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Grant Morrison: Master & Commander Introduction  Anyone choosing comics as a profession has their own version of the story so I can't present my case as representative. I don't have kids, so I suspect the lack of that kind of responsibility makes me less susceptible to commercial pressures and more willing to take chances with my bank balance and my reputation by releasing material which is slightly ahead of its time and hence unfashionable, like The Filth. Truthfully, the job security in this business is uncertain, the hours are long, long and lonely, the audience is increasingly small, fickle and dissatisfied, like 3 of the 7 Dwarves, respect is nonexistent, success fleeting; you'd be better off in a boy band, where at least you'd get laid before they made you obsolete. It's a miracle traditional American comics get made at all (and still with the same characters they've had since the fucking Boer War or something. Mister Terrific! How can these things still exist? What monstrous act of love and will keeps a comics 'universe' alive for so long, against the odds?). They're the last bastion of something, that's for sure, but it's hard to imagine them, through the compound eyes of future eons, as anything other than a curious example of primitive, hand-drawn 'virtual reality' technologies. Most of the people who do this kind of work, do it out of love, like the love you'd show to an ailing friend. This creeping unease a lot of fans are feeling isn't so much about people wanting to get paid for their labour but about a kind of devaluing of comics as a form, which has been going on. As the rush to convert comic books into handy illustrated movie pitches becomes less chaotic and more transparent, I think we've all become aware of a kind of betrayal, a public strangling of the exotic strangeness and uniqueness of American comics, as publishers, creators and readers confuse their media and expect comic book stories to conform to Hollywood storytelling conventions. Wise up: the more comics imitate movies, the less need movies will have for comics as a source of imaginative material; let's remember that the movie industry is ONLY NOW learning to simulate the technology and imagination Jack Kirby packed in his pencil 40 years ago. As I've been saying to the point of boredom for the last couple of years, our creative community owes it to the future to produce today the insane, logic-shattering, side-splitting day-glo stories which will be turned into all-immersive holographic magic theatre experiences in 40 years time. The comics medium is a very specialized area of the Arts, home to many rare and talented blooms and flowering imaginations and it breaks my heart to see so many of our best and brightest bowing down to the same market pressures which drive lowest-common-denominator blockbuster movies and television cop shows. Let's see if we can call time on this trend by demanding and creating big, wild comics which stretch our imaginations. Let's make living breathing, sprawling adventures filled with mind-blowing images of things unseen on Earth. Let's make artefacts that are not faux-games or movies but something other, something so rare and strange it might as well be a window into another universe because that's what it is. Let's see images which come directly from the minds of inspired artists, not from publicity stills. Superhero comics are way too expensive for the mass market and the brand of garish, violent pulp they were once the only source for is available these days in more attractive media. We should get real about this and stop dumbing down, stop stunting our artists' creativity and stop trying to attract a completely imaginary 'mainstream audience'. The best way to consolidate comics as a viable medium is to make them LESS like other media, not more. Let our artists go wild on imaginative page layouts. Let our writers find stories in their dreams and not in the newspaper pages, at least for a little while again. Aim for the cool, literate 'college' audience, as Stan Lee did to great success in the 60s. And let's also clear something up - people like superhero movies, not because they like superheroes or comics, but because they like movies. At best, they remember Spider-Man and the Hulk and the others from TV shows and cartoon series, not from comic books. There is NO significant crossover market as comics sales figures indicate. We're dancing like fools for pennies and there's nobody there who wasn't there already. How about a return to some pride in our medium and its singular qualities? I was lucky enough to get my first big mainstream exposure and success - with ANIMAL MAN, DOOM PATROL and ARKHAM ASYLUM - at a time during the 80s when experimental superhero books, inspired by Nicolas Roeg movies, Dennis Potter plays, Brecht, Joyce, Warhol, Beuys, Burroughs, sex, drugs, transcendental philosophies, and the Theatre of Cruelty were actually fashionable AND lucrative. It was possible to make money with ambitious work which thumbed its nose at the rigidly enforced styles of Hollywood writing and honoured comics as a medium of expression in and of itself. Now it's like Joyce never happened. It's like Picasso and Kerouac never happened. It's like Bill Sienkiewicz never happened. Mainstream comics storytelling has allowed itself to become mired in the conventions of the 18th century novel and the Hollywood flick, which seems such a comedown. There's room for everything, of course, that's what they keep telling me, but there's just not enough of the comics I'd like to see right now; I enjoy a few things here and there, which I ought to mention, like Gail Simone's 'Rose and Thorn', Milligan, 'Planetary' when it comes out, Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier' book, 'Plastic Man', Waid's Superman and a few other attractive tumbleweeds but otherwise, there's a strange 'within budget' quality to so many post-Ultimate books. Leave the biz where it belongs, I say - in the hand of mad visionaries, acid trippers and all the other colourful eccentrics who produce narratives that are NOT inspired by Hollywood movies or HBO shows. And I'll say this one more time until it's the next new 'movement' before you know it; even films don't look like films any more - why should comics be expected to remain in some pre-digital mode of image presentation? To attract our amazing imagined, moronic 'mainstream audience'? Well, why not lower the collective IQ all the way and see if our audience gets bigger with the addition of all those 'slow' learners out there...'See Captain America run! Run Captain America! Run!' Fuck, it sounds brilliant doesn't it? What was the question again? 'Faster Wonder Woman! Kill! Kill!' You would, wouldn't you? Introduction
 To comment on this article, contact Co-Editor in Chief Jonathan Ellis at ellis@popimage.com  PopImage Forum - Discuss this message at the PopImage forum. E-Mail Us - Send us an e-mail commenting on this article. Grant Morrison.com Crack Comicks.com Industrial Archive - Read past Industrial articles |
