Xstatic #1 (May '92)

Well 'ard

Martin Conaghan tagged along with Grant Morrison and Mark Millar at a recent signing session to hear what they had to say about life, comics and each other.


"...hmmm, that hair looks quite tasty," said Grant Morrison, pointing at the salad portion of the bacon baguette which I had just ordered in a supposedly reputable brasserie in the more up-market area of Edinburgh.
	I looked down in horror at my preferred choice of lunch and, to my utter disgust, I saw a huge black curly hair perched perkily on top of a neatly cut slice of cucumber. So, not wishing to cause a scene (and suffering from a wretched hangover to boot) I pushed the salad end of the French roll to one side and forced the rest of my snack down through gritted teeth.
	Mark Millar, completely oblivious to this outrage, continued to slurp his consommé across the table from me.
	So far, the day had not got off to a good start. Only an hour previously, we had almost missed our train from Glasgow and spent a frenzied five minutes rushing around the train station in an attempt to buy our tickets, only to discover that we could have easily purchased them on the train. To make matters worse, Grant had threatened to arrive at the station wearing a Gaultier basque, stunning make-up and a platinum-blonde wig.
	It was all talk, of course. Dressed soberly in a black poloneck and jeans, Grant's only concessions to his threats were a tasteful set of pearls, with which he toyed as he sipped a glass of cold milk.
	"I'm feeling much better now," he explained. "I've spent most of the last year in a nightmare world of addiction and psychotherapy. In an effort to become the Syd Barrett of comics, I was overdosing on Haliborange and attempting to write my scripts telekinetically. Something had to give and fortunately for me it was my pretentions. I cleaned up my act and enrolled in a Tae Kwon Do class. Now I'm fit and healthy and lethal once more - the Jackie Chan of comics - and I'm ready to take on all those bastards who've seen fit to criticize me while I've lain ill in bed. Rennie, Phillips, critics everywhere, beware!"
	I weathered this outburst and then asked him to tell me about his incredible struggle to establish himself as a comic writer and the years of hardship and poverty he endured before reaching the Olympian heights of success he enjoys today.
	Grant: "I spent over two years bugging - or buggering - the hell out of 2000AD staff, in an effort to find work. At one point, I was so reduced in circumstances that I had to walk the twelve miles from my home in East Kilbride whenever I wanted to meet my friends on a Saturday. 12 miles there and back and, in between, a delirium of bad drugs, petty crime and almost constant sex with little Mod girls. Eventually, I was forced to storm the London offices of Fleetway and demand that they see me, explaining all the while that I'd travelled 500 miles in search of a job. They finally grew so tired of my invasions that they allowed me to write a few 'Future Shocks' and the rest is engraved on the hearts of millions of fans."
	Not exactly the easiest way to get yourself into the comic industry, but he's reaping the benefits now, with a super champagne lifestyle and a posh house in Glasgow's trendy west end - his Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum has sold over 200,000 copies worldwide and earned him a fortune. No small fish, despite being a remake of the Lewis Carroll classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
	Grant: "Well, I'd read the Alice books and decided to put Batman into a similar situation - where he goes into a strange place, strange things happen to him and then he comes back out at the end, none the wiser - and by the time everyone got the shrink wrap off and realised that they had been ripped off, I was already rolling in it."
	His colleague and close personal friend Mark Millar had a slightly less bumpy ride into the business but he's enjoying the benefits of success just as much. Since writing the Saviour series for Trident comics in early 1990, his career has gone through the roof. He's now writing Judge Dredd in the Daily Star newspaper and he's working on a whole hoard of projects for DC and Fleetway.
	Grant: "He's the luckiest bastard I know. He jumped on the bandwagon and nobody had the heart to throw him off again and now look at him. Rich as you like at 22. Cunt!"
	No hard feelings though. Despite making several derogatory comments about each other during the course of that long, long day - in the vein of "If Alan Moore is the King of comics, Grant Morrison is the Queen..." and "Mark slept with John Wagner... and LIKED it!" (I won't say who said what) - they work very closely and have plenty of joint projects in the pipeline. Grant has recently completed the fourth, final and "Most boring" series of Zenith for 2000AD and Mark is working on book SEVEN of the catastrophically unpopular Red Razors for Judge Dredd Megazine. "I just don't know when to stop," he grins.

They are even working on a massive re-launch for 2000AD which will see the light of day mid 1993. Mark outlines, with a certain degree of fervour, the character who will spearhead the campaign.
	Mark: "Grant and I are co-writing a strip called 'Big Dave - The hardest man in Britain'. Dave comes from Manchester and wears shellsuits and trainers. He's got two pit-bull terriers and he takes on everything from aliens to Spaniards."
	Grant: "We're both sick of the way 2000AD is full of poofs these days. Judge Dredd's turned into a poof and so has everyone else. All the stories are about Buddhists, Feminism and Ecology - it's a real drag. These old bastards keep complaining about how 2000AD is not as good as it used to be - well, who do they think is writing the bloody thing these days! -THEM! - Pat Mills and company, that's who!"
	Mark: "Now hold on a fucking minute, mate! You're well out of order! - WELL out of order! I think you're forgetting that Pat Mills CREATED 2000AD, not to mention Slaine and A.B.C. Warriors and Mach One. I'm not going to sit here and let you slag the geezer off - alright? You'd be sweeping the bloody streets if it wasn't for Pat Mills - sweeping the bloody streets - D'ye hear me!"
	Grant: "Fair point. Fair point. Pat Mills is alright in my book - no harm to the man."
	The atmosphere soon lightens when I buy the lads another drink and they soon forget their differences. Getting on to the subject of rubbishing the efforts of those present, I ask them what they think of the claim by the original 2000AD team that the younger writers don't have the talent to create new characters.
	Mark: "I'm sick of listening to them bleating on about how bloody great they are. Take a look at some of the stuff they've created. Only Judge Dredd is any good. If they had their way, they'd turn 2000AD into WOMAN'S OWN! We want a kicking comic with teeth and big bastarding Doc Martens boots."
	Strong words, but if Mark's dream sounds too much like the late unlamented Toxic, then you could be in for a shock.
	Mark: "Toxic was done by old poofs for old poofs - and it showed. We're going to make 2000AD more like The SUN - with a 'Dear Tharg' problem page and Page Three birds done up like Judge Anderson and Halo Jones with their tits hanging out. We're going to fit some bingo in there, too. There's plans to give away free gifts like stick on tattoos and a cassette of Big Dave singing 'Fly me to the Moon' on a Karaoke machine."
	Grant: "2000AD has been out of date for years - it's more like 1800AD these days - we want to liven things up a bit."
	They both smile and say "Solid!". (I'm not entirely sure if 2000AD is safe in the hands of these two.) It's like giving your firstborn child to Charles Manson to babysit - but if anything, it should prove to be... well, interesting. Even more unusual are Grant's plans to write a Spider-Man graphic novel, to be drawn by a top artist whose name can be anagrammatised into SIBON SLIMEY.
	Grant: "I can't say for sure when it will be out - maybe never. It's not Spider-Man in Arkham Asylum or anything - it's action all the way with things blowing up from page one but it still won't be a great deal like the Spider-Man that everyone is used to."
	Mark is also working on a rather unusual idea at the moment. He tells me he's handed in a plot outline to DC with an amazing setting for the Superman character.
	Mark (laughing): "Instead of landing in Kansas as a child, I've decided to explore what could have happened if his rocket would have landed on a collective farm in the Soviet Union. Instead of working for the Daily Planet, he'll be a reporter for Pravda. There's a reversal of the current situation, this time it's the U.S.A. that's splitting up with Georgia and Louisiana demanding independence - tanks rolling through the streets of New Orleans. I'll be including a whole bunch of DC characters, like Batman and Green Lantern - who you'll see in a new light."
	As we finished our short lunch, we moved on to the planned destination - remarkably on time - and the lads took up their seats in the graphic novel section of the new, massive Forbidden Planet Edinburgh (with FIVE floors of comics, books, leisure wear and Rambling equipment - it's the biggest comic shop in the world!)
	While Grant and Mark attended to their fans, I took the opportunity to browse through  the material which Forbidden Planet had put on display in order to publicize the event, and upon flicking through the recently compiled Dare graphic novel (Grant's future rendition of the pilot of the future) I happened to notice a particularly 'tacky' picture of Grant with the book's illustrator Rian Hughes - both of them standing outside a building not unlike the Space Fleet Headquarters featured in the story.
	Grant (weeping): "We had that taken outside the Hoover building. Don't you think it makes us look like the Pet Shop Boys?"
	I have my reservations as to whether that comment was made in jest, as I happened to hear Grant actually singing a previously unreleased Pet Shop Boys song (which can only mean that both he and I have a copy of the album on which it appears - sob.) Sounds like he has a varied taste when it comes to homo bands, but I found more unusual was to hear that Grant doesn't read comics - more to the point, he doesn't even BUY comics.
	Grant: "There's nothing around to pique my interest. I leaf through the current favourites and search in vain for something resembling a story, plot or incident. Not that I hold these elements to be indispensable, but when I constantly hear others singing the praises of some title, I'm inevitably disappointed when I actually attempt to read them and find not even the faintest whiff of a good idea. I was in Bill and Ted's Excellent Comic in a story drawn by the fucking cunt who does Cheese and Chocolate, or whatever it's called, in Deadline. I cut out the panel and stuck it on my word processor. He'll do me again because he can't help himself, his analyst probably tells him that it's good to express his anger. So, I'm looking forward to that, but otherwise, I just don't pay attention to comics these days."
	So where does he get his own ideas from, if he doesn't read comics?
	Grant: "If you're looking for ideas, comics are definitely the wrong place to search. I read books, newspapers and sweet wrappers. I listen to music and live a vivid lifestyle. If you continue to feed yourself in this fashion, ideas inevitably spring to mind and then can be developed. It's not difficult to cultivate ideas - the very simplest thing to do is to take two things not normally associated and throw them together. Lautréamont described this method in his famous 'the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table...' line, which became like the bedrock of surrealist technique. Or take one fairly charged word like, say, haunted, and add any other noun to it - 'haunted ashtray', 'haunted toothbrush' etc. - these things, daft as they are, suggest all kinds of possibilities for stories. For instance, I'm working on a three part series with Steve Yeowell, called Sebastian O, which is based on the collision between Oscar Wilde, 'Die Hard' and Virtual Reality. Victorian Dandyism meets guns, explosives and rollicking action."
All the work he has on his plate barely leaves him time for his own pursuits, but he still manages to write plays, act, study martial arts and rehearse with his new band 'Super 9', with whom he is currently recording.
Mark also has a lot on his plate at the moment. A brief list would include Red Razors 9, Rogue Trooper, Sam Slade, Dan Dare for a new Fleetway comic for kids, Hard Case (based on the idea of Nazi Judges in South America) and various projects under discussion with DC.
I ask him how optimistic he feels about the future of comics.
Mark: "Well, they're fucking dead, aren't they? I mean, things looked really good a couple of years back. There was Watchmen and Dark Knight, and Elektra and Arkham, and everything. Look at the state of the industry now. It's turning to shit - it has. Look on the shelves. Look at the fanzines. Read the reviews. The American companies are constantly squeezing out big curly dollops of shite and the readers are just eating it up with greedy, open mouths. Momentum keeps the market going, momentum and clever marketing, but that won't last forever - believe me - unless something pretty fucking brilliant comes along soon, then the comic market will be DEAD by the mid 90's."
Grant: "I agree, I mean, look at Doom Patrol. Look at Arkham. Brilliant pieces of work, you have to agree. Look at the reaction to them - people don't want anything interesting or different anymore. They just want the same old shit, month after month."
Mark: "And we're JUST THE BOYS to give it to them, eh, Grant?"
Grant: "Aye! Up their arse, mate!" (Snarling laughter)
I notice their reaction to many of the women present at the signing, winking slyly and nudging each other in a suggestive manner. This prompts me to ask what they think of the increasing number of women working in the industry.
Mark: "I should really say that I'm pleased, but have you seen the state of some of them? Bloody hell, we might as well re-name the UKCAC 'Crufts', with the number of dogs running around it every year. Don't get me wrong, mate, I mean, I'm strongly in favour of more women in comics..."
Grant: "Too right, gives you something to look at when you're at the DC party, doesn't it? Nice bit of leg. Nice pair of knockers, know what I mean, Martin?"
When the signing session was finally over, we made off to another highly recommended coffee shop to round off the day. We sat down at our table and Grant ordered another glass of cold milk. The sound of Elkie Brooks singing 'Lilac Wine' brought tears of nostalgia to his eyes and I seized this moment of vulnerability to put the but in and repay him for spoiling my lunch earlier.
"That's a lovely set of lips there," I said, pointing at a neat pink lipstick imprinted on the edge of his glass, which obviously hadn't been cleaned properly.
This time, however, Grant made a fuss and demanded that the glass be changed and a new one brought in its place. Then again, he can afford to play the prima donna.
As we travelled home on the train to Glasgow, we talked more about the history of comics. Slowly, Mark nodded off in a copy of World Wrestling Federation poster magazine and Grant buried himself in a book of surrealist games he'd picked up earlier in the day. I kept on talking, staring out of the window and thinking about that bloody hair.