SFX #21, JANUARY 1997

GRANT CHECK

COMICS GURU AND SOCIAL CHAMELEON GRANT MORRISON TALKS TO STEPHEN JEWELL ABOUT HIS UNIQUE TAKE ON SOME TRADITIONAL COMIC FIGURES - AND HIS CULT SUCCESS WITH THE INVISIBLES.

Ever heard the one about life imitating art? Well, that, eerily enough, is what happened to Grant Morrison last year. The man who wrote The Invisibles, an esoteric cross between The Illuminati and The Avengers, with shades of Karaoke thrown in, soon found the plotlines he was developing for The Invisibles' leader, King Mob, popping up for real in his own life... "King Mob gets something wrong with his face and suddenly I had an abscess on my face. His lung collapses because of a gunshot and then the same thing happens to me, for some other reason. The whole year of The Invisibles was about trials and initiations, facing up to death and fear, and suddenly I went through the whole thing myself."
And it's not just The Invisibles which apparently affected the writer's life - he had the same problems with Flex Mentallo. "I wrote about the guy's girlfriend leaving him and the same thing happened to me about four months later," he laments. "It's like comics voodoo. The only good thing about it is that at the end of all these stories, everything gets resolved really well so I'm looking forward to that!"
Morrison, a thin, thirty-something writer who started off on 2000AD, before moving to America to work for DC and Vertigo on titles like Animal Man and Doom Patrol, has a reputation for being a bit of a chameleon in interviews. In the past he's reinvented himself a number of times - here as an Oscar Wilde-style, sensitive auteur; there as an all-action, '80s-style go-getter — but today, knocking back a curry with sometime writing partner Mark Millar at a Glasgow Indian, he seems relaxed and reflective. If he is putting a persona it can only be as a "serious artiste," since the conversation soon turns to the duo's drive to drag the corpulent comics industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century...
"The Invisibles explores the same territory as The X-Files. The basic concept is simple. Imagine every possible paranoid conspiracy was true. The government is involved in aliens. They do Satanic rituals. The Royal Family's involved in cocaine smuggling and child abuse... All these weird rumours that you get through the underground, the Internet, Fortean Times, wherever... Well, The Invisibles are those people who know what's going on. They've identified it and decided to fight back, so we've got this struggle between two opposing forces: chaos and order, good and evil, repression and freedom... It's the basic human conflict that we've had for thousands of years and are still trying to deal with, blown up into this adventure story which is using all the stuff in comics like the superficiality, the adventure and the fights, shootings and explosions... But we're trying to do something that has philosophical content as well."
Sadly, despite critical acclaim, sales of the original series weren't up to scratch, so a decision was soon made to clear the decks for a relaunch: The Invisibles, Volume Two. "The structure of the thing is a trilogy anyway," says Morrison, "which is going to be done over six years in books of 25 issues each. The Invisibles have had over a year to recover from all the terrible things that happened to them in the first instalment. The fun for me is writing a book where the character dynamics are all different because a year's gone by. We don't see what's happened, but suddenly King Mob's sleeping with Ragged Robin while the others have been off in New York. The team structure operates on elemental symbolism and they've changed it around so each of them gets to experience a different role. King Mob's no longer leader, he's just one of the gang. Ragged Robin becomes leader instead and she has to toughen up."
So how much of King Mob is a reflection of Morrison himself? "What I'm doing with my life is to make myself more like him because I've created this character who's just so cool. A lot of his past is based on mine. I was in a band and had a nervous breakdown when I was 21. Then I went to India and had a spiritual revelation. The only difference is that I don't kill people and he's better at martial arts. But it's always the most rebellious, anarchistic and dangerous aspects that I'm interested in."
In fictional terms, King Mob is based on Gideon Stargrave, a character Morrison first wrote and drew in the early '80s comic magazine, Near Myths, while still an aspiring comic creator. Another character he clearly owes a lot to is Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius. It's an influence Morrison openly acknowledges in his three-part "Entropy In The UK" (easily the highlight of Volume One). However, it turns out Moorcock didn't appreciate Morrison's take on the character. In fact, he was so outraged he sent a letter to Vertigo, to be printed in all the company's titles, publicly voicing his disgust...
"He said my work was crass and immature and a disgrace, but, as Mark points out, Michael Moorcock branding your work crass and immature is probably a great compliment! I think he read one issue and has no concept. He's made a fool of himself because he seems to think that the whole of The Invisibles is based on the Jerry Cornelius concept without having read the rest of what we've done."
Ragged Robin is another Invisibles character who owes something to Morrison's past work, with hints dropped that she might even be Crazy Jane from Doom Patrol. "She was the one who wasn't working, so I had to go back and rethink what I was doing. You'll find out more about her in Volume Two. The whole thing is that she's born in 1988. She's from the future and has been sent back from 2012 to participate in what The Invisibles are doing, which will bring about events in 2012. You see her as a kid in 1996. She meets herself in this pivotal moment. The kid's called Kate, which is Crazy Jane's name. So it's almost like this is the real world, alternate version of the DC Universe's Crazy Jane."

Morrison has recently taken over writing DC's Justice League Of America - and the he's taken a deceptively simple angle: "He's chucking out all the annoying second stringers, like Metamorpho and Fire & Ice, and bringing back the biggies," explains Millar. "It's essential. The Justice League's the world's greatest superhero team, so you can't have all these obscure superheroes. You've got to have Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern... The ones everyone's familiar with. These characters are now 50 years old and have dug right into the collective psyche."
So what of the two pivotal characters of the Justice League - and, indeed, the whole DC Universe - Superman and Batman? How have they changed? "I've played Batman up as a kind of SF Batman, because I wanted to get away from the grim Dark Knight. He's really confident and supercool. He looks at the others with disdain and likes a joke, but it's a sense of humour that's so rarified and aristocratic that the others don't really get it. It's just nasty 'I'm better than you' humour. But he still has all the gadgets, real high-tech stuff, like silver armour for the Arctic."
As to Superman, he comes across as a more troubled character... "He's the guy everyone looks to be the leader," explains Morrison, "but he doesn't really want that role. He can't really handle it, but feels that he's got to because his whole thing is, 'I have to do what's expected of me and what is right.' "
Morrison also plans to expand the Justice League roster. Green Arrow will join during #7, as will a brand new Hawkman, someone who Millar and Morrison hope will have his own comic in time. Other possible members include Plastic Man, Garth Ennis's Hitman and Morrison's old mucker, Animal Man. The duo is also keen to put Buddy Baker back into his Animal Man costume after Vertigo drove the book to eventual cancellation. "He's a guy who had powers that all made sense. I did the whole thing where it tied into shamanism, the morphogenic field and all that Rupert Sheldrake stuff. Then they grabbed it and turned it into Swamp Thing."
So what's Morrison's main aim with the JLA revamp? "Basically, I want to address why superheroes don't fix things. They hang about in alleyways and beat people up, but they don't fix pollution or go Green. I had to find the rationality that would make that work. Superman says, 'We can't wet-nurse mankind. They can't be our lapdogs. If we do everything for them, their evolution is finished... It's really important to stand aside and let them do it but we're there to catch them when they fall.' That to me is what the Justice League is all about. There's something creepy about that, though. These beings on the Moon [the new JLA base] can see the whole Earth and there's this element of, 'Can we trust these people?' Superman can watch you with his X-Ray vision, but the dangers of that... There's this apocalyptic feel to these beings... 'Okay. We're here to help, but to help you we're going to have to watch everything you do.'"
He admits that his current view of superheroes was inspired by his work on the 1995 Flex Mentallo mini-series (a series based, bizarrely, on the old Charles Atlas adverts you'll find in '60s comic books), which proved to be something of a watershed for him. Its success was helped, in no small way, by Frank Quitely's astounding artwork. "Flex is one of the best things I've ever done. All the ideas I got out of that now feed into Justice League. I wanted to recreate the feeling you got with comics when you were a kid. It was a time when there was a lot more fun going on, a new concept on every page... A sense of this huge universe which was infinitely interesting and infinitely explorable."
But while many comics, from Image's Big Bang to Alan Moore's work on 1963, hark back to innocent, better times, Morrison himself finds them too nostalgic. "Flex was an attempt to modernise all that and give it a feeling of, 'This is the end of the 20th century.' Flex is the first comic of the 21st century. It's my dream that people will look back at it in 20 years' time and think, 'Yeah. This makes sense. This is how you should do comics now.'"
Morrison is also writing a crossover between Justice League and Image Comics' Wildcats. "I wanted to do an event like the old Justice League-Justice Society team-up, which felt like when the JSA first met the JLA back in the '60s, and it seemed like parallel worlds. I've got this dream of having all the heads down the side of the page: Superman, Batman, Green Lantern... Down the other side you've got Majestic and the other Wildcats... I've been doing this big, fabulous, free-wheeling, alternative Earth-type story. It also explains how things like Amalgam [The DC/Marvel crossover] could work, even though DC are saying they don't want me to say this is the explanation. It doesn't use parallel Earth theory, but is a new thing I've come up with which allows for the existence of different universes. I'm just trying to evade all the stuff that's going on at DC, which I think is stupid, but I can only do it to a certain extent."
That isn't stopping Morrison from deconstructing the DC universe in another of his titles – Aztek - The Ultimate Man, the new monthly Morrison and Millar launched this Summer. "He's part of an ancient society which has been preparing for the return of Quetzlcoatl: The Aztec God Of Light, who's going to fight the last battle," explains Morrison. He's the latest of this long line and he's the one who's unlucky enough to be Aztek at the time when the powers of darkness actually come back. Aztek is sent to Vanity, a hellish city which is the focal point for this terrible darkness. So Aztek's in there and he's this noble young guy who's been trained in everything - ethics, philosophy, martial arts... He's been trained to be the ultimate perfect man, but he's never been out with girls. Aztek will eventually join the Justice League and a rare glimpse will be provided into the JLA's inner workings." Millar interjects: "We're going to see behind the scenes of the Justice League in the pages of Aztek." Which is good thinking since, as Morrison puts it, "If you're in the Justice League, how do you know someone isn't an alien pretender or a shapeshifter?"
Morrison is also set to follow fellow Vertigo writer Neil Gaiman to the small screen; aside from a pilot he's written with that enfant terrible of the SF book scene, Jeff Noon (see Strange Tales), The Invisibles has also been optioned by BBC Scotland and will hopefully go into production early next year. "What I want to do in television is something like The Prisoner. I imagine credits like The Persuaders, getting that kind of Lew Grade look to it... It's looking good, but it could end up like bad Doctor Who!"