New Grant Morrison interview

[superboyprime]

Rolling Stone Magazine has a new interview with Morrison up. Morrison's normally quite tactful and complimentary to the work of his peers, but this time he gets quite vicious about some of them.

Some excerpts:

Do you think this is the death spiral [for superhero comics]?
Yeah. I kind of do, but again, you can always be wrong. There's a real feeling of things just going off the rails, to be honest. Superhero comics. The concept is quite a ruthless concept, and it's moved on, and it's kind of abandoned, the first-stage rocket.

Abandoning comics?
And moving on to movies, where it can be more powerful, more effective. The definition of a meme is an idea that wants to replicate, and it's found a better medium through which to replicate, games, movies. It would be a shame, because as I said in the book, one of the most amazing things about those universes is that they exist, there's a paper continuum that reflects the history, but people don't die, it's like the Simpsons, people don't age, they just change.

*

There have been histories of comic books, but your book Supergods is all superheroes. It's a counter-narrative to the idea that comics need to outgrow this superhero stuff.
I can appreciate someone like Chris Ware for his artistry, which I think is beautiful, but I think his attitude stinks, it just seems to be the attitude of somebody really privileged, and honestly, try living here, try living on an Indian reservation and shut up, and really seeing all that nihilistic stuff, it really makes me angry, it's unhelpful to all of us, and it's coming from people who have money and success to talk like that and bring those aspects of the way we live in favor of all the others, and it's indefensible.

So I never liked that stuff, I always thought that I had a real Scottish working class thing against the fact that these were done by privileged American college kids, and they were telling me the world was flat. "You're telling me the world is flat, pal?" And it's not helpful, it doesn't get us anywhere. OK, so it is, then what? What are you going to do about it, college kid? My book wasn't academic. I can't take on those Comics Journal guys, they flattened me, as they did, it's just defensive, smartass kids.

This is what I'm into, and here's how, through my eyes, it's exalted. You may look at the same thing and just see trash, toilet paper, I'm looking at this and seeing William Blake angels. This is how it looks through these eyes, this is all I've got, I can't talk about it in half degrees, but I can talk about it in the sense of a practitioner of it, someone who has thought about it intensely for an awful long time, and again, I thought, "What can I make, a book that reads the way Nick Kent talks about music," those guys, it at least gives you a personal connection to someone who takes this very seriously.

*

Do you still hang out with your former protégé Mark Millar at all?
No.

Is that an estranged situation?
It's a can of worms. I met Mark when he was 18, and I really got on with him, because he laughed at all my jokes. He has the same sense of humor as me, he's very dark, and has that sense of humor, so we bonded. I used to phone him every day, and we ended up doing some work together on 2000 AD, which went well. It was funny stuff, we'd meet in the pub and get drunk and do this Big Dave strip, which was a comedy strip, and obviously, he was trying to get into American comics, so I got him on in Swamp Thing, and they asked me to write the book but I said, "Let's get Mark in, let's give him a job," so I consulted with him on the stories, and so on through the Nineties.

When he got the Authority book, his star started to rise, and at that point, he felt he was in my shadow and he had to get out, and the way to get out was to do this fairly uncool split. It was quite hard, I felt, but he had to make his own way, and he was in denial that I'd been there, because I saw a lot of his work had been plotted or devised, even dialogue suggestions were done by me right up until the point of The Ultimates. It was seen by him as a dimunition of his position, even though it wasn't, I was quite proud of him as a mentor. He's done well without me, he has his own style, he does his own stuff. It was kind of that archetype, you get caught up in that story.

You came out and acknowledged this, but that was after the estrangement?
Yeah. Before that, everyone in the business knew that I was working with him, it was obvious, I was 10 years older, I was already successful. His star rose, and that history became sidelined.

He still lives in Glasgow, is there a chance of bumping into him?
There's a very good chance of running into him, and I hope I'm going 100 miles an hour when it happens.

You were very kind to Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis in Supergods.
I was trying to be kind because I like Brad Meltzer. He's a nice guy. I have a lot of interesting conversations with him so I tried to focus on what I thought was good about it and there was actually quite a lot when I read it again. The first time I read it I was kind of outraged. I thought this was just… why? What the fuck is this, really? It wasn't even normal. It was outrageous. It was preposterous because of the Elongated Man with his arms wrapped several times around the corpse of his wife. I thought something is broken here. Something has gone so wrong in this image.

For legality, a panel from Morrison and Quitely's Flex Mentallo:



I hate to admit it, but I think there's certainly a grain of truth in what Morrison says about superheroes moving away from comics. Just looking online, it's pretty obvious that even most comic book fans care more about and buzz more about movies starring their favorite characters than the comics that do. I think most of them genuinely would prefer, say, a good Batman TV show to a good Batman comic book, sad as that is. For me, it'll always be the comics first and foremost, but I imagine I'm in the minority.

Comments

[pilot_star]

I mostly disagree with him. I think he seems to dismiss the entirety of comics as a medium because he doesn't like Chris Ware, which is fine (I'm not a big fan of Ware either) but doesn't represent every comic that isn't a superhero comic. He comes off as vain and egotistical in this interview, imo.

[proteus_lives]

"He comes off as vain and egotistical in this interview, imo."

Honestly, when does he not?

[pilot_star]

Does he always? I guess I haven't kept up with him an awful lot except to read his comics, and this doesn't really come across through his work.

[proteus_lives]

I've read more then one interview and essay, he nearly always comes off like that.

[whitesycamore]

You don't think? Part of the reason that I dislike a lot of Morrison's work (although I love some of it) is that it often feels shallow and self-congratulatory, and the characters kind of... impoverished when it comes to any spark of humanity.

Morrison-characters mostly feel like paper dolls to me, and I think it's because he treats them that way. They all speak with the same dull, wooden voice, except that some of them are varnished with hilariously bad dialects or accents.

[salinea]

Yeah, I've noticed that as well, their lack of humanity. :/

[icon_uk]

Have you read his Animal Man and Doom Patrol runs? Some weaks spots in both, but the likes of his Cliff Steele and Dorothy Spinner seem very human to me.

[bruinsfan]

Kid Eternity similarly had a couple of very human main and secondary characters (though the title character himself was largely a cold and distant cypher). But that was a *long* time ago.

[icon_uk]

Agreed wholeheartedly, it's frustrating to me because I know he CAN (or COULD) write good human characters, but hasn't in quite some time, and I'm one of those who is not a huge fan of his Batman work precisely because of that. His Dick Grayson seemed to be more or less part of the wallpaper (With a few moments where he did indeed shine), and his Damian had plot immunity to an annoying extent.

[an_idol_mind]

I haven't read many interviews with Morrison, but one thing that turns me off on a lot of his work is the fact that a lot of his stories seem to me like they're trying to show off how clever he is rather than trying to tell a good story.

That's not to say the guy is a dick in person - I've never met him. And it's not top say that he doesn't write some good stuff - he writes a great Superman, and his stuff back in 2000 AD is out of this world. But most of his modern comics just strike me as written by a guy who is more interested in being unique and clever than telling a solid story.

[venatosapiens]

I'm going to go out on a limb here (though I do have my own issues with Morrison's work, god knows) and say that personally, I prefer people trying to be unique and clever. At least making an attempt. If it's a choice between a Geoff Johns-style "solid story" or a Grant Morrison joint like the confusing, flawed but ultimately interesting Final Crisis, I'd have to say I prefer the latter. Works that attempt to rise above mediocrity and fail just appeal to me more, I suppose.

Your mileage, of course, may vary. :)

[an_idol_mind]

I agree that works should attempt to do something unique, but I also think that the focus should be on telling a good story. A lot of Morrison's older works have his quirkiness and imagination without the feeling that he's trying to be weird for the sake of being weird. He still has that to an extent, and he's definitely a solid writer. Every once in a while, though, his stories feel to me like he's trying to prove his genius more than just tell an entertaining tale.

Final Crisis, to me, would be an example of a decent story that could have been much better if Morrison had reigned himself in a little bit. It might just be me on that front, though.

[mrstatham]

Again, though, FC at least feels somewhat more aspirational in it's scope than something like Infinite Crisis, which really amounted to little more than shuffling a bunch of pieces around and getting characters to where Johns wanted them. FC might not have hit all the marks, but it's resolution didn't at least stretch out into parts of 52.

[jlroberson]

This. He does. He is so far up his own posterior in this interview that he makes John Lennon seem cheerful in HIS infamous RS interview.

I really do get the feeling that the reception of FINAL CRISIS deeply wounded him. That's one aspect of this. But I mean, in order to be the anti-Moore, he HAS to embrace the machine and pretend he's being punk, which is where being contrary will get you eventually. Because Moore was only a willing part of the machine, in retrospect, in an eye's blink, long ago. And Ware has never been part of it at all. I imagine he may also think of Crumb or Sim as losers who simply wouldn't have been able to hack it in "real" comics. Or at least, that's the extension of his logic.

I can understand why he wants the biggest organ possible by which to spread his ideas, and he's good at it. But he shouldn't attack those who are speaking to something different, that the machine doesn't want to put out there.