MONDO 2000 #11, 1993

The Candlemaker's Privilege – Grant Morrison Plays God

By Paul McEnery


Grant Morrison has been called the Glaswegian André Breton of the graphic novel. Or again: Luis Buñuel directing the Marx Brothers in material out of the Fortean Times. Whatever. He came to comic books out of theatre - Red King Rising, in which Alice springs full grown out of Lewis Carroll's head and confronts him with his real urges. His first big break came during the British Invasion of DC Comics which later evolved into Karen Berger's Vertigo line. He picked up Animal Man, a rather crappy bit character that nobody remembered and turned it around into the most interesting deconstruction of comix ever. He courted controversy with The New Adventures of Hitler, hit paydirt with a Batman graphic novel, Arkham Asylum (with Dave McKean). Now he's slated to take over Swamp Thing (with Mark Millar) and will be scripting issues 15-17 of Spawn, currently the hottest book on the market. The new book is Sebastian O, which is J. K. Huysmans crossed with Hannibal Lecter in virtual reality. But his real achievement to date is Doom Patrol - the world's first surrealist superteam, a book which cheerfully plagiarizes Borges, Terence McKenna and the Smiths.


MONDO 2000: All the young turks of comics are English — I say English but I shouldn't say that...

GRANT MORRISON: No you shouldn't. I'll have to go strap on my battle kilt.

M2: ... and they seem to be uniquely infatuated with America.

GM: I think what happened was that this is a generation that grew up with American comics, and American comics of that kind were more imaginative than British comics. It's as simple as people working out childhood fantasies. I know I got to feel a thrill that I probably shouldn't have felt at all when I finally got to write a scene where the Flash presses his ring and his costume shoots out.

M2: Unlike some people out there, you seem to relate to comics like a big kid.

GM: Well, there was an effort a couple of years back to create of comics some kind of valid adult medium but I think that's a misguided attempt. Comics should always be a marginalized art form because that's where the interesting ideas come through. I'm glad to see the failure of all these coffee table editions that people tried to bring out as a way of legitimizing the whole comics business.
The idea that you could bring something as ridiculous as superheroes into the real world seemed to me completely insane. The logic of that didn't hold up and I was more interested in comics as what they were, as ridiculous garish combination of words and pictures about people with ludicrous talents.
For me, the big mistake of social realism is to deny that people have an imaginative life and people said that's not really realistic until you see someone pissing in the sink. But in actual fact, they eliminate a whole other area of people's lives that involves the fact that everybody's got some sort of weird ghost story in the family, or had some strange thing that's inexplicable. The artist's job is to deepen the mystery.
The things I liked when I was a kid was where Flash got turned into a paperweight on the cover saying "Please, help me," with a whole streetful of people walking past, ignoring him. To me that stuff is a lot more important. Those guys were working at speed and working to an audience that they felt was below them and by doing that they were actually getting stuff through that they wouldn't have allowed themselves if they thought they were working for adults and trying to impress someone. I liked comics that you'd pick up and there'd be screaming word balloons all over them and exhortations for you to buy it, and Superman with the head of a giant red ant on the front…
I've always felt that the best comics were the ones that appeared as adverts in the other comics, and there'd be some fantastic cover scene you could never find. They were like the Holy Grail of comics. If I could finally write a comic that existed purely in the realm of potential, then that would be my ultimate ideal.

M2: In one of your plots, the Pentagon uses fairy stories to soften up dead souls. Do you think you've traumatized many kids with Doom Patrol?

GM: I'd like to think I'd traumatized lots. I'm grateful to the people who scarred me as a child. I read all sorts of hideous European fairy tales when I was in school. It's all grist for the mill later on. A lot of the fears you have as an adult are rooted in things you read when you were a child and you root it up and expose it and use it. Turn it to advantage.

M2: Your villain is usually the omnipotent bad father.

GM: Well no, because I get on really well with my dad. He was a radical activist, and someone I really admire. The whole bad father thing was in the head of Crazy Jane because she bound the series together. She appeared in the first one I wrote and disappeared in the last one. A lot of the stuff could be seen as her delusions. I always had that in the back of my mind.

M2: She's like the 64 Faces of Eve, with a different power for every personality. Why the big interest?

GM: I have this deep down belief that personality's a fiction, and basically everyone has multiple personality disorder. Basically we let some people take over in situations where they shouldn't; sometimes you try to be suave and sophisticated and you turn into a stumbling seventeen year old. Where did that guy come from? I really do think there's quite a strong fragmentation in most people's personalities.
That was the whole thing with Crazy Jane at the end of Doom Patrol, she learned to let them take charge where it was appropriate for each one to take charge rather than the other way round. I think that's true of most people, except most of us don't call it a disorder. My character's a bit more flexible in that way. The whole disorder thing has just arisen because of Oprah Winfrey, basically. It's all her doing.
When I was doing Doom Patrol, we used to get multiple personality newsletters sent in, and it was always great stuff, like people would have a problem page in it, and it would be answered by the same person but in three different personalities. I always had this dream that multiple personalities would buy Doom Patrol, and each of the personalities would buy a copy, get the sales up.

M2: Your methods are pretty fractured as well. You're known for using cut-ups and plagiarism, for example.

GM: I just can't read fiction because I know the tricks and I can see the machinery and by page 15, I know what's going to happen on the last page. It doesn't deliver what I'm looking for, which is a more all-encompassing view. It's like Burroughs says, when you walk down the street, the information that comes at you is so scattershot, you hear a strident conversation, you see a stop sign flash, you get certain images in the corner of your eye... that's the way we experience things and art still isn't quite up to the task of getting that across.
I like to think of the stuff that I do as disposable as well, because it's of the moment and expressing something then. There's always that egomaniac in you that wants to be remembered in 300 years time but that's so unlikely that what I'd rather do now is get sense impressions out and try to connect with people.

M2: One of the avenues of plagiarism is that it grabs the big ideas and shrinks them into four-color pictures.

GM: Well that's democratic, because everyone can plagiarize, and by doing so, it's like the Borges story of Pierre Menard. His version of Don Quixote is revealed by Borges to be completely different from the original because it's by a man whose background is different — he lives in the twentieth century as opposed to the 17th century. The text takes on a whole other meaning when passed through a plagiarist.
I detest stories and 19th century story structure. These are really strong in comics and basically if you try to do anything else you're condemned as pretentious, and while I may be pretentious I'm still not interested in linear stories. To me he idea of comics is like sitting in front of your TV with a channel changer. To me MTV is much more successful than any of the postmodernists in getting across the idea that perception is a cut-up.

M2: Do you ever have any desire to work in any other media, like film?

GM: Right now I'm working on a treatment for Ridley Scott, but that may come to nothing. Film treatments come and vanish into the ether. He's made a pile of money from this Blade Runner: the Director's Cut, and he wanted to do Dan Dare. He liked the material I'd done with Rian Hughes because it was slightly more the darker edge and it was a bit more ironic, so I've written a treatment for him. If he likes it, it proceeds from there; if he doesn't then that's the end of it.
M2: You've got a bad attitude towards science, but you go on a bit about new science, like nanotechnology, catastrophe theory and all that.

GM: It's only because I don't understand science. When I got to twelve I made a conscious decision to be arty rather than scientific. Interestingly, I used to be fairly good at mathematics and physics, and then I became hopelessly inept at them overnight. I don't understand science, but I'm interested in it in a poetic fashion. It's not hard science, it's science used as metaphor.
The same in Sebastian O — virtual reality's in it, but it's more important to me that VR is an extension of the whole decadent creed of the Artificial — a world free from nature, which is impossible, of course. That's why I combined those two things, Victorian Decadence and the computer thing. I was interested in that as a symbol, rather than as science, because the virtual reality in Sebastian O simply will not be possible for a hundred years from now.
They're all living in a generated world; Lord Theo controls everything. Basically, he's God, and Sebastian shoots him, and he's quite happy to be living in an artificial world because it fulfills his aesthetic creed. It's the ultimate decadent idea to live in a world which is completely without nature.

M2: There's unusual for you — to kill God inside of three issues. It took you six in Doom Patrol.

GM: Well, I've still got to kill him again.

M2: You're a soft-spoken man, but you blow up universes for a living.

GM: Peter Barnes once said, "Trust the song and not the singer," and that's how I feel. I lead a fairly quiet, inoffensive, monkish life, but secretly I want to destroy the universe and everything in it, so that stuff comes out in the work. The fact of having grown up in the time of punk throws a nihilistic thing in there — smash it up, soon-to-be-picturesque ruins, all that stuff. My characters are just doing what I find impossible to do in my real life. It's a pathetic wish-fulfillment fantasy ultimately.

M2: The Candlemaker: "All these things, did I make them? They're not real, and now I'm going to destroy them." That's your writing style.

GM: So horribly true. I had this whole fox thing when I was a kid. I believed there was a secret underground kingdom of benevolent foxes who were running around and I would signal to them in the hills; and one time when I was really arsed I started to hallucinate, and all I hallucinated was foxes, so I decided to adopt that as a totem. I was even more interested when I found the Dogon tribe have their Satan figure, this character called Ogo who was also known as the pale fox. Ogo created the earth, this thing that was soiled and imperfect and that's why God didn't like him, so I totally identified with Ogo and wanted to be his avatar on earth.

M2: Is that the way you see yourself as a writer — the satanic demiurge?

GM: I'm always on the side of Satan, because he's the one who introduced us to the concept of knowledge. When I was a kid I kind of figured out this whole thing where the serpent is the symbol of life and rebirth and DNA, so I decided since then that if I was on anyone's side I'd be on Satan's side, which is not to say I want to join Anton LaVey's church. I see Satan and Christ as the same thing which is the creative principle and the principle towards evolution.
To me, the way I look at it currently, the superhero is a debased manifestation of the desperate need for some feeling of movement towards evolution. That's what they represent. Whether it's bad or good is something I want to examine and really delve into. That's one of the things that made the old comics more interesting, the whole concept of kryptonite which destroys God. We create Superman and almost immediately we have to create something which destroys Superman. Looking at that stuff in a different light is what I became interested in dealing with.
I've got a Flex Mentallo series coming out from DC, which I want to be the first superhero comic for the 21st century. It's going to be for slackers what Sartre was to existentialists and Hesse was to hippies. I've put a lot of work into it. It's four issues and it says about everything that I want to say about superheroes and how they can be used. I deal with Superman being a sort of male figure, and what I thought was great in the 60's was they invented red kryptonite which made Superman fluid and female. There was this whole transformation throughout the sixties when all the male heroes were feminized — this whole concept of transformations and weird vibrations and turning into ants or women. You know, Jimmy Olsen's forever dressing up in women's clothes. That to me is important in the development of comics, the idea of diffusing the hard body.

M2: That sounds like Michel Foucault.

GM: God help me. What I'm interested in digging into is why that should be popular, and why the whole idea of the feminized superhero has disappeared again, and what they were really saying in those things. These days it's the whole revenge vigilante thing that's really popular.
One of the things I like to do is to invest objects with power because I think it's the viewpoint you have as a child or when you're on drugs — things become immensely significant and that kind of gets rid of the need for art. I suppose for me the best art is the stuff that reminds you how to look at the world, like Duchamp's urinal — now each time you look at a urinal you see it as being a significant object. That's what I've tried to do, to take these ordinary objects and say this stuff's quite interesting depending on how you look at it.
The whole kind of Danny the World thing at the end of the Doom Patrol is to say the world we're living in is actually Wonderland and Oz, but it just depends on how you look at it, and to try to get people to look at it in that way.

M2: Sort of a sous les paves, la plage sort of thing. There's pretension for you!

GM: [Nervous laugh]