BACK TO ARCHIVES

To Live Outside The Law You Must Be Honest
Grant Morrison

Barb Lien-Cooper

August 2002

I had the great privilege of interviewing Grant Morrison a few years ago. The result, while interesting, wasn't everything I'd hoped for for a Grant Morrison interview (partially because it was done by just standing around outside San Diego Con). I waited three years to pose the possibility of an extended interview with the man. In that time, I thought hard about every question I ever wanted to ask the author about his writing. I realized that I didn't want to ask him about specific pieces of his work (which speak for themselves, by and large), as much as I wanted to ask him questions concerning the craft of writing, the influence of other art forms on his work, how and why his work keeps evolving and changing every few years, and so forth. I finally sent an e-mail his way and after several nice e-mail conversations with his lady friend Kristan, a massive e-mail containing Grant's interview answers showed up some time later. It is everything I wished it to be: thoughtful, honest, imaginative, exciting, and (at times) very funny.


Barb Lien-Cooper: Not to talk too much about me, but I didn't exactly come from a comics background. Sure, I read them as a kid, but I abandoned them in favor of music, movies, and literature as I grew older. It was Animal Man and Doom Patrol that got me back into comics, for the simple reason that in your comics, it all came together — all the pop culture I love and comics that met my maturing needs as an adult reader. I have some questions concerning these topics.

In the 1960's, rock music was where all the crossroads met — Joe Orton did a script for the Beatles, Mick Jagger hung out with film makers, the Velvet Underground was Warhol's house band. But, then, especially post-punk, music became just another commodity again.

Now I think the pop culture crossroads meet at comics. Do you agree? Why or why not?

Grant Morrison: I agree and think you make a fascinating point which I hadn't considered in this way. I think there's a lot of evidence to support the idea that comics have taken over from 'rock' music as the popular art world's least compromised avenue for expressions of rebellion and dissent. In a recent article, I talked about how all the lines I've noticed running between comics and the counterculture — Alan Moore is a respected performance poet on the London bohemian arts scene, for instance; David Conway, the Vampirella writer, played bass for My Bloody Valentine; Danny Vallely of DHK once drew Mark Millar's The Saviour and my own Bible John; Doug Rushkoff is a long-time comics fan and is working on his own on-line graphic novel. Steve Aylett is talking to Karen Berger about a project. Independent filmmakers like Darren Aaronowsky and his partner Eric Watson are reading comics and hanging out with comics people. Dave McKean makes avant-garde jazz records ... the list is longer than Charles Manson's prison sentence. The fringes of the comics world are haunted by poets, fine artists, occultists, musicians and all manner of interesting oddballs. I have a global network of creative friends from all fields, all of whom I've met through my work in comics.

As a sidebar, I'm not sure how commodified music really became after punk rock. The mainstream was certainly dull but the thriving, inspirational post-punk indie scene developed as a flourishing reaction. I was in one of the earliest of the official 'indie' bands and — as part of a fizzing broth of fanzines and club nights — was involved in the whole early '80s psychedelic ArtPop scene which formed a brief, argumentative, but potent nexus for bands as influential, as diverse and as every bit alike as the TV Personalities, The Pastels, the Times, Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream etc ...This thriving counterculture music scene led directly to the development of Alan McGhee's Creation records and initiated a strand of '60s influenced punk rock best exemplified by the Smiths and, in a different way later, Oasis.

BL: Some of the best art seems to be made from the fringes, from the under-appreciated genres (noir writing, SF/fantasy, the DIY movement of punk). There is a line of thought in rock criticism that rock "died"; when it became respected and "legitimate". For instance, Nik Cohn thought Sgt. Pepper was the death knell of rock and roll music.

In keeping with the above, are comics an art form? How respected should comics be?

GM: Unlike every other entertainment medium it seems, comics are always having to prove to the rest of the world that they're an 'art form' in order to be taken seriously. Is TV an art form? Are pop singles an art form? Do we need to take things seriously in order to enjoy them? Do we care? Comics are a form of expression and they're very good for telling tall tales and putting across a lot of information in highly memorable and digestible chunks. As such they can be used for good or ill. I think most comics are pretty good and stand comparison with their equivalent TV shows or novels. Is The Ultimates as good as West Wing? I think so. In fact, I prefer it.

Having spent fifteen years of my life trying very hard to promote my field and gain the respect of 'mainstream' culture, I've come to the conclusion that only the very cool and the very uncool will really care about comics in any significant way in the future. I think the comics will survive as lo-fi 'authentic' concept farms maintained by movie/games companies. They will be read mostly by enthusiasts. That's fine because it means that expectations will be high.

Notice how the fictional super-people — who always know when to evacuate from a disaster area — are heading out of comics like rats leaving the Pentagon basement. Fifty years ago, these fictional supermen rocketed to safety from the doomed pulps, arriving in the immensely popular millions-selling comic book medium to be nourished by generations of kindly creators. The super-meme was too strong for other 'genres' and all were swallowed by the viral spread of the costumed heroes. Now the supermen are making the next jump: from sinking page to lifeboat screen.

It's important to understand that the superhero is a very powerful living idea. The superman mega-meme locates and colonizes vulnerable niches in the media environment, always creating stepping stones to wider and wider cultural acceptance. When I say living idea, I mean these words literally of course. Why do I write superhero comics? Why does Mark Millar write superhero comics? Why, in spite of himself, does Warren Ellis do his best writing on superhero titles? I think it's because we are all good and useful carriers/ hosts for this incredibly voracious 21st century meme. 'Rendering technology' in movies, which once diminished the supermen into joke special effects, has finally caught up with imagination, making films a far more efficient carrier... which is why comics are going the way of the pulps and why superheroes are bailing out of the monthly titles and onto the silver screens.

The next stage for the superman meme, of course, is to make the long-awaited jump from screen to reality. This will happen within a decade or two, I predict, and seem normal by 2050. Which is why superhero stories are the true social realist fiction of tomorrow, demanding the serious attention of our finest imaginative minds right now. British media commentators are way too snobbish to even consider comics as anything other than bum-wipe for retarded kids and refuse to accept that the content of some comics may be demonstrably more intelligent and entertaining than the contents of their favourite dreary thirty-something Crisis novel, play or motion picture. The American pop mainstream is too fucking brain dead to be proud of one of its three best ever ideas and has instead spent fifty years trying to censor comic book content into oblivion instead of encouraging comics to get weirder, wilder and more relevant to our wild, weird times.

So, no, there are no signs of respectability yet and we remain a fine piratical medium, in the sense that no-one really cares what we do and in fact, only notices us to complain about our influence on 'children' on a fairly regular basis. If only comics had more impact on children then we might have higher literacy rates and a broader, more humanistic and more sensible moral code ...

The average age of the comicbook readership is now edging into its 70s, I believe, while children run wild in the streets with Stanley knives. Frankly, comics should be made compulsory reading in schools but who's listening?

The Spectacle consumes everything of course, even the lives of comics creators. When I'm too old to enjoy it, I expect to be dug up and hailed as the founding father or something or other, paraded around in my bath chair as an example to young fools with handheld living computers. The prizes and theses I've long sought in vain will come at last, dropping into claw-like withered hands too old even to wank with.

Viva comics.

BL: Are comics one of the fringe areas where an artist can do great work precisely because its under-appreciated? Why is this the case (or isn't it)?

GM: I think this is just a palliative lie which undervalued pop artists use to console themselves with ('unpopular pop' as Nick Currie AKA Momus has described it). Being under-appreciated may force the needy artist to try a little harder to get noticed which often lends the work a feverish, desperate glamour but speaking from experience and study I can't say it necessarily makes it any better. What's more likely to happen is that, until the young writer/artist gets the security of money and recognition, he will write pretty much any old crap to get noticed. There's also pressure to conform to whatever style is currently in vogue, in the effort to seem attractive to prospective buyers who may not want the radically different but simply the radically fresh-faced.

Early or 'protest' work has an all too familiar rhetoric ring all its own. First album stuff. I suppose that right now, I'm more interested in hearing what successful people have to say for themselves and by successful I don't mean rich. I'm more interested in hearing revolver than I am in hearing With The Beatles if you see what I'm getting at here. Established creators are in a position to actually afford to take more chances with their material and when he or she has solved the basic problems of survival and food, the creative person is free to ponder weightier issues than fame, glamour, and success and free also to make artistic leaps the novice would never dare.

The reasons why artists have done great work in comics as in any other lo-fi industry (one where the sales are small but steady) are legion but it might be worth considering that in comics, the work is much more closely tailored to the needs of the target audience. The fanbase is closer to the stage and more vocal, many of the creators are often fans themselves who have become professional writers. Next to music and public performance, it's the closest thing to live performance. There is fierce competition and a high demand for strong story values, absolute currency, imagination and a fine healthy dose of lunacy. The way comics creators monitor and adapt to the needs of their audience should be taught at corporate management seminars.

BL: You were one of the last generation that cut their teeth on the comic book version of the old Hollywood "studio" system, just as Coppola and the "New Hollywood" of the 1970s were the last generation that did their first works in places like exploitation films.

How valuable was the experience of writing for comics such as 2000 AD to your writing?

GM: I began my professional career in underground magazines and mass market popular comics at exactly the same time, so I was allowed to go wild on the one hand and on the other I was trained to the highest standards of storytelling and pacing by the rigid ancient regime of DC Thompson (Scotland's leading publisher of comic books and newspapers. They are the corporate brains behind Beano and Dandy among other things — weekly humor comics published in an unbroken line since the 1930s.)

BL: How does it help or hurt a creator to have his/her first works published by an established imprint as opposed to self-publishing?

GM: I've always felt that self-publishing is a pretty dodgy idea and much of my early self-esteem was based on the fact that I could sell stories to professional publishing outlets and actually be paid for my skills as a writer. I've wanted to be a professional writer since I was six years old and I would have written children's novels, plays or television dramas if the comics scene in the 1980s hadn't been so vibrant and inspiring. I have no interest in 'fan' fiction or vanity publishing, so those wavelengths of the comics spectrum have never appealed to me particularly. I used to make up my own JLA comics when I was a teenager but I'd never have attempted to have them published. From the age of 17 onwards I've been more interested in writing as a job than as a hobby so I suppose I'd favour the established imprint option.

I'm very much of the old school in that I think a writer should be good enough (i.e. adaptable enough) to find suckers to pony up the cash for his thoughts. I was very glad that I'd been forced to face my fears and conquer my adolescent shyness by knocking on doors and selling myself and my work to hard-nosed publishers. Why waste your own money on something when you can just as easily keep your money and convince a professional publisher to hire you and put out your work at his own expense? Self-publishing might be a good start for the housebound or for creative people who prefer not to face the harsh glare of editorial criticism but it's not for me. I still own most of my own creations. I make up so much stuff every day that I really don't mind giving some of it away.

In the end, it doesn't hurt to be published in any way if being published is simply your goal. The thrill of seeing my name in the papers wore off when I was a small child and for me, being published was all about earning a living ... in a city where 'earning a living' is an activity on a par with 'slaying a hippogriff'.

BL: One of the big differences between creators now and creators back when you started is that it seems that you lot have experienced pop culture a lot more outside the comic book box, having read "real" books, listened to music, seen more films, and frankly lived a lot more.

My opinion is that if one only reads comics and doesn't experience other forms of art and pop culture that it tends to make one's art too inner-bred, giving the creator only comic book cliches to work from. Would you agree with that assessment? Why or why not?

GM: I don't know if that's strictly true although there is some evidence. Real life is full of cliches and if I wrote my own experience down unmediated by imagination, no-one would be able to accept the constant unlikely coincidences, plot reverses and non sequiturs of 'real' life. I have a baffling reputation as a tremendous liar but I rarely lie in print and it simply seems to be that people don't believe a single word I say when I'm telling them what I've just done or where I've been.

BL: To me, the best art is made by what I call "exiles" for lack of a better term, people who are not fully at home with their surroundings, but have adopted a medium for its power (Raymond Chandler; John Cale denying his classical background in favor of rock-and-roll, Ray Davies writing odes to Victorian England during the hippie era, Van Morrison writing Astral Weeks when everyone else was going to Monterey, Jonathan Richman and The Modern Lovers writing odes to monogamy during the "Me Decade"). In short, people who are both of their time but also transcend it, like episodes of The Prisoner do. Even though you've been in the industry for awhile, you also are an outsider in the sense that you make trends more than follow them and you pursue projects outside your medium (e.g. The Mystery Play).

Do you consider yourself an outsider to comics or an exile in any way? How so?

GM: In spite of my efforts to belong, I've never really been accepted into the body of the Kirk as far as the comics 'industry' is concerned. Fuck knows why but I've always sniffed a certain suspicion directed towards me from the balloon groves, and I feel that my constant wry grin has left some doubt as to the seriousness of my mission in this field. It seems disgraceful to me that The Invisibles never won an industry award at any time during its run. As you say, I'm usually working against the prevailing trend at any given time and by the time a story or approach becomes vogueish I've already moved on.

BL: How much attention do you pay to the trends in comic books?

GM: I've been obsessed with pop music and fashion since I leaned to sing 'She Loves You' astride my dad's shoulders, so the predictable cyclical returns of pop culture run so deep in my blood I can feel them like weather coming over the horizon. I can tell you what will be in vogue three, five, ten years from now to a fair degree of accuracy, simply by observing and extrapolating pop weatherfronts.

I pay attention to trends in comic books but usually I find myself a little ahead of the curve so by the time something becomes a trend I've already lost interest in it, which means I can't really read about 95% of the comics I'm sent (which doesn't mean the other 5% don't make it all worthwhile).

These things are still in the main written and drawn by the most unfashionable people unfortunately. It disturbs me slightly that the word 'pop' has been bandied about by the most desperately tasteless people of the last five years. Pompous pronouncements are being made about fashion and trends by people who wouldn't know fashion if it set their wardrobes aflame. They have no idea what 'pop' is or they would wear better clothes and listen to better music. I'm sorry.

I 'd rather be uncool these days. I miss the warm damp of anonymity and opposition. I wanted no credit on The Filth but Vertigo insisted and I suppose it makes sense for the retailers but ... you know ...

BL: Writing good pop music is nearly an instant experience. It takes three chords, 90 minutes max, and the power of the word. It requires discipline, but it doesn't require a long attention span. While it takes longer to write comic book scripts, the closest equivalent I can think of to writing a comic book script is writing a pop song. How accurate is this comparison and in what ways does it fall down?

GM: I've always felt this was a very good comparison. I write with music on and always have done. The comic boundaries of 22 pages no more than 50 words a panel are as tight as the parameters of a perfect three-minute pop song.

I'm very comfortable building a comic and the process is very like creating a song. Writing straight prose is, I find, a much more organic experience but I love the discipline of paring back meaning to the exact words ... comics writing is mostly editing. The 22 page horizon never really goes away and everything has to take that into account.

This might be a more interesting question to ask someone like Mark Millar who has very little interest in music at all (something I find horrific. It's like having no soul). He owns only a couple of records which I believe he bought in the 80s. One of them is the Best of Queen and the other is the Charlatans, for fuck's sake. And yet, Mark writes with a rhythmic looping style which demonstrates a fairly high-level comprehension of beats and rhythms and silences.

BL: You once said that good comic book writing affects you like a good pop song. While it's not totally accurate, it conveys the same feeling I get when I read a good comic. Can you elaborate a little on what you said for those who aren't music fans?

GM: It's the rush. It's that simple, it's that tingle in the spine and the sense of flying on the razory wings of pure lunacy. There's also an element of familiarity involved in a good story or song, we should have the weird feeling we've heard or read something like this somewhere before but never quite like this. It works for me if it sums up a perfect feeling or a time, or if it provides a perfect role model character. When I heard "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" at age 21 it immediately connected to my Jerry Cornelius obsession and added the soundtrack to my frock-coated, frilly-shirted, sci-fi mod lifestyle at the time. I've hoped that comics like Kill Your Boyfriend or certain issues of Invisibles etc would have a similar life-enhancing delirious sparkle.

BL: What makes for a good comic book script?

GM: The drawings. A script isn't a comic book until the art is added. Bad art can sometimes annihilate a good comic script and to be honest often does but it's just not a comic until the pictures come on.

BL: What excites you in a good comic?

GM: Timeliness, honesty, shock imagery, romance and breathtaking adventure. A sense of the writer telling me about his or her life in a way that startles me but connects me at the same time. I love good rhythm — which is what I like most about Warren Ellis' work, which is very musical and percussive.

BL: What turns you off in a comic?

GM: A sense of labor. A joyless recycling of cliche because the writer's brain is on automatic. Good art with a shit story. Retro-pastiche, homage, self-conscious 'cool', a pandering to the expectations of fans.

BL: You once said words to the effect that comic book creators should be our rock stars. I definitely think there's an argument to be made that comics are very close to good pop music, but I'm not sure about the rock star bit (after all, treating a rock star like a rock star has made little tin gods out of 16-year-old school leavers in the past). Can you elaborate on why creators should be seen as rock stars?

GM: Because we bloody well deserve it. We have great fun doing a cool, weird job. We travel the world and live wild and interesting lives. We hold unusual, controversial opinions. I think comics people would clearly make better media interviewees than pop stars and footballers. It's a no-brainer. Spin us as the Beat Generation, as outlaw creators doing radical, poetic work in a fringe medium for a clever, appreciative, critical audience who all think they can do it too (poetry then, comics now). We already are rock stars. I find it very easy to get into papers, magazines and TV studios and do at least one or two interviews and photo sessions a week sometimes. And there are lots of us. The question is now 'How long will it take for someone to realise this and write the definitive article ... like 'GO!' in its day.'

BL: In keeping with the idea that an author should live-live-live and experience-experience-experience life and art in many forms before writing, you were the first author that gave characters realistic lives outside the comic-book box. Sure, other authors would bring the "real world" into comics; it always felt fake. For instance, someone would say, "Hey, Dazzler, great that you won that Grammy when the competition was Blondie and Michael Jackson" or "Hey, Lois Lane, great that you won that Pulizter Prize for your story on Superman when Dan Rather and Walter Croncrite were up for it too." How come your characters' "real lives" feel, well, "real"?

GM: I don't 'construct' characters, I come to them full-blown as if they're people I'm meeting or have met and I know Mark's approach is very similar. We've talked about this and we both just have this feeling of 'knowing' the character intimately — we even agree on details we've never discussed. When I started Animal Man, for example, the Buddy Baker character was little more than a super-cipher glimpsed occasionally in crossovers, wisecracking pitifully, like a tenth-rate Peter Parker. But for some reason, I looked at him and knew immediately where he lived and how he related to his family and the world and to me. I knew he was going to be important and meaningful in my life and then he was simply there talking. In an instant, I knew Buddy Baker from the DNA out — I knew he loved spicy Mexican food and post-punk American 'paisley underground' psychedelia like early REM, Rain Parade etc ... I knew he would be a proto-slacker with a daredevil, idealist reflex and an easy target for emotive causes. I knew he would be really happy when the grunge movement got going and a little embarrassed by his costume.

The same kind of understanding goes for Clark Kent or Reed Richards or any of them and it generally turns out that past continuity backs up my wild guesses on most occasions.

I can't explain this. Perhaps I'm unnaturally attuned to unreal worlds and characters. At an important time in my life, between the ages of 12 and 19, I was practically autistic at home. I had a lot of fun at a boys school during the day but evenings were grim beyond Morrissey's most rueful yodellings, spent huddled in our flat above the Finefare, drawing my own homemade comic books and writing fantasy novels with cock in hand (see Flex Mentallo #3 ). I believe utterly in the 'reality' of fictional characters and assume that they all exist independently of my imagination with needs and requirements of their own, like Buddhist tulpa thoughtforms. I've always felt that my best writing is more like channeling the voices and adventures of real characters doing this stuff in a real place — the comic as it exists in the future perhaps. Call me crazy if you like but it's working very well for me so I'm unlikely to be convinced at this stage that my conclusions are mistaken.

BL: While you always mentioned music in your comics, I noticed that in Doom Patrol, at least, you most mentioned the Smiths and The Jam. What was it about that music that was conductive to writing DP especially, since you mentioned those two groups in this comic the most?

GM: I was listening to the Smiths a lot during Doom Patrol. The Jam crept in a couple of times particularly when I re-appraised the lovely 'Liza Radley' B-side and was deeply moved by it to the point where it became a new personality for Crazy Jane and for myself, transforming both our lives beyond all recognition in the process. I wasn't really into the Jam by then — I'd been a big fan in the early '80s/late '70s but by 1990 I was listening to indie stuff and early dance crossover. There's a lot of acid house influence in Doom Patrol. And mushrooms.

I just re-read a bunch of Doom Patrols and they were fucking brilliant. I'm a little ashamed that I would never dare end the X-Men on a full-page cliffhanger featuring a floating pyramid and a Satanic Noel Coward lookalike with a periscope in his head shouting the words 'REVERTH MY BUTTOCKTH SERGEANT MAJOR!'

BL: In Animal Man, it felt as if you were in the final issues deploring the "simplifying" of the DCU that Crisis meant to do. I'm not going to talk your ear off about DC work, as it's in the past but I do have some questions, if I may —

What did you think of the mess caused by Crisis?

GM: It made for a great maxi-series and possibly the best, most apocalyptic superhero crossover ever. Ten billion characters screaming as entire universes caught fire. George Perez was the John Martyn of comics and there was a sense of genuine threat and armageddon. It seemed like the most important event of all time (unless you'd been there for the death of Jean Grey, which fucked with me more, sleek and romantic and 21 by this time. I wept silent tears as Scott and Jean held hands and ran out to face certain death on the moon. Lying on a park bench beside Hyde Park in the sun at 8 a.m., I penned a tear-stained paean to mutantism. Me in Chelsea boots, drainpipe trousers, fluffy moptop, with The Winds of Chaos, my first novel in a folder in my attache case.

'Dear Chris,

I cried for Jean Grey ...'

It was the most embarrassing piece of prose I've ever created and was fortunately trashed stillborn. I keep going back to it now, though, talking about it. I think I wish I had sent it).

Anyway, Crisis was all right but in the end it left a DC universe stripped of its childlike lunacy, and in which some fairly dull limits were placed on the creative imagination by John Byrne and others (for sound creative and marketing reasons perhaps but short-sighted, I believe, as these things often are). This seemed to me a boring path to take in a business which relies on peddling the rawest and most outrageous fruits of the deranged mind and so I began to rebel against the prevailing trends as soon as I got work on a mainstream DCU title. I missed the super-pets and the parallel worlds and felt they could have been handled in a number of ways and still retain their odd appeal and meaning. I hated the post-Dark Knight school of pain-and-guilt comics and I'd lost interest in the claustrophobic 'realism' of the Watchmen camp, so by the time I got hold of Animal Man in 1987 I was ready to bring all my favorite four-color John Broomist crap back in a tidal wave of self-referential madness. Hence Animal Man and especially Doom Patrol.

BL: Did you at that time think that if you got your hands on the DCU, you'd put it right (I always thought so from the last few issues of Animal Man)?

GM: Of course. I plan my comics years in advance and I plan my life the same way so it usually works perfectly to plan. The seeds of Hypertime are all there in Animal Man but my multi-dimensional enfolded realities concept had no name until I scrawled a weird geometric figure and explained it to Mark Waid, who yelped 'Hypertime!' in that frightening, high-pitched way.

BL: Did Hypertime "cure" the Crisis mess or cause more problems?

GM: Yes, it cured all the problems but since nobody quite seems to grasp the concept and I didn't get to stay on long enough at DC to explain it, Hypertime has been quietly ignored and no-one quite realises how elegant and perfect the theoretical framework is. It's very simple. I have a diagram.

My one regret about my brief falling out with DC after the 'Superman Incident' is that I didn't get to do my HyperCrisis series at DC to explain all this stuff and set up a whole new playground. It's the one thing I could still be arsed doing with classical superheroes. If I ever go back, I'll explain the whole Hypertime thing and recreate the Challengers of the Unknown as Challengers: Beyond the Unknown.

It's one thing I still want to do. It had a monster eating the first few years of the 21st century and Superman building a bridge across this gaping hole in time. A bridge made of events. The Guardians of The Multiverse and a new Green Lantern Corps made up of parallel reality Green Lanterns, the Superman Squad and the mystery of the Unknown Superman of 2150 etc, etc. There's a huge synopsis filled with outrageous stuff.

BL: Uh, just how the heck did the Superman of the future "punch a hole through time"? That aspect of DC 1 Million always troubled me.

GM: It's just superhero poetry. Send Right-Brain Barb to read the sequence again. It's sheer comic book poetry — Superman punches through things, right? Superman 1 Million, who's from the great wide-sky-Texas that is Tomorrow, punches through things too but it's not just brick walls and steel vault doors for him, oh no ... this guy can actually drive his fist through the alleged 'time barrier' we're always hearing about. Bask in the audacious, absurd beauty of a man literally battering his way through the 'time barrier'. And luxuriate in how very beyond the Silver Age that is. Like Superman I'm leaping 'from world to world ...'

BL: You've written several Vampirella scripts with Mark Millar for Harris. What aspects of the character of Vampirella interest you?

GM: None, really. As a desperately lonely and attractive-but-oddly-dressed young man, I'd spent some guilty, yet thrilling, hours with those beautifully drawn Jose Gonzalez Vampirella comics of the '70s but that's about it. Mark and I befriended editor David Bogart first and then did the stories as a favour to our mate and, in my case as a tip of the hat to solitary summer afternoons when mum and my sister were out and it would be just me, a Yorkie bar and Vampirella. The thing I most like about it is all the really clever, new vampire hunting techniques we made up — most of which were nicked for the Blade movies.

BL: Sometimes, the ends of your various series (especially the non-creator-owned ones) remind me of the story of Jerry Lee Lewis being forced to open for Chuck Berry. Lewis was so angry at the prospect of going on first that he set fire to his piano at the end and told Berry, "Follow that!". It sometimes feels as if you want the definitive version of something, then you make it so no one can follow that act. Am I reading too much into your writing style? Why do your series often seem to end with this feeling of "no one can follow that"?

GM: That's for them to say. I have no trouble 'following' the biggest names because I believe utterly in my own bullshit and remain convinced that my song and dance is as entertaining as any other. I like performing and the whole competitive aspect of the comics racetrack quite excites me. I've often stimulated artificial divisions and paradigm changes just to keep things jumping but the line between agent provocateur and asshole is thin as a blade and so often deliberately ignored.

I put all of my feelings into my work — the ugly, stupid feelings as well as the high and refined ... which lends it a slight feverish intensity perhaps. I'm often accused of favouring 'stream of consciousness' narrative or 'psychedelic' writing although I have no idea why. Trying to copy that kind of writing is always inadvisable and can lead to confusion. My plots are actually very tightly structured — even when they seem most freeform as in The Invisibles — and have their themes coiled tightly around them but I like to play with the familiar underlying structures of the adventure series form and rhythm. I always build to a definite ending from page one.

That shouldn't be too hard to follow. BL: Did you really hate the "grim and gritty" realism of the 1980s as you alluded to in a Wizard interview that came out when you took over JLA or did the dislike go more the way that the post-Watchmen/Dark Knight realism was ripped off by lesser artists until it became a cliche? GM: Probably. I really loved Dark Knight at the time and its power is still very much evident today, particularly in the visceral stabbing and punishing prose structure. It's clear Miller's guts were totally involved in the creation of that book.

Dark Knight seems strange to me nowadays, I have to admit, not least for the pall of right-wing terror and repressed homo-erotic longing which hangs over every page. It's a little raw to read now but I think it's a great, honest work and deserves its place in the pantheon. It's also one of the key American texts of the Reagan '80s along with Rambo and American Psycho. I don't think it can be seen as the last word on superheroes, as many have viewed it but it makes its point in an undeniably original way and is light years ahead, in both ambition and execution, of most other works in the field at the time. There are comics I love a whole lot more (the underrated Marshall Law, or particularly the sublime Strange Days and Paradax) but I won't begrudge Dark Knight its status as a classic and as a pop moment deluxe.

Watchmen seemed like such an exciting event and there are incredible moments — particularly in the Doctor Manhattan threads but in the end I felt unmoved by what seemed a highly self-conscious intellectual exercise. I still much prefer Miracleman, which I consider a far superior, more innovative and more influential piece of work but by the time Watchmen came out I was reading Brendan McCarthy and John Broome and jettisoning all my first stage rockets. The 'realist' stuff seemed stuffy and concept-album-y to me by 1986. Arkham Asylum was my kind of indie-goth response to all that. It made a packet.

Then it was the '90s ...

BL: As a follow up, have you read Dark Knight Returns or do you plan to? If you did, do you have any opinion on it?

GM: The whole thing felt slack and unconvincing in every area of its production. I assume Miller was talked into it by friends or paid a vast amount of money. Probably both. It's a shame he didn't give it his all but maybe I'm wrong and he's going through a deliberately primitive phase. I don't know. I loved his Daredevil: Born Again and Robocop 2, but his work is otherwise not to my taste generally. All that hardboiled- noir-crotch-sweat does nothing for me.

BL: When I read DK2, its attempts at "shock value" seemed heavy-handed and almost quaint, yet aspects of New X-Men truly do have the power to shock me.

What legitimate role does shock value have in comics?

GM: I love being shocked and challenged. I love walking away from a book, comic or movie with my expectations bent and my head expanded with new ways of seeing the world. The new is always shocking but I'd rather be shocked than mollycoddled and lied to. If people are so easily shocked by images of the fantastic, what the fuck are they doing reading comic books?

Who are these dull bastards who think that comic books — comic books!!! for Fucks sake!!!! — shouldn't be relentlessly shocking?

BL: How do you keep your shocks fresh and relevant, especially in a world that seems more and more shocking every day?

GM: I don't know. I never think about trying to shock people in the sense of 'We've reached page five without a shock — I'd better plug the finger into the socket. Hmm? What shocks people today?' etc.. Everyone has different limits so I simply tell the stories which seem to encapsulate my feelings about events around me. I grew up in a hard, angry, witty city and I still choose to live here. All my work is just coded symbolic responses to things I'm experiencing or watching or people I'm meeting. When these thoughts emerge as characters warring on paper they may seem shocking ... I don't know. The more I think about this the more ridiculous it seems.

BL: You said to me at San Diego Con that you outgrew your influences (possibly after your bout with serious illness) and were now ready to be an influence. That fascinated me. Could you talk more about that process of putting the past in the past?

GM: Nature does the job without any help from us. Things change. What once seemed fresh becomes dull. What once was dull is seen in a new light. I follow my own inner star of what seems worth writing or talking about.

What few followers seem to comprehend is that people prefer fresh material. The Johnny-Come-Lately book released to cash in on a vogue for vaguely fascistic superheroes will find that its novelty hungry audience has already seen the cliches of The Authority played out in a dozen other simulations of the original Warren Ellis notion. Trying to follow trends in comic books is marketplace death.

By the time your Ultimates knock-off comes out, the prevailing trend in comics will be away from 'realism' again and you'll miss the boat. It's best to do what your heart and head wants you to do. Chasing glory and trying to cash in on trends you didn't create leads to disaster in the end — I've recently noticed a new crop of writers dissing Mark's Authority then trying their best to replicate his style in hamfisted fashion.

BL: How and when did the idea of leaving your influences behind happen?

GM: It was an organic process. No particular idea came to me. I just felt sick when I listened to my old records or thought my old thoughts. I had to go find new music, new input, fresh perspectives I'd overlooked or ignored. If I want to get the vibe of London life at the dawn of the 21st century, I'd much rather listen to The Streets than play the Who or Blur, for instance.

For The Filth it was fun to look again at stuff I'd grown to despise — particularly from the '70s. I found new meaning in things I'd once loved but really come to hate, so The Filth is filled with references to Roger Dean and TV21 comics, Gerry Anderson, Syd Mead, Brian Lewis artwork, '70s porn, 'fantasy' illustrators like Roger Woodroffe, Rodney Matthews or Jim Fitzpatrick. Things which reminded me of bad teenage times became the building blocks of Art when twisted and processed through the lens of The Filth for laughs and...god help us, 'shocks'. There are some great shocks in The Filth.

I also felt I'd lived through all the psychedelic, alien abduction, swinging pop parallel reality stuff and was sick to death of the public persona I'd developed based on these elements of The Invisibles ... this 'Grant Morrison' person I barely recognise.

BL: How did it change your perspective on writing comics?

GM: The process is ongoing. As I said , I just read some Doom Patrols the other night and felt the call of sheer lunacy again. The age of the realist comic is winding down as trends mutate faster and faster. The time of lo-fi weirdness is almost upon us. This is when everyone has to open up their heads and spill out their personal shit for all to see, without trying to catch the trend. I think the current focus on craft will shortly be replaced by a focus on integrity and uniqueness. The emphasis on movie-like 'realism' will be replaced by an emphasis on dreamlike wonder and raw emotion. The comics about superhero celebrities, budgets and PR will be facing a challenge from less Blairite fantasies.

BL: What does it mean to now "be an influence"?

GM: It means that you see your old tricks or your old ideas turning up in the work of other people. This is very flattering but sadly makes the work of others seem boring, out-of-date and unconvincing. I can spot a writer in 'Grant Morrison' drag as soon as I see one come into the room, hoping to be given my blessing, tottering like a docker on ill-fitting six-inch heels.

BL: Good artists such as, say, the Beatles have such a broad base of work that those influenced by them latch on to different aspects of the creative vision. For instance, what Kate Bush got from the Beatles is as different from what XTC got from the Beatles as, say, Oasis or the Soft Boys got from the Beatles. While I see a lot of aspects of your work that are now in the mainstream (the panoramic wide-screen paneling of JLA, the deceptively "non-linear" style of your work that actually makes a lot of sense when read in Trade Paperback Form, the pop culture references), are there aspects of your work you wish would be picked up on that haven't been yet?

GM: There are no pop culture references in my recent and current work and I think it feels much fresher and more primal. There are no drugs or psychedelic trips in anything I'm doing right now. There's no magic in the traditional Crowleyan/Victorian sense we've been used to in comics which deal with the subject. The magic in The Filth is very modern and will not even be visible to most readers. Blank Magic, I call it. Most of my new stuff is moving back towards the feeling of fairy tales and the weird school readers of my childhood. Disney. I want to write stuff everyone can read.

BL: Artistically, there's a lot of death and regrowth to your vision. For instance, after Doom Patrol, it felt like you were taking a rest from comics or some such, only to come up with The Mystery Play and then The Invisibles. Similarly, after JLA ended and Invisibles ended, it felt like you took another rest to do a novel, then out came New X-Men.

GM: It's my dynamic and I have to deal with it. I reach the end of a project then I start to feel really sickened by what I've created. Then I go into a destructive phase where I trash what I've just done and throw out all my records. I feel embarrassed by my emotional connection, previously so intense, to something which now seems tarnished and dated. At the same time, I still get really pissed off if other people dare to criticise my ugly baby.

Years later I look back on the poor neglected story and love it with the understanding distance brings. Old stuff just curdles and goes sour in my heart for a while. Then I get loads of new ideas for comic books and come back smiling and the old stuff seems rich and alive again in hindsight. The Invisibles seems so totally uncool and misinterpreted at the moment but in a few years that comic will truly activate and be understood and re-evaluated so I'm trying to forget about it all until then.

It's a very powerful, alive and unusual thing The Invisibles.

BL: Are these just cases of "a change is as good as a rest" or is there more to it?

GM: Possibly. A change is as good as a rest so that may be explanation enough. Neurons in the brain have what is called 'refractory periods' where they stop firing completely and go into rest mode while other neurons take up the slack and carry the charge. I think you have to enter fallow, meditative phases sometimes — travel, take notes, laze around thinking about nothing and the brain soon refills with input to be processed. I like to spend a month on a lagoon in the Pacific between projects. Amsterdam. Melbourne. LA. I like to hear new music, read thoughts I disagree with.

A rest is also as good as a change.

BL: How do projects outside the comics medium affect your writing in the medium of comics?

GM: They give me a legitimacy as a writer which comics still can't provide. Sad but true. Although the bulk of my best and most significant work is for comics I'm still taken more seriously for writing movies, plays, articles or songs than I am for my huge body of comic book work.

BL: How has your writing style changed over the years?

GM: The storytelling in Zenith is not much different from that of X-Men but in between I've played with thought balloons, first-second and third-person captions, pictorial thought balloons, stream of consciousness multiple overlapping perspective narrative captions, retro-pastiche, 'digital' storytelling, 'dub' storytelling, 'widescreen' and iMAX.

In the end, I prefer just pictures with a few smart lines of dialogue really but its good to shake up the accepted story telling style every now and again. I think the filmic, captionless, sound effect-less style is becoming slightly formulaic now and the boundaries of what can be done with word and image on a page need to be tested again. Bryan Talbot did all this 'new' stuff twenty-five years ago in The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. I'd like to see more narrative although captions and 'tricks' tend to date a comic faster than anything else so I'm keen to see developments designed to counter this flaw.

BL: Yet, if one puts one's old influences in the past, one still needs input from the world around one and in the pop culture around one to continue having authorial significance. What do you now listen to/read/experience to continue keeping the ideas flowing and keeping relevant to the new century?

GM: There's always something new. If you listen to indie music and hate reggae then go listen to some dub albums. Pick up abstract POLE CDs. Immerse yourself in cultures you once hated. Go to clubs you never used to go to ... If you love '60s music hang out with some metal goths or hip hop MCs. Smash styles together and create new ones. Prise open your blinkers and turn all the fresh input into art.

BL: A trend I have noticed in comics is a post-modernistic tendency, where a creator decides to use a comic book character from another company by 'thinly veining' him or her or using historical characters along side comic book characters. What do you think of this trend in comics and what accounts for it?

GM: I think it's a played-out trend. There are now so many Superman knock-offs running around (Supreme, Samaritan, Apollo, Hyperion, Majestic etc) they could repopulate the planet Krypton with the bastards. I think the only place it can legitimately be called post-modern is where it occurs in Warren Ellis postmodern Planetary comic, which features analogues of familiar characters which are designed to critique and comment on the history and assumptions of the comic book industry.

A lot of people call The Invisibles post-modern and it definitely arose out of some cultural trends in the '80s and '90s but I was really struggling towards a new 'modernism with that series. It reared up out of the mire of post-modernism and shone the light of its eyes on the Next Way — something I've called neo-modernism for want of an official name. I think post-modernism is a misnomer anyway — post-modernism is actually the decadent, recombinant phase of culture which appears prior to modernism in a given cycle. It should properly be called pre-modernism, I reckon. The Filth is my first totally deliberate neo-modernist work I think.

BL: Another trend I have noticed in comics since your days on JLA has been bigger panels, with two page splash pages and so on. It seems to be an attempt to make comics more like action movies. I find the trend to be a mixed blessing. While it makes the comics more exciting, it makes comics a much 'quicker' read (I'm able to polish off the average comic of today much more quickly than that of a comic from the 1980s).

GM: They'll get faster too if Marvel has its way and comics come out twice a month. That's okay. The nuances become more important and the soap style is paramount.

BL: What do you think of this trend, having been a father of it?

GM: The trend really came from Image Comics. Widescreen was my attempt to take the static Image 'pin-up' layouts and bring a little storytelling function to them. Widescreen originates on pages 16/17 of JLA 2 (and The Authority, if I'm being mischievous, make their debut on pages 19 and 20 of JLA 26) The typical widescreen image should contain huge amounts of information with narrative function — JLA is full of this. Instead of the full-page intro of yet another team of snarling deformities in the Image style, a typical JLA splash would show Europe replaced by a vast firepit, implying the conquering might of Darkseid and all manners of other story possibilities. I was also influenced by the increasingly more grandiose action movies of the '90s which emphasised spectacle above character and seemed an ideal template for the DC superhero model.

BL: Is it being abused by some authors or does it still have a legitimate function?

GM: I don't know.

BL: As sad as I am to say this, it feels like the mature title (especially the mature superhero title) is all but dead. Not artistically, as you and Mark Millar (amongst others) are doing it, but in terms of actual output of good mature titles at companies other than Marvel. It feels as if everything's becoming more and more all-ages and more conservative in comics right now, which leaves a comic book reader that is an adult up a certain creek.

GM: I'm doing my bit for this demographic with things like LeSexy, but I prefer to aim all of my work at intelligent 14-year-olds. When I was that age, I loved Jim Starlin's Warlock, McGregor and Engelhart — all the brainy, psychedelic, political stuff. If you write for that clever kid you'll hit everyone's pleasure centers I think.

'Mature titles' are simply the ones you discover when you're a teenager and you've outgrown children's stories.

BL: What can be done to bring back the mature title?

GM: I'm working on two titles aimed at a grown-up audience right now with another three in the pipeline. That's what I'm doing. I have no idea what my colleagues are up to; I hear all kinds of testosterone-fuelled talk so I'm looking forward to the results.

BL: My husband was amazed to see that the New X-Men is also a reconfiguration of the original X-Men of the 1960s, with the White Queen being sort of Ice Woman and Angel being the new version of Angel. Did you have this idea from the start?

GM: I hadn't noticed that so no. Interesting.

BL: I call your work "avant-garde traditionalism" because it has a real love/hate relationship with the past and a certain guarded idealism about the future. You know this stuff and love it, but you also see that resting on the past is a trap. How right am I about this and can you elucidate more on this ambivalence?

GM: I love it because I grew up on it and know its tranformative power. What I'm not interested in is recreating the exact experiences of my own youth in the form of retro-pastiche. Audiences change. I'm interested in what provokes awe or debate in 2001 or 2010 not what worked in 1965 or 1942, so the task seems to be to take a feeling and dress it in contemporary clothes to carry new memes or meanings.

My idealism about the future isn't guarded; I'm an out-and-out Utopian.

BL: On a certain level, I see New X-Men as a metaphor for the state of comics right now. The New X-Men are the talented creators, the comic book bureaucracy (especially the way it was in the past) as the U-Men, taking what they want from the creators and throwing the rest away, and the students as being the comic book readers and those authors coming behind current creators.

Am I reading WAY too much into this or am I on to something?

GM: No, you're interpreting the text which is the whole point of reading and appreciating. My work is always filled with numerous layers of analogy and metaphor, much of which is deliberately planted and some of which is purely subconscious and usually cringingly embarrassing.

Which is my way of not answering this question really. There's a lot about the creator/publisher/consumer relationship in X-Men so you're onto something certainly ....

BL: You write female characters really well, in a way that is mostly three dimensional, strong, and smart.

How do you write such strong female characters when many creators write female characters as men in dresses (NOT Lord Fanny types, but just what is sometimes referred to as the 'dickless male'), sex objects, or victims?

GM: Again, it's not something I think about much. I grew up in a home with two very strong, intelligent and forthright women and I've tended to be attracted to those types throughout my life so I assume that I'm writing about the kind of women I like and hang out with. I can also have fun reversing that and exposing and articulating my unconscious hostility towards strong women. I think it might expand my range to write about women who are weak stupid or ignorant for a change.

BL: Anyway, with Fantastic Four 1234, while every other character is updated, Sue stills seems stuck in the 'why ain't I nothing without a man?” fixation she had in the 1960s. When everyone else in the FF got a new psychological update that still holds faith to the 1960's comic, why is Sue still somewhat Jackie Kennedy-Kirby -drew-me-esque? Did I just miss something in your authorial intent or is Sue just impossible to update?

GM: I read your analysis and I think what you may have missed from my portrayal of Sue was the class element I was introducing into the Sue/Alicia dynamic. The FF are rich, Alicia is poor. Alicia sees right through Sue's gripes to the spoilt rich girl element of her personality beneath and so the undercurrent of the conversation had a certain prowling menace based on very different approaches to money and privilege. The issue of gender is a sideline.

I also think you're being incredibly optimistic when you suggest that women tend always to emotionally support one another. Based on long and painful observation, I'm afraid I don't believe this to be true.

BL: There seems to be a thematic tendency in your comics to have the characters both be acted up and yet 'writing' the comic. Animal Man: we find out in the last issue that you are a 'character' in the comic and the creator. Doom Patrol: one interpretation is that Crazy Jane 'wrote' the comic in her fragmented imagination. Invisibles: Round Robin is the writer and the written. Fantastic Four 1234: Doom and Reed Richards are 'writing' the comic's events in virtual reality. Even in New X-Men, Cassandra is a character and yet is controlling a lot of the action.

GM: Its always been my desire to remove myself as author and let the pure text live for itself. I'm only a processing station for roving memes — my genetic predisposition is towards storytelling (my family were Irish seanochaidhs or professional bullshitters dating way back. My grandfather told my mum weird stories of 'Larry O'Keefe and the All-Seeing Eye' before I was born and as a result, perhaps, I seem to be adept at splicing concepts in interesting ways which allow one idea to mate with another and produce exotic children. The memes like to mate in my fertile mindwater and as long as they do I'm happy to report the fruits of their spawning. The idea of stories flowing through me is very appealing and I've done a lot of good work in a state of trance and surrender to the text. My physical body carries the gene and the meme and the less involved in that process 'I' become the smoother it seems to run.

I cured my near fatal Staph aureus infection in 1986 by 'magically' bargaining with the germ and converting it to pure story in the pages of The Invisibles. Staph Aureus appears as in hypersigil form as the Gnostic 'Outer Church' in that story.

Elephant head, elephant head, I worship a god with an elephant head.

BL: While important to authorial freedom, can't some fan alienation seen as an inadvertent result of constant re-boots of comics? For instance, fans feel they have a history with a comic and its characters. Then, it's rebooted for modern times. Goodbye history. Hawkman's been rebooted and re-configured so constantly, you couldn't even use him in JLA. How can the industry balance the need for new stories about old characters and authorial freedom with longer-term fans feeling of 'history' with the characters? Can it be done? Should it be done?

GM: I think it's simply this: that the time has come to wave goodbye to history. Until the day the publishers allow characters to grow old, die and be replaced, there can be no real use for 'continuity'. Otherwise, allow characters to simply go on forever with no pretense towards real time and under the full understanding that this is an imaginary world made by generations of workers.

Again, no real use for long-term continuity. I think it's possible to make a nod towards a character's established history but at this stage, with some characters' origins dating back to the early years of a previous century, it's unlikely that anyone, apart from Kurt Busiek, would be enthusiastic and anal enough to read and incorporate every single story and event from a character's endlessly repeating life.

BL: Beyond your own, which Marvel titles do you read as a fan? Which are your favorites and why?

GM: I read the comics my friends write. Milligan, Millar, Ellis, Ennis, etc. I like Amazing Spider-Man. I know too much now to really separate the books from the business which means I read fewer comics with a lot less pleasure.

BL: Any hints about what's next for the New X-Men that you can tell us about?

GM: The second year is looser and stranger — lots of wild stuff based on some of my favorite Euro-comics, then school riots and a breakdown of discipline at Xavier's, a new way of looking at the 'Phoenix' concept and the X-Men vs. the Ultimate Enemy of all intelligent life.

BL: Any current projects (or ones in the foreseeable future) that you can tell us about?

GM: As far as comics go, I have The Filth, LeSexy, We3 and others in progress alongside the Marvel stuff. I've been living in Hollywood for months at a time and I'm involved at various stages of various movie projects. I'm doing a lot of work on video games including Battlestar Galactica of all things and that's the area I'm becoming most interested in for the future.

Everything will be games in ten years.

Everything.