"Crowd Noise" "Mic Sound" "(Announcer) This man is one of the most highly acclaimed and influential comic book writers of all time." "He truly is an advocate for growth, transformation and for the power of ideas." "Ladies and gentlemen," "The true rock star of comics..." "Mr. Grant Morrison!" "Cheering and Applause" "Thanks a lot, that's very kind of you I can't express how much that means to me in words, so I'll do it in the form of dance." "To me, it just comes down to a very simple equation, is that life plus significance equals magic." "(Tim Callahan) Grant Morrison is the most popular and the most successful comic book writer of his generation, but he's also the most controversial." "(Karen Berger) Y'know, he'd get involved in these adventures that just seemed so absurd... and fictional almost." "(Tim Callahan) Art and writing are magical things." "I don't know how much of it, what you hear about him, is myth and what's reality." "Everybody wants to hear the crazy stories about him." "Maybe the guy walks around his house and takes out the garbage in a silver suit but I sort of doubt it." "I'm not going there...the magic stuff" "When you hang out with Grant" "You just get like, the fucking download l went up to him drunk and in tears and basically told him that he had changed my life" "And he does have the image, the glamour he projects a certain aura" "(Camilla D'Errico) Because he's iconic, just visually" "(Karen Berger) He's always had very strong interests in a lot of weird shit." "When he shook my hand, he has these intense laser eyes and his big voice... I was just like Wow!" "It almost feels like he's above all of us" "Looking down on everything and can see the whole" "We as three dimensional entities... we're interacting with a two dimensional plane." "Grant's the only guy who knows how to draw hypertime on the back of a napkin!" "What you have to remember about Grant is that... his greatest creation in a lot of ways is himself." "It's never gonna' be me, you'll never get it" "Y'know, you'll never know... and whatever you think I am, that's what I'm not." "I, grew up as a kid in a fairly poor part of Scotland in Glasgow." "And my father had been a soldier in World War ll" "He'd started as a soldier and then he became a pacifist." "He was a big man, a strong man..." "He had a mustache, looked a bit like Stalin..." "He was a character." "I'd been up at my grandmother's and... one of the last steam trains that ever went on the rails in Scotland came roaring past me." "And my dad saw me like rooted to the ground apparently from the window and ran down and scooped me up" "And he said the terror that was on my face and the noise that I was experiencing is why he got really into the whole nuclear war thing, the whole disarmament thing" "Because he'd seen how frightened I was and the sound and to him it was the sound of bombs that he'd lived through in the war." "He was a political man he was very political" "Very driven by the causes." "My dad's stuff was all anti-nuclear nightmare brochures, y'know, pictures of cities burned out and screaming skeletons and nuclear fallout." "I was kind of used as a decoy..." "My dad would go and he would kick balls over fences." "And we'd climb in and he would pretend his son was looking for his ball while he would take photographs of these underground nuclear bases." "So, I saw some really strange stuff when I was a kid." "Like Prisoner style things where you'd look down a long tunnel into a hillside and there's little men in carts driving past." "Over here to our left, even though we can't really point the camera at it ls RNAS Coulport, which is the home of the Trident missile defense system" "This is the place where my dad used to take me when he was doing all his protest stuff." "And he actually got into the underground base right over there." "They had things like..." "They had everyone's coffin cardboard coffins piled up in the wall" "And it was the idea that when the nuclear war came all the civil servants would have four minutes to rush to these hidden shelters." "And from there, they would sharpen their pencils and start the world up again." "It was insane, the idea that they even believed this could happen." "But they actually had stacks of coffins cardboard coffins that could be folded out." "And they had everyone's names printed on them from the electoral register" "So they were just waiting for us all to die." "So you can see influences of that ln things like The Invisibles the breaking into bases, the underground tunnels sort of representing the subconscious." "And, that was my early life." "He grew up during the height of the Cold War and his parents were activists." "So the spectre of the bomb was something that loomed large over his life and creative career." "(Grant Morrison) My father was getting arrested often" "For having these demonstrations or for breaking into places." "So we would have like the men in black turn up at the door" "They turned up one night and said to my dad if he kept it up, he would vanish and never be seen again" "And as if to prove it, one of his friends vanished and was never seen again." "The guy got in a taxi one night and no one ever saw him ever again." "ALARM" "explosion" "Y'know, I just lived daily with the fact that my parents were fighting against the bomb." "That the minute this thing happened we would be obliterated forever." "That the minute this thing happened we would be obliterated forever." "And for me, the big thing was discovering superhero comics." "Because suddenly in superhero comics here were people who could stop the bomb." "Superman could take an atom bomb hit on the chest and just smile and shake it off." "So all that's in Flex Mentallo." "The character talking about the moment where he realized that the bomb before it was a bomb, the bomb was an idea" "And suddenly that understanding of oh, ok..." "Superman's an even better idea, so why don't we make that one real instead of that one." "He was here at the convention a couple of years ago and somebody said" "'So All Star Superman 10... does that mean that Superman is..." "God?" "'" "He was like, 'Yeah, Superman loves you." "Doesn't that make you feel good?" "He's a more proactive God.'" "The first superhero comic I remember reading I was three years old, and it was Marvelman and Baron Munchausen." "And it seems very obvious that was the first one you'd read." "It was a superhero and a guy who tells lies" "So it's almost like the archetype of a writer is Baron Munchausen meeting a superhero." "Grant's mother encouraged the whole comics thing." "I think she was always into the whole science fictiony type thing and everything." "My mother took me out when I was eight years old." "Not only did she take me to see 2001:" "A Space Odyssey three times... she took me to astronomy classes..." "Then she took me out one night in the cold, pointed at the star Sirius..." "And said 'Son, that's where we come from.' with no explanation." "And just left me to deal with that." "Apparently his uncle was a big reader." "Loved counterculture type stuff Y'know, was a 60s guy." "Was a Crowley aficionado." "So, when Grant was growing up, his uncle's library was a place that he found quite fascinating." "Apart from the specter of the bomb, everything was fun." "Kids used to go out a lot then,so we had our own kids' society that had nothing to do with the adult world where we weren't told what to do, we made up our own games." "We played our own stories I was always encouraged to read and write and draw and express myself." "So, there was never any problem, I wasn't one of those guys whose parents threw out his comic books or banned him from reading comics." "I was really encouraged to live in fantasy worlds." "In the 1990s, Grant Morrison worked with Frank Quitely to create a series called Flex Mentallo." "Flex Mentallo drew upon Morrison's own childhood experiences and combined it with the superhero archetypes." "(Frank Quitely) Flex Mentallo was just this brilliant, complicated idea that he had about story, and fact and fiction and how the two are kind of the same thing." "All of the stuff in Flex Mentallo was kind of real." "When I had my appendix taken out, I was lying in hospital watching this green light all night" "Just imagining that it was some kind of alien intelligence studying me as I lay in my bed of sick." "Same thing when you see the kid sitting" "His parents are playing guitars and singing" "Well, Leigh always reckoned that Flex Mentallo was based on Grant's father, Walter." "(Grant Morrison) All that's real..." "Like wanking off to drawing supergirls in the nude." "I would do when I was a young teenager without a girlfriend" "So you'd draw superheroes getting off with each other and stuff." "After childhood, I got to twelve years old and my parents split up." "And that kind of fucked with my head a little bit." "And at the same time, I made the horrible mistake of I got a scholarship to go to a boys' school." "I thought this was a great idea when I was twelve and then when I was fourteen, I was going crazy l was climbing the walls because I wanted to meet girls" "And there was just no way of meeting girls." "So, what happened to me after this interesting, happy, peppy childhood was that I had to the worst teenage years." "When I finally got out of the boys' school I was like fucking nineteen and I hadn't even been near a girl." "And I thought I was never going to be alive and never do anything" "And I'd be stuck in this room for the rest of my life." "And at that time, I really got into comics I became a proper geek." "Because I had nothing else in my life so just for years and years of teenage wasteland... I was sitting reading comics and drawing comics and making up stories as a way to escape." "(Announcer) You'd be excused for thinking that the characters featured here had been dreamed up by a top comic strip writer and had been drawn by a professional cartoonist." "But they are, in fact, the brainchild and the work of a local sixteen year old artist." "They're part of the hobby that has grown into a whole way of life for Grant Morrison of Corkerhill." "As he'd been keen on drawing since an early age" "He began sketching some of his favorite characters and found he had a talent for it." "Soon he progressed to creating his own characters and gave them names like Monad and Luch of the Long." "Now, with the help of two young friends he produces complete stories in comic form featuring his own heroes." "Grant says of his own artwork 'l create superheroes because I think people want to... read about superheroes just now.'" "Grant has no set formula for his comic strip stories... 'l think up a basic plot, and make up the story as I go along,' he explained." "He says, 'I'm hoping to take up art asa career." "If that doesn't come off, I've nothing else in mind.'" "A lad with a great future is Grant Morrison." "(Grant Morrison) I wanted to go to art school" "That was my big thing." "I thought, at least if I get into art school, I'll meet people, I'll hang out, I'll have fun." "I got the rejection letter through, and that was like the end of the world for me." "And they just didn't let me in to art school." "And I got the rejection letter through and just that was like the end of the world for me." "Back then, I just thought I was never getting out of the house, I was just going to be stuck in there forever." "He didn't drink or take drugs or anything like that, that came later." "I was just drawing comics and making up stories." "doing nothing else, I didn't go out at night I didn't do anything." "That gave me a kind of, a sympathy for geeks because I was a super geek." "So, I can understand how people feel when they're in that position." "And how things like comics and fantasy can get you out of that, and give you something to aspire to" "Something to live up to, I really felt that they'd saved my life in a lot of ways which is why I love them so much, and why I keep going back to them." "And kind of trying to make sure those worlds are kept alive and kept vital." "If I had superpowers, the last thing I would do is go out and get a suit." "Whereas for Grant that's the first thing he would have a huge cape and a collar and everything." "So, I had a whole bunch of material, and I went to a comic convention in Glasgow" "And a bunch of hippies were trying to put together this magazine, Near Myths." "Grant Morrison's first published work was in 1978 in Near Myths which was an anthology series." "Morrison was only seventeen at the time." "And, he was writing and drawing his own comics." "In that anthology, he wrote and drew a character called Gideon Stargrave who was a psychedelic dandy." "That character would later reappear in Morrison's Invisibles as kind of an analogue for Morrison himself." "(Grant Morrison)And it was just really weird time traveling guys walking along haunted, desolate streets looking for ethereal girls." "He seemed very quiet and shy, and to see the work being produced by a nineteen year old at that time was impressive." "And they hired me straight away and said we'll give you ten pounds a page." "And that just seemed like a fortune for me, that was real proper money." "In addition to comics, one of the things that Morrison's known for is his interest in magic." "Specifically chaos magic, the idea that by believing in something, you can make it real." "And he'll talk about the rituals he'll perform and then seeing if they'll produce results in the real world, and for Morrison, they have." "You would look at things one way, but he would always look at them from some other abstract kind of dimension." "Or imagine it this way, he always had that." "The first time I tried a magic ritual, I was nineteen and I'd been given a book by my Uncle Billy." "who was interested in Crowley, and he was the same guy who gave me my first comic books." "So he was a big formative influence." "And I was a kind of dis-empowered kid, so I felt I wanted something that would give me some agency in the world." "And magic seemed like a pretty cool thing to try out." "The first thing I did was a kind of invitation to magic." "I just did this thing, ok, let me in, I want to be part of this." "I was really cynical, I didn't believe any of this stuff." "I'd never seen ghosts" "I'd never seen anything, ln fact, my mother was quite witchy" "She read tea leaves, but nothing of that seemed to come through to me I was a totally down to Earth kid." "I tried this ritual, I did the whole thing I got the candles out, I did the magic words, I did the circle, I did the banishing and all that stuff." "Then, I stopped and I went to bed and then... this thing happened when I was lying down." "And right in front of me, there was a kind of gravitational point in the air in the room which was drawing all the perspectives towards it as if there was a hole there or a crack." "And there was the sense of black oil filling up the folds between the brain." "I just freaked out and called in the gods of my mom and dad." "Y'know, Jesus get me out of this one." "And the whole experience ended after a little bit." "And then there was a vision of a lion's face, which started to announce stuff." "So, it seemed pretty convincingly Crowleyan to me." "That I'd actually activated whatever it was that he was talking about." "Grant's take on magic for the most part has been to say... lt's really easy, you just do this and results will happen." "I did it, and it happened for me." "(Grant Morrison) And that's what I was interested in the nuts and bolts of it, not whether it was an angel or demon." "because I don't believe in angels or demons to tell the truth." "I believe there are things that we can manifest as angels and demons or project on to." "And really all magic is about is enchanting... the apparent chaos of ordinary matter around us with meaning." "There's probably nobody on earth that you want to learn more about magic, or expanding your consciousness than Grant Morrison." "That was my lifelong interest, I kept trying it out and doing things" "Just weird stuff you can't explain, but you look back on it and say something happens when you start on that path and you start to think in that way, and you start doing these things." "The world seems to adapt a little bit, a roundabout." "The magic gave him the confidence to join with a few friends and start a band." "The magic gave him the confidence to join with a few friends and start a band." "That was it. I formed a band, and just started to live." "And get out and dress up and be the person I'd always wanted to be." "(Gordy Goudie) lt was kind of psychedelic, kind of garage rock and roll, a bit of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and just that kind of pebblesy" "Electric Prunes, very 60sinfluenced." "(Grant Morrison) I was into punk" "And I was into The Beatles. I grew my hair out like kind of Beatle hair" "And I started wearing what now would be regarded as Austin Powers style clothes." "The Gideon Stargrave character that's in The Invisibles, that was how I looked back then." "I had one of those red military guardsman's jackets, and the shades." "Fairly kind of dandyish." "In a kind of very skinny Oscar Wilde kind of way." "I used to go to a place called The Rock Garden." "And it would just be, I'd carry my tarot cards around, so if anybody wanted advice I'd pull out the tarot cards." "And do stuff." "So, I was kind of just a mod shaman around town for a little bit around Glasgow." "Even in the Zenith synopsis, he was referring to his own research into magic." "People would come in and say, I've split up with my boyfriend." "Then I'd pull out the tarot cards, I didn't even read tarot cards, I just used to wing it" "And it tended to work." "Like Gordon, Gordon Goudie, he lost a guitar." "(Gordy Goudie) This guitar, which was the only guitar I had lt got stolen from the Glasgow school of art and Grant said, I'll do magic and get your guitar back." "I had this click in my head, which I always had this super certainty when I knew magic was going to work." "And it came on in my head, and I just said Oh no, you'll find it within a couple of days." "And it'll be very close to the house." "I had no idea, just, I was absolutely sure." "I kind of disbelieved the thing and was like, the guitar's still not here and bloody man goes, it's really close, it's really close." "And a couple of days later, he discovered the guitar hanging in the window of a pawn shop like right around the corner from where he lived, so he was able to retrieve it." "(Playing Guitar)" "And for a little period then, I was kind of doing stuff like that, to test the magic to see if it worked, and there was a certain run of it where it just felt so natural and so normal" "that these things would happen spontaneously." "Other than Captain Clyde, which was a superhero comic strip that he wrote and drew for the Scottish newspapers and Starblazer Magazine, which he contributed to he didn't doa lot of comics work in the early 80s." "I was making money off comics, but I just wasn't putting an awful lot of effort into them because I thought the band was going to happen." "Despite the fact that we had a lot of really good singers, we had three great songwriters and we did really good songs." "We weren't great musicians, but we had a lot of enthusiasm." "The trouble is, everyone was coming from a similar place of damage." "We weren't very good at being a band, we didn't know how to deal with groupies" "We just used to send them away, scared." "We were a kind of crappy band, but we looked beautiful and we sounded really great." "The thing is, I could never understand it because he was handsome, he was good looking and girls liked him but he was just seemed slow coming forward." "He seemed sort of unconfident within himself or something." "I also took a job in the civil service, for a year, where l sat behind a desk wearing all this ridiculous 60s finery in an office, and tried to be a filing clerk." "And I just decided after a year of that, that I would never, ever, ever work again." "So I decided the only way to do that was to get back into comics and take it really seriously." "The band was more fun, but ultimately I realized that the only hope I had of doing anything meaningful was to break away." "I think he was only at that stage making his mind up about whether he wanted to pursue a career as an artist or asa writer." "Ultimately, I wanted to just tell stories." "And I didn't want to draw other peoples' stuff, and that was the kind of work that was being offered." "The more I got closer to the actual comics mainstream." "So, I was kind of forced into a choice and I decided to be a writer because it allowed me to tell more stories and get more work done, and get more out of my head on to the page." "Fortunately at the time, the magazine Warrior had just come out" "Which had Alan Moore's revival of Marvelman and V For Vendetta ln the early to mid 80s, when Morrison was away from comics" "Alan Moore came into the picture, really changed the nature of comics." "He took comics in a much darker, much more mature, much more adult direction." "I remember reading V For Vendetta and thinking this is what I wanted to do." "This is the way comics should be." "So, one of the first things I did was go down to see Dez Skinn in London, the publisher of Warrior." "He was such a quiet, unassuming kinda guy when he'd come into the office." "He was more like a fan than a professional, very shy, very timid seeming." "But his work was the absolute opposite, it was totally out there, even his early stuff." "And I'd taken this story, which was a kind of Kid Marvelman spec script, and he bought it straightaway." "So again, it was a really good jump for me." "And I thought it was a really nice little five pager." "But Alan, like any creator, I guess, who owns material didn't want anybody else touching his material." "Then Alan Moore had it spiked." "And said it was never to be published, so thus began our slight antagonism that's persisted until this day." "Alan Moore, he's very disdainful of the whole medium except for the work he produces." "Morrison tends to poke fun at that sort of thing." "Alan kind ofi sat this pedestal and Grant just has to poke at him." "I kind of get that feeling sometimes." "They asked me to continue Marvelman because Moore had fallen out with everyone on the magazine and taken away scripts." "And they asked would you follow this up?" "And to me, that was just like oh my God." "The idea of getting to do Marvelman, following Alan Moore, I'm the only person in the world who'd really do this right." "And I was well up for it, but I didn't want to do it without Moore's permission" "And I wrote to him and said, they've asked me to do this, but obviously I really respect your work" "And I don't want to mess anything up, but I don't want anyone else to do it and mess it up." "And he sent me back this really weird letter l remember the opening, it just said I don't want this to sound like the softly hissed tones of a Mafia hitman but back off." "And the letter was all, you can't do this we're much more popular than you and if you do this, your career will be over, and it was really quite threatening." "So I didn't do it." "But, I ended up doing a little bit of work for Warrior." "What I saw in his work was, an almost fully formed, straight out of the box professional comics writer." "There wasn't the slightest hint of amateurishness in those scripts of his that I read." "2000 A.D. was the biggest magazine of the day in England and he created the first superhero for 2000 A.D., Zenith, and it was based on the idea of superhero as pop star." "And he created what ultimately became a four part saga that drew the attention of American publishers." "DC started to recruit because Alan Moore's Swamp Thing had been very successful." "They said they'd give me a call and it was one of those moments where it's like oh my God, DC Comics just phoned me." "So, I went down to London for one of the first big summit meetings they had." "And it was the same meeting they discovered Dave Mckean and Neil Gaiman and Peter Milligan and all those people." "He was very shy, extremely shy, but he was a good talker." "And, when we could finally understand what he was saying, pitched a number of ideas." "One of them was Animal Man." "(Grant Morrison) I went down on the train and had no ideas" "And I came up with Animal Man, who was a character I'd loved as a kid because he was really obscure and I was the only kid who knew who he was." "I kind of had a slight emotional connection to that character, and I thought, what could I do with that." "What would fit into DC's reviving our superheroes mode?" "He pitched a very sort of real world scenario for this crazy character." "So, the first four Animal Mans were done as a kind of sub Moore approach because I thought that's what Karen Berger wanted, which she kind of did." "I first read Grant's work on Animal Man#1." "I had recognized the character from Who's Who and stuff and I read that first issue and I was blown away." "That was, like, one of the best comics I had ever read in my life." "What happened was the first four issues were accepted, they took them on..." "And then they said we want you to develop this as a comic, so suddenly it became a lot more real." "And I didn't want to just follow that same path." "So, instead of taking superheroes and making them more like the real world, which was the Alan Moore approach" "He takes the comic book world, and overlaps it with our world" "And tries to bring our reality towards the comic book reality." "I didn't think it was right for superheroes to be burdened with real world problems." "I was more interested in going into their world, I wanted to find out what it was like in there where the sky was always blue, where everything was primary colored, where time was represented by boxes and you could cut between one moment and ten years over the space of a gutter." "So again, that's why I always thought my agenda and my project was so different." "Because I felt that Moore was about bringing the grit and the grime into superheroes' lives and hurting them and messing them up and exposing their futility and their frailty." "And to me, I don't want to expose the futility or the frailty of one of the last great ideas that we have." "Well, Grant has a different kind of knowledge of the DC Universe." "Grant, it feels like Grant when he talks about it, has lived there, has been there." "That allowed me to stake out new ground, that the other big names weren't really covering at the time." "And, I'm still doing the same kind of stuff I guess." "Grant Morrison had been writing Animal Man for a couple of years, and by the end of his run he actually appeared asa character in the series." "It was the early attempt to just appear on the page and talk to the character and say, I'm the guy that made you." "I'm the guy that killed your family" "I'm sorry about it, but we need drama, we've got people up here clamoring for their comics every month" "And if I have to kill your family to sell a few more episodes, then sorry, I'm going to do that." "And to also have Animal Man say, well, can you bring them back?" "And I'm saying well, that's not realistic nobody's going to believe that, and then doing it because the realization was that in a comic, you can do that." "His wife and family could be sat back on the seat as if nothing had ever happened." "Only in fiction is that possible. lt can break the rules of physics and time and space and life and death and that's quite profound." "I felt like when The Beatles first discovered hallucinogenic drugs in that it blew my mind, and changed my concept of what you could do in superhero comics." "What's really interesting is the fact that these long running universes have a weight and a reality of their own which is bigger than mine." "I wasn't alive when Superman was having his first adventures, I'll be dead and he'll still be having adventures." "So there's a certain element of that continuum we've created which is much more real than the one we live in." "The process back in the 80sand in those days, it was easier because I didn't have so much work." "Animal Manor Doom Patrol, I had an entire month to write those comic books." "And I used to spend an entire month doing it." "So, a great part of the day was me just walking about the streets and going up and down the canal and having vague romantic thoughts." "Looking at things around you, and thinking how they got there, how they're made." "Thinking about how everything is the way it is and how you fit into it." "And it was a way of kind of enchanting the landscape." "And as the walk goes on, you try to lose yourself in it, you try to almost forget where you are." "Until this stream of information becomes almost unconscious." "And things start to talk and to have meanings and to have connections." "The comics tend to start in things like this which is a particularly cheap version of things like this, usually they're a bit more sturdy but this one says it all about the current chaos of life." "In here, is little sketchy illustrations." "The artists never see these unless it's a specific layout that's hard to describe in words." "Quite often, he might send along a little thumbnail sketch of a particular design" "This cover here is obviously recognizable as Frank Quitely's cover for Batman and Robin#1 in its very infant idea stage, and he takes that and does something so much better and much more accomplished than that." "I really like the challenge of an open ended cover, where you can do what you want or you have to base it on some sort of idea." "But, equally, it's really nice when somebody actually gives you a drawing they've done and says 'Do that, that's what I want.'" "One of these books lasts about a month or sometimes a couple of months, so as you can imagine, there's quite a lot of them." "The interesting thing is that sometimes, I find books like this, and there's a better version of a story that's been published in it, that I'd completely forgotten about." "Notebooks are always with me, I have to have one all the time because every stray thought goes in these" "Just little lines or stupid names for things" "All fire is the same fire, sound like an Alan Moore quote, but there it is." "I don't even know what that means, a black mask, renegade costume, could be anything." "Once you get past having written one of these, you have no idea what you were talking about when you look back on it." "I saw the Earth remade with my own eyes." "There you go." "From there,just go straight into working on the script." "He's seen it in his own head, and he's worked it out to be paced this way and to fit into this size, it works." "It's just a question of taking that, and then trying to make those words that he's described his vision with work in pictures." "Usually I've got notes, I've got kind of breakdowns." "If it's a twelve issue series, I try and work out the entire twelve before I start." "I'll sit down and I'll work out the entirety of The Invisibles, the six years of it" "Having said that, I didn't know what the last sentence in that book would be, until the very last page when I got to it, and suddenly I go, oh, ok." "Our sentence is up." "So, it starts in the notebook, goes straight on to the computer, and out to the artist." "He tells me the story, then I tell the readers the story, which is I think the way it should work anyway." "I was speaking to an artist friend, and he couldn't believe that you could start in comics with drawings, convert them into text, then send them to an artist to re-convert them into drawings again, but different drawings." "(Tim Callahan) After Animal Man, in the late 1980s" "Morrison gained more prominence." "When he would show up to conventions, or in articles about him he began to develop this reputation as an oddball, as someone who was different as someone who was writing comics that maybe didn't quite make sense." "You're the weird one pigeonhole, it's such an easy, cheap pin to put on somebody." "Back in the day, I used to go to these comic conventions, and I couldn't identify with the people in comics." "I think Grant liked having somebody with him, in a way to draw the attention off him back then." "He turned up at one comic convention with Adam Ant." "He wore a cap, leather cap." "Sideburns, dark hair." "Little rose tinted glasses." "I've previously described him as looking like a negative zone Andy Warhol." "I think Grant was unique in that he was very conscious of image as a comic book creator." "We were so used to dealing with the sort of dyed in the wool, traditional comic book writers that the appearance of Grant looking dapper and sharp at a Marvel UK Christmas party probably we didn't know what to say to him." "Yeah, I felt like an outsider, and you can see it in Animal Man, you can see it particularly in Doom Patrol." "They gave me the Doom Patrol title, and obviously Doom Patrol had started out at DC as the world's strangest superheroes." "And it was more a case of thinking, what is currently strange that I can expose these characters to?" "And for me, what was currently strange was just all the new stuff that I was getting into which was like situationism, and surrealism and dada." "These were superheroes that you wouldn't want to actually be." "You don't usually find someone who wishes they could be a brain in a tin can or somebody with sixty-four personalities." "It was kind of about the people I was hanging about with." "Y'know,just fuck ups, people on medication, artists." "Crazy girls who made beautiful sculptures, but then spent the rest of the night crying." "I was trying to mythologize that experience, the experience of bohemia through superheroes." "Finding Doom Patrol was one of those life changing moments." "Realizing there are other weirdos like me out there." "So, I kind of set out deliberately to write comic books that were chaoses that we had to make sense out of." "Life causes all manner of confusion, I think stories should as well." "In the late 80s, Morrison was working on Animal Man and Doom Patrol" "Both of those series were great, critically acclaimed, but they weren't starring popular characters necessarily." "But then he comes out with Arkham Asylum, which features Batman." "A friend of mine and I had been thinking about and talking about, just imagine you got to do Batman" "This is what we would do." "It's not sitting there relying on being this pulpy action thing." "That's what most people expect out of Batman." "And here he's giving you this psychological drama." "(Rich Johnston) But it got published" "Just at the time that Tim Burton's Batman movie was coming out, and so the sales on this thing were immense." "(Karen Berger) I still remember calling" "Grant and Dave up and telling them what their royalty check was." "And she just said you're rich, that was the first thing she said." "And they'd sold 120,000 on the first day, and I was getting a dollar on each book." "It was the book that really made his career." "It just felt brilliant, because it'd been years, assuming that I'd always just be in the same position stuck in Glasgow with no money." "He left comics behind for a while to travel and to experiment, and just see what life had to offer." "It took me until I was thirty to decide" "I'm gonna' start drinking, I'm gonna' start taking drugs, I'm going to see what life is like for other people." "And so my whole life kind of blew apart, and I split up from the girl I was with and started doing all this other stuff." "When he broke with Judy and went around the world and stuff like that that's when he changed, that's when I noticed a change in him." "The night before I did the around the world thing I was in a little Travelodge motel thing outside Heathrow Airport" "And I thought this is it, I'm going to go around the world now, nobody I know can see me." "so I'll shave my head at last." "I did it, and I just thought, Fuck, this looks great." "The writer that I met in 1985 was far quieter, less outgoing, less sure of himself I think." "From being like the Doom Patrol where l felt like a real outsider and no one understood me" "Suddenly I was traveling around the world, flying to San Francisco to meet people that seemed interesting." "Suddenly I was going to fetish clubs." "I'd done things that I didn't think I could do." "If I'd imagined them back home, I'd never have left home because it was too scary or too weird." "But being in those situations, I found that I could deal with them." "And it just made me feel bigger and more expansive and more capable of doing more things I hadn't done before." "He really came out of his shell." "He really came out of his shell." "What was it Rambeau called it?" "The complete and systematic derangement of the senses." "That was my goal at the time." "To see how close I could get to the complete and systematic derangement of the senses." "It was always done in these ridiculous experiments for me, so when I decided to see what drink was like I bought a whole bunch of different drinks starting off with really cheap cider and then working my way up to champagne." "And everyday I would just pour a pint and drink the pint, which was nuts, y'know." "So I thought ok, what's cider like?" "Pint." "Ohh, that's interesting." "And then the next day, I would be like what's wine like?" "I suddenly realized then, this is kind of interesting." "I feel a bit loose now, I feel a bit disconnected from all those old problems I once had because I'm now drunk." "And then a couple of friends, we got into the whole magic mushrooms thing for a few years." "There's a little bit of that in Doom Patrol, all the stuff about the insect mesh and the other planet stuff is all magic mushroom trips." "He said, there's this most beautiful place we have to show you." "Me and my friend Ulrich took her up the mountain where we used to harvest our mushrooms." "(Jill Thompson) Grant said out loud to everybody" "Can anyone else manipulate matter?" "I concentrated and I felt like oh, I'm finally Jean Grey from the Phoenix" "And I went 'Yes, I can.'" "And it was sunset, which was beautiful and then I was realizing, we have to climb down this mountain." "When we rushed down to the bottom, there was no one, it was just nature around us and a little bench." "And Grant said, you know what's happened, we've been like Rip Van Winkle, we've been up that mountain for a hundred years." "When the bus comes, it's not going to have any wheels, it's going to fly with rockets coming out of it and spacesuits, we've just been trapped in a time bubble and the world has passed us by." "And everything we know is completely changed." "I came past his room to see if he wanted a drink." "And it took a while for the door to open, and when it did, it creaked open slowly" "And I could see Grant, who appeared to be wearing nothing but a gray blanket tugged over his head." "I said, do you want to come out for a drink?" "He goes, 'No, I'm writing." "I'm having breakthroughs.'" "And then the door closed again, and the thing is, I didn't see him touch it." "It just closed all on its own." "(Grant Morrison) He's making that bit up." "I should add to these stories, rather than debunk them, but I'm trying to tell the truth." "He had a kind of reputation for being mischievous, shall we say, in his work and socially." "So I just started going out dancing, and doing lots of stuff I hadn't done before." "That became kind of the meat of the comics." "Back in the early 90s, I was doing the whole tranny thing and going out and dressing like that just to see what that would be like." "If I had gone over the edge as much as him, I'd be institutionalized." "I'd just be, I'd be gone." "When I talked about the first demon or angelic experience, it came across as a very slight visual distortion." "On drugs, you had the demon in the room, with its multiple heads and ten tails and flailing barbs." "On drugs, you had the demon in the room, with its multiple heads and ten tails and flailing barbs." "In 1993, I went on a tour for some of the early Vertigo stuff I was there with Steve Yeowell and Jill Thompson, and we went along to the 50 Years of LSD celebrations." "which were going on in San Francisco that night." "Someone said, you guys want to go to this rave tonight?" "Danced and danced and danced, you could feel the music." "(Steve Yeoeell) Just having a good time really." "(Grant Morrison) And suddenly out of this night came" "Hey, let's do a comic together." "C'mon, hey let's save the world." "So, I tried to come up with something that encompassed all the stuff that interested me the fashion, the music, the mythology, the counter culture stuff." "Something like The Invisibles is the ritual, it is the spell." "The Invisibles was a sci-fi, dimension hopping conspiracy thriller." "that was heavily influenced by his own life." "The comic to me is real, so my interaction with The Invisibles was very literal." "For me, I had to become a character, in order to write about those things." "He puts himself into the comic book lnvisibles as the character King Mob this ultra sexual, ultra powerful avatar for Grant." "The things in The Invisibles, they're all based on real experiences." "I made myself look like the lead character, I started to go to places he would go to and hang out with people he would meet." "The way that he connected what felt like was happening in the zeitgeist and what was happening day to day in the 90s to such a giant science fiction story made it feel like it was a story about your life." "to such a giant science fiction story made it feel like it was a story about your life." "As Morrison was writing The Invisibles, he practiced a basic form of magic called a sigil" "And he actually taught his readers, in the letters page, how to perform sigils." "And it's a really good entry into magic, because it's very simple." "So, I picked up on it because it seemed to be something that worked." "To construct a simple sigil, write down your desire in the form of a sentence." "Then take out the repeated letters take out the vowels, and you'll be left with a string of consonants." "Then take those consonants and rearrange them and mash them together until you've got something which doesn't look like your original sentence which is its own little glyph." "The idea is that you activate the sigil, and that's where it gets to be fun." "Look at that sigil, meditate on it, and masturbate." "While you're staring at the sigil, and at the peak, pour all your concentration into it and hopefully and generally, you will find that the thing you wanted will slowly enter your life." "He says something, and then somehow, events align themselves to make it what he's after." "I used to just do them to meet people, to kind of get off with girls." "We cured a couple of friends of Herpes, by using a sigil." "The notion was in The Invisibles to extend the sigil concept into areas of plot and narrative." "When I started the sigil that became The Invisibles, I did it by doing a bungee jump from a bridge in New Zealand." "It was the way of charging the sigil using absolute terror because it was absolutely terrifying until the moment where you actually jump and then it becomes ecstatic." "If you make something that gets seen by a whole lot of people" "You can impose your ideology on them, you can bring that idea into the world and that is making magic." "I hate stories that are just stories." "I can't relate to stories that are just, somebody's making something up." "I like a story that's actually meaningful, that's coming out of life or coming out of an emotion or has some weight behind it." "The boundary between the imaginary, or the supposed and the real was going to become much more permeable." "A lot of people like to characterize Grant as a spacecase and a nutter." "What people don't realize, in large part because they're not listening is that he's extremely practical and pragmatic." "When he talks about his alien abduction, when he talks about magic lt's all about the practical method to make something happen." "In his completely insane and unreasonable way" "He is actually completely reasonable and pragmatic about these things." "Ashe was starting to write The Invisibles, Morrison traveled to Kathmandu and he had a completely transformative experience." "Something that he later termed an alien abduction." "There were these stairs there, which was365 steps and if you could climb them on one breath, then you were guaranteed enlightenment." "We got some tickets for Kathmandu and left." "And we did the thing, so we ran up the stairs, no problem." "So we figured, that's it, enlightened in this life." "The job is done." "A couple of days later, I was sitting on top of the Vajra hotel I was actually writing the introduction to The Invisibles when the experience happened." "There's a break that says shit, I've just gone away and the most profound experience of my life has happened." "The temple began to look like a machine." "And it was pumping this kind of spiritual energy and it was getting quite profound." "These things came out of the wall, these little silvery blob guys were saying to me where do you want to go, and the first thing I could think of was Alpha Centauri." "and suddenly there was this collapsing stargate kind of effect and I wasn't in my body anymore." "There was three suns, and there was a planet that was blue and green." "And they say, we're going to take you off the surface of the space-time continuum now, ready for this one?" "And I got peeled off four dimensions of space and time." "They said we'll show you what's going on." "What we do is create universes because only in time can you grow things." "Things here are eternal, so we can't make new ones unless we build time." "In the second to last Invisibles, we see Jack walking along, leaving a trail of after images" "That's him through time, stretching back all the way through his life." "Pull out further and you see every single human life represented this way" "Not only in the present, but in the past." "We pull even further back and now we're outside of time" "We see time represented as a four dimensional crystalline structure" "(Grant Morrison) ln order to get here today, you had to be yesterday" "And you also had to be ten years old, and nine years old and five years old and everybody had to wind their way back through, down into their mother" "And then their mother winds her way back into her mother" "And the whole thing connects as one continuous activity." "And I spent the six years after that trying to probe what that meant what had just happened, what was going on in my brain through The Invisibles." "When he's talking about alien abduction it's more a metaphor of an awakening, of an awareness, of the layers of reality." "And I think that's the same experience that we can get from reading his comics." "Grant writes very basic comic book scripts." "In terms of format and structure, they're really no different from any other comic script." "I think people expect them to be these insane missives on the world, and the world that he lives in and they're really not." "They're very structured, formal scripts." "What makes a Grant script different is what he's asking people to draw." "My reaction when I get a new Grant Morrison script, my reaction upon first reading it is..." "Oh my God, how am I gonna' do this?" "Oh my God, how am I going to draw this?" "It's like trying to draw a sunset or something like that." "You can't capture all the aspects or the other sensory inputs." "I guess if there's a difference in Grant's scripts, there's just so much information." "I often would just write him and make sure I had the important points in there, so that I didn't miss anything." "He would say, the character opens the door and there's a blob of mirror matter behind it." "He wouldn't put the character opens the door to see the most amazing sight ever y'know, mirror matter." "Exclamation mark." "Exclamation mark." "He was very matter of fact about it." "Nowadays, Morrison has close collaborations with people like Frank Quitely and J.H. Williams." "It was important for me to talk to him." "And so we just started having conversations over the phone and I remember him talking to me about conversations with the characters." "When it flows, I hear them talking." "They're talking and they're saying what they're saying and they're saying it in their voices." "When I don't hear that, I have to reconstruct it asa writer using writerly tools." "I don't think anybody would ever know the difference, but to me it's not as good as when you start to hear, oh god, there's Scott Summers, and it sounds just like Scott Summers, quick write that down." "Other artists just get the Morrison script, and then do their own thing with it." "Some people I speak to quite a lot, like Frank Quitely because we live nearby and we're friends." "We3 I think is the most collaborative, in terms of actually... you breathing down my neck." "And telling me that it's not different enough and it's not good enough and it's not new enough." "Other guys I just trust them so much, like Cameron Stewart he's brilliant and I hardly ever get in touch with him, I feel terrible, I should get more in touch with Cameron." "The only contact I have is generally through e-mail and even then, it's not usually with Grant himself, it's with his wife Kristan." "I want to be able to trust my co-pilot to work well." "I don't want to be hanging over their shoulder, or be in control." "I actually never speak with Grant while I'm working on his books." "I like to kind of reinforce the mystery of it." "Maybe he's, to busy communing with forces of the universe to start typing on a MacBook or whatever." "How you doing?" "I'll just say hello to you for five seconds then leave." "Another five seconds!" "We'll meet each other next year." "(Grant Morrison) I'd never tell them to change anything even if it's wrong." "The mistakes areas cool to meas the things that work." "I think when he's working on the corporate trademarks, the big Marvel characters, the big DC characters I think when he's working on the corporate trademarks, the big Marvel characters, the big DC characters that he works on, he has a responsibility to those trademarks and to that corporation." "Obviously, so those works are not as transgressive as perhaps his other work, his more personal work is." "But still, these ideas do get smuggled in." "You have to look at Grant's work asa bullet with a candy coating." "A kid can read it, and their parents will never be the wiser that their kid's getting their mind good and fucked." "I really thought I wouldn't do superheroes again, I just wanted to do The Invisibles and things like it." "But I got a real yearning for it." "JLA was a very strange book, in that basically DC Comics gave Grant Morrison a man known for more introspective, weirder projects" "And they kind of gave him the keys to all their biggest cars." "And with Justice League, I just thought, I want to just doa big old superhero comic, the way I think they should be done." "Like huge ideas, imagination, let's throwout all this stupid dark stuff and the realism of it." "They came in, here's Batman, here's Superman, here's Wonder Woman." "Pretty much the first time, they'd been put all together with a major comic book writer." "As you know, at the time, I was tripping out my box most days" "So, I was getting a lot of really good ideas for superhero stories." "The Invisibles was quite intensive work and it was very involving." "Justice League, I could just go away and cleanse my palette with some crazy stories that would allow me to play with my favorite toys and giant beasts and hyper-dimensional entities" "All the things I was into, but taken down a level into the idea of the adventure story." "I remember he'd get involved in these adventures I remember he'd get involved in these adventures that just seemed so absurd, and fictional almost." "If I wanted to write about voodoo, I wasn't just going to read a bunch of books I would have to interact with voodoo Loa, to see how it felt, so I could do it in a way that was actually honest." "By mistake, this one night, I found myself in the palace of the scorpion gods." "And it was horrible,just these big things, with kind of human faces, on bodies." "They were telling me I had to get a tattoo, at the base of my spine, with a scorpion on it, which I gave to King Mob" "They're things that anyone can do, anyone can contact scorpion gods" "Anyone can talk to John Lennon, or Mickey Mouse or Ganesh." "He was talking about how one time he healed his cat." "When I had a bad experience in my life, the first person I called was Grant because I wanted us to do magic" "And we did magic over the phone, and I think it worked, I believe in my heart it worked." "I was living it, I'd become the character." "I was wearing the clothes, I was going to the places, I was doing the things, I was doing the rituals I was hanging out with the Gods, then putting it back in the comic, and then being affected by what was in the comic." "So yeah, in terms of reality, that one was the actual deal." "That one was bringing me to the verge of death." "When Grant was working on The Invisibles he got sick, right around the time that character got sick." "(Grant Morrison) Just after King Mob had been convinced by the bad guys that he'd been given a necrotizing fasciitis bacteria that was eating through his face I suddenly get this huge boil on my face, and within three days, it's enormous, distorting my entire features." "I remember him saying, Steve, look at this" "And he pulled his ear back and there was this hideous green, crusty kind of crater thing behind his ear." "He'd got no idea what it was." "I was sweating constantly, I was going into fevers and having these shakes and rigors and then freezing." "I just couldn't get up anymore, and I lay in front of the fireplace in my house." "I mean, he thought was going to die, he'd broken down in tears" "He was delirious, man, delirious." "(Grant Morrison) And suddenly this giant column of light comes through the door" "Bear in mind I'm hallucinating, but this was one of the most amazing hallucinations I've ever had." "And it's Jesus." "The first thing he said, which is the thing I put in the comic, just this voice suddenly announced itself I am not the God of your fathers, I am the hidden stone that breaks all hearts." "So then he's saying to me, ok, you're about to die now, but you don't have to die." "And I said, well look, I really don't want to die." "What do I have to do?" "And he said, well, if you want to stay here, you have to work for us." "You have to spread the light, whatever that means." "There's sequences in those issues of The Invisibles that came out of the hallucinatory experiences he had on his sick bed." "(Grant Morrison) And it really felt like I'd been through something very closely attached to the comic." "That was my shamanic experience, that was my trial, my encounter with death like I'd forced all my characters to go through." "It's not like you do a comic where George Bush dies and he's going to keel over in his bed or something." "But you write a comic book where you get sick, and who knows?" "When he told me the story, it was very profound." "And I could see in his eyes, and I could see in his reactions it had been a very real experience for him to have survived." "It was really obvious to me then that what I was doing was having a much wider effect and deeper implications in my own life." "There was a Disinformation retreat weekend at the Omega Institute in upstate New York and somebody brought a guitar." "And at one point, Grant gave a forty minute impromptu concert." "Singing for these gorgeous girls and admiring boys." "I was just like, there he goes." "There's the totally self expressive human with no doubt." "Just..." "Boom!" "And I wanted that to be the experience of the people who read the comic as well." "Hopefully sometime in 2010, they'd be sitting there, wearing their own clothes that they'd been inspired by." "And suddenly they'd be the ones who were being contacted and who were having the experiences." "Who would then become the next generation of spear carriers, who would come back and inspire me." "(Jill Thompson) Grant would be off having adventures ln India or Jakarta while he had written some of the stories." "He would say, I've seen this most brilliant thing, and I'll be sending you photo reference for it." "And the photo reference never came." "(Phil Jimenez) There were times he was out of contact for weeks." "We would get the script, and then he would be off to Australia or Asia, some place." "I suddenly knew loads of people around the world because of The Invisibles." "And I had some friends in Sydney who said, look, you're going to have to see this film." "This'll really blow your mind, you're going to get quite a shock." "In 1999, The Matrix comes out, and it's obviously hugely influential." "But if you look at The Matrix, a lot of the details... the style of The Matrix, a lot of the cosmology of The Matrix, basically comes from The Invisibles." "Holy shit!" "This is the same story." "They're wearing the same clothes that I'm currently sitting watching this, wearing." "The first thing I remember is just how much I loved it and thought, what a great movie." "And then kind of two days later, I was thinking fuckin' bastards, they've got really rich by doing my stuff." "I think The Matrix owes Grant Morrison everything." "Did I just say that?" "Wow, I just said that." "And then a little bit after that, I thought, no this is what you wanted." "This was the whole idea of doing The Invisibles as a hypersigil, so this would catch on." "And weird gnostic ideas would get out into the general populace and make them think differently." "After that, I realized, yeah, it opened up people to these ideas and they didn't care." "It didn't change anything, it didn't create a world of gnostic superheroes yet." "It didn't change anything, it didn't create a world of gnostic superheroes yet." "In February of 2000, I organized an event in New York called the Disinfocon." "Douglas Rushkoff gave the keynote speech, I spoke, Paul Laffoley, Robert Anton Wilson and Grant." "Who I knew would pull out the stops." "People were getting quite bored at that point in the day, and they were starting to fall asleep." "So I came on and screamed at them all to wake them up." "SCREAM!" "And it also was because I was nervous." "It was a big thing to go on and talk for forty-five minutes with no notes, nothing." "Okay, I'm pissed, and in half an hour, I'm going to come up on drugs, so watch for it." "But it was great because his tongue was loose." "And he improvised an amazing forty minute speech that is kind of a classic at this point." "He talked about his Kathmandu experience, he talked about the idea of the hypersigil." "He basically put into words a lot of the things that he had been putting in to The Invisibles comic." "There is that whole thing where there's a public version of you." "And then there's the real person who is obviously a lot more complex and difficult and spiky." "So I can see that, and that's a presentation, that's like being in a band, that's performing." "(Richard Metzger) After Grant's speech..." "A lot of female friends of mine, women who should have known better I might add" "Were saying like, tell me about that Grant Morrison or what about that Grant, huh?" "Or, can you introduce me to Grant?" "I can't watch it now because it's a performance." "I'm just thinking, Jesus man, y'know, how did you getaway with that?" "I thought what he did was effective for the crowd, in the situation." "But I also felt like I didn't get a real dose of what he could share." "The Verve did that great song at the end of the decade, 'The Drugs Don't Work.' and that's how I felt at the time, it was just that exhausted, this period is over." "The 90s is over, pal." "I know he'd been alone for a longtime, I know that he was very lonely." "He'd been traveling the world, but not really connected to people ina very close way." "(Grant Morrison) Three strippers came up to my room" "These girls I'd met through The Invisibles, big fans of The Invisibles, really smart girls." "And we just sat all night drinking champagne, smoking dope and talking about quantum physics." "And I thought, I'm in a real bad place if I can sit with three stripper girls, and all we do is talk about quantum physics." "I don't have a girlfriend right now." "What the hell am I doing?" "(Tim Callahan) Around 2000, Morrison's attitude changed lt seemed to darken, and you could see it in the comics." "Because The Invisibles was so, kind of, druggy utopian I got to the end of it and I thought, you're not dealing with the reality of some peoples' lives." "In fact, you're not even dealing with the reality of your own life, because I was finishing off The Invisibles" "And at the same time, one of my cats is dying of cancer, and dragging herself about and shitting on the floor" "And I hadn't gone out with anybody for a year, so I was in this weird, kind of, celibate space." "Listening to the music from 2001.:" "A Space Odyssey over and over, the whole sequence where HAL is dying" "That was my favorite shit." "It was just a nightmare." "There's a little bit less hope eternal to what he's writing, and a little bit more, here's where things have been left" "The whole 21st century I found really difficult, after 9/11" "Stuff like,just seeing people on the internet." "I thought outside, there were these beautiful outsiders, just waiting to change the world" "Morrison wrote Final Crisis, which was intended to be DC's big event book." "It's about these superheroes who are trying to fight against this overwhelming evil." "And even though it sold well, readers would go online and complain about how the series didn't make any sense." "And there was a school of real animus, real hostility" "Like, how dare you make me think." "I wanted them to be saved, I wanted everybody to be star children" "And suddenly I saw their ugly, yorping faces." "And it was such a downer, such a terrible downer." "(Adam Mortimer) I'm a super fan of Final Crisis." "People complain that it's super fragmented and you can't tell what's going on" "But I think the feeling of if the entire dimension had been invaded" "Nobody would know what was going on, shit would be moving really fast." "He doesn't give you the information, but he gives you the feeling." "In Final Crisis, the internet, it seemed, practically went to war over it." "There were people on one side saying this is genius, this is groundbreaking, progressive." "And other people just saying this is gibberish, I have no idea what's going on, this is unfair." "He shouldn't be allowed to do this." "There are people who say he's obscurantist." "Like, oh, he's totally drugged out and he just puts whatever bizarre hallucination he comes up with on to the page and it makes no sense." "How can you think this stuff makes sense?" "Clearly, this stuff does not make sense." "And once people have selected what box you live in, there's no way out of it." "And no matter how straight, or how dull I could make stuff lt would probably still be declared incomprehensible, and the work of some raving idiot savant loon." "The way that people talk about Grant and what he's up to and everything I mean, the fact is that the guys got to where he is by just being a real hard grafter." "And just staying in and writing, writing, writing" "And just never giving up." "Something that really annoys me now is when people say, oh, he smokes crack or he's on crack." "Y'know, I've never taken anything like that." "Those are dangerous, addictive drugs." "In the early2000s, Morrison was writing X-Men for Marvel." "And in that series, which started out with more of a hopeful, optimistic feel." "You could see Morrison's own personal demons, kind of filtering through." "And by the end of his run on the series, it ended up in a much darker place." "People were revealing themselves to be bastards." "And my best friend was splitting off from me and insulting me in the Scottish press, and saying horrible things about me." "Again, another horrible,just another one of those knives in the heart of this last ten years." "So, my abyss was the same for me honestly as the abyss I saw a lot of people going through, our culture going through." "It was after the twin towers fell, and we're at war and all that." "And I was saying what's our responsibility now to youth, how do we talk about this, and how do we take a stand." "And he's like, ah, fuck all that, that's adults and their problems." "They're never going to listen to us anyway, I don't even pay attention, I don't even care." "I think asa writer, in a culture, all you can be is a barometer of that culture." "And try and create work which is somehow reflective of all the influences around you." "So it's not that I'm sitting down thinking I have to talk about soldiers dying in the Middle East." "It just seems to be that you can't avoid these things and they make patterns." "So it was to find a way... how do you get art out of that and The Filth was kind of the start of that." "And yeah Filth is a, is a dark fucking ride man." "All the glamour and sex and glitz and pop of Invisibles is replaced by horrible, horrible, horrible things." "I've agreed to draw The Filth and the first page I get features the description of a beaten naked woman, down on all fours with someone dropping a match into it." "And I thought..." "Aaawwhhhh, my God!" "What have I agreed to?" "I was able to look at these quite dark, negative feelings and process them through the work." "Darkseid, Dr. Hurt." "Those were the characters who came out of thinking there are actually people out there who would really want to see you fucked up." "They would cheer." "And I didn't really think they existed before." "I thought ultimately you could make friends with everyone and get them to laugh." "And somehow, that doesn't (laughs) lt doesn't work like that." "When we were doing Final Crisis and Superman Beyond and Batman." "It was about the idea of almost a post-traumatic superhero." "The man whose seen it all, done it all." "Who's come back and still somewhere in his soul he's dragging out this little last iota of hope." "And I had to be showing" "OK, this is how it feels." "To be on the course of absolute self..." "Do you want to go there?" "Do you want to go with that?" "Do you want to follow this down?" "And ultimately at the end to turn around and say of course you don't." "What you want is President Superman, and multiple worlds and hope." "I think it eventually came to an end when my dad died." "And suddenly that was as bad as it got." "And the cat died." "The ginger cat that was my familiar cat." "Everything died at the same time so it was really this peak of blackness and bleakness." "But at the other side of it the sun rose." "How did I meet Kristan?" "That's Mark Millar's fault." "Mark's wife was sort of friendly with Kristan." "So, she'd come back and she said to Mark" "Oh, There's this girl in my office who's really into this stuff Grant's into." "She reads Philip K. Dick and she wears sort of fetish clothes and goes out to these clubs." "And the two of them should meet." "But we did meet," "Kristan's boyfriend at the time was this, like, 6'5 matrix dude." "I befriended the two of them." "But obviously I kind of fancied her." "But, y'know she had a boyfriend and her boyfriend was ..." "could kill you just by looking at you." "I invited them to a birthday party I was having." "So, she turned up, you know." "We were getting on. lt was pretty cool." "So I kind of went home and did this huge ritual to aphrodite." "To bring me the person I need." "Really nuts." "You know, I said please, I'll just ..." "bring me who..." "I need." "Someone I need." "Someone I need..." "And three days later the phone goes and its Kristan and she invited me out and I went out." "And she told me that she split up from her boyfriend and we just got together that day." "And that's been it ever since." "It was really fairytale-ish." "I remember when he started dating her and he was an utter gentleman." "He would hold her hand while they walked down the streets." "He would open doors for her." "It was a very different image of Grant Morrison than I had ever experienced." "It was not this fantastic forward thinking auteur." "It was kind of like a boy from Scotland with his girlfriend." "And I just found that so adorable." "She doesn't like the idea that maybe she was conjured into being" "But it's just, you know, it's the synchronicity highway." "That's how things work." "You do things." "You don't know how they're going to work out but obviously the strands of our getting on with each other and being friendly... it eventually led to this." "Well in a way he got married to his manager." "Or he let his wife be his manager depending on how you look at it." "And it's a really interesting interdependency." "He's created a kind of support matrix around himself." "To sort of support this after the-age when it takes care of itself." "With a lot of creative people they tend to drift." "Kristan is a rock." "She's the business side." "He's the creative side." "It's a great melding." "And she understands comics and loves comics." "I think there is something really healthy about it." "I think she probably works very hard because he's such an eccentric but I think it works for them." "The reason I was able to write (The Filth) is because once I met Kristan" "The reason I was able to write (The Filth) is because once I met Kristan I was able to go to the places that were really scary because I felt very secure. I felt pretty upbeat." "It was quite ..." "Oh, that's OK." "I can deal with that because they're real." "They're as real as the dreamy, utopian other worlds." "(The Filth)was just about a guy who's a fuckup and has fallen apart and his life's collapsing round about him." "but the way that looks in his own head is this magnificent structure." "If you live in a bad situation then ennoble it with your imagination." "Find even in the cat's shit beauty and magic." "Because imagination can turn a hovel into a palace." "I guess over the years he's probably become more calm and mellow than he was when he was younger." "I think he just has a more mature way of getting his point across now both socially and with his work." "The idea was transcendental materialism, would be to say OK you guys if you don't believe in magic, lets just talk about what science says is factual and in all of those factual things, you will find gaps that are so immense and psychedelic" "and bizarre and weird that it's much more interesting." "We don't need the supernatural." "We can actually do magic purely using the nuts and bolts and the concrete elements of the world that we live in." "It's the stuff your friends can't say "oh ... you're only tripping."" "No you're not only tripping." "We came out of a star." "We came out of a big bang that's still happening." "It became... everything became magic and everything flowed in a very different way and it was a lot more grounded." "It seemed ludicrous to frame it as magic now because it actually just seemed like reality." "Magic seemed like the fashions." "The clothes you wear when you're young to try and be cool." "I'd just been wearing those clothes to get to this place of understanding." "Which is really very like "oh it's just that?"" "Well, that's kind of cool. (laughing) lt's that simultaneous "it's just that, but (awed) oh my god it's that."" "(Tim Callahan.:) Kristan and Grant got married in the mid 2000s." "Ultimately, they bought a house together in Scotland and it was this isolated house where he could just totally work on his creative endeavors." "1863, that's when the house was made." "Which is quite cool." "A lot of stuff that was involved with the kind of magic I was doing at the time suddenly became concretized in the house." "And when we came up, I knew we were going to stay here." "It's a really, really awesome old mansion." "The view is pretty spectacular." "And they're restoring it room by room." "This isn't narcissism, is it?" "(yahhhhhhhhhhh) ls somebody burning something?" "It's probably someone burning their husband." "This is what happens to you if you cross me." "This is a ... this was a stately mansion until I decided to deal with it." "As you can see there is nothing left a human can inhabit anymore." "And so ... don't mess with me. (laughs) I remember going upstairs being in the room upstairs where l now work and just thinking, that I was going to be here and I'd be here again and I'd been here." "A sense of absolute familiarity." "It's quite a small room, but for me it's just the room I always dreamed of all my life." "To have a little tower overlooking the ocean." "Generally I'm in here and the cats are in here." "Everyone's in here cause as I said it's the only warm room in the house." "This is where the writing happens." "(Adam Mortimer) ln the nineties he would talk about what music he was listening to what country he had just been in." "He was meeting people." "He was taking in a lot of what was happening in pop culture and he was spinning it back." "What he does now is coming completely from his imagination." "I don't think it's cause he is anti-social." "I think it's just he's in Scotland and he works eighteen hours a day writing and he has evolved to a point where he doesn't need input." "The stuff I'm doing is very hot housed at the moment." "It probably reads that way as well." "It's coming out of somebody's head rather than someone's experience." "Hopefully that stage will end soon because I'd like to travel again." "I'd like to swim through the undersea ruins of Pompeii or something like that." "If you could see inside my head it would be pretty exciting right now." "There's all kinds of stuff going on." "It's like the back projection in Natural Born Killers all the time but sadly you can't see it." "The most surprising thing about working with Grant is that he's so free with his ideas and he's such an easy collaborator." "I love the fact that we can talk about physics at a high level and then thirty minutes later we can be talking about what Krypto's collar is made out of." "The best part is when you've got your notebook and something new has just come into your head and it's like the head is on fire." "It's like some neuronal activity." "It's orgasmic, you know." "It's the best feeling you can get." "And everything's coming." "There's all these connections and it's new things and everything feels fresh and you get a name for something and then you get chapter titles and it all starts to fall together." "He has more ideas in a two hour meeting than I have in a two year period." "Ideas come everyday." "I've got notebooks of stuff that would keep me going for the next forty years unfortunately." "But then I'll have another one tomorrow and another one tomorrow and another one tomorrow." "It never ends." "And if you think the comics are dense, you should read the scripts." "and I think there are incredibly talented artists that work with Grant that are able to translate those scripts and really present all those ideas fully on the page." "All of that, was just that feeling, that orgasmic feeling of connection to something." "(Fan.:) My wife and I are emergency doctors and she'll tell you this is how I unwind after working so... (Grant Morrison.:) Well, brilliant." "I'm glad to help." "(Fan.:) No it's great man, it's great." "(Grant Morrison.:) I'm sure you'll need it after all that." "(Fan.:) (laughs) ln the early nineties, we all knew the Internet, something was happening." "And there was that sense of incipient revolution or renaissance in his work and now there is much more acceptance that we've been through something." "Rather than we are about to go through something." "We're now being promised everyday that the ecology will have collapsed in fifty years." "There'll be no tigers left. lt'll be most of the species on the planet will be gone." "When you've been told there's nothing left and your species is a bunch of useless bastards who don't deserve anything but extinction" "Suddenly the superheroes are there to say" ""No, no ..." "listen, remember you made us." "We're your last crude attempts to imagine where it might go right."" "And I felt as though there was something in Grant where he wasn't accepting the darkness of the universe." "But I think when you talk to him a little bit more he is racked with the horror of the cosmos." "Grant's solution to that was the universe is a cold, empty, miserable place but in defiance of all of that, the most rebellious thing that you can do is be happy." "So, I'd like to think now we're actually rehearsing something good." "We are actually trying to think what's the best in us?" "What does it look like?" "How does it behave?" "You know, what is the superhero?" "Because we invented it. lt's something we wanted." "So, what's its use?" "Because we invented it. lt's something we wanted." "So, what's its use?" "His work on Superman redefined the character to some extent." "In All Star Superman he presents in twelve issues the definitive Superman story." "Grant and I were talking seriously about taking over the Superman books." "And we had been approached by DC for our ideas." "And we're talking about how do we do this Superman stuff." "It's just really, you know, it's so big, it's so hard." "How do we get this?" "And suddenly we looked up and there's this guy walking across the tracks in a Superman costume." "And it's a pitch perfect Superman costume and he looks like he just walked off a comics page." "I'm not talking about some ratty velour costume with padded muscles." "This guy looked the part." "I said we've got to talk to this guy, this is the shamanic moment, this is the message from the universe." "And he was just sitting there, posed much like on the cover of All Star Superman#1." "One leg up casually, just sitting there on a rock." "(Grant Morrison) Just the cape was kind of draped." "And it was just like really relaxed, this guy." "And I'd always thought of Superman as being posed, or being constantly stiff and statuesque." "And to see the way the cape was draped, and the way he just had one knee up and he was kind of leaning on it." "(Mark Waid) And Grant just started asking him questions about what it's like to be Superman." "And the guy, in character, completely in character, had a conversation." "(Grant Morrison) So I would say to him" "So how do you feel about Batman?" "He'd think for a bit and he goes, Well, Batman doesn't really see the light in people like I do." "And he'd be really serious." "Then, how do you feel about Lois Lane, and he'd talk about his relationship with Lois." "I'm just sitting there, noting stuff down." "So I always tend to see that asa kind of shamanic vision of Superman that came at exactly the right time." "And kind of informed the whole of what went in to All Star." "The sun goes down in to darkness and rises again." "That's the basic concept of the magical journey." "And the sun for me in the work was in All Star Superman, which was based around the whole concept of our sun." "And kind of exalting that as an inner strength." "So there was that and... it was the feeling of okay, I'm in this kind of mature position" "And Superman's starting to get closer to me, and Superman's the peak of the superhero comics, the original the daddy of the mall, so there was this dad stuff going on." "He talked about the way you would feel if you met Superman." "It would be a bit like a God, a bit like a dad, a bit like a celebrity." "We met Robbie Williams, the singer." "He's the biggest singer on the planet, and I thought it was really interesting to be that close to a golden human." "Almost godlike, I'd never met anybody like this, an actual star who when they came into your house, you feel as if you've taken a drug just by them sitting there." "And yet at the same time, he's just an ordinary guy trying to deal with his life." "It was exploring that theme again about the importance of story" "What story actually means, and how story can be very real because of the way it affects us." "Suddenly I was writing about something that meant something to me." "I could also talk about Superman's father dying, the whole Jonathan Kent thing orJor-El." "The idea of losing a world or losing your father, of living up to your father's inspirations." "The whole book became about that stuff, and I think that gave it its strength and its spine." "And the resonances it had, and it's what makes ta real book about real things rather than just a superhero slug-fest." "The consciousness of the reader comes in and a hologram is formed between the creator and the reader with the comic book in the middle, and the thing comes to life." "to the point where people can sit with tears streaming down their eyes at We3 when there's nothing there except ink and paper." "I cried at the end of We3." "I'm sitting there sobbing over this comic book, this graphic novel." "I'm crying on the pages." "That happens because I'm sitting there writing it with tears streaming down my eyes and somehow that's communicated." "Just you, there's no one in the world like you." "So, let's see what you see, and what comes out through your head." "It's okay to mess up sometimes." "Yeah!" "It's good to mess up." "Sometimes when you mess up, you find new things and new ways to work." "You got that?" "Yes." "Alright, what do you say?" "Thank you." "Anytime." "Y'know, and we've shared a few adventures." "A few adventures." "(Interviewer) Anything that can be said on camera?" "Sadly no." "Maybe when we're much older." "Shortly before I die." "But I wouldn't care what people think." "Actually, hopefully you'll be dead before me." "When I won't care what people think of me." "I don't mean hopefully for everybody else, just for..." "No, that's alright. I'll try my best." "As long as I can be allowed to do them, I'm going to keep doing them because they let me do anything I want in comics." "which is really rare these days. lt's very hard to be able to absolutely express yourself in the way you want." "And I remember he came to comicon" "And he's being escorted around by two security guards and then him and his wife" "And there's like three hundred people lined up to get their books signed from him." "And we met up at the DC party that night and he's just like oh fuck man, it's like out of control, it's like really, it's gotten big." "When you're young, you can be a girl, you can be a guy, you can be a clown, you can be a freak" "You can be cool, you can be..." "The older you get, you kind of get forced into being who you are which is someone hurtling on their way to the grave." "So I don't know, the next one's whatever the next one is, whatever the next big change happens." "I'd like after this phase to goa bit crazy again, maybe I'll go completely mental." "I've lost faith along the way." "There have been times where l think, alright, that it's" "Now he's off the reservation, and he's never coming back." "And he never fails to stick a landing." "Or, if anything else, fail more brilliantly than anyone else can." "And I'd rather read interesting failures than boring, easy successes." "(Grant Morrison) I've gone back to being optimistic I sense things feeling better." "It might just be me, and I'm seeing the best in the world now that I'm feeling a little bit better." "But, I think it has to." "I've got to go back to my original belief, when in the 90s, I had my experience that everything was okay." "And that we're not to be frightened, because it's only part of something much bigger that will be wonderful." "And it's starting to feel more real again." "To believe that things are going to get better, and that we will participate in things getting better is not to hand over to some father from the sky, I don't believe there's any father from the sky" "I believe there's just us, about to become something else." "And if there's anything else out there, they're not fathers, they're not mothers, they're some other fucking weird thing as I've tried to describe in the past, but can't." "And I'd really rather ultimately just say that" "All I've got to offer is that I'm a witness to the events of my life." "That's all, I know fuck all else." "Why would I tell stories?" "All I've got is the truth in this world." "To say, this happened to me, what do you think that means?" "Because it happened. I saw the demon." "I did that, and this happened." "I'm not lying, this isn't getting me money." "I've got money, I'm doing fit well." "If I shut up, I'd have less crap thrown at me." "But, part of the experience I had was the compulsion to tell everybody." "You've got to come back and say, what if this is?" "What if I'm right, and the world isn't dying, and it's actually just about to be born." "So all I can offer is to say, I'm witnessing this shit." "I did this, this, this, and you can do this, this and this." "Tell me what happened to you." "Because if it's the same thing that happened to me, then we're on to something." "What is my final statement?" "Jesus Christ, love one another." "Love me more than everybody else."