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COMICS: This interview is one more reason I think that Grant Morrison is by far the most interesting person in comics. Beyond being a great writer, he’s just a hell of an great subject for an interview. This is obviously an email interview but even given the limitations of that (no followup, much more formal answers than a personal interview) and the somewhat generic nature of some of the questions Grant fills the page with very intriguing and well thought out answers. I always find it strange how comic book creators who obviously have vivid and well-oiled imaginations turn into complete bores when confronted with an interviewer. One of the reasons I look up to Grant Morrison as a writer is that he always finds a way to get his ideas out there in interviews as well as in his work. He obviously thinks a lot about the process of writing and coming up with good ideas and he’s going somewhere with his writing. He’s not just putting finger to keyboard to get a paycheck, he wants to express himself and move people forward out of the ruts it’s so easy to get into in the comic book industry. Fellow comics writer Mark Millar has obviously taken a lot of inspiration for his “interview persona” from Grant (I believe they’re friends and worked together so with a personality as big as Grant’s I don’t fault Millar for that) but I don’t think he’s nearly as successful at it as Grant. When Grant talks about his view of the world and the reasons for his work being the way it is, I believe him. When Mark Millar talks about reasons for his work it comes off as hucksterism, not an actual belief. Even if it is all a put-on, it’s a good enough one for me that I don’t care.
One thing that always bugs me about a lot of comic book readers when talking about Grant Morrison is how they go on and on about how weird and hard to understand he is. Yes, he has weird ideas. He has ideas and isn’t afraid to express them, some of them are bound to be weird. He thinks about them though and explains them so I think part of the problem people have is that they think beforehand that he’s going to be “too weird” for them so they start out with a bias. I won’t even go into the people who read his superhero work and then complain about his other work as being “that weird Vertigo shit” or whatever they say. Those people should rot. I’m talking about people who have been given the impression by others that he’s hard to understand so any time he goes out of the normal boring range of interview answers that most other comic book creators stick to it’s automatically labelled as “too weird.” There’s something wrong with a person who believes that any idea is “too weird” to try to understand. Even if you don’t agree with Grant’s idea that the world (including us) is a single giant organism about to undergo a severe metamorphosis, it’s something interesting to contemplate. Give him a chance. You don’t have to have read the entire Invisibles saga to understand Grant Morrison. You don’t have to be into magic and have seen extra-dimensional aliens to read his work.
Read the interview and I defy you not to have at least a little respect for someone willing to put his brain out there for all to see.
One thing that always bugs me about a lot of comic book readers when talking about Grant Morrison is how they go on and on about how weird and hard to understand he is. Yes, he has weird ideas. He has ideas and isn’t afraid to express them, some of them are bound to be weird. He thinks about them though and explains them so I think part of the problem people have is that they think beforehand that he’s going to be “too weird” for them so they start out with a bias. I won’t even go into the people who read his superhero work and then complain about his other work as being “that weird Vertigo shit” or whatever they say. Those people should rot. I’m talking about people who have been given the impression by others that he’s hard to understand so any time he goes out of the normal boring range of interview answers that most other comic book creators stick to it’s automatically labelled as “too weird.” There’s something wrong with a person who believes that any idea is “too weird” to try to understand. Even if you don’t agree with Grant’s idea that the world (including us) is a single giant organism about to undergo a severe metamorphosis, it’s something interesting to contemplate. Give him a chance. You don’t have to have read the entire Invisibles saga to understand Grant Morrison. You don’t have to be into magic and have seen extra-dimensional aliens to read his work.
Read the interview and I defy you not to have at least a little respect for someone willing to put his brain out there for all to see.