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WIZARD RETROSPECTIVE: GRANT MORRISON | | He's the writer who met himself in a comic, wrote 'Spawn' accidentally and followed Neil Gaiman's fashion sense. Here, he retraces his creative path to 'Final Crisis' | | | By Kevin Mahadeo | | Posted 10/10/2008 | |  | |  |  Grant Morrison constantly questions.
After three decades in the business—from making 400-mile trips as a young man between Glasgow and London, knocking on doors begging for work to now handling DC Comics' summer 2008 mega-event Final Crisis and selling scripts in Hollywood—the Scotland-born scribe's inquisitive nature has made him one of the most sought-after writers in the comic industry and one of the most influential storytellers in history. And still he questions.
"They would give me an idea," explains Morrison, "and it would be more, 'Here's the challenge: What will I learn from doing this? 'What would be an updated version of that idea? If bad guys are the Justice League in this world and everything's in reverse, what does that mean? You're the son of Superman. What would you wear?'"
Eager and ready to talk, Morrison chatted away for three-and-a-half hours straight about the multitude of titles produced over his 30-year career—titles that questioned the role of the author in their own stories, the rules of the two-dimensional page, the cultural subtext of the superhero mythology, and above all else, questioned the very limits of his readers' imagination.
With no end in sight for the author's illustrious career, the man who asks all the questions gets the tables turned when we ask him about what goes on in the mind of one of the most popular comic book writers of his generation.
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ANIMAL MAN
(1988-90)
The series that launched Morrison to fame in America began as one of many pitches to DC Comics. The writer, who wrote the first 25 issues, didn't shy away from social issues regarding animal treatment. But most notably, Animal Man broke the rules of traditional comics when Morrison inserted himself as a character and confronted Animal Man with the fact that he, as his writer, killed off Animal Man's family.
MORRISON: The first four issues were kind of preachy. It was a bit in the style they were expecting of British writers at the time, so I wasn't really into it that much, and then they asked me to continue it and I asked myself, "Okay, what do I really do?" That's when I got into the whole kind of "Animal Man's going to meet his author" idea. I thought we'd kind of reached a limit because this was the year just after Watchmen had come out and all those books were influenced by the grim and gritty and everyone was trying a little to do things a bit more realistic. I wanted to stake out some ground that was a little different. I liked the idea of guys getting into their own comic, and it seemed as if there was something there where, instead of trying to make the superhero real, I would send me as a real guy into their world and see how weird it was. I took it as a real place, which was a big breakthrough for me, and started to explore the DC Universe as if it was real and I was an explorer.
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ARKHAM ASYLUM
(1989)
Never one to do only one or two projects at a time, Morrison scripted Arkham Asylum—one of the best-selling graphic novels of all time—while working on Animal Man. The novel explored themes of identity and insanity set amid the halls of comics' infamous asylum and portrayed realistic interpretations of many of Batman's most notorious foes.
MORRISON: Arkham Asylum was one of those things that had been growing in my head for a while. Imagine this real big "scary theater of cruelty" kind of story of Batman trapped in the asylum. Suddenly I went back to it and I pitched Arkham Asylum and [DC editorial] said, "Come up with an action story for it." I made up the story on the spot and they really liked it. You know, it was a fortunate pitch for me.
The idea was even not so much to humanize [the characters] as to kind of suggest that they were inside us all. We all have elements of the creepy guy or the guy who hates everybody. It was more like the idea for Arkham Asylum was just to do a real psychological story that nobody had done. It was a lot more about what was going on inside [Batman's] head and everybody's head, so I think that's why the villains may seem human because they were trying to be parts of us that we might recognize.
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DOOM PATROL
(1989-93)
After reading his scripts for Animal Man and Arkham Asylum, then-Doom Patrol editor Bob Kahan handed Morrison the title in hopes of reinvigorating the series. Starting with issue #19 and lasting until #63, Morrison added many elements of surrealism and introduced a number of new and complex characters, such as Flex Mentallo, who eventually went on to star in his own four-issue miniseries.
MORRISON: It was a challenge, that one. The other [books] were things I wanted to do but this was being handed a challenge. So it wasn't something I would have chosen to do but it was really good to be given it because it fit in with a lot of stuff that I was starting to get interested in at the time. I was into all this surrealist stuff, and Crazy Jane came from reading a book called When Rabbit Howls by Truddi Chase, which was about a woman who alleged that she had multiple personalities. I just thought, "Imagine if they all had superpowers!" I was just into a lot of cranky stuff at the time and it all came out in Doom Patrol.
When you're given a name like "The World's Strangest Superheroes," then you've really got to take it seriously. So I just wanted to expose them to stuff which seemed really strange to me at the time. It just fit those characters well because they were always meant to be strange. When Arnold Drake—the creator—said that my version was the one that came closest to his original intention, I was really pleased with that, really proud.
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SPAWN
(1993-94)
Although only on Spawn for a three-issue arc (issues #16-#18), Morrison's team-up with the Todd McFarlane-created character came about as a happy accident, one that, Morrison says, really worked out for him in the end.
MORRISON: The British newspaper Comics International had run a story to say that Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore and Frank Miller were going to do issues of Spawn, but they mistakenly said that I was going to do one as well. I read this as the headline on the front and I thought, "Well, nobody told me!" [Laughs] So I called Todd McFarlane and said, "I read this thing that said that you want me to write Spawn?" And he said, "Well, no, I hadn't considered you for writing Spawn, but do you want to it?" And I said, "Yeah, I'll write Spawn."
The weird thing was that at the time, a lot of the guys on that particular paper didn't like me very much, so they'd kind of set up this thing whereby I got some of the biggest checks of my life working for Todd McFarlane by a sheer misunderstanding that they themselves had created, so it was pretty brilliant.
Continue the Grant Morrison retrospective!
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