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Grant Morrison: Master & Commander Introduction Having left Marvel to pursue a contract with DC Comics, three new projects were announced. All mini-series, all available from Vertigo. Seaguy with Cameron Stewart, We3 with Frank Quitely, and Vimanarama with Philip Bond.  Seaguy is a 3 issue limited series. Usually a work of this length would be in a graphic novel or prestige format series, but instead you're going with the regular comic format. Is this being done in the vein of the Pop Comics idea, ala Warren Ellis' own recent series for DC? Seaguy, We3 and Vimanarama were all conceived as 96 page complete stories in the 'Earth 2' hardback graphic novel format - Karen Berger then decided to release the books first to the specialist comic market as three monthly editions of 32 pages each. So, yes, broadly speaking the idea behind these books is to do stand-alone stories that anyone can read. It's the kind of work I like to do between big projects - a decade ago there were the one-off books like 'Mystery Play' and 'Kill Your Boyfriend' - and this time I wanted to create what I'm calling 'Western manga' for want of a better phrase at the moment - super-compressed, innovative, fast fusion cuisine for fast brains. The idea is to make sophisticated material which can be enjoyed by smart five year olds, middle aged ladies and cool teenagers alike. This new stuff that's coming out this summer has been very influenced by my time in Hollywood and Japan, fairy and folk tales, Miyazaki, Pixar and Dennis Potter. And yes that's 'supercompression; get it here while stocks last. Beware of imitations. The solicitation for Seaguy makes mention of sinister brand names, when all the great battles have been fought what enemies are left? Evil cola companies? There's no evil left to fight in Seaguy. The world is 'perfect'. The heroes in this story are up against the lensed, bleached and xeroxed flatness of 'reality', as that word has now been ruthlessly defined by the media. The nauseating, shapeless lurch of unscripted lives, (our own), in a world where EVERY house is the Big Brother house and we're all perfectly infantilised and keeping an eye on one another for our masters, whom no-one can even identify any more - remember way back when I said 'In the future everyone will be famous 24 hours a day'? Who's the fucking daddy? I'm really pleased that people seem to like Seaguy so much and I hope all the goodwill means DC will let us do the next nine issues soon - 'slaves of mickey eye' and 'seaguy eternal' are the next two 3-part stories to come and that's BEFORE we get to 'cosmic adventures of seaguy'. I think 12 comics might tell the whole story in the end but I'd work with Cameron forever on this if the ideas keep coming. As for the surveillance cameras, and this is something I've brought up before, because it's not just about reality TV and security cams but also about reality itself. Everyday more and more cameras cover the landscape, and even what you wear, so much so that everyone is on camera and as it's been said before "All the worlds a stage". The character Reuben Zion in The Invisibles was created as a comment on this - he was someone who saw the cameras-everywhere society as an opportunity to turn his dull life into an ongoing performance art masterpiece - because that's what our lives are now. Policemen sit agog before multi-screens, watching the great and endless reality show of our Friday night wanderings through the town centre. We should dress up for them, stage weird dramas in city streets, perform inexplicable one-act improvs depicting scenes of arbitrary kindness, perversion and bizarre revelation. If we must have cameras recording our every move, let's live up to all this attention. There have actually been theatre troupes doing just that, usually for the surveillance cams in subway stations. Seaguy is also described as a post-utopian world, and you've often described yourself as a utopian. What does this really mean to you? While there are many grand solutions, like some of those presented in Thomas More's Utopia, for the most part the concept is primarily a personal vision. I think it was me who described it as post-utopian (the current buzz phrase among academics, I'm told, is post-colonialism so I probably had my tongue up me) in the sense that, here in the world of Seaguy, a recognisably 'utopian' facade is achieved at the cost of significance and meaning. There really are no villains in Seaguy, no conspiracies, just expediencies, and blanket attempts to 'provide' for human needs and to do what's 'best' for us - a kind of mollycoddling swollen unchecked into monstrous tyranny. A perpetual childhood for the world. As far as my own ideas about 'utopia', I've declared myself utopian in the past because the word suggests to me a kind of shiny, blue optimism about things turning out okay, even the bad things. It implies some kind of faith in the natural, fundamental processes of which we're all an undeniable part but which most people don't care to think about until they have to - life, death, the elaborate connections between the macro and micro worlds all around us and inside our bodies - all the stuff we're taught to ignore. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I believe that things are going exactly as they're meant to be going and that we have nothing to worry about except the often painful decay and passing of our meaty, huffy, puffy 'time suits'. Although nobody seems to worry too much about being born or morphing wildly into a twelve year old and then a twenty-year-old body, do they? Also, I'm a super-fit, highly judgmental, skinhead perfectionist when I feel like it and that's when I most appreciate the song 'Utopia' by Goldfrapp, which is to me the theme song of the MARVEL BOY series. 'I'm a super-brain. That's how they made me, fascist baby.'  Vimanarama seems as though it will act as a bit of an introduction to middle Eastern history and religion for those unfamiliar, but do you feel it'll have the same appeal to Middle Eastern readers as it might to North American readers? It's not any kind of history or religious lesson. The main players are from a large Pakistani family living in modern-day Bradford and the story is a big, operatic, science fiction romance. The Arabian Knights via Asian Dub Foundation, Jack Kirby and Monster Magnet, for a contemporary audience. It grew out of rambling chats I've had with Steve Chandra about a big Asian cosmic rock opera fold-out Roger Dean gatefold sleeve type prog project and whether or not Steve and I [could] ever actually collaborate on anything like that, VIMANARAMA! is a version of some of the ideas I started to play with while listening to ADF's last two albums. Phil Bond's work is incredible. Immense widescreen shots of London in ruins and a sky filled with the monstrous flying machines of the Rama Era. 'Daleks Invasion Earth'. All that kind of stuff. I've never seen him do anything like it. It's epic artwork. You'll see. But to answer your question, no, I can't really imagine anybody from Iraq braving a hail of bullets to order 'Vimanarama!' at their local 'mom and pop' comic store. So far, the majority of your new projects for DC, that have been announced, are mini-series. Do you feel you need to take a break before jumping into another long serial? No. I'm doing tons of stuff as I mentioned before and it all links up into something bigger than a serial. Very diverse, very new, very sexy - you want? What are you, bitch-fucking me? Of course I want. Currently you have two projects planned with Frank Quitely, We3 followed by an unnamed DCU project. Frank seems to be attached to a number of projects as several writers have him. What is the appeal for you, aside from his art abilities, is Frank just the type of person you can hand a script and just know that he'll 'get' it? The 'several writers' you mention are actually Mark Millar pretending to be a crowd of suspicious men. Frank is working with me on We3, then we're doing a 12-part series for the DCU. He's done a few covers for Vertigo too. Vince draws the way I wish I could draw - he can pin down my dreams and my most nebulous ideas in lifelike detail on the skin of the 2nd dimension and I can talk to him about art history, explain things in terms of classical references, colours or shared memories, so it's very easy to communicate my ideas to him and have them understood. I feel privileged to be able to collaborate regularly with such a master of the form, whose work will be studied as long as there are sensory organs. He's my artistic soul mate, really, my most perfect collaborator. Only Cameron is coming close. What's the Quitely appeal? Haven't you seen him? He's gorgeous, luv!  We3, from the early ideas revealed I was guessing the series focused on 3 people who are survivors of grim military experiments. Turns out I was wrong about the 'people' part. When I heard the focus was animals I immediately thought of the CIA's Acoustic Kitty experiment. Can you reveal anything about this upcoming series at this point? It's best just to read this one. There are hardly any words in it, so for a change I don't have much to say about what it all means. No big symbolic structures here. It's mostly from the perspective of animals. Otherwise, the original idea grew up out of a wish to do more with the surgically-augmented angry critters in The Filth, it then got married to a nice New Scientist article about remote-controlled rats being used for military purposes, and gave birth to my lifelong wish to create a classic animal story in the 'Incredible Journey', 'Watership Down' mold but with the added ingredient of trademark Quitely hardcore graphic ultraviolence. The rabbit slaughter sequence which opens the second issue takes the churning of stomachs to new queasy heights. I read lots of books on animal communication and, in no time at all, I was able to use the skills I'd picked up to grunt, paw and whine my story ideas directly to my collaborator, in return for bananas and vodka. The entire premise of We3 is neatly explained on a few pages of the first issue and after that all words become superfluous for most of what occurs. This is my 'Straight Story'. I wrote it for my ten year old self, so there's no bullshit. It's like tadpoles turning into frogs. How is your novel 'The IF' currently progressing? Slowly but with great dignity and a love of the AAAAAArts. We have some mainstream publishers taking an interest, (I'll know more in August after the book fairs) and it looks like it will be finished this year. 'Harry Potter' meets 'A Clockwork Orange!' is what I keep telling them but it's much better than that. Introduction
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