HERO ILLUSTRATED #9, March 1994

WHAT’S BURIED IN GRANT’S TOMB?

By Steve Darnall


Not long ago a friend of mine got the chance to read a stack of material written by Grant Morrison. Several weeks later, I saw her again and asked her opinion on the books she'd read, which included the wildly anarchic Doom Patrol, the wonderfully satirical Animal Man, the dark, multi-leveled Arkham Asylum and a wacky, apocalyptic two-issue run on Hellblazer. The first words out of her mouth weren't about the books, but about the author:
"Was he raised by circus people?" "Actually, I was raised by gorillas in the African jungle," the soft-spoken Morrison jokes in a quiet brogue. Actually, he was raised by gorillas in Scotland. No, that's not it either... but the Scotland part is right... oh, hell, take it, Grant...
"I don't know if you could call my family 'circus people,' but they were fairly colorful characters," he admits. That's putting it mildly: "One of my uncles is actually a white witch, stuff like that. I suppose I come from a long line of Bohemians. I remember when I was a kid everyone would be around at my parents' place, reading Dr. Strange comics, and talking about Jack Kirby and stuff like that. There was always a grounding of that stuff." Grant's parents, meanwhile, "were always involved in political activism of one sort or another, so it was that kind of milieu I grew up in. [It was] kind of an avant garde-Bohemian-left wing-nutcase environment."
Grant can joke about it, but his parents' activism would play an ancillary role in his comics career. More importantly, his household was full of comics like Superman, Flash and Fantastic Four, drawn by the likes of Curt Swan, Carmine Infantino and Jack Kirby. "I was always encouraged to read comics and when I decided to actually work for them, my parents backed me up on it. I was lucky there."
The encouragement from Grant's parents came in handy early on: he was still a teenager when he made his comics' debut in 1978. The story, "Time Is A Four-Letter Word," appeared in Near Myths, a book Grant describes as "an underground comic which we were trying to aim at a mainstream audience."
In those early days, Grant divided his time between extremes, between the underground qualities of Near Myths and the upright, mainstream D.C. Thomson, publishers of long-running British comics like Dandy and Beano. Morrison recognized the difference — and the value — of each company. "[With Near Myths] we were allowed to do anything we wanted," he recalls. "Because there weren't any rules, a lot of interesting stuff was being done. In conjunction with that, I was working for D.C. Thomson, and they were the complete opposite.They demanded the really strong story structure and straightforward plot, so I learned the technical stuff from them and I got to do the weird stuff on Near Myths."
Grant was getting story-writing experience, but the big break didn't come until 1986, when he created the wild adventure strip Zenith for 2000AD. When things broke, however, they broke big: in 1987, DC made one of their treks across the ocean to raid Britain's talent pool and Morrison found himself tapped as one of the successors to Alan Moore's throne. When it came Grant's turn to pull an obscure hero out of the past and revive him, Grant wound up with Buddy Baker (a.k.a Animal Man), which was about as obscure as they came. The original plan was for a four-issue mini-series, which would include Grant's views on animal rights, but it ended up being more — much more, even though nobody knew it at the time.
"I felt the first four issues of Animal Man were in a style that was acceptable at the time, which was along the lines of what Alan Moore was doing. I kind of figured that's what DC wanted, so that's what I gave them, but by the end of the fourth issue, I was really bored with doing it that way. I just thought I had to get away from what had become the orthodox style of the time, particularly from British writers. I could probably have kept it going on sheer technical ability, but I'd have been terribly bored doing it."
The story in Animal Man #5, "The Coyote Gospel," was an attempt to break out of the dark and gritty mold. When Grant wrote it, "Gospel" was the story of a Wile E. Coyote-type who questioned the relentless cruelty of his cartoon world, and was banished to the real world by an angry God. In retrospect, it was the start of a story arc that would carry Grant (and artist Chas Truog) through the rest of a 26-issue run. With that story, Animal Man went beyond being just another British revamping of an old hero; instead, it became the comic book equivalent of Six Characters In Search of an Author. Before it was over, Buddy Baker met his personal God — namely, his writer, Grant Morrison. The climax of the saga involved Grant explaining the comic book facts of life to his leading man: "We thought that by making your world more violent, we would make it more 'realistic,' more 'adult.' God help us if that's what it means. Maybe, for once, we could try to be kind."
Seen as a whole, Grant's run on Animal Man looks a lot like a 26-issue limited series whose main theme is "modern superhero comics suck."
"Yeah, that's basically it," he admits. "It's something I do think about, because that stuff is obviously selling pretty well. I wanted Animal Man to be a lot more... bright than what was going on at the time, because it was definitely a superhero book, and so was Doom Patrol."
If Animal Man was a postmodern indictment of modern comic books, Doom Patrol (Morrison's second assignment from DC) was Grant taking years worth of bottled-up superhero ideas and yanking out the cork, to the point where things literally spilled over the top. The team's new members included a girl with multiple personalities and a transvestite, sentient street. The villains' ranks included the terrifying (The Candlemaker, The Butterfly Collector), the strange (The Men From N.O.W.H.E.R.E) and the hilarious (The Beard Hunter).The cornucopia of new concepts and characters struck some people as merely an exercise in weirdness. Morrison, on the other hand, saw Doom Patrol as a successor to "the Lee and Kirby Fantastic Four issues, and that level of new ideas and interesting concepts coming in every issue. I don't think it was very weird at all."
"I think people just aren't used to seeing it anymore," he adds, "but that was the way comics were written at one time. I was trying to capture the love and spirit of the comics I enjoyed, where something new and interesting would happen all the time, and you'd constantly be giving the reader something to think about."
Morrison wanted to give readers plenty to think about with his next project, the Arkham Asylum graphic novel, and when Dave McKean (Black Orchid, Cages) agreed to paint it, it seemed like the creative sky was the limit.
Guess again: Morrison had immediate run-ins with DC's owner, Time/Warner. They had no problem with Arkham's story, in which Batman's enemies literally take over the asylum and invite him along for the ride — but they had serious reservations about The Joker dressed up to resemble Madonna.
"The Madonna thing was the real problem I had with it," he says. "Basically, I handed in the first script and got a call from Karen [Berger, now head of the Vertigo line] saying 'You'll have to change every single word of this.' Then it was a couple of months battling to get stuff through, but I'm pretty pleased with the stuff that got through."
After all that effort, however, Morrison sees as many weaknesses as strengths in Arkham. "I deliberately put in subtext, and different levels of meaning and interpretation" he explains, "but I discovered when you do that, nobody notices. The structure of the book was based on Alice In Wonderland, so there was a lot of stuff to do with Lewis Carroll and the Alice books in there. It can also be read as kind of a Joseph Campbell-hero journey; there's a Gallic magic ritual in there, disguised underneath all this stuff."
Maybe so, but you ask most people what they got out of Arkham, and they're more likely to say "Oh, yeah! That's where Joker goosed Batman."
"I don't mind if people carry away the image of The Joker goosing Batman. I'm not entirely convinced that you shouldn't be able to [include levels of subtext] with someone like Batman, because Batman's a big cultural icon. The fact they didn't get all the other stuff made me think again. I look on it in that sense as a failure, because people didn't really pick up stuff that was important in it. Basically, I think I was asking too much of the education of the readers. If I want to do something like this in the future, I'll try to make my points a little more obviously, rather than hide them and expect people to go digging."
"The thing that amuses me most about Arkham is that everyone bought it, opened the shrink wrap and all the pages fell out," he says with a soft laugh. "I think it was a scathing indictment of consumer society."
At least Arkham's darkness had a point to it. By comparison, Grant's Kid Eternity mini-series looks like a case of "Hey, 'dark and gritty' sells pretty well...Grant, give us a 'dark and gritty' book!"
That's actually not far from the truth, admits Morrison. "Karen Berger sent me a whole pile of Kid Eternity stuff. That was a case where they said, 'Can you do anything with this character, because everyone hates him.' So I just made everyone hate him even more."
If I were doing it now, it'd be more like [the old Kid Eternity]," Morrison notes, "because, like most people who've got any sense, I've gotten really bored with dark and unpleasant superheroes."
The controversy sparked by Grant's treatments of Batman and Kid Eternity were nothing, however, compared to the furor that greeted Sr. Swithin's Day. The story of a teenager who plans to assassinate Margaret Thatcher, the book combines teenage angst with political hatred, and is still one of Morrison's favorites — although his opinion wasn't universally shared.
"A British MP called Teddy Taylor got hold of the book," he explains. "Questions were asked in the House of Parliament, and The Sun, which is kind of a right-wing tabloid, ran a headline that said '"Death To Maggie" Book Sparks Uproar.' The phones were going every day, and people were asking me if I wanted to kill Margaret Thatcher. Obviously, the answer is 'Yes.' Me and everyone else in Britain. It wasn't really news. It got some publicity and stuff, but fortunately it didn't lead to anything worse. I wasn't taken to the Tower of London."
Morrison devoted most of 1993 to traveling around the globe, although he did surface last summer with Sebastian O, a three-issue series for DC (with artist Steve Yeowell). The title character could only be described as "The Punisher meets Oscar Wilde." Victorian intrigue and sexuality were mixed with virtual reality for a series that was unique and entertaining, although it promised more in the debauchery department than it delivered.
"I'm sorry," Grant laughs by way of an apology. "I promise when we have a second one we'll put in much more sex and debauchery. There was a subplot in there which involved the corruption of Lord Theo's daughter, and that went out of it completely, and will probably turn up when Steve and I get it together to do another series."
So there's a market for Oscar Wilde-influenced superheroes after all? "We were really surprised, and the marketing people at DC couldn't believe it," he laughs. "They were saying, 'How come this book about a Victorian faggot sold so well?'"
Having kept a low profile during most of 1993, Morrison has returned to comics this year with a vengeance. He and Greg Capullo are currently in the middle of a three-issue run on Spawn, which has Al Simmons pitted against nothing less than the United States military. "It's pretty straightforward," Morrison says. "It's a good superhero slugfest for a couple of issues, with some interesting stuff in the background, which was more my kind of thing.
"I like the attitude at Image, because it's very... pop," he adds. "That's the only word I can think of. I kind of like the way they churn out comics the way people churn out singles. Even if I don't like the content, for reasons I've already mentioned, I like the attitude they've got, and it's a sexy place to work, because it's young guys doing stuff that they're really into." Spawn aside, however, most of Morrison's attentions this year are focused on DC's Vertigo; he'll be co-plotting (with writer Mark Millar) a four-issue story for Swamp Thing, and later this year, he'll be starting a new monthly title (with artist Jill Thompson), The Invisibles. "There's five characters with weird abilities who belong to what's basically an occult terrorist organization," he offers as an explanation. "Hundreds of people belong to this organization, but nobody knows who the other members are. There's a huge canvas of things going on, and it's basically to do with a huge occult conspiracy that exists from the dawn of time."
Of more immediate interest to Morrison is his collaboration with painter Jon J. Muth, a graphic novel called The Mystery Play. "The idea behind the [original] Mystery Plays was to present the Bible stories in the language of the community." Now, in modern-day England, a small town decides to restage a Mystery Play, and an actor ends up murdered: More specifically, the actor playing God ends up murdered. Of course, the town suspects the actor playing Satan ("Everyone's immediately assuming that he's got to be behind it"), and the intrigue begins.
Like Dave McKean's work on Arkham Asylum, Jon J. Muth's painting adds an extra dimension to Mystery Play. "The story is set in the real world," Morrison says, "but it has a lot of strange hallucinatory interludes. That works well if you get a painter like Jon who's perfect at capturing all these details of the real world. I think that really worked well in the story, because when it goes into the hallucinatory stuff, you can't tell the difference, and it hopefully messes up the reader's perception of what's real and what's not."
Well, you know, if there's any writer who understands the value of messing up readers' perceptions...