Grant Morrison: “Dan Dare was a fascist!” (EIBF 2013)

Grant Morrison began his talk at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last Friday by praising another giant of the comics industry, namely writer/artist Bryan Talbot.  In particular, he insisted that Talbot deserves greater recognition for the early work he did on Near Myths, a “weird and trippy” sci-fi magazine published in Edinburgh in the late 1970s.  It was this magazine that gave Morrison his start in comics, launching a career that has seen him create some of the most innovative and mind-bending superhero comics ever written, as well as original creations like Flex Mentallo, The Invisibles and The Filth.

Without a specific book to promote (his new Wonder Woman project won’t be released until next year), the content of Morrison’s talk was pleasingly diverse.  From his own approach to writing superheroes (“I never pretend that these people could be real”) to what he thinks is great about the comic book medium (“it activates BOTH sides of the brain!”), his comics recommendations (mainly Scott Snyder’s recent run on Batman), his experience of receiving a MBE (“Charles said he used to read The Eagle….I always told you Dan Dare was a fascist!”) and his time as a Hollywood consultant (“we spent two years at Warner Bros. explaining superheroes to people in suits”), Morrison held forth on a range of subjects in his usual warm and witty manner.  His most compelling insight, though, was about the current state of superhero comics and movies.  Superheroes, he said, have been soldiers for too long.  Our post-9/11 world has seen comic book characters become part of the military-industrial complex, almost as an artistic response to overwhelming trauma, Morrison suggested.  As far as he’s concerned, superheroes should get back to stopping bank robberies!  As is often the case with Grant Morrison, his apparent flippancy disguised an astute observation.

So what’s next for Glasgow’s greatest comics writer, apart from his desire to play Lex Luthor in the upcoming Batman/Superman film (“NOW you’re fucked, Superman!”)?  His new Wonder Woman comic, The Trial of Diana Prince, seeks to put the sexuality back into the character without being sleazy (only time will tell if he’s succeeded), but in addition to this he’s been working on a 9-issue series of ‘parallel worlds’ stories for DC, one of which will apparently be a “haunted comic”.  Morrison refused to elaborate further on what that actually means, except to say that readers will think they’ve been possessed!  His ambition to write more Flash stories remains, as yet, unfulfilled, but the third and final book in his Seaguy series, Morrison’s tragicomic labour of love, will be published in the very near future, he claims.  Here’s hoping that it’ll be just as bleak, beautiful and bizarre as its two predecessors!