Grant Morrison
12/02/2009
Scots comic legend gives us the lowdown on punk rock rebellion and occult experimentation
Comic book writer Grant Morrison is best known for injecting American superheroes with counter-cultural cool. He began mixing science fiction and left-leaning politics in late seventies Glasgow. Here he reveals his encounters with the occult, the excitement of working for DC and Marvel for the first time, and why Scots have such a ghoulish imagination...
How important was your own work and that of other comic writers in pushing radical ideas into the mainstream?
How important was your own work and that of other comic writers in pushing radical ideas into the mainstream?
A lot of the stuff we see on TV and movie screens, especially in the last 20 years, has been sourced from comics, and in many cases without any credit to the originals. Until The Invisibles nobody had thought to combine, fetish club PVC, bald heads, shades and leather, with Gnostic Philosophy, quirky codenames, Kung Fu, gunplay and extra-dimensional machine/insect monsters. After The Invisibles, but particularly after The Matrix, that kind of ‘social surrealist’ sci-fi, mixed with ‘Blade Runner’ atmospherics, became something of a cottage industry for moviemakers across the globe.
The Invisibles was more influenced by stuff that was going on in my life. My dad was a trade union activist and was jailed as a Committee of 100 ‘spy for peace’ in the ‘60s, so I grew up in an atmosphere of educated working class dissent, protest and teenage punk rock rebellion. By the time I started on Invisibles, I’d begun to radically transform my own life by plunging headlong into a world of occult experimentation and global travel. The Invisibles became a fictional record of that time. I was trying to entangle my own life with the events of the narrative and even changed my appearance to look like the lead character. Life as a comic book character. Guns and bombs aside, it was a diary of things I was doing, places I was going and people I was meeting, disguised as an adventure story.
The Invisibles was more influenced by stuff that was going on in my life. My dad was a trade union activist and was jailed as a Committee of 100 ‘spy for peace’ in the ‘60s, so I grew up in an atmosphere of educated working class dissent, protest and teenage punk rock rebellion. By the time I started on Invisibles, I’d begun to radically transform my own life by plunging headlong into a world of occult experimentation and global travel. The Invisibles became a fictional record of that time. I was trying to entangle my own life with the events of the narrative and even changed my appearance to look like the lead character. Life as a comic book character. Guns and bombs aside, it was a diary of things I was doing, places I was going and people I was meeting, disguised as an adventure story.
The conspiracy narrative seemed to me to be the master-myth of the post-Cold War world, which is why I chose to place ‘the ultimate conspiracy’ as the McGuffin at the heart of The Invisibles. In the end, the ‘conspiracy theory’ view of history seemed to me a desperate, almost sad, attempt to enchant the mechanized modern world with a little mystery and meaning. The idea that someone, somewhere, is in charge and has a plan, or a spaceship, is a comforting one but it seems to me a secular version of faith in God.
The New Adventures of Hitler and St Swithin’s Day (an anti-Thatcher satire) brought you to the attention of the tabloids. Was the controversy difficult to deal with?
A little but I was in my 20s then and cared a lot less about offending or irritating people. At the time, I felt I could justify the political allegory of New Adventure of Hitler in the context of poll tax riots, Clause 28 and the final days of Thatcher.
How much truth is there in stories about hallucinogenics and ouija boards and aliens from Kathmandu? Can you explain your understanding of chaos magic and how important exploring occult ideas was to you?
I’m a very sceptical, even cynical, person and always have been, so when someone tells me it’s possible to contact disembodied but active and intelligent entities using a lump of cardboard and a bit of plastic, I have to try it out for myself.
In the case of the ouija board, my artistic collaborator and I used one as part of an investigation into the ‘Bible John’ murders for a documentary comic book of the same name and we discovered, much to our surprise, that the board works exactly as intended. Names, places and other specific and verifiable pieces of information concerning the case were spelled out and continued to be spelled out even when we both took our fingers off the planchette in disbelief.
The same applies to ‘magic’ and the occult. I became interested in ‘chaos magic’ as it came to be called, because of its ‘punk’ or ‘post-modern’ leanings and its focus on results and the practical. Chaos magic de-emphasizes the need to ‘believe’ in any given philosophical or religious framework and instead concentrates on the concrete here and now of ‘what happens when you say and do this?’ I don’t ‘believe’ in spirits or aliens, for example but I have had instructive and life-changing encounters with aspects of the human conscious experience which do a pretty damn good job of behaving like angels or ultra-terrestrials.
As for hallucinogens and the rest, I didn’t even drink alcohol until was 30. I came to magical practise straight and sober. It’s always easy to dismiss experiences in this area as the product of intoxication but in my experience there’s much more to ‘ordinary’ human consciousness than we’re taught at school and as I say to everyone, don’t take my word for any of this. Buy the books and try it for yourself
How exciting was it to begin working for DC on Animal Man, and to be taken seriously by the Americans?
It was like being told your record had gone to number one on the American charts; a dream come true, quite literally. I’d wanted to write American superhero comics since I was a kid but it seemed so unlikely. My guidance teacher at school had told me in no uncertain terms that my ambitions were unrealistic and that ‘better people’ than me existed to do the kind of work I hoped to do. He suggested I work in a bank, unable to foresee a day when working in a bank would be a less secure proposition than freelance writing!
What was the motivation for taking on and re-inventing such well-known characters as Superman and Batman, JLA and X-Men?
In most cases, I was asked to do so by my employers at DC or Marvel Comics. I prefer to do my own comics with my own characters but I grew up reading Superman and Batman and all the others, so I know them well and find it easy to slip into their world. Because my interest in these characters was never particularly nostalgic, however, I felt free to try new things with them and to give them a political, literary or spiritual dimension they may have lacked previously.
How do you assess the surge in popularity of superhero stories in Hollywood? The studios seem reliant on the comic world for their summer blockbusters – is there a danger in bleeding the genre dry?
I don’t think so. The basic idea of the superhuman is a very malleable one – you can do ‘realistic’ superhero stories like say Watchmen, which takes a hard-nosed look at how these creatures might alter the social and political landscape of our own world, or you can – as I prefer to do – position them as archetypes that allow us to talk about the world using the language of symbolism and allegory. There have been ‘realistic’ superhero stories, ‘surreal’ superhero stories, superhero westerns, superhero war stories, superhero detective stories, superhero horror stories, superhero romances etc.
I’m not even sure if there is a superhero genre or if the idea of the superhero is a special chilli pepper-like ingredient designed to energize other genres. The costumed superhero has survived since 1938, constantly shifting in tone from decade to decade to reflect the fears and the needs of the audience. The current mainstream popularity of the superhero has, I think, a lot to do with the fact that the Terror-stricken, environmentally-handicapped, overpopulated, paedophile-haunted world that’s being peddled by our news media is crying out for utopian role models and for any hopeful images of humankind’s future potential!
How has the perception of comics and the idea of the grown-up graphic novel changed over the years? Do you find the readership more difficult to pigeon-hole?
From the 1940s to the 60s comics were a mass market business aimed at children. These days the audience has grown older and a little more jaded, I find, and sales have diminished.
The talent pool is incredible, however, and the freedom to experiment is extensive. The standard of writing in the best comic books puts TV and Hollywood movies to shame and the artwork is a continued wonder – the idea that people sit like mediaeval monks hand drawing these beautiful books is one that never ceases to amaze me. And yet the core readership is shrinking at the same time comic book creators and their creations are becoming more widely known. It’s odd to be so influential in the culture and yet so marginalised. The people who read my stuff are usually young, smart and dressed in black, so my own audience has remained fairly consistent over the years.
Why such abiding interest in comics in Scotland? Is it fair to say there is an abundant supply of storytelling talent in Scotland?
There’s the Celtic bard aspect, I suppose. Storytelling, especially ghoulish, fantastical and imaginative storytelling has always been popular round these parts. It’s rare to find a Scots novel, even, that doesn’t have some whiff of fairyland or Hell off its pages. Scottish literature, Scottish storytelling – from the Border poets to Burns, Stevenson, Hogg, Trocchi, Gray, Banks, Welsh, Rowling etc etc - has always revelled in the grotesque and the outlandish, so it’s no surprise that many of us found a perfect outlet in comic books.
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