About a month ago I put up a post about a book I like called Writers on Comics Scriptwriting. The book is a collection of interviews with people who write for comics, and it brings together perspectives from a lot of really great writers. One of the most entertaining interviews in the book is Grant Morrison's, who wrote The Invisibles and We3 and All-Star Superman. Like the other writers, Morrison's got a lot of useful info about the peculiarities of writing for the comic book medium, the challenges and rewards of working with artists, etc., but the interview gets really interesting when he starts talking about how he was abducted by aliens, how he uses the comics he creates as magic sigils to affect his real life, and other far out stuff like that. The guys an interesting character, to be sure.
He's so interesting, in fact, that some guys made a movie about him called Talking With Gods. Here's the trailer.
I watched the movie a few weeks back (you can watch it free on Hulu), and then I checked a whole bunch of his comics out from the library, and I've been reading Grant Morrison like crazy since then.
Not all of his stuff is perfect, but at his best Morrison's stories are exhilarating and intriguing and--to put it plainly--a whole lot of fun. Probably the work I liked best was All-Star Superman, which is all the more significant because I normally am not interested in the Superman character at all--he's just too boring-ly perfect and omnipotent to interest me. Morrison's story, though, manages to take the omnipotent, uber-grand scale of Superman, and frame a story to meet those dimensions. What I mean is: Morrison deals with Superman as an archetype, as an idea more than a person. The world Superman exists in, consequently, is a fantasy world, a place to explore ideas about our reality--and about the values and perspectives we develop to help us deal with that reality--without attempting to recreate something that feels authentically real. The story becomes a parable, but a parable of epic scale. And, partly because of that, Morrison captures some of the wonder and optimism we feel as kids, but he does it with a story that has no taint of immaturity.
Reading All-Star Superman, and watching the Grant Morrison movie, has helped remind me of how much fun it can be to just dream big dreams, to let my imagination run wild. It's easy to feel obligated to write stories that try to stay true to reality, but that can be inhibiting, too. Why not go all in for fantasy? There's joy to be found there, sometimes.
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