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Grant Morrison: Master & Commander Introduction Writing comics, not writing comics, quoting Oscar Wilde and the Grant Morrison Biography. Can you see yourself doing anything outside of comics or music? For instance, some artists often have nightmares about their hands getting hurt and not being able to draw. Some of them already do that jes' fine without having their hands hurt. As for me, I've always worked outside comics, as I'm sure you know, but I'll just use this as a golden opportunity to pimp out my wondrous CV to the congregation. I've been a successful playwright, short story writer, published journalist, travel writer and TV screenwriter. I'm a card-carrying member of the Writer's Guild of America, and got paid to write 'Sleepless Knights' for Dreamworks SKG. I've done two video games, including the upcoming 'Predator' release from Vivendi/Universal, with more on the way. Right now I'm finishing a novel - the IF - with initial interest from at least one major mainstream publisher in the U.S. New productions of my plays are in negotiation in both Britain and the US. I'm involved in pitching another new version of THE INVISIBLES, this time for American television. I'm waiting to hear more about plans for an operatic version of my Lewis Carroll play 'Red King Rising' with Alison Goldfrapp suggested for the Alice role but these things come and go all the time. I get paid to do regular talks and summits on science, creativity, technology and magic all around the world and on TV and radio - next is at the Omega Institute, upstate New York, on the weekend of August 13-15 with Doug Rushkoff, Howard Bloom, Paul Lafolley and Richard Metzger. I keep close links with just about every area of the arts, from animation to theatre, opera to academia, comics to independent film-making, poetry to textile design, etc. Kristan and I run our own throbbing, unruly business venture in the form of gmWORD Ltd. AND we have a band called FUCK STAR which is recording new material next month. This is in addition to the comics arm of the business and the 15 series I'm working on this year. See that bit in the very last issue of Invisibles where we get a hint of what King Mob's been up to with 'Technoccult'? That's me, that is and if I sound a little pleased with myself then that's because I am. I like to keep busy. I've been describing myself as a writer and getting away with it since I was five. I'll do it as long as I can hold the pen or grunt dictation. Comics is the best gym in the world for exercising the old imagination, certainly, and this is where I feel most comfortable and free to fuck around with daft, unrestrained head jam - but I could probably survive without them if I really had to, which I don't, so what would YOU do if five Nazi assholes were about to rape your woman and you only had one bullet, hotshot? Guess I should have said outside of 'entertainment' then comics, but I can't see it much. If not writing then perhaps acting, hell, even being a media advisor is a performance. Maybe a teacher. I've done a bit of acting but I'm crap at learning lines and only good at improvisations. And I'd be the worst teacher in the world; I often find myself encouraging people to do better by mocking all their faults. I like kids but I'd never be able to teach them anything except how to talk shite in a flamboyant and amusing way. Is writing comics getting harder? When killing Gods has been done and with appearances in the real world of girls in Russia with x-ray eyes, 'demons' infesting electrical appliances in a small village in Sicily and the U.S. planning to fight wars in space with Transformers robots, does this force you to go back to basics or to try and push further? Both? Comics are never hard to write. My problem is I just don't have enough time to write them ALL, although I'm going to try. So far, I have fifteen black Daler notebooks filled with my own characters and company franchise revamps - hundreds of pages of drawings and stories and ideas for The Atom, Doctor Strange, Moon Knight, Iron Man, Freedom Fighters, Captain Marvel Jnr. blah blah blah. Every wee sparkly fish drifting through my head gets a pat and a polish from me on the way past. I love my job, it has to be said. And it seems to get easier all the time, to tell the truth. My upcoming stuff for DC has been planned and written almost effortlessly, in a gushing pearl necklace of new concepts, characters and locations. For me, this field allows for the kind of subsidised self-expression unavailable anywhere else and I also get to create extended, occult narratives or hypersigils to help exercise my magical will. Comics are so far in advance of any other popular entertainment form - they're more relevant and modern than movies and still just about edging out video games for interactivity and sophistication.  How does it feel to have someone writing a biography about you? Somehow inevitable. I used to always imagine it being written and tried to live my life accordingly. I'd say to myself or whoever I was with, 'It'll look good in the biography.' and then I'd go ahead and do whatever daft thing it was - like taking acid on the sacred mesa or doing the bungee-jump, getting the haircut, dancing with the stranger, talking to the crowd - whatever I was 'scared' of mostly, or fancied doing, or never dared before, I'd try it on the basis that it would make for a more interesting read one day. I craved experience so that I'd be able to write and talk about something other than the brainy book-stuff and intellectual chit-chat I'd learned to emit at school. I wanted my writing to grow out of things I'd done, not things I'd read, and I tried to live according to templates established by my 'Romantic', 'Beat', musical or counterculture heroes and role models, with sex, music, magic, travel my watchwords. Oscar Wilde and Gilbert and George turned their lives into Art. I thought they'd found a great way to enliven existence, was inspired and decided to turn my own life into Comic Art. If Kerouac could burn out a novel in a single session, I could finish 48 pages of Really & Truly scripts in a single day with the help of a tab of E and so on. My life's had this weird public and media dimension since I was a little kid photographed on protest marches and picket lines with my mum and dad and recently I felt it had become necessary in my head to 'kill Ziggy', if you like. And move on. So, in these end times of Big Brother, it seemed like laughter in the dark to include one last big expose before I get on with the next chunk of my life; this final revelation, this naked kiss-and-tell, behind-the-comics shocker that will have everyone quacking like Donald and sick of it all by the end. Truth will be revealed. Empires will crumble. The tabloid element is already rampaging roughshod over what remains of pop comics journalism so I wanted to come up with the goods in a proper bare-all, Jordan-style tits-out expose of the comics biz and the freaks who live there and you can win a night out with me at a top London nightspot! Whether or not it turns out quite that lurid remains to be seen. The POP Mag!ck book has a much more subjective, HUD view of the life and wanderings of the ah-dist to this date. So somewhere between those two books and between the collections of columns and interviews I plan to release around the same time, the big picture will emerge - it's easy to make anything sound great or dull - an evening after a gig with friends can be an acid-drenched, never-ending party in a strobe-lit glamorous Andy Warhol world, or it can be a bunch of slacker losers nobody's ever heard of pissing about in funny clothes because they have nothing else to do. It depends how sensitive and imaginative Craig [Craig McGill, Author of the biography] is prepared to be. How do you put across those magic moments? I think of smells and bells as I'm watching some student performance of Javanese mythological dramas in Jogjakarta, with the gods and heroes all wearing shades. Drowning in the shimmering universe of possibility opened up by that G chord on a white Rickenbacker 12 string. Or dying, hallucinating on septicaemia and boiling with Gnostic fever. Waltzing with Ian McKellen, passing curse runes to Gaspar Noe at the 'Irreversible' premiere party, head-butting Dominique Swain or dining with Marilyn Manson as the names drop like prolapsed wombs. The parties, the fetish nights, the champagne and mushrooms, the spicy food, the vomit. The hysterical 'Big Night Out' that was me and Millar in the 90s. The tranny witch years in high heels, PVC and Paloma Picasso red lipstick. The aliens and demons. The beautiful girls. The lovely cats and houses and nights of upside down stars on the other side of the world etc. Without the sweetener of poetry which memory can add, it can all become cheesy tabloid fodder, Qlippoth. Magic turns into the deranged antics of a global mental case. The potential to be damned is strong and always worth flirting with, so we'll see how it all comes out. At any rate, it's sure to shatter a few myths and inspire some new ones. The biography is what the Tibetans call chod - I'm handing over my old life to be torn apart by demons in the form of Craig's pen; all the little moments that meant something to me reduced now to gossip and schizophrenia. According to the Tibetans, this should free me from any lasting attachments to my 'Ego'. Fuck only knows what that is. I'll be totally see-through after this. As Wilde said 'Those who want a mask, have to wear it.' Or also appropriate "All art is at once surface and symbol, those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril." Oh so true, but what peril! I must admit to being increasingly deranged by the kinds of bizarre myths which have grown like moss around my name in comics fan circles - I keep coming up against this idiot savant image; me reflected back at myself as a shambling, incoherent drug addict, wanking and drooling out meaningless gibberish which can only be understood by 'those lying bastards' who claim they can see 'Magic Eye' 3-d pictures and wee men reading the news on the TV. I can hardly read my name in Wizard without some reference to illicit narcs stuck on the arse end. Mainstream comics fashions jump when I whistle but the US comics industry still treats me with nothing but disdain and suspicion even after all these years; I can't fathom why my name's always so conspicuously absent from Awards Nominations forms, why my obvious peers and imitators crawl miles over glass to avoid mentioning my name and influence in interviews, why my long service record and my achievements are often overlooked or mocked. Trying to smile through that kind of wearying, inexplicable prejudice can sometimes be hard work and if, as I often suspect, I'm being dissed for some imagined drug-related sins which violate Puritan ethics, they're picking on the wrong writer. I like psychedelics as well as the next man (if the next man is Timothy Leary and I did a ton of them for 'research' and vision quest purposes in the 90s) but I sampled some LSD once in the spring of 2003 and before that, in 1999 when I went to see The Matrix in Melbourne. I'm clean, officer. I was resolutely straight-edge all through my teens and twenties and had only limited contact with any drugs (that's including all psychedelics, all stimulants, booze, tea or coffee) until I was 32 but inside my head has been mostly 'psychedelic' since I was born. My mum reads tea leaves. We used to all live in a nice modern haunted house in bloody East Kilbride. I've been a practising magician since I was 19. The weird shit is just how it is round our way. It's nothing to do with drugs. It's worse, much worse than just drugs! More plain truth? McGill's book looms... 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 |
