Basically, The Invisibles was the story of a secret
band of revolutionaries attempting to save the world from alien insects.
But that's kind of like saying American Beauty was the story of
a guy who likes to jerk off. The "plot" was just salad dressing sprinkled
over Morrison's wild melange of weird ideas. The comic freely reinterpreted
William S. Burroughs, Situationist theory, Crowleyean ritual, Illuminati
conspiracy theories and other bizarre fragments from the fringes.
Sadly, the final issue of The Invisibles hits the stands
this month -- and Morrison's tenure on JLA has also drawn to a close.
And not in a nice way. He's had a nasty split with DC claiming, among other
things, that the company offered him no further work after JLA.
When I cornered Morrison, he was in New York City on his way to
Los Angeles where he planned to pitch a superhero movie idea. He talked
about the end of the Invisibles, how Hollywood rips off comics and, in
an iFuse exclusive, his rather intriguing plans for Marvel's flagship title,
The
Fantastic Four.
Oh yeah, he also revealed the secret of the universe.
iFUSE: Did you grow up reading comics?
GRANT MORRISON: Oh yeah. I was big fanboy. I had the plastic bags,
the no-girlfriend thing! Comics mean a lot to me. That's why I extract
these mythic dimensions out of them.
iFUSE: Where did the idea for The Invisibles come from?
GM: I'd been reading Jack Kirby's Boy Commandos. That's the
coolest tale. And I'd been reading a lot about the Scout movement...
iFUSE: The Boy Scouts?
GM: Yeah. I had a vision of doing a William Burroughs-style thing
about the Scout movement where they become subversive. So you've
got the Psychic Scout's Manual, and the Scouts are fucking up the government.
That eventually became The Invisibles. But I made it more insane.
Then I had this experience at Katmandu, this alien abduction experience.
I went there to get an alien abduction experience and I got one.
iFUSE: You went to Katmandu to get an alien abduction experienced
and you got one?
GM: I did what I was told to get an alien abduction experience and
I got an alien abduction experience. Which I thought was amazing. It means
those techniques work. So I find myself with all these weird fuckin' ideas
and views on the universe -- kind of five-dimensional thinking that then
became The Invisibles.
The Invisibles is my attempt to duplicate an alien abduction
experience on paper. If you read the entire series all the way through,
you'll feel the way I felt when I come out of that abduction.
iFUSE: What happened when you were abducted?
GM: I met these silvery morphing creatures who explained the secret
of the universe to me.
iFUSE: May I ask, what is the secret of the universe?
GM: We are a larval entity that's progressively developing and we'll
soon grow up and become one of these five dimensional entities. But the
entire universe is a nursery in which one of these things has to be grown.
It has to be grown right through from the big bang to the end of the universe.
All human beings are processes through time.
We know we were around through time. We know we were around when
were two years old -- we can remember it. But we can't point in the direction
we came from! That's what I really got into, why can't we point to the
past?
iFUSE: Hmmm. Well, um, what's in store for the end of The
Invisibles?
GM: The last issue's set in 2012 so it's a completely different
thing again. It's kind of like, what would the teenagers in 2012 think
of The Invisibles from 1998? Everything I believed in, I went against
-- as if some punk kid had come in and said, "This is bullshit, man. We
can do better than you." I rethought the whole thing. The last segment
is the coolest thing I've ever thought of in my entire career.
The second to last one nails down all the story stuff. The story
is kind of misdirection, hypnosis so you absorb the message.
The Invisibles was me trying to scrape together weird shit
and experience. I was doing all these experiments. If I read Aleister Crowley
and he says, if you do this you get a demon -- I have to do it! I found
that magick works. You can bend reality. You can make things occur. You
can make people appear in your life. So that means that every one of us
can surely do that. What does that imply?
So I started writing this comic about what's going on here. That's
the whole thing -- what the fuck is going on?
iFUSE: You also bring in Situationism, conspiracy theories and
all kinds of esoterica.
GM: All of it is just a way to try and understand the world. Put
order into it, and meaning. Conspiracies are like constellations. You look
at the stars, it's just chaos up there. But we make constellations. That's
what conspiracy theory is -- an act of creativity. People look at a jumble
of disconnected information and creatively they start making connections.
And the connections become as real as any of the reality that might have
been in there.
Who cares who killed Kennedy? It's more exciting to imagine
it may have been aliens via the Skull and Bones society and the 33rd degree
Masons who killed Kennedy! That's purely a creative act.
iFUSE: Does it bother you that your superhero comics are vastly
more successful than The Invisibles?
GM: That's just pop culture, you know? If I could get The Invisibles
in a different medium, it would be gigantic. People watched
The Matrix
and that's about the same things.
iFUSE: I'd heard you were upset about that movie.
GM: Basically, those guys read The Invisibles and nicked
the stuff. The last few months it's been getting all legal and weird. All
I want is for them to admit they read the comic!
iFUSE: Are you suing them?
GM: No. I don't want to sue. It's uncool.
In The Invisibles, if I was interested in something I'd always
put in the back, "Go read Robert Anton Wilson, go read Terrence McKenna."
The Matrix was a great movie. I loved the movie. But comics are dying and
we need their help. So what those guys should have said is, "If you like
The Matrix, go read The Invisibles, go read some comic books. 'Cause
that's where we're getting all of our ideas from."
But they didn't, and it seemed dishonorable to me to not do that.
iFUSE: A lot of movies recycle ideas that first appear in comics.
GM: Because a lot of the younger directors are all reading comics.
And they're just, like, taking stuff! It's terrible because comics
are dying and we can't afford to let comics die.
iFUSE: What can be done to revitalize the industry?
GM: The medium's got a problem because the managerial people who
run it, they can't engage with the real world. They always say the market
is the problem. There's no problem with the market in comics. Two million
people watch Superman and Batman cartoons every day -- but 20,000
buy a Superman comic? Bullshit!
I've always said, give me a PR budget, give me one week and I'll
make Superman the biggest thing on the planet.
iFUSE: How would you do that?
GM: Get him in the papers. Why do video games get reviewed in newspapers?
How can you review a video game? Just play the fucking thing! But they
won't review comics which are actually quite literate and quite clever
and quite meaningful and reflect the times.
I'd say, Superman is meaningful again, he has something to say to
the 21st century. The fact that the Human Genome Project's talking about,
in hundred years we will live to be 180, we will have superpowers, we'll
see things we couldn't see before.
So I think the figure of the superhero is getting bigger. But the
venue for the superhero, comics, is getting smaller. Which is sad.
Yet everyone happily goes to watch The Matrix, which is a
superhero movie! People like superheroes!
Me and [fellow Scottish comics scribe] Mark Millar, we have this
idea for a superhero movie and I think people will love the idea. Everyone's
into superheroes. They grew up with Batman, they know Superman. So we thought,
let's take it off the comic book page and onto the screen where people
want to see it.
iFUSE: There's a little more money in that, too.
GM: Oh yeah! I've been doing 13-hour days for the last six years.
I want to just work for two months and stop. I have no life. I was living
in the world of fiction. I was writing only two titles, but the way I write
is pretty intense and I'm pretty informed so, seriously, 13 hours every
day, seven days a week.
iFUSE: Are you writing any comics now?
GM: I'm doing Marvel Boy for Marvel. Which is really cool.
It's punk rock superheroes. And then I'm going to do Fantastic Four.
You're the first person to hear this.
I've worked out this whole Freudian shit. The incest thing in The
Fantastic Four. What you've got is a family. There's Reed and Sue, the
Mom and Dad. Johnny's the big brother and Ben's the little crazy baby.
But in that situation you've got Johnny and Sue -- brother and sister!
So there's an incest thing that the Fantastic Four hides.
I looked at it and said, okay, Sue actually wants to fuck Johnny
and Johnny wants to fuck Sue. So how do you do that? They make Namor,
the Sub-Mariner who is always a linked pair with Johnny. The Human Torch
and the Sub Mariner have always been together since the '40s. Namor is
the dark, seedy, watery, wet, dirty side of it. And Johnny's bright, mercurial.
So he doesn't fuck his sister -- but Namor does.
iFUSE: Marvel Comics will let you write this?
GM: All I'm doing is using that as the basis, then I make a story
out of it. The story suddenly has this incredible power because underneath
it are these terrible incestuous tensions.
iFUSE: Are you doing anything besides the two Marvel titles?
GM: I've written a novel that's coming out from Penguin Books. It's
called The IF. It stands for International Front. It's the next
stage after The Invisibles, I turned everything in The Invisibles
on its head.
iFUSE: Movies. A novel. Will you ever stop writing comics?
GM: No! I love comics. Comics are cool! That combination
of words and pictures is so magical and so shamanic I could never leave
it.
