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POPPREVIEW: ANARCHY FOR THE MASSES   SAMPLEThe following is an adapted excerpt from ANARCHY FOR THE MASSES, presenting Grant Morrison and Jill Thompson discussing the infamous controversy over issue 1.7 Arcadia: The 120 Days of Sod All. This sample is reflective of the creator reflections on each individual issue of the series in the book, capped off with a further, chapter-long interview with Grant that comprehensively looks back at THE INVISIBLES as a whole. Also featured are unpublished images by Steve Yeowell and Chris Weston, as always, click for larger images. AFTM: As early as THE INVISIBLES seventh issue, things went awry both inside and outside the series. Sales were plummeting with each issue of Arcadia, even as Vertigo censors began altering interior pages. GM: They kept drawing little vests and pants and things. Jill had already made the effort to think where to put what's seen. Obviously she knew what her parameters were and she was trying her best to either keep things in shadow or ambiguous enough so that it had the effect without being gross. But even that wasn't enough for the censor's pen. AFTM: The censor's pen wormed its way into the story itself, which is remarkable for a creator-owned series in a line for mature readers. GM: Oh, yeah. I had back and forward calls with [Vertigo executive editor] Karen [Berger] about it, and Karen just would not have it. My point of view was that what I was trying to show was the de Sade's vision of these four evil bureaucrats - which is basically what they are - in a castle where no one can tell them what to do is a metaphor for the world if you look at it through the paranoid's eyes. They see the world as a prison from which nobody can escape and the bad guys are in charge and they can do anything they want to. I said to Karen, "You've got to face the fact that your child," because she'd just had a little baby, "your kid is owned by the US Government. If they want that kid to go to war, they will take him off you and send him to war. And that's what I want to talk about in this story." De Sade was a utopian. Sure, he was a pornographer. He was a pornographer because he was stuck in a cell for however many years with nothing but a pole for company, as he says. But he was a utopian, he was savage, he was set to destroy the world so he could make a better one, so he could live his lovely libertine life. I was trying to make them see that it's worth being a bit savage. Jonathan Swift would do it; Mark Twain would be even more savage. I was trying to say it was in this tradition. I was using a previous text, and trying to incorporate it to have a new meaning and defend the context of what THE INVISIBLES was about. But these things just didn't wash. The very idea that I was suggesting that Karen's child could be taken in the US Army I think really upset her. But there's truth in it, we are owned in certain ways, and we have to find ways to make sort of Temporary Autonomous Zones, as Hakim Bay called it.  AFTM: What was taken out?GM: References to the fact that it was kids in the story, because I'd used de Sade's original text, and it was children. Everybody gets fucked in those stories. But there was a lot of objection to using children, so they'd write something like "lost souls" or something. I think it's actually worse to do it to lost souls! My point was that it is children, it is developing minds that are in danger. I was trying to drag all these things out and show that to reach utopia people will go through hell and that would have to be prepared for some hell, and not be caught up in it. And it's to see from the Invisibles' perspective that the castle wasn't a locked place; it was actually only locked because they'd locked themselves in it. I think a lot of that wasn't allowed to come across in that story, because it couldn't be as savage as it should have been. But even so, after all that, it kind of carried the message, you know? I don't think it was that that harmed the sales of THE INVISIBLES, but the fact that it was quite intense. The subject matter was too abstract. It wasn't really abstract at all; it was intellectualized maybe beyond what the comic reader had been expected to deal with up until that point. I was thinking, "People can handle this, they're reading Neil's Gaiman's SANDMAN, and it's pretty intellectual." But I think I'd gone that little bit further, because that wouldn't have been a story. The Invisibles were in there demonstrating philosophy. I basically had the story set up to provide action through the philosophical junk. AFTM: Jill, your first arc as artist had a high level of violence, sex and gore... JT: Oh, there were horrible, horrible, horrible things in it. When I was reading it, I was like, "Oh man! How am I going to show this?" And then I realized, it won't be shown. When so-and-so violates someone, I'm not going to show it. But I'm going to show a grimace and an angle that you can tell that something really wrong is going on on the other side of that panel, but you can't see it. I'd rather do it through facial expression or shadow or something like that than anything that's really graphic. You don't need to see somebody - I personally don't need to see somebody getting violated that way. AFTM: Do you think the scenes would have been handled much differently if the arc had been drawn by a male artist? JT: Maybe. Maybe they would have been graphic. If Tim Vigil did it you'd see everything. In that specific comic, it didn't matter who drew it - nobody was going to see anything. The funny thing on that issue is there's so much that I didn't illustrate on those two unfortunate characters that were being used as the example that were in the Marquis story. I never showed any genitalia, I never showed any buttocks or anything like that. This is how I qualified it: If someone was naked, they were nude. They weren't naked. So I didn't show anything raw, and there was a shadow or arms or something. But the powers that be were so freaked out about that story that they had production go in and draw shirts to cover the characters. AFTM: How extensive was the editorial interference? JT: Well, for me, if they just trust that I'm not going to draw anything... Because I won't. I have plans on how to do this creatively that'll be disturbing but won't show anything. But they were too freaked out about it anyway. Nobody interfered with me, but they really fought with Grant. That was probably Grant's least favourite anything ever. In know he had big fights with them. I think they kept chopping and chopping and chopping at his script, moving passages. I was told, "Make sure you don't show this, make sure you don't show that." I'd already drawn most of it and was like, "Don't worry, I didn't." The one thing that I wished that they'd have shown is there was this guy, when the Invisibles pop into the Marquis' area and come to the quote-unquote hospital, which was pretty much just like a place where sick people are dying with a lot of dead people around them, there's an old man who had passed away, and he had elephantitis of the testicles. That was the only thing I drew that was graphic, because I found it to be so unusual medically, and I wanted to draw something that was disturbing but not titillating. He got a big shirt covering his testicles. When I got it back I peeled the shirt off and I said, "Oh, that's gross." There were bugs and stuff crawling on him, and the man that was too ill to move this rigor mortis corpse with the big testicles that was kind of just clawed onto him and he was like, "Eh, help me!" No, you're in a hospital. I took that issue with me when I was doing a convention in Montreal, and totally almost got stopped at the border for obscenity. I realized, "I do have obscenity on me! I've got artwork featuring the story of the Marquis de Sade!"
 Award-winning journalist Patrick Neighly has reported on telecommunications from four continents. He contributed work to ANARCHY FOR THE MASSES from Bangkok, Glasgow and Los Angeles. Kereth Cowe-Spigai is currently pursuing a graduate degree and is the managing editor of the award-winning magazine, the Florida Review.  PopImage Forum - Discuss this message at the PopImage forum. E-mail Us. - Send us an e-mail, commenting on this article Disinfo.com - The Disinformation Network Grant Morrison.com - Official Website of series author, Grant Morrison PopImage's Grant Morrison ProFile Industrial Archive - Read past Industrial articles |
