protecting 14 year old boys...
G. It’s not even for 14 year old boys. What do 14 year old boys like? They like South Park, whatever the latest thing is. Fourteen year old boys are quite aware of what’s going on in the culture.
S. They’re not into whatever 50 year old editors were into when they were 14.
G. The editors are convinced that everyone is just like them, and that’s the way it’s always been. And the horror is, it has to be said, that these editors are geeks, and they’re frightened to engage with the real world and talk to people because they feel slow and ashamed of themselves...
The tape/transcript ends rather suddenly at this point. I know we discussed a few more things, but not much that I can recall now, other than he also remembers the Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators series of kids' mystery books, and his oft-told story about meeting Superman (which makes me think I must have another tape somewhere with more of the interview... watch this space!)
At the end of the interview I was heading off to the Astor to see Chris Marker’s La Jetee. I invited Grant along but he had already made plans to catch The Matrix. I believe he had more to say about that later.
I found Grant to be as charming and cool and as forthright as I expected him to be, and I still think that if there's a casting call for Spider Jerusalem, he should top the list.
To recap: I mentioned yesterday that I have purchased a Mammoth Annual NN/#1, and that it contains Century #’s 1, 5 and 7, all from 1956.
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