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Grant Morrison: Master & Commander Introduction What do Douglas Rushkoff and Courtney Love have in common? Same thing as you and I. Comics. Herein we discuss trends and style in comics. A word we started throwing around a few years back to describe the evolving superhero archetypes was post-super human which has since been integrated into comix-speak. Post this, neo that. Do you find these labels still hold true? I don't know if I ever did. Anyway, what about the Praeterhuman? He's surely the toughest of all of these rogue synonyms. All I know is that right now, there's not much difference between the current comics and the early 70s 'relevant' books. The same social currents drive early 70s glam rock and The Darkness or 70s terrorist chic and the new Middle East version. Things repeat themselves on these predictable and fairly-easy-to-plot cycles. Which is why the 'realistic' phase of the comic books will, starting this Spring, be finally superseded entirely by another 'cosmic', 'psychedelic', 'surrealist' or 'weird' phase of some kind, as I've been saying for a few years. Probably this will be started by the praeterhumans as the first gambit in their chilling 'annexation' of our world. Expect the rightful, long-awaited canonization of Brendan McCarthy, like that bit with Aragorn in the third [Lord Of The Rings] film. Are there any aspects of sequential stories you'd like to experiment with, appearance wise? Colouring has come a long way but facets such as lettering certainly have potential to evolve. I'm mostly interested in playing with page depth at the moment, rather than with the particulars of lettering etc. On We3 in particular, Vince (Frank Quitely) and I have been working together in a close but manly way to develop and extend some of the very fast, hi-res digital comics effects I'd been starting to play with in books like Marvel Boy. We3 has experiments with page space, time edits and motion rendering. Particularly in the second issue when perceptions shift from human to animal modes. We're going past the page 'surface' and using the page as a 3-dimensional space. Some of the narrative and design ideas Chris Weston and I were using in the Filth - like the idea of surveillance camera images creating 4-d mosaic layouts - are further developed in We 3. Hopefully it shouldn't be too self-conscious or obtrusive either. For my action books, I've spliced the MTV model of fast digital cuts and effects with the kind of 3-dimensional depth effects familiar to us all from computer games - the TV screen or VDU is as much a flat 2-plane as the comic page, there's no reason why we can't fake the same depth of field on our pages. There's no need to treat the comic page as a flat plane surface upon which images float. There's no need to arrange panels only on the passive 'surface' of the page space - dynamic panel arrangements can rise from the page depths, recede, rotate through three dimensions and fold. As for all this talk I keep hearing about how 'ordinary people' can't handle the weird layouts in comics - well, time for another micro-rant, but that's like your granddad saying he can't handle all the scary, fast-moving information on Top of the Pops and there's really only one answer. Fuck off, granddad. If you're too stupid to read a comic page, you shouldn't be trying to read comic books and probably don't. As creative people, I feel we need to call time on the relentless watering down of comics design and storytelling possibilities in some misguided attempt to appeal to people who WILL NEVER BE INTERESTED in looking at or buying hand-drawn superhero comic books. Anyway, now I've finally got that off my hump, there's an amusing aside regarding 'experimental' work and that 'difficult' rep of mine, I read a piece by Stephen A. Meller recently where both my ARKHAM ASYLUM book and the 1940 Batman story 'Batman vs. The Joker' were subjected to the Flesch Reading Ease Test. The 'simple' Golden Age tale scored 78.25 for reading comprehension while ARKHAM ASYLUM came out ahead with 91.28 - as Meller says, 'ARKHAM ASYLUM is a lot more easily read than BATMAN VS. THE JOKER'. How much leeway do you get with this new contract, are you allowed work outside DC presuming you produce a certain amount of content for them? How about Humanoids considering DC's recent partnership with them? I get all the leeway I want to do any kind of writing outside comics but for two years I have to produce all of my comics work for DC. Which is fine by me because the deal's set up so that I can create all the new characters and stories I want at Vertigo and also play out my superhero fixations and 'sentient universe' theories in the bustling DCU. I've spoken to Humanoids in the past but to be honest, nobody in the business can match the ownership deals and the long personal friendships I have at Vertigo so I tend to launch any new work there. One of the recent changes at Vertigo I was glad to hear about was the addition of Jonathan Vankin to the editorial staff, if for anything, the potential of talent he can bring to the table. How do you feel about Jonathan's new gig? How about yourself, when you hear of or meet talented people outside comics who are interested in the medium, do you encourage them to get involved? I've known Jonathan for a few years and like him a lot so I hope he gets a chance to really make his mark. Now is the time for high intelligence and catholic taste in comics - a time of psychedelic renaissance. King Kirby Konkers Konvention. I'm always encouraging talented people to get involved in comics but it's as hard for them to get a break as for anyone of the young unknowns with brilliant scripts in their bags. Brendan McCarthy couldn't sell his incredible 'House of Ideas' project to Marvel. I couldn't get Marvel interested in Doug Rushkoff's 'Eternals' mini-series pitch and my efforts to get a Steve Aylett comic going at Vertigo foundered on the rocks of disinterest, even though I think a straight adaptation of 'Slaughtermatic' would make brilliant comics. Maybe Jonathan can do something about that. What do you think, readers? It's interesting to me to see many people who have no need to work in comics express an interest only to receive a bad response from publishers. For years we've been name-dropping Rushkoff here at PopImage and I know Marvel has contacts for the likes of Quentin Tarantino, and M. Night Shyamalan 'cause we gave it to them. Hell, Noam Chomsky is doing his first ever comics work soon and it's not for either of the big two. At least with Vertigo you see some breaks from the usual suspects every so often. Not just with the likes of Jonathan but also Si Spencer and Tara Mcpherson. There are popular TV and film writers working in comics, but there are also writers and artists that a lot of people have never heard of but who will, wherever they go, draw a crowd of people willing to wait outside for three hours in the rain just to meet them. So don't stop there, keep going. Push for covers by the likes of Mark Ryden, Paul Booth, Joe Coleman, and if anything, keep checking out your friends. I bet even Richard Metzger has a comic idea or two. I agree with you but I still think the manga format is going to be where the big action is and that Tokyopop is currently setting the pace as far as remaking comics into something attractive to the mainstream goes - they've already got Courtney Love writing for them, haven't they, and surely she knows a bandwagon when she sees one trundling around the corner ? One of the upcoming projects I was really looking forward to was the planned collaboration between yourself, Douglas Rushkoff and Genesis P. Orridge. Is this still happening? The more I learn about each of you it's interesting to see how much you have in common and that together you make up a modern cultural magick trinity. This project got stalled for various reasons some practical and some magical. I've only seen Doug a couple of times since then and I've had no real contact with Gen at all during the whole period of his transformation into a stunning she-male. The whole 'Abyss' experience since 2001 has taken me out of the picture for a couple of years. I'm currently in the process of rebuilding my network. Daniel Pinchbeck and I are supposed to be doing some kind of interview/discussion thing soon. There was talk of 'Rolling Stone' and then there wasn't but we'll see what happens. His amazing book 'Breaking Open the Head' is a seminal text of the new psychedelic wave and a must read. He's working on a new one. 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 |
