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Pop Will Shit Itself with Grant Morrison
Introduction
I wanted a flagship character, preferably with the name 'MARVEL' in there somewhere. Captain Marvel was taken so I asked if I could come up with a new Marvel Boy using the name of the 50s character, that dreamlike 'Boy from Uranus'. They said fine and I made a new character, Noh-Varr, up out of various glittery bits I found lying around the Marvel U. Marvel Boy is not only a secular hymn to Horus, the 'Lord of Force and Fire' of the New Aeon, he's also my version of Superboy and Captain Marvel Jr. - last survivor from a world of superscientific Zen Fascism. Danger: Diabolik is another big influence on the series. Speaking of the 'corporate powers adopting magical practices' themes present in MARVEL BOY, might this be in reference largely to the use of Astrologists in the stock market? Or something like the use of Feng-Shui in siting corporate headquarters and arranging office layouts. Or the use of NLP and Ericksonian hypnosis, motivational gurus and occult jargon. What will be the themes of the following volumes of MARVEL BOY? Any specific corporate empires to be attacked? Bill Gates as the villain maybe? The Bush cabinet androids go on a Dragonball Z style killing spree after a freak electrical storm fucks with their wiring?
Like The Authority, like Miracleman and the others, Marvel Boy is here to destroy our corrupt old social structures and create a finer, higher world. Readers will have to decide if that's really for the best when they discover that the Kree techno-religion he wants us all to follow is not liberal democracy but a kind of sexy Zen Fascism. The second volume of Marvel Boy begins with our hero in the worst jail in the world and gets wilder and wilder from there. Volume 2 is Marvel Boy vs. the Marvel Universe. Tentatively scheduled for July is Grant’s Fantastic Four mini series with formidable artist Jae Lee. Titled FANTASTIC FOUR: 1234, the current series outline stands as follows: 1: Once Upon A Time On Yancy Street… 2: Staring at the Fishtank. 3: Darkness and the Mole Man. 4: Prime Mover. Grant, what stories will your Fantastic Four project follow?
I'm trying to do something which sums up everything I love about the Fantastic Four and the Marvel Way. If you read this, you won't have to read any other FF comics. It's ended up as a kind of ARKHAM ASYLUM for the FF so I'm very pleased with it. Imagine Chris Ware's Fantastic Four... Lots of fun, or a team of elemental heroes in downtown New York? Were you influenced by any specific run? I was most interested
in the early stuff before the characters were quite formed. There's a certain
bleak, bad dream ambience in early stories like The Skrulls From `Outer Space'
and The Menace of the Miracle Man. Back before the days of It's Clobbering Time!'
and the kind of gentle, catchphrase-heavy knockabout the retro-enthusiasts seem
to love, the Fantastic Four were creepy and scary. A typical exchange between
the Human Torch and the Thing might read... Before all the
nonsense and over-reactions about the Fantastic Four incest angle, you had many
Marvel proposals planned, are those still in the air or do you find Marvel taking
your suggestions with a grain of salt now? The whole 'incest' controversy generated the best publicity the FF have had for years so while Marvel may be a little bemused by my tactics, they seem confident enough in my ability to generate readers. I've just finished the first issue and I'm very pleased with the series weird, dismal tone. From the issue descriptions it looks to be an homage to the very early issues but with the 'campiness' of the era substituted with depth and emotion. What type of style/fan reaction will you be going for? There’s very little campiness in the early FF stories. The later adventures are filled with catchphrases and pratfalls but the early stories are like eerie, fucked-up fever dreams of gross disability. What are your plans on changing the look of the X-Men?
Did you have any say as to who would join you in talking over the core X titles? And if so, what made you steer towards Joe Casey? ***Click Here to read some of Joe Casey's ideas on the X-Men from PopImage's June issue*** It wasn't really my decision but Joe’s a friend and I'm glad to have him on board this awful narrenschiff. I’ve had some fun times smoking dope in the LA sunshine in Joe’s big ol Mystery Machine van. Fuck knows what he’s going to do with it - he's already written fourteen issues or something - but the idea of all three X-MEN books being written by cheerful optimists who share an evil sense of humour and a love of sex seems very healthy to me. I know some of the plans for the X-MEN includes 'sexing' them up. Do you feel you have enough freedom to go to such lengths?
How did your X-meetings in NY go? How did talks go in regard to artists, design and the basic direction of the book? Everything you could hope or lots of late caffienated nights? The meetings were
apparently the most boring X-meetings ever. No sturm no drang. Everyone was
in accord around the table and all of my most outrageous ideas were met with
complete approval by Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas. I love the atmosphere at Marvel.
Will you be involved with the new mature line coming up at Marvel? Potentially. We’re all waiting to see what the contracts are like and how much new ground Jemas and Quesada can actually break in their bold effort to fuck the competition into the ground. Surfer: Year Zero, Drawn by Frank Quitely, the formative year of an entity crushed in the shadow of a galactic force of nature. Will this be mainly focused on the Surfers search for freedom and redemption or will it be of a much more complex nature; spirituality, metaphysics, universal omnipresent monks? I remember Stan Lee telling tales of college students who would, surprisingly relate the Surfers tale to that of Jesus, any plans to follow that up? Nothing like that. Almost the opposite in fact. I've steered clear of Stan's shiny 60's peace pilgrim and taken my cue instead from Kirby's original concept of the Surfer as a cold, emotionless Angel of Death. If anything, the story exists to mock spirituality, redemption and free will. I think you'll like it. Damn straight, I get the feeling you're going to work in some way so the Surfer seems to appear to have ghostly angelic wings, like 'the illusion of wings' created by lens flare reflected off his body or something.
Ha! Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve just been immortalized. What about the perception of Galactus? We know that Galactus is actually a force of nature and that the only reason he 'seems' solid is because that's how different species perceive him. Will you and Frank at all be playing with different forms for him? No. It will be the Galactus you’re familiar with done in a way that makes him seem completely unfamiliar and terrifying beyond all rational thought. The Filth, a new monthly series to be released late 2001. All we know at this point is that "It's Gerry Anderson for paranoid schizophrenics." So how about a little more info, like which publisher, number of issues planned, creative talent attached and just what exactly is THE FILTH? Coming from you, a title called THE FILTH could be any number of things. It won't be out until late 2001 so I'm saying nothing because the truth is that any new idea I mention gets nicked, previewed and hollowed-out by fellow writers and corporate cool hunters the minute it's past my lips, so with such a long lead time I'd prefer to play my cards close to my curvaceous bosom on this. I’ve written scripts for three new creator-owned comics to be published by a major comic book pimp and have top fan favourite artists to work with me on this. The Filth is a British term of endearment for the police, of course, so that may help. It's also what American children are having injected into them by doctors in an effort to reboot their failing immune systems after decades of antibiotic abuse.
No. This is a one-off designed to spoil any good memories people had of Zenith. It's a day in the life of the superbrat, now aged 32 in the Blair's Britain 2001. I wanted to capture the precise and particular feeling of British cultural life in the infant century in much the same way that I tried to document the late 80s and early 90s in the original Zenith series. How did you get involved with the computer games market? In what format will NEW BEDLAM: CITIZEN DEATH be released [specifically for computers or planned release with any gaming systems]? Plans are for vast online gameworld with characters spinning off into console adventures. Look at what king Mob's doing in the final issue of THE INVISIBLES and you may get some idea of where I'm going with all of this. Also upcoming is your LUVKRAFT Vs. KTHULHU novella, originally presented as a performance piece, what can people who missed the performance expect from the book? Have any revisions been made to the story since the performance? The performance only included the first two of five chapters, so readers can expect the conclusion and a lovely twist. They'll also get illustrations by the incomparable John 'Pickman' Coulthart so it'll be well worth the look. 'the heavens'." -Grant Morrison Excerpt from LUVKRAFT vs. KTHULHU
Introduction
All characters, titles, images mentioned or shown are copyright and trademark their respective creators.
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When
you were given a chance at a Marvel Knights series, you had all sorts of choices
you could have made for a series, why MARVEL BOY?
Marvel
Boy's not really an anti-corporate book. I'm more interested in exploring the
notion of what an alien superhero would do to change our world whether we like
it or not. Warren, Alan Moore and Mark Millar have all entertained us with the
notion of what super-people with an agenda might actually DO to the World As
We Know It. In most of these cases, the superheroes are presented as good liberals
chipping away at entrenched right-wing power structures to create a freer, more
democratic world.
I
plan to get rid of the costumes and hopefully help redesign the covers and logos.
It will be a social sci-fi book, not a superhero comic.
Just
take a look at MARVEL BOY. I never have to SAY anything, I never have
to SHOW anything particularly offensive and yet... the whole book reeks of barely-repressed
sodomitic, incestuous lustings. I believe there are many and varied ways to
inject a bracing dose of steaming eroticism into a given comic book.
The writers and
artists are all friends, the editorial people support the creative people. What
can I say? These are sci-fi adventure comicbooks aimed at a pop audience. As
DC entrenches itself in conservatism, Marvel enters a radical phase of restless
experimentation. It happened in the 60s - conservative DC, radical Marvel. The
slow changeover occurred through the 70s until in the 80s the pendulum had swung
- radical DC, conservative Marvel. It’s clear from the mass migration of talent
where the fun is these days.
Interesting
feeling... Are you using drugs yourself right now, by any chance?
Now
there's also your 2000 AD: ZENITH story ['zzzzenith.com' 8 pages with art by
Steve Yeowell.] which a lot of people are looking forward to, especially since
you announced it begins with Britney Spears being raped by a robot. Any plans
for a serial with a heftier page count anytime in the future?
