How do you interview one of your heroes?
Probably something like below. You ask questions about the book they're promoting with not too many nerdy asides about writing Batman.
You see, Grant Morrison has, over a long and varied and consistent career, changed the face of comics. He has refreshed Superman and Batman textured, he has created multi-layered stories that change the way we see the world, he has refreshed long-enduring characters and brought them up-to-date.
And he's just written his first book, about superheroes. Supergods is part memoir of Grant's work and the people he's interviewed over the years, and partly a discussion/potted history of superheroes and why they're important to us. So I interviewed him. About that book. And managed to sneak in more nerdier questions about DC Comics later on.
Even if you're not a fan of comic books, Supergods is a book that says more about the human spirit than most things out there at the moment.
> Hi Grant – I’m a longtime fan of yours and have to stop myself asking you all manner of nerdy questions. So to introduce you to people who may not have been reading DC Comics in the past ten years, what would you say is the best jumping-on point for your work?
The best thing would possibly be, in the superhero world, All Star Superman. Other things could be The Invisibles or Flex Mentallo. You could start anywhere and get something back.
> One of the themes that always seem to be present in most of your work is a level of confidence trickery and scamming…
It just seems to me to be the way the world works. Everyone’s working on their little patch of the quilt. You get all these strange interference effects with everyone’s attempts to make sense of things. I always felt there was an element of scamming in the world. Even the idea of being a human being in a peculiar world where we don’t know why we’re here and what it’s all about, there has always been a sense of magic and illusion and conjuring. In its best sense as well as its negative sense.
> Supergods is your book. It’s in places a memoir, as well as a discussion on our relationship with superheroes. Who in your opinion wrote the most honest version of a superhero?
The way I look at these things is that they tend to be elements of the human personality, which is why I liken them to gods. Because in the past, that’s who the gods were. They represented the eternal qualities of the human experience like love and hate. I don’t look for superheroes to be human. The Watchmen explored what it was like to be a superhero in a world of humans. Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass explores what it would be like for a 16-year-old boy who wanted to be a superhero but had to face up to the pressures of a real world. The most real superheroes are the ones who operate in psycho-dramas instead of attempting to be real, to talk specifically about the real world and its politics. They work best as elemental or eternal of the human experience. Most superheroes do do that. So I feel like they do say something profound and meaningful. Superman, the very first superhero, speaks to a basic human idea that somewhere inside the ‘stuffy shirt’ there is a better version of us, a dream version, a more exalted special wonderful version. That basic idea has been examined in so many different ways by people over the seventy years of superhero comics and films. Narrowing that down would be difficult. All of them have had something useful to say to us over the years.
> Why do you think we love them so much?
They’re a crude and final attempt to discuss what we would look like if we had a future. The media narrative is to deny us any future – the planet is dying, all the lights are turning out – if it’s not war or plague, it’ll be some other form of extinction that takes us down. It’s not like the sixties when we imagined a space-faring future of humanity taking off into the blue yonder. In the absence of that utopianism, superheroes are a last gasp attempt to imagine us as we are if we decided to become better people, if we used technology to enhance the finer qualities of our lives. They are representative of all the qualities we wish we had more of. Each decade has a different take on that. In the thirties it was the socialist champion of the oppressed. Today, it’s the celebrity billionaire businessman who tries his best to help people. It’s always about the proactive positive side of the human personality coming through and we like representing that.
> How do you make a timeless character?
You make a timeless character through sheer chance. A lot of those characters who were around at the same time as Superman have been forgotten but he has survived. Think of King Arthur, Robin Hood and Sinbad – they have survived to the present day. If you can capture something very specific about the human experience, and you can transform into a character that represents that, you have a chance at longevity. Again, the time in superhero universes is different to real time; they’ve been constantly refreshed and updated. In the book, I say that Superman and Batman are realer than we are. They were here long before us and they’ll be here long after us. They’re continually sustained by people’s attention. There’s something interesting about these types of characters and how they proliferate themselves through time.
> What was the one comic book you read that left an impression?
Marvel Man. It was black and white. Marvel Man meets Baron Munchausen – superheroes and con-man in one book. That theme that set me up for life.
> What is your biggest achievement to date?
I don’t know. I don’t think like that. Probably still being a live? As a writer…?
> Well, what are you most proud of?
Probably the work I’ve done with Frank Quietely. Flex Mentallo, the end of The Invisibles and All-Star Superman.
> Legions of comic book fans look up to Grant Morrison. Who does Grant Morrison look up to?
Pretty much everybody. I love Garth Ennis’ work, Warren Ellis’ work. I like Alan Moore, Pat Mills, Peter Milligan… I’m a pretty uncritical reader of comics. I love everyone’s work. I’m usually impressed by anything.
> What about fiction?
I don't read much fiction, much more non-fiction. The biggest influences on me as a kid were from TV dramas from Dennis Potter, David Rudd – they left a big impression on me. In term of fiction, when I was growing up, Tolkien and Alan Garner were the people who taught me about storytelling.
> Working on so many different books, how do you balance so many different arcs in different titles?
I have a ton of notebooks on the go to try and keep track of everything. Most of the time, these things are on a strict deadline so you don’t have much downtime. They’re done in very much a live performance style. I have a bunch of stories I continually juggle and a whole bunch of long term plans I continually revise to suit new ideas. It’s like spinning plates.
> Who’s the most complex character for you to work on?
So far, it’s been Batman. He’s got a lot of angles. There’s been a lot of different interpretations of the character. It seems very easy to play that character in any way. It can be comedic, dark psychological, or simple crime noir. It can be cartoonish. Batman seems to resist all kinds of interpretation and so he is the most complicated to work on.
> What are you currently reading?
Books about dinosaurs. I’m reading everything DC puts out because they send me a big box every month. I’m reading the new DC stuff.
