AFTER-IMAGE #6, January 1988

By Steve Holland

Scene setting:
It's Sunday afternoon at UKCAC'87, and everyone's a little quirky. Grant Morrison has perched himself on a chair opposite me in the bar of the Institute of London, having just come off the 2000AD panel. It's fairly empty because the Watchmen panel is due next downstairs, and everyone wants to get a seat at the front, but there are still a few bodies scattered about, convention attendees relaxing from the hectic bustle of the dealer's room, or just sleeping off the excesses of the previous night. There are some noisy youngsters running around whose every cry was picked up by the tape recorder in perfect accordance with Sod's Law of Acoustics. I'm nervously moving the tape from table to knee and back again, trying to figure out where it's going to record best from, and wondering where I should begin, when we get around to it.
I'm lucky, in that Grant Morrison is a very affable chap, slightly imposing in his dark glasses, with a wry sense of humour which made him a popular panellist at UKCAC. He speaks softly and carefully on a wide range of topics, not all of them comics, and not all of which made it into the tape. It's easy to tell that behind the glasses is a very lucid and active mind, and the first thing you might recognise in him is confidence, the knowledge that something is going well.
Although still in his mid-twenties, Grant has already managed to tuck a lot of experience under his belt; at the age of sixteen he was being described as "a lad with a great future" in a local paper under the headline "He's Quick on the Draw!" The article also featured Monad, a superhero creation of Grant's which he had been drawing for his own pleasure. The circle is now complete, as Grant has returned to the superhero with "Zenith", although he is no longer drawing his own creations. With Zenith riding so high in the popularity charts at the moment, it may seem strange that Grant felt that the early article was a little over-optimistic; he plays down any thoughts of child-prodigy, although he had high hopes of his early writing and drawing. So what made him try his hand at comics? "Really it was just desperation because I didn't get into Art College and there was nothing to do," he says. "Near Myths was being produced in Edinburgh and I met up with the editor, Rob King, at a comic convention in Glasgow. I'd done these sketches which I showed him, and ended up doing some work for him. It was £10 a page, script and art. I thought that was it - my career was made and I'd be a millionaire before I was twenty!"
The lead character of his Near Myths stories was Gideon Stargrave, the background a thermodynamically unstable universe of engrams and entropy. The storytelling technique may have lost a number of readers, with quick cuts from scene to scene, laterally inserted information which at the time doesn't seem to be relevant, more akin to William Burroughs than Michael Moorcock, who at first sight many thought to be the main influence.
"Stargrave was originally based on the lead character in J. G. Ballard's 'The Day Of Forever'; everyone thought he was ripped off from Jerry Cornelius, but it was Ballard. The Stargrave stories were completely off the wall... we were given the freedom to do anything we wanted and everyone had ambitions to raise comics up out of the gutter and into the realms of High Art. In the end, though, the lack of discipline resulted in self-indulgent and impenetrable stories that made no attempt to communicate to the average reader.
"Having said that, there is a lot of real personal stuff in there and it's probably closer to 'Art', with a capital 'A', than anything I've done since. Looking back, I can see that there was a lot of value there. I think if we'd managed another couple of issues... everyone was finding their feet by issue five, when Bryan took over editing and I think another couple of issues would have really established us."
Issue five, under the guidance of Bryan Talbot, was to be the last issue, with financial chaos finally overcoming everyone's enthusiasm for the title. Talbot was one of the artists to first come to prominence in the pages of Near Myths, with his "Adventures of Luther Arkwright", along with Graham Manley and the first strip work by Tony O'Donnell. Perhaps in the post-Watchmen world of comics, Near Myths would have been more successful, and in retrospect it can be seen as some years ahead of its time. Its folding put paid to another series written by Grant, namely "Abraxas", a galaxy-spanning space opera, set partly on the future Earth of 1985. A ten-page Prologue (one of three) was completed at that time, admirably drawn in colour by Tony O'Donnell, which eventually saw print in 1986 in Harrier Comic's Sunrise. Even this version (now reduced to black and white) has had its problems, and sadly not weathered the black & white glut of the past year: Sunrise folded after only two issues, and two promising Prologues are all that exist of the story.
Grant's next published work was for the D.C. Thomson science fiction pocket library series, Starblazer: "We'd been doing Near Myths for a couple of issues and I saw an advert, in the Sunday Post of all places. D.C. Thomson were looking for science fiction writers to work on a new series they were planning, so I just wrote off and sent them a synopsis which was accepted straight away. I'd included some illustrations of the characters and they asked me to draw the story as well. I think they regretted it afterwards. It took a long while to do; I was working on it all day and night and sending in these notes saying “Please excuse me, I think I've developed glaucoma so it may take another few weeks." I actually did visit the optician and he told me I'd messed up my left eye through overwork. It's okay now, but that was one of the reasons I stopped drawing. The Starblazer work was a bit rough, no backgrounds.
"Again, though, I look back on those stories with fondness. In complete contrast to Near Myths, the Starblazer work taught me a lot about the disciplines of plot structure and the necessity for clarity and economy in the storytelling."
For the series, Grant concocted the adventures of one Mikal R. Kayn who, after the first adventure, was a 'blind' futuristic detective who could only 'see' in the infra-red. The stories were notable for a strong secondary character, one of the few females to appear in the series, and some good artwork from an Argentinian artist, Alcatena. The character has proven popular enough to continue, although no longer written by Grant, nor with the stronger female companion, replaced instead by her blundering Conanesque brother, and bringing the series unnecessarily down to Starblazer's standard fare.
At the same time as his work on the early Starblazer stories, a new series was launched upon the unsuspecting world: 'Captain Clyde', a Glasgow-based super-hero who appeared in 150 weekly episodes written and drawn by Grant for three newspapers. Here Grant combined numerous influences in both artwork and storytelling; in an interview some years ago he confessed a strong artistic influence in Neal Adams (having said that, the Adams 'school' of artwork was so widely spread at the time, it was probably impossible to escape). In comics he says that Len Wein influenced him, particularly the Justice League stories which fired his early enthusiasm for comics. Outside the field, his taste in writers is diverse, ranging from Alan Garner to Harlan Ellison. These eclectic influences were tied in with other interests, particularly the occult, and the Captain Clyde adventures make interesting reading when compared with the current Zenith storyline, which still shows the same basis, yet with added zest and technique. Clyde harked back to the previously mentioned Monad, and the new strip used many elements from its previous incarnation, and lasted for three years, surviving death and resurrection, countless supernatural enemies including the oddly named Sinister Circle, but not surviving an editorial decision to kill him off in favour of a safe, syndicated strip, namely "Tom and Jerry"!
Apart from the occasional Starblazer, there was no new strip-work from Grant for some time, a period he spent gathering together various influenced, writing two as yet unpublished novels, and playing in an "almost successful" band. His next story showed a tremendous increase in storytelling power: "The Liberators", which appeared in Warrior.
"I'd given up on comics ever making any progress until I picked up Warrior in 1982. Captain Clyde was coming to an end and I had serious doubts about the worth of continuing in comics. Then I saw that Alan [Moore] was attempting all the things I thought would never be attempted and my interest was fired all over again."
Essentially a 'mood' piece. The Liberators established its tone with remarkably few words. The narrator is in touch telepathically with a group of people approaching an alien spacecraft, and her inability to save the group (being so far removed from the action) is conveyed with a strength previously unseen in Grant's writing. Unfortunately, although several episodes were written. Warrior folded, and even a plan to continue the series in America has fallen by the wayside. Grant has had more than his fair share of bad luck when it comes to titles folding away from under him.
"I used to feel really paranoid - I discovered Glenn Fabry feels the same - because every comic I started work on would immediately fold. I'm usually in the last issue. Remember 'Pssst!'? Well, I had stuff planned for that. I'd done a new Gideon Stargrave story... it's my favourite one I've ever done in my life and it's never been seen anywhere. And that was due to come out in the next issue of Pssst!, and suddenly there was no next issue, it was all over. There were a lot of independent comic projects that I was involved in that never made it past the planning stage, so I began to feel that I was some kind of albatross - it got so that I just had to think about submitting work to a comic and the bloody thing would go down the tubes!"
Slightly more successful was his work on 'Zoids': "Marvel phoned me up because I'd done one thing for them which was the Captain Granbretan story in Captain Britain. That was the first in a planned series of 'Tales of the Alternate Captains', and I'd also done Captain Anglia and Captain Kingdom. Of course, Captain Britain was immediately cancelled! Ignorant of the fact that I was the kiss of death, they approached me and asked me if I wanted to do 'Zoids'; and my first thought was, 'Christ, no! It's those stupid toys!' But the more I thought about this... there were these red and blue robots and it began to seem like a - I started to get ideas above my station - it was a metaphor of world politics, and there was the red on one side and the blue on the other, and these poor people in the middle who were just ordinary people, trapped between titanic forces they couldn't understand. So the first episode, 'Old Soldiers Never Die', was about death and inevitability. I sort of jumped in with combat boots, forgetting that this was a comic for kids, and it's probably the closest I'll come to something like Watchmen; I put everything into it. There was stuff from the Tarot that nobody will ever notice, there were all sorts of recurring images and symbols. And the strange thing was, the readership really got into it."
A planned Zoids comic to be scripted by Grant was another project which never came to fruition, although his work for Marvel U.K. has continued to appear, with stories in Dr Who Monthly. While well received, he is a little doubtful about writing more.
"I'm a bit upset with the art now that John Ridgway's not doing much and Tim Perkins is taking over. I like working with John but he's just too busy now to devote much of his time to Dr Who. I don't know if I'll do any more Dr Whos, but I quite enjoyed it. I really liked Colin Baker's Doctor, but he was never given a decent storyline. The potential was wasted. I'm nervously waiting for the reaction of the readers to my new comic story, because there's a lot of stuff about continuity and I'm afraid I screwed it up. I based the story [The World Shapers] on a text piece I remembered from an old annual - I think it was 1966 - which I thought was set on the planet Marinus. Recently I discovered the annual at a comic mart, and when I re-read the text story it wasn't set on Marinus at all and it wasn't anything like I'd remembered. So, I've messed with the continuity and I've also brought back Jamie as an old man, which will probably bring in some flak from the die-hards. Thing is, if you're going to do it, you might as well make the effort to try something different. I think if I'd written for the T.V. series and brought back an old Jamie, it would have been hailed as a masterpiece; because it's the comic, they'll probably say 'You're messing with sacred stuff!'
"There was a Dr Who story they wouldn't let me do last year. I came up with this idea where the Doctor meets two future versions of himself, a sort of 'Three Doctors' thing. I thought, 'I won't do two Doctors from the past, I'll do two from the future', to make it a bit different. One of them was a woman and they wouldn't let me do that at all. They said the readership wouldn't accept it. There was some big controversy."
The same readers have readily accepted a penguin as the Doctor's companion for some time; Grant has his own opinions on the subject of Frobisher.
"I wanted to kill him in my first story, but they wouldn't let me do that, either. Now I think they've decided to get rid of him anyway. The only reason he's hung around so long is that John Ridgway just loves to draw talking penguins. I'm sure there's a psychiatric name for that, but it's not really something I'd want to go into..."
Grant has finally come to public attention through the pages of 2000AD. After a number of 'Future Shock' stories (most of them little more than extended puns, although a couple did look quite promising), and a couple of brief tales about Ulysses Sweet (whose hobby is mindless violence, and who can identify every bone in the human body by the sound of it snapping!), he has come to the forefront as scripter of the highly popular series Zenith, whose success has surprised even his creator.
"I must admit I didn't expect the reaction to be as good as it has, especially with the younger readers, but kids have been coming up to me at the convention and saying they really like it. It's a surprise to me, because I thought there would be at least an early resistance to the fact that it takes place in the present day and it's a superhero story. It's very gratifying."
The original artist slated to do the series was Brendan McCarthy, with whom Grant had first discussed the idea of a superhero for 2000AD. McCarthy designed the characters, but other work meant that he was unable to draw the series. Grant has previously worked with Steve Yeowell whilst writing for Spiderman & Zoids, and the choice has proved fortuitous.
"I liked Steve from the first time I saw his stuff, which was in Totally Alien magazine. The most impressive thing about him is that I've seen some of the later episodes and his work is getting better all the time. I think Alan Davis was the same: put under pressure their work just improves. Some people fall apart under pressure, but I think Steve's one of those people who... it just brings out the best!
"The original Zenith synopsis was written two years ago for Fantastic Adventure - the working title for a project David Lloyd never quite managed to get off the ground. It was a boys' adventure comic for IPC, but eventually they rejected it in favour of Mask, the toy comic, which was a real disappointment to me. I had three strips in Fantastic Adventure! I really wanted to do this thing, you know, and David had lined up some really nice artists - that's where Steve Yeowell actually got his first sort of professional break, and I was also working with John Burns, which was amazing. Anyway, one of the things I came up with was a superhero idea called Zenith. Originally it was a real grim story, closer to the mood of Watchmen, with an alternative world history and various generations of superheroes, but by the time 2000AD expressed an interest in doing a superhero story, Watchmen was already out. I still wanted to use the Zenith concept, but we decided to downplay the parallel world angle and to concentrate on making it more light-hearted and disposable, so that it wouldn't really be covering the same territory as Alan and Dave's stuff. We definitely wanted to get away from the idea of the mentally unstable superhero, which has begun to dominate the whole market. I mean, reality doesn't necessarily have to be so grim and gritty. The only grit in my life is the stuff in the cats' litter tray, and I'm not really keen on this new cliché that equates 'reality' with people leading grim and terrible lives.
"A major source of irritation to me is all the self-congratulatory hype that's coming out of comics now. It's almost as if nobody can actually believe that comics have begun to produce work with some slight degree of thought behind it and we're getting a kind of hysterical over-reaction to a few well-written superhero stories. As far as I 'm concerned, we still haven't approached the achievements of television drama, we haven't approached films, we haven't approached novels at all and I think everyone's going to have to try an awful lot harder before we even see mainstream acceptance and legitimacy on the horizon. For instance, I just watched the Dennis Potter season on T.V. recently, and beside the kind of insight and humanity that Potter displays, even things like Dark Knight and Watchmen just look silly and melodramatic. There's just so much further we must go".
Undoubtedly, there are still advances to be made, particularly in the U.K., where the comic is (and has been for seventy years) an instantly-disposable entertainment for children. Without a drastic rethink on the part of the few comic publishers we have (or the arrival of new publishers), the only advance possible in this country is to give comics a more street-credible image, something 2000AD has achieved in a way over the past ten years. Yet the bias still remains and the perception of most comic editors is that writers must write down to their readership. The question of censorship has been raised on the panel; had there been any editorial censorship on Zenith?
"No... I've been really lucky on Zenith, as I said on the panel. It's just simple things, like people going to the bathroom, or kicking each other in the balls, everyday stuff like that. We've got a fairly graphic Freudian horror in at the end, and although these things aren't what you'd really call great advances for the medium, it's nice to try and push them through. I had some bad experiences with the Future Shocks, because they would just re-write them and my name's still on it. Nobody knows that these things have been completely changed and some of them read like Janet & John, with brain damage. A couple of them were altered so much that they were almost... [looks embarrassed] ... I was kind of worried that they would do that with Zenith, since it was my first major project for 2000AD; they could have screwed it up horribly and ruined my career. There's some border line stuff coming up so it will be interesting to see if any of that has been censored. I think I'm getting away with most things and I must admit [editor] Richard Burton's been pretty supportive and enthusiastic about Zenith from the beginning".
Zenith Book One ends with Prog 550, but that will be far from the last readers will see of Grant Morrison. After a lot of bad luck, he at last has a number of future projects lined up which seem certain to appear. Apart from further work with 2000AD, he also has projects lined up with DC in America.
"I think they want Zenith Book Two out fairly quickly after the end of the first series, but I don't plan to start work on it until December. We've now plotted to the end of Book Four, after which Steve and I probably won't be fit to continue, so it's worked out to come to a fairly apocalyptic conclusion. From Book Two, the William Blake elements which are only hinted at in the first series begin to come out more strongly. Blake's poetry and all the Albion stuff in his prophetic books becomes an integral part of the storyline as it progresses. Each of the Zenith books actually has a title which doesn't turn up in the comic, but which will be seen on the Titan reprints. The current storyline is called 'Tygers'. Book Two is 'The Hollow Land', and it reveals what happened to Zenith's parents, as well as providing more clues about the mysterious plan devised by the 'sixties characters. Book Three is 'War In Heaven', which is our answer to Crisis on Infinite Earths. It features about a million superheroes, including an anarchist super-team called Black Flag. Book Four, the last one, is 'Jerusalem'. I don't really want to say anything about that, but if you know your Blake, you can work out the allusion and draw your own conclusions.
"As for DC, I'm working on three things for them at the moment. One of them is Animal Man, a character from the 'sixties. He had three adventures and then went into limbo, surfacing recently to appear briefly in the aptly-named 'Forgotten Heroes'. He was just another one of those characters I loved when I was a kid... he had a really nice costume, and everything. It's a purely nostalgic thing. I suddenly had the chance to work for DC, so I asked if I could do Animal Man because nothing was ever done with him and I thought he deserved better than that. I've already written three issues of a four issue mini-series for that. Again, I decided no psychotic superheroes, so he's just a guy struggling to bring up his kids without a great deal of money... well, actually his wife's doing most of the struggling while Animal Man buggers about, wasting time. But he's got these super-powers and he decides he might as well take a stab at being a successful superhero, before he's past it. I suggested that we could make him more of a radical character, get him into animal liberation, and that sort of thing. He's got these Animal powers, so why doesn't he do something for animals themselves, instead of just fighting crime? DC came back and said, 'Go even further. Make him really radical'. So he becomes a complete fanatic, with his family: he won't let them eat meat or wear leather. It's something I feel quite strongly about - the exploitation - so it gives me something... I don't want to make it a soapbox, but I can bring issues like that into the stories. I like the idea that I can do a superhero who'll just go out and smash up Russian whaling ships!
"The other thing I'm working on is an Arkham Asylum graphic novel called 'A Serious House on Serious Earth'. Dave McKean's going to be drawing that, and the whole project's shaping up to be something really interesting. What I'm doing here is... you know the asylum from Batman stories? - yeah, well it's April the first and the inmates take over the Asylum. They are holding hostages, and they demand that Batman be sent in because he belongs in a nut-house with the rest of them! So it's a sort of psychological thriller, with Batman going through all sorts of mental and physical cruelties at the hands of his worst enemies. The story draws its inspiration from the medieval Feast of Fools and the World-Turned-Topsy-Turvy ceremonies when the rich would swap places with the beggars, criminals would become clergy and they'd all enjoy a day-long orgy of role-playing. So we look at all the familiar Batman paraphernalia from the viewpoint of these insane villains.
"The whole thing's set in the asylum, so I want to make it really claustrophobic and nightmarish. It's fairly strong stuff. We've got the Joker in a dress and an anarchy badge, the Mad Hatter's become a deranged paedophile with a Lewis Carroll obsession. I've tried to approach all the villains in a completely new way, and hopefully it'll shock quite a few people when they see what we've done, especially with Two-Face. It's something I'm really looking forward to.
"The third main project is a revival of an old 'forties character, called Kid Eternity. It was a sort of 'Heaven Can Wait' concept, about a boy who was killed during the war. It turns out that he shouldn't actually have died - there's been some kind of cock-up in the hereafter, so to compensate, they give him special powers and send him back to Earth. Strangely enough, he's got a white polo-neck, just like the Phantom Stranger - there must be a Man-at-C&A's in heaven, or something! I'm revamping that but there's been a bit of resistance to it, because it's out-and-out horror. DC are a little worried, because I've turned Kid Eternity into an agent of Chaos. The whole thing is inspired by Bertrand Blier, the French film director - he makes brilliantly funny and vicious films that have no redeeming moral values in them at all and I wanted to do something equally nihilistic. The whole DC Universe concept of Order and Chaos is a pain in the arse. It's so simplistic to assume that Order means good and Chaos means evil. I'm trying to show things from the Chaos side and show that Chaos is the well-spring of creativity and change, whereas Order is the concept behind all totalitarian regimes. It's going to be a genuine occult book, based on my own research and experiments in that area, so I'm hoping DC will err on the side of artistic integrity and allow me to keep the graphic scenes of disembowelment".


Postscript:
Before me is a letter from Grant, which says, "Projects I didn't mention at the time but which you can include as a postscript (only if you want to) are a biography of Shelley (it's set in a bizarre cross between early 19th century and today, and has Shelley and Byron as comic strip writers) and the continuation of my Animal Man mini-series into a regular monthly". Grant Morrison is a busy chap, and thanks are long overdue, not only for the interview but also for finding time to edit it and dig out some excellent artwork to accompany it.
Now, about that expense account...