Superheroes - made in Scotland

12/02/2009

How Scottish writers and artists transformed the world of DC and Marvel comics

by Adam Forrest

I loved comic books as a boy. It sounds like a confession, but it shouldn’t. Not really. If it was an addiction, it was pain-free and widely accepted. Most of my friends read The Beano, Buster or Whizzer and Chips. Commando and Football monthlies were swapped in the playground, and parents were happy to buy Asterix and Tintin adventures to keep the back seat of the car quiet on long journeys.

I devoured them all. Most well-thumbed were the US superhero stories of DC and Marvel. Nothing could compete with the world of Batman, Superman, Spider-Man and Green Lantern. The intrigue and graceful violence. The thrill of secret identities and flawed personalities. The sharp wit and strange world weariness found on the mean streets of the American city. Even adverts for multi-coloured cereals and weight-lifting regimes suggested a more glamorous existence elsewhere.

Who knows on which sad day the neglected piles of comics were boxed up and handed over (presumably) to a charity shop or younger cousin. By then, adolescence had struck; the long, awkward adjustment to the real world and its only occasional excitements. But there comes a time to return to childish things. A recent peek or two at some new comic novels revealed impressive things had being going on while I wasn’t looking.

The world of the superhero had become darker, more complex; told and rendered in more visually imaginative ways. Legends surrounding each iconic character have been deconstructed and infected with politics, philosophy, sex and black magic.

Who's responsible for all this? It would seem unlikely, but a bunch of Scotsmen can take much of the credit. Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, Alan Grant and Frank Quitely are revered as being among the most brilliant writers and artists in the business.

Fantasies forged right here in Scotland now command the attention of Hollywood studios, provoke endless online discussion and allow their creators godlike status at comic convention signing sessions around the world. Morrison, a character with a past colourful enough for fiction, recalls the excitement of making the breakthrough at the end of the ‘80s with his first project with DC on the Animal Man series.

“It was like being told your record had gone to number one on the American charts; a dream come true,” remembers the Glaswegian. “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 that my ambitions were unrealistic. He suggested I work in a bank.”  

There is an anti-establishment feeling, born from the coming of a political age in Thatcher’s Britain, connecting the work of the Scots writers who would take America by storm. “I grew up in an atmosphere of educated working class dissent, protest and teenage punk rock rebellion,” Morrison explains.

The Invisibles, a series that began on a DC imprint in 1994, gained him a huge following in an era besotted with conspiracy. The story detailed the struggle of a secret society trying to throw off the physical and spiritual oppression of civilization’s nebulous rulers (a template for The Matrix and a raft of other sci-fi spin-offs). It was also a period of personal change that saw Morrison shave his hair off and dabble in magic and meditation. At the time of release, he suggested the story was told to him by aliens when he was abducted during a trip to Katmandu.

“I’d begun to radically transform my own life by plunging into a world of occult experimentation and global travel,” reveals Morrison. “The Invisibles became a fictional record of that time. I was trying to entangle my own life with the events of the narrative and I even changed my appearance to look like the lead 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.”

How far could the journey into the occult be stretched? Well, Morrison and his artistic collaborator worked with an Ouija board in developing a graphic novel about the Bible John murders. “We discovered 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.”

Morrison would take this kind of risk-taking into mainstream comic books, granted free reign to model different parts of the Batman, Superman and (JLA) Justice League America franchises to his own, more adult tastes.

Mark Millar, another Glaswegian, was also given the chance to re-work established formulas. He began the X-Men story from scratch, erasing decades of back history and exploring the psychological character quirks that would provide the basis for the blockbuster movies.

In 2003, his Superman: Red Son, a reimagining of the iconic character growing up in the Soviet Union, was released. Millar’s Wanted series was turned into a movie starring James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie, and he has become the best-selling British comic author of the decade. “It’s the only job in the world where you can work in your jammies and yet still go to swanky parties in LA,” he jokes.


Not every Scot has been welcomed so warmly in the US. Alan Grant, now in his late 50s, began comic storytelling with DC Thomson in Dundee. Grant and Scottish colleague John Wagner came to the attention of the Batman editors in America after their work on the Judge Dredd strip for British comic 2000AD.

“Basically, I wrote whatever DC [Comics] asked me to write, and tried to put my own personal spin on everything. I think there was probably some suspicion and resentment from several US writers and editors about foreigners handling their favourite characters,” Grant concedes. “But in my opinion, the Batman stories written by Alan Moore, John Wagner, Grant Morrison and myself are far superior to almost all of the American takes on the character.”

Rival American writers were not the only ones unimpressed. Grant recalls showing his mum his first interpretation of Batman, an issue of Detective Comics featuring Scarface. “I was elated,” he says. “When the first issue was released I proudly gave a copy to my mother. She glanced at it and said; ‘What a lot of shite!’. Which certainly brought me back to earth.”

Although he hasn’t written Batman stories for the last five years, Grant did manage to introduce an ambiguous character called Anarky to vent his own radical political leanings. “It didn’t sit too well with American readers, who prefer the soap opera and cool costume aspects of superhero comics. But I became a minor hero in many Latin countries, like Argentina and Mexico, where readers had been subjected to tyranny and fascism and knew precisely what I was writing about. Someone recently sent me DC’s new take on Anarky, and I was saddened to see they were using him as just another asshole villain.”

Artist Frank Quitely concurs that working for the American comic giants is not all back slapping and invitations to Hollywood parties. “I actually go there as seldom as possible; it doesn’t really work with my deadlines,” he laughs, colouring as he talks in his Glasgow studio (Quitely is working on a new DC collaboration with Grant Morrison, but the details are still top secret).

Despite international status for his New X-Men work, Quitely most fondly recalls projects closer to home, especially a collaboration with Alan Grant on a book called Batman: The Scottish Chronicles. “This was before the Da Vinci Code, but Alan was writing about the Knights Templar and had some scenes in the Rossyln Chapel,” says Quitely. “I went through there a couple of times with friends and family. It was fun to be drawing something familiar.”

Comic adventures in Caledonia don’t end there. Grant also wrote a S.H.I.E.L.D. comic set in the Orkney Islands and sent the Punisher to Scotland in Blood on the Moors. “There’s an abundant supply of storytelling talent in Scotland. To steal a phrase from someone else, we stand on the shoulders of giants,” says Grant, referring to luminaries such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott and Arthur Conan Doyle.

So why such interest in comics in Scotland, and why such an abundant supply of talent? What links the new comic gods with the Celtic bards and our literary greats? According to Morrison, the connection may be a fascination with the grotesque. “Storytelling, especially ghoulish, fantastical and imaginative storytelling has always been popular round these parts,” he says. “It’s rare to find a Scots novel that doesn’t have some whiff of fairyland or Hell off its pages.

“Scottish storytelling – from the Border poets to Burns, Stevenson, Hogg, Trocchi, Gray, Banks, Welsh, Rowling etc – has always revelled in the grotesque and the outlandish, so it’s no surprise many of us found a perfect outlet in comic books.”