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Pop Will Shit Itself with Grant Morrison
Introduction How far along are you on your novel? When you say it will be a continuation of THE INVISIBLES, do you mean it will reflect on the same characters or just the ideals set forth within the series? The novel, entitled the if, takes some of the 'beyond duality' social and personal ideas from the last issue of THE INVISIBLES and develops them into a 'Clockwork Orange' style sick romp. Like THE INVISIBLES it's about a group of 'terrorists' but there the similarities end. It also has a brilliant formal conceit at the end which no-one has ever done before in a novel as far as I know. I'm very proud of it. When it's finished it will be slim, cerebral and sexy. The perfect 21st century mind accessory. Even separated from her primary weapon and most of the major nerve clusters in her forearm, Her Royal Highness proves a formidable enemy. She throws surprise after surprise at us before we can assimilate her combat strategies and exploit them to completely disable her." -Grant Morrison Excerpt from 'THE IF'. Do you have a publishing house set up? An estimated release date? No. Penguin felt the novel was too fractured. Fortunately I have a very good agent and we're currently shopping it around.
Yes.
After FLEX MENTALLO, I knew I had to do some superheroes.
More specifically, I had to see if I could bend the entire superhero
industry in a certain direction in order to effect a large scale
magical working - a shiny pop direction I blueprinted in the last
book of the FLEX MENTALLO series (each of the issues of FLEX
was designed to encapsulate one of the 'ages' of superhero comics
- the Golden Age of 38 to 50 informed issue 1, the Silver Age of
55 - 75 was issue 2, the Dark Age from 75 - 95 added its ambience
to issue 3 and a coming transcendent age is predicted in issue 4).
A blueprint for a new 'adobe age' of comics, perhaps? Perhaps. The moment Warren created THE AUTHORITY, which married my 'widescreen' approach to a fresher and more modern continuity, the future was set. When I saw the first issue of that book I knew my work was over, it was time to leave JLA. THE AUTHORITY is to JLA what The Justice League of America was to The Justice Society. After seeing the Midnighter, Batman's 'costume' now looks ridiculous and dated. Did you ever get caught on the continuity error in the first storyline of JLA? Seeing as how there seems to be a 'fanboy collective' ready to pounce on anyone messing with the characters over 30 years old [Referring of course to the white martians fear of fire]. I hadn't read many mainstream DC books for a long time so I had no idea that the Martian vulnerability to fire had been turned into some reductive psychoanalytical bollocks by the time I came up with the groovy notion of having Batman beating three super-powered Martians armed only with a box of matches. Continuity is the obsession of a small hobbyist element within comics and while I have nothing against these people personally I simply don't share their mentality. I don’t collect comic books or toy figures or cold cast porcelain so that aspect of the business is meaningless to me. To be honest I view them in the same way that David Beckham or Wayne Gretzky might view the collectors of football programs. I'm not writing for collectors or hobbyists any more than Elvis Presley was singing for rare vinyl enthusiasts. I'm making trains for passengers to ride in, not for spotters to spot.
What do you do now, that will top Armageddon? Which has been a running issue amongst the better comics in the field. Do you try to top yourself or do you come back down and handle more everyday issues? All the new stuff I'm doing is funny. It strikes a balance between the titanically cosmic and the grindingly mundane but basically it's just...funny now. How do you feel about the evolution of the classic superhero archetype into the 'post super-hero' era as seen in such characters evident in titles like PLANETARY and WILDCATS? Do you think it will effect how, not just the way the industry perceives them, but how you yourself see them? How you write them? I hope so. I’m fascinated by the notion of the superhuman protagonist in whatever form the story unfolds. As the century of genetic modification, DNA enhancement and life extension opens ahead, the world will look to us for images, models of the human of tomorrow. It’s worth thinking What will they be like? The superpeople will be here sooner than we imagine. The memes of the comic books are infesting the mass culture mind via movies, TV shows and increasingly sophisticated, increasingly immersive virtual realities. The comicbooks have spent decades imagining and rejecting numerous, splendid versions of the various ethical codes which might govern the activities of our genetic successors. I’m always interested in continuing that kind of speculative strand.
MARVEL BOY is my currently ending fun book. I have plans which I won't go into here but I'm currently working up several major new comics projects which involve my current, particularly dark idea of 'fun'
No. I don't like to go back. I do like the character of Flex a lot though so he's the only one I might find myself going back to when I have something new to say about the relationship of comics to reality. How much planning went into the INVISIBLES at first? In the first arc we see Tom O Bedlam passed by a younger version of himself, and then! Thirty some odd issues later we see the scene again, with the foreground and backgrounds reversed. How could you think so far ahead and still keep things together? Pretty much the entirety of THE INVSIBLES hung in perfect suspension in my mind for the seven years it took to plan and complete. It was hard to think of anything else at all during that time and I'm only just coming off that particular high in the last few months. Even JLA and all the other work I was doing at the time seemed to tie into THE INVISIBLES. My entire life tied into THE INVISIBLES in ways too numerous and occult to mention if the truth be told and it will one day. The entire story is a single continuum representing my view of 'time as an object' - all the characters and events seem separate, distinct and often even wildly antagonistic but the real secret of THE INVISIBLES universe is this: they're all drawn on the same paper. We all think we are individuals but we're all drawn on the same 'paper', you dig? The trick is to learn to see the paper behind the drawings.
What's going on with INVISIBLES on film? It was up, then it was down then up again, what's the current status? The BBC version died like a dog but Channel 4 are expressing interest. The film idea is still shuttlecocking around Hollywood. I don't think the world has heard the last of THE INVISIBLES but it may take a little more time before these ideas become mainstream. Not long. THE INVISIBLES predicted most trends and fashions in the 90s - And We're All Policemen, the VERTIGO: WINTER'S EDGE story, done in Summer 97 was my attempt to divine the new zeitgeist as the baggy, hippy rave/britpop current of Britain in the 90s began to gasp its last. It's all there - the black, sick humour of Chris Morris or The League of Gentlemen, the tight clothes, Clockwork Orange droogs kicking a grey alien to death, Tony Blair's hyper-reality of Cool Britannia, the idea of terrifying authoritarian images like Big Brother and the surveillance state becoming not only hip but desirable and funny etc. I was channeling so much through THE INVISIBLES that it still seems to be way ahead of its time and every day I pick up a paper or a 'New Scientist' I read about stuff I thought I was making up. THE INVISIBLES goes way beyond just being a monthly comic and I try to say that without making it into a boast. I'm as surprised as anyone by stuff in that book. It was written using powerful shamanic methods and is a giant chaotic attractor which can itself be used for magic. You've tried this yourself, correct? And if so, with what results? The six years of THE INVISIBLES is a record of me trying it. The way the world around us looks today - with bald heads everywhere, anti-corporate activism, Gnostic film heroes, Playstation ads, conspiracy myths, voodoo spell kits for office workers etc is a direct result of the Invisibles working. Try to remember how the world looked in 1994 before THE INVISIBLES and think of how it looks now. Images which seemed quite unfamiliar in the early INVSIBLES are now everywhere in the media. It's quite hard to tell the two apart these days and it will continue to get harder as we zoom towards 2012. Do you ever go into trances while writing? Or perhaps purposely go into trances and THEN write? I probably
go OUT of trance when I'm writing but yes...I've written in various
altered states including those produced by drink, drugs, migraine
headaches, septic poisoning, magical meditation, refined sugar,
intense depression, caffeine and erotic arousal. 
Do you often meditate, and if so do you use a visual focus? Like maybe the INVISIBLES covers? Or do you have a specific mantra? I’ve meditated on various things, including INVISIBLES covers but I tend to close my eyes and use the TM mantra I foolishly paid 800 quid for in 1995. Eight fucking hundred quid for a course that lasted four nights with a Sanskrit word at the end of it. It does work, I have to add, so perhaps £800 is a small price to pay for extended lifespan, less stress, more libido etc etc as it says on the box. Introduction
All characters, titles, images mentioned or shown are copyright and trademark their respective creators.
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You've
said in the past you took on JLA to finance INVISIBLES, would you
have taken on JLA even if you didn't need to? You wrote it so well
I assumed you loved to come on?
Using
the big icons of JLA I figured I could really influence the
trend away from dead end realism and towards a hyperfuturist renaissance
of the comic book imagination. I'd been working on this since ANIMAL
MAN but getting access to the JLA allowed me to bring
big concepts and wild ideas back to the mainstream. The success
of JLA had a ripple effect of course and I got exactly the
comics medium I was looking for, for a little while. Unfortunately
a lot of people took the fact that I'd used the Big 7 characters
as a cue to go 'retro' and a predictable fin de siecle nostalgia
boom erupted in my wake. JLA was never meant to be Silver
Agey or backward-looking: I introduced the lunar Watchtower, the
telepathic communication between members, the new villains etc.
Everything was meant to be futuristic, inspirational, over the top
and shining neon blue.
I'm
all for internal CONSISTENCY, where stories and characters operate
within certain agreed parameters. But continuity is something else
and I view it as entirely pernicious. I want to tell good stories
about interesting characters and sell them to a modern, mainstream
pop audience. I don't want to be hamstrung by stories written years
before me, for a different audience, in different times.
If
you could do another 'fun' book like AZTEK, what would you do?
Do
you ever consider revisiting old characters and titles, DOOM PATROL,
FLEX MENTALLO, DAN DARE, etc?
The
cover of Volume 3 issue 2 condenses the meaning of the entire series
into one beautiful image - the Holy Grail as a virtual, transcendental
object which only appears when two people interact, as in those
optical illusion illustrations where two profiles face one another
if you look at it one way and a cup or vase appears when you flip
figure and ground and look at it the other way. While grade school
magical symbolism teaches that the Grail is the ultimate female
principle, twenty years meditation on the symbol will yield deeper
and more useful profound implications, I think. Look at the issue
2 cover and reverse figure and ground by bringing the universal
Grail object into foreground. The faces of King Mob and Helga then
smoosh into one background fleshscape with eyes and nostrils. That
background face, which is BOTH KM and Helga, is Brian Bolland's
drawing of a hyperdimensional entity. Study it for a while and you'll
see. THE INVISIBLES covers can also be copied and reduced
down to card size for use as a Tarot pack.
