[Vertigo] WE3 - Neues Projekt von Granny M. & Franky Q.

THE NEW AGE OF MORRISON Post #1 http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/forums/images/ip.gif

http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/...tmorrisont.jpgBy Mitch Brown, ComiX-Fan Staff Writer

Glaswegian-born Grant Morrison is one of the most highly-respected and colorful writers in comics today.

He is responsible for some of the most innovative comic books of the past twenty years, helming such critically acclaimed books as Arkham Asylum, The Filth, JLA, Doom Patrol and The Invisibles. Recently Morrison completed a highly controversial and bestselling run on Marvel's New X-Men. Not only that but he also has found time to serve as a playwright, columnist, DJ, practicing magician and more recently as a self-style "memetic engineer".

Not one to rest on his laurels, Morrison has at least a further three comic series due out this year from DC/Vertigo (Seaguy, We3, and Vimanarama). The first of these, Seaguy hits the stands on Wednesday, May 19th. After many weeks of surveillance of the gmWord Ltd. compound, ComiX-Fan's black ops team were able to infiltrate and contain the Grant Morrison virus for interrogation on Seaguy, the X-Men, and his plans for the impending collapse of space-time.

http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/...ewx154artt.jpgComiX-Fan: Growing up on Chris Claremont's golden era, coming onboard to revamp New X-Men must have seemed like a boyhood fantasy come true. Looking back, how do you feel now about the assignment? What would you say has been the most rewarding and/or harrowing aspects of the experience?

Grant Morrison: Rewarding: working with the characters, all very rich and alive and absorbing. They’re an interesting bunch and they responded well to a bit of TLC. Can’t wait for Magneto to come back AGAIN, though, can you?

Harrowing: Allowing myself to participate in the scrum of the mainstream superhero circus by reading message board postings, paying attention to my chart placings and actually worrying about sales figures; it can make a man mad.

CXF: Probably the biggest controversy surrounding your run comes from your decision to pair up Cyclops and the White Queen. While Jean's decision at the end of Here Comes Tomorrow is a truly heart-breaking and beautiful moment, many long-time fans are angered about the splitting up of what they see as THE X-men couple. What were your main reasons for collapsing the Scott Summers/Jean Grey gestalt?

GM: It was stale and going nowhere and we all knew it. Scott has changed – he’s not the teenage boy who fell in love with Jean; when she died for a second time on the moon, their love was over as far as I’m concerned and the stories after that back up my contention – everything after Dark Phoenix was just Jean and Scott trying really hard and failing miserably to recapture that perfect moment of running out hand in hand to face certain death.

Poor Scott had to grieve twice and rebuild his life…then Jean came back again. How could anyone hope to maintain a normal emotional connection with someone in these circumstances? Emma and Scott are the perfect couple – with Jean, Scott had to be a superhuman to keep up, with Emma he can let his humanity out to play.

CXF: As a writer, does it at all bother you that the creative changes that you made to the series may be ultimately be un-done following the latest Marvel revamp?

GM: The new creators can do whatever they like with the characters and probably will. That’s the nature of the beast. It's a relay race.

CXF: You've spoken about the idea of "fictional reality" in the past, speaking about your life "turning into" The Invisibles as you were writing that series. Were there any of those kind of meta-universal, reality/fiction crossover experiences while writing New X-Men?

GM: Yes. Whenever I do a new comic, I try to immerse myself in the special qualities of the book. It’s a kind of ‘method’ writing or performance art thing that keeps it interesting for me – I’m not the kind of anthropologist who sits at home forcing super-characters and their worlds to conform to ‘real world’ pressures. I like to ‘go inside’ these long-running universes and collaborate with the characters who live there on the types of stories THEY want to appear in – when I was doing Invisibles, for instance, I BECAME King Mob and other characters and allowed my whole body and personality to change. I embed myself very deeply into the narrative process and allow its influences to enter and re-direct my life.

So I’d have to say that the sustained absorption of the X-Men’s frantic, paranoid mood affected ‘real’ life quite badly - the soap operatic qualities of the book raged through my day-to-day existence for three years since around the time of 9/11 – death, loss, shattered friendships, triumph, tragedy, breakdown, recovery – it’s been an evil rollercoaster and I blame the X-Men for foolishly trying to do good in a world that hates and fears them. I'm glad I did it and glad it's over.

http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/...eaguyCVR1t.jpgCXF: With your recent exclusivity deal with DC, you have a number of new titles coming out this year under the Vertigo imprint. Let's start with the first - what exactly can you tell us about Seaguy? Without giving too much away, what can we expect from this title?

GM: It’s a daft attempt to say something about current society, the whole ’Big Brother, ‘American Idol’ culture of schizophrenic fat consumers, where every talentless fool has been conned into thinking he or she can be a pop star because we’re all somehow ‘equal. So with Seaguy, everyone thinks they can be a superhero…

Seaguy is the story of a wannabe hero in a world where all the old super-battles have been fought and won long ago. The world seems perfect. People are happy. And there’s nothing to do but watch TV, go to the store and wander around idyllic New Venice. When Seaguy stumbles upon what looks like an adventure, things start going from bad to worse so it’s partly about what happens when you break the rules in a ‘perfect’ society. It’s also a proper ‘nautical’ comic with Sinbad-style voyages, evil whalers, storms, mysterious islands, drowned cities and sea monsters.

CXF: For all the converts to your work in the wake of New X-Men, what would be the best reasons for them to check out Seaguy?

GM: It’ll make you happy. It’ll make you sad. And it’s a new comic, a new hero, a new world - not something with a hundred years of history attached. Reading Seaguy makes you different, strange and special…

CXF: You've said that Seaguy is "the true antidote to your military-industrial realistic super-heroes!" – after writing the leather-clad and altogether serious X-Men for the past four years, is it cathartic to be writing a more tongue-in-cheek story like Seaguy?

GM: Crime and Punishment would seem joyous and cathartic after the X-Men’s miserable lives of persecution, so yeah, I’d have to say that everything I’ve written since X-Men has felt like spring showers following a long, dark night.

Seaguy, however, isn’t as tongue in cheek as it may seem…not at all. Despite how it appears, the book is a pretty hardcore indictment of ‘the way things are’, as you’ll see if you stick to with it to the end. There are absurd elements of course but these are metaphors designed to point out the equally absurd elements of day to day living.

What was most cathartic for me was being able to create a whole world with its own rules. Not the tight, continuity-impacted world of X-Men but a world all my own again. Seaguy and the other Vertigo books I have out this year have been created especially for the bookstore market – but we’re releasing the single editions to the Direct Market so that comics fans get the first chance to check out the stories in serial form. Cameron and I are hoping for three volumes of Seaguy, each with three parts. The whole story would be nine issues long. The first book deliberately ends on a kind of creepy cliffhanger so we’re hoping people will beg for more…

CXF: Originally I had heard that Vimanarama would be the first new Vertigo title from you this year. Why the change in release schedule?

GM: Cameron Stewart draws more quickly than Frank Quitely or Phillip Bond so Seaguy is first out of the blocks. Then We3 – in August – followed by Vimanarama. Then in 2005, as part of the second wave of my DC/Vertigo exclusive output, I’ll be releasing a book called C.O.O.L. with Rian Hughes and two other new mini-series with artists TBA.

CXF: Mentioning Vimanarama, any ideas on when we'll see this? It’s always a pleasure to see a new Philip Bond project out there.

GM: He’s doing an amazing job on this stuff and it’s quite different from books we’ve seen him work on before – big widescreen invasion scenes with fossil demons and ancient flying saucers. It’s like those insanely detailed drawings of spaceships blowing up cities you used to do when you were a kid. Or at least I did. It’ll be out after We3.

http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/...0804/WE31t.jpgCXF: How is We3 coming along? Is there any more information you can give us on this title?

GM: It ‘reinvents’ and updates the idea of the ‘funny animal’ comic or Legion of Super Pets concept – similar to the ways in which superhero comics have been reinvented, updated and made ‘serious’ since the 70s. It’s a pretty straightforward story – innocent animal cyborgs on the run, hunted by the might of the US military - but Frank Quitely’s art is brilliant beyond the call of duty.

CXF: Another project mentioned in conjunction with your name has been Indestructible Man. You've mentioned it fits into the thematic scheme established with The Invisibles, Kill Your Boyfriend and The Filth. In what way does this relate to those titles, and when can we expect to see this one?

GM: Not for a while. Nearer the end of this decade probably. This project got very ‘weighty’ and is currently on the back burner. I also realized that Flex Mentallo, The Invisibles and The Filth already formed the cohesive ‘hypersigil’ trilogy I was talking about and that Indestructible Man was becoming something quite different.

CXF: A large amount of your "archive" material is currently out-of-print, such as Zenith, the remainder of Doom Patrol, as well as your prose anthology Lovely Biscuits. Is there anything in your back catalogue that is screaming out to you to be re-collected?

GM: All of it, including the stuff you mention. I’d love to see collections of The New Adventures of Hitler, Bible John, Really & Truly and the Big Dave stories I did with Mark Millar, in particular. Readers today don’t seem to be aware of the wide range and diversity of work I’ve done in comics – comedy, horror, sci-fi, documentary, etc. and it would be nice to have some of the more left field stuff out there to help balance out my reputation, such as it is.

The real bummer of course is Flex Mentallo. As every child knows, the unavailability of Flex is a crime almost equal in magnitude to the Jack the Ripper slayings or the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Imagine a comics industry where important and influential works like Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were kept out of print and languish in obscurity. The influence of Flex Mentallo can be seen all over the place but the series itself remains trapped in limbo like some Golden Age superhero waiting for Geoff Johns to notice him. It really riles me up, Bruce Banner style, the more I think about it…. so I’m going to stop thinking right now. Click. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…..

CXF: Moving out of the comics genre, one project in particular has had me sweating in anticipation for the past year or so. What's the status with the Pop Mag!ck book with Doug Rushkoff and Genesis P-Orridge, is it still in the pipeline? How did you come to be involved with those two countercultural luminaries?

GM: We countercultural luminaries all tend to hang out together at seminars and summits all round the world so I’ve known Doug for years (he was a fan of The Invisibles and I loved his Cyberia book, so we hit it off fairly quickly) and met Gen at the Disinfo Convention in 2000, when we were both speakers and felt like I’d known him all my life. The book we talked about doing together wasn’t Pop Mag!ck (that’s the name of the book I’m currently writing about the new magical system I’ve developed over the last twenty five years of occult practice) but the brief idea was for us all to get high on Ketamine and talk about the universe until a book of discussions popped out. I’ll be seeing Doug again soon at the Omega Institute workshops in August so we’ll probably get moving on this again in some form.

http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/...iblesvol4t.jpgCXF: Another constant in your work is your forecasting of popular culture. For example, in The Invisibles you put everyone on TV. Now it seems almost every television show being pumped onto our screens is, in some form or another, a part of the "Reality TV" fad. What’s the zeitgeist of the second half of the “naughties”?

GM: And how ‘un-naughty’ these boring, paranoid ‘naughtie’s have been so far. Next up, after urban-pastoral folk, is ‘dark’ psychedelia…ultraviolet hippy Borg on salvia. It’s already starting in the underground but it won’t hit mainstream until around 2008-2010. In comics, the new ‘cosmic’ wave will start to break this summer and overthrow the dominant ‘realist’ paradigm fairly rapidly, thank ****. It won’t however, be the same as the old cosmic wave so there's no point digging out those old Jim Starlin ‘Warlock’ books in an attempt to rip off and cash in…

CXF: I understand that the movie rights to The Invisibles are currently in the hands of Richard Metzger. Has there been any progress made in getting The Invisibles onto the screen?

GM: Not at this stage…We’ve been through several times to bring ‘Invisibles’ to the screen but I’m not letting anyone do it until they can do it properly and don’t just want to buy the name, so no results yet. It was never meant to be anything other than a comic, so any live action version would have to be faithful to my philosophical goals or I’d be wasting my time and betraying the project. We3 will get turned into a blockbuster movie long before The Invisibles does. There’s talk of a radio version of Invisibles being done soon though. That’s a lot more likely to happen.

CXF: Mark Millar and Brian Michael Bendis have teamed up to create Ultimate Fantastic Four. Surely it’s only a matter of time (and contract expiry) before we see Ultimate Skrull Kill Krew?

GM: I’d love to think so. I wrote a great pitch for a Skrull Kill Krew hardcore ultraviolent black and white biker flick but in the end Marvel E got shafted on a rights problem (the people who have the rights to FF also have the rights to the Skrulls, so we couldn’t use them in a separate movie, which killed the thing as a Marvel pitch – it would still make a great exploitation picture if I just changed the names so I might). They won’t stay down for long, I’m sure. ‘Ultimate Chitauri Kill Krew’ sounds like the sort of book they’d all be queuing up to buy.

Of course, ‘SKRULL KILL KULT’ (as a play on Thrill Kill Kult) was the original intended title for the book before Marvel pulled the plug on using the word KULT. Why ? I have no idea…

CXF: Speaking of Mark Millar, have you been keeping up with his recent MillarWorld titles?

GM: I’ve seen a couple of them. My favorite bits are the dozens of mentions Mark gives himself in every issue, like those comics you used to hand draw as a kid – Written by me. Drawn by me. Lettered by me. Colored by me. Published by me…Thought up by me etc… Chosen is the one I like best.

CXF: You've said before that you target a lot of your work at a demographic of "intelligent fourteen year olds". Given that the readership of comics seems to be getting older, with a decline of interest from younger readers, how do you think its best to grab the attention of this age bracket?
Is the industry itself doing enough to promote comics as a viable medium for intelligent storytelling?

GM: The industry is incapable of promoting itself very well at all, so it’s usually down to the individual creator to do that. The real problem is this: in spite of all our attempts to insist that one exists, there is actually NO mass market for traditional superhero comic books – why would there be ? It’s such an esoteric and old-fashioned branch of popular culture and seems to have more in common with collecting stamps or 60s retro kitsch. You can imagine Bryan Hitch drawing Steve Buscemi playing the sort of guy most people think is into these kinds of comics. After all the recent superhero movies and cartoons, at a time when Robin and Beast Boy and Spider-Man have their faces all over buses, comics sales have not improved significantly at all - it's never going to happen unless we change the pricing, the format, the content and many other things about traditional U.S. superhero books. Kids like manga because manga comes across as modern and cool and exotic; I fear that trying to make Golden and Silver Age superhero characters appeal to a young audience is like trying to sell wax cylinder recordings of Al Jolson to consumers who listen to Outkast MP3s. As I say, comics could use some new ideas, new characters and competitive formats but change comes slowly.

Intelligent is not necessarily the point; I think what older readers (and younger ones too ) want to see is not necessarily more ‘realistic’, in the sense of ‘filmic’ comics, but simply what’s lacking from most current books and that’s a sense of the truly epic, the unusual, the novel, the beyond simply mundane. Stuff they haven’t already seen in a movie or on TV, basically. And with the best will in the world, who really wants to watch Superman suffering agonies of doubt, for instance, when he could be wrestling Phantom Zone giants back into the 10th dimension ? If Superman felt any doubt at all, he’d know it was Luthor’s Doubt-O-Ray to blame and smash it up fine style.

http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/..._xmen_133t.jpgCXF: You mentioned to me that you are traveling once again. Something that always strikes me about your work is your accurate and knowledgeable portrayal of foreign cultures - your extensive use of India and Brazil in The Invisibles, introducing the controversial Muslim character Dust during your X-Men run, as well as the Islamic influence on the upcoming Vimanarama. India is clearly a great love for you - what have been your other favorite destinations and how have your travel experiences influenced your writing?

GM: Fiji, Rarotonga. I love the whole Pacific region - which is many thousands of square miles of love. The red Australian desert and the beautiful city of Melbourne. India messes with my head though – I’ve been there three/four times and each time I vow I’ll never go back, only to become fascinated all over again. Travel, preferably alone, is one of those things that should be compulsory for any writer; reading color guidebooks for ‘research’ while phoning out for a pizza isn’t the same as being chased by wild dogs down an alleyway in Ladakh at three in the morning.

CXF: Are you still DJing? How is the ass2ass CD coming along?

GM: We do DJ nights whenever we get the chance but recently it’s all been bereavement and comic and movie work, so no Beastocracy. ass2ass is sitting on the tapes and has been through some changes. Two years on and we’re only just beginning to get time to pursue those musical dreams. If things go well after June, we should be preparing the ass2ass and F***STAR CDs for public consumption. My apologies to anyone who’s waited patiently – sometime you can be too enthusiastic and attempt too much, too quickly…and that’s what happened to gmNOISE, a division of gmWORD Ltd.

CXF: Last, but certainly not least. It's December 22, 2012. As humanity takes its last wistful look at the constraints of space-time and dives headlong into the Supercontext, where is Grant Morrison?

GM: Shagging like bloody Shiva, I hope. I think that if anything happens at all, it’s most likely to come in the form of a mass consciousness change – possibly triggered by planetary electromagnetic field alterations predicted to occur around that time – so that basically everyone will start peaking on the acid trip that never ends. ‘Individuality’ will dissolve and your minds will start to merge into one mass mind, which is likely to seem quite frightening and overwhelming, especially for the sheltered minds, and time will seem to disappear as we identify with the mitochondria in our cells, instead of identifying with the physical individual carrier ‘bodies’ we use to expedite the shuffling around of DNA.

The world’s current social structures should collapse quite rapidly when that happens and chances are, only people capable of handling the immense influx of new information will be those already familiar with heavily-altered states of consciousness. For everyone else, it will seem like the Second Coming, the arrival of the Space Brothers, the Rapture, Hell on Earth, the 32nd path of the Tree of Life or whatever they decide to see – everyone will get their own personal apocalyptic transfer into this new mode of being. Some poor souls will have to be guided out of hell, others will have to be coaxed down from sci-fi Ultraspheres but we’ll all be living in a state of permanent psychedelic ecstasy and will have to restructure our entire existence to cope with the new consciousness. I have a feeling that psychedelic drugs provide a flashforward glimpse of this kind of consciousness and help prepare the human mind for when that mode of consciousness is permanent.

If something like this occurs at the end of 2012, and it’s also possible that nothing of note will happen - we should see a lot of people freaking out when we re-enter what some Australian aboriginals call Aljira (a word English is not up to the task of translating, so it comes out as ‘Dreamtime’) and I call ‘the Supercontext’. When we see in a new way and become new to ourselves, we’ll also see lots of stuff that will probably scare people who didn’t know it was there all along. People in delirium and on the brink of death see these crawling, replicating ‘wilkie-swilkie men’ all over everything and soon, I think, everyone will start to see them. They are ‘the spaces between things, come to life…’

As for me, I hope I’ll be screaming ’Yes!’ like Molly Bloom as the universe rolls up into a silver paper ball for the quantum cats of Hell to play with…