Grant Morrison's work often produces very polarizing responses in the world of comics. Readers either adore him and hail his books as genius for his creativity and challenging scriptwriting with titles such as the Invisibles or Doom Patrol, or criticize him for being too difficult to understand in Filth, Animal Man, or a host of many others. There is often no middle ground for audiences, especially if message boards and comic shop culture are any indication.

Although he has often talked about his work as part of a public relations campaign during the launch of a new title, rarely has Morrison ever revealed much about his process and approach to scriptwriting and the craft of creating comics and graphic novels. Wanting to delve even deeper into this process and move beyond an interview simply rehashing his previously published works, I had the honor of speaking with him at length about his life in comics and his role and growth as a professional writer.
 


Looking back over your lengthy canon of work, what do you consider your best work and why?
 
Well, that is a hard one because I kind of like all of them, even the ugly, bizarre looking children. I love them all. It's hard between specific single issues and runs, but in terms of runs it would probably be things like Flex Mentallo, which I feel refined a particular approach of mine and opened up some new ground other people hadn't quite explored, so I felt it was quite novel and quite effective at the time. Or The Filth, again which is my favorite thing I've ever done. It's the one that really, really combined all the themes and the ideas just exactly the way that I wanted it to. There’s Seaguy, which I really love, but it's not quite finished yet. Marvel Boy at Marvel, which I think is a really nice, cohesive six issues that worked really well, and Superman Beyond, the two-parter that was in Final Crisis, the super-cerebral conceptual Superman story.
 
Are there single issues that stand out too?

There's tons of stuff. Lots of Doom Patrol issues, particularly the one with the Brain and Monsieur Mallah, and the Desccartes mind/body thing, tons of issues of Invisibles and Seven Soldiers, and there are a lot of single issues I think I've done a really good job on, but there are too many of them to list. I love my work (laughs).
 
Having worked on Superman in different ways, how does Superman Beyond rank within the other stories you've done on the character? Is it your most fulfilling Superman story?
 
It's the most fulfilling superhero story I've ever written. It's slightly overlooked because it was a bit cerebral, so maybe it wasn't quite grasped since it appeared in the context of Final Crisis and it slightly lost a little of its visibility. But that's my all-time favorite one in the superhero stuff, I think. There's a lot of the All Star Superman, the run of All Star Superman, that I think is the most complete and rational and enlightened of my work (laughs), so I really like issue #10 of that, which is probably one of the best things I've written, but in terms of just personal issues, Superman Beyond I like even better.
 
I would agree about the visibility as a reader, because you were never quite sure about the Final Crisis spinoff books and tie-ins, and just how connected they were to the main title.
 
Well, I was hoping that people would just buy mine (laughs). I think they kind of missed out on a few of them.
 
If it makes you feel any better, I didn't.
 
Well, God bless you (laughs).
 
In all your free time (laughs), do you still enjoy reading comics? Can you read them simply for enjoyment or does your long experience in writing take away any of that pleasure?
 
Yeah, I'm quite an uncritical reader of comics. Only afterward, I start getting into them with the hatchet. Usually, I kind of read them in the bath and I love all of them and I think, “My God, everybody is better than me; this is amazing.” I have no defenses (laughs) when it comes to superhero comics.
 
Can you disconnect the writer, though, from the reader experience? Do you see yourself looking at pages as a script first and then story second?
 
Yeah, I do see that. It's unavoidable, but at the same time, no, that's never taken away the pleasure; it's only added to the pleasure because now I have an extra layer of enjoyment and consideration of the comic. But I would say that I'm pretty much an uncritical reader, but afterward I can do a reread and start realizing, yeah, that wasn't really as good as I thought it was in the bath.
 
Not knowing much about how comic writers interact then, would you say that there is a community among writers? Do you discuss scripts and books with other writers?
 
Yeah, it does happen, although I'm hopeless at contacting anyone, so it doesn't happen a lot with me. But usually, yeah, if I like something, like when Paul Cornell wrote those two Doctor Who episodes, I wrote to him to say how much I enjoyed them. I write to Mark Waid or Geoff Johns or people that I know quite well whenever they've done something I like. So, yes, certainly, and I get the same replies from people if they've enjoyed something.
 
Are these mainly craft and scripting discussions or just the pleasantry of the story?
 
It's mostly just the great idea, the lighting stroke of something so obvious and so perfect you wonder why no one thought of it before. You know, Geoff Johns has become very good at coming up with these moments, and the last few times I've spoken with him, it's just that sense of, Here's such a great idea you wished you'd thought of it. That's what I get from it, not so much technique, although that sometimes comes into it, but ideas.
 
What writers inspire you to be better and why? What do you look for in a good comic and what entertains you? Do you attempt to bring any of this into your own work?
 
In comics, it's all of them. I mean, I read everything. I'll read Brian Bendis' Avengers and think, “My God, that's quite an interesting technique or very emotive moment” or “That's a clever use of panels and page space,” so kind of everything. And at the same time I'll go, “Ah, you stole that from me, you bastard (laughs)! I wrote that two months ago or six months ago!” So there's always that kind of dialogue going on. And it's all comics since I don't really read a lot of fiction, so I was influenced by people when I was younger who have lasted with me, like Alan Garner or the dramatist Dennis Potter, that really affected me and have a very obvious influence on what I do. But not so much now. I don't really read a lot of fiction, so I miss out on a lot.
 
Do you not read fiction out of choice or because of time constraints?
 
I just don't have the time. I just kind of stopped. I used to read an awful lot, but then I reached that Philip Larkin moment—“books are a load of crap”—and stopped. I started to read nonfiction because it was more useful for me to spend the time doing that and maybe pick up some research for the stories. And I really didn't want to be influenced by anyone. There's so many people, so many writers pick up an idea at the same time, I'd hate to be dissuaded by reading an idea someone else has done that was a little like something I might have done, so I guess I just steered away from fiction.
 
What do you look for in a good comic? What entertains you?
 
A good cover, and pages, and a pulse (laughs). I like a good story. I like something that doesn't have a lot of words in it, like a pop song where the rhythms and the flow are good. I like things that are inventive, and I like people who can use language well. I like a good cliffhanger, the classic stuff, and I like getting involved with characters and coming to believe in little paper people.
 
Do you ever try to bring any of this into your own work?
 
You always want to be aware of what's going on, to at least play the game of football at the same level as your peers, but I'll see things and I'll learn little tricks or else just be inspired to go do some work, which is what mostly happens. I'll read a few comic books and I'll go, “Now it's time for you to go and show your skills and play the guitar.” It's a kind of dance.
 
With so much on your plate then, how do you juggle multiple writing projects without going completely insane? While Batman, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, and Batman & Robin are obviously related, they have yet to crossover or bleed much into each other's storylines, thus largely maintaining separate objectives and atmospheres. Do you have a "big plan" that you're steadily moving both toward that allows you to shift back and forth between your projects? Does the book itself require a different persona for you as a writer? How do you then accommodate your other current projects such as 18 Days and Joe the Barbarian alongside this?

With the help of my wife (laughs).
 
That's always a good answer!
 
It's Kristan who answers the phone and does all the hard administrative work while I sit upstairs and do nothing but write from dawn until dusk. Really, it's particularly the last six months that I've been supplying scripts for 11 artists simultaneously, which has been quite unusual and a new Olympic record for me. Plus, you know there's been the book I've been working on, Supergods, which comes out from Random House next year, and there's a TV show Bonnyroad and the Sinatoro stuff, so there's been an immense amount of work this year that has been quite bizarre. So I've had to get a handle on doing nothing but that, and I don't know at this stage whether you can do that and not go insane (laughs).
 
Because of my own academic interest in history, can you tell us some more about Super Gods?
 
Well, it's part history. It's mostly like being stuck with me on a very long transatlantic flight (laughs), so itis kind of anecdotes and meditations. It starts in the Golden Age and moves to the current date, but it's not superdetailed; it's not academic. It's kind of musings on the idea of superheroes based on things and sort of looking at stuff from new angles. Sort of like the Action Comics #1 cover. Because that book had just sold for, I think it's $1.7 million, I thought it'd be interesting to treat the cover as a piece of fine art (laughs). You could buy a piece of fine art for that money. And I started to find things that I'd never seen talked about. And you know the fact that an X- shaped structure where a spiral where you reach your eye around the central figure of Superman who is smashing an automobile, which at the time was kind of a symbol of oppression and mechanization of America in the days of Charlie Chaplin and Modern Times. So Superman is in fact this working-class heroic figure destroying the symbols of oppression and production, and the more you look at the cover, the more of this stuff is in it. So it was stuff like that, just looking at the comics from different angles or all of the Batman films from the 1940s serials to the Christopher Nolan films, but in the context of the costumes and what they were made of and what they were wearing and how functional they were. Kind of essays on everything.
 
Do you find yourself having to switch your persona as a writer between books or adopting a different frame of mind? Or do you try to be as focused as possible?
 
It's a bit of both. I mean, you do have to slide over into the ambience of whatever book you're working on, so it usually means reading the last few issues and getting really involved in it and then it starts to catch fire again. So, yeah, there is a bit of a process involved. But it can be done so quickly.
 
Is it easier sliding into the ambience with corporately owned characters or with those creator-owned projects?
 
I guess that's a weird one because there's always that feeling of propriety with something like Joe, but at the same time, I've been doing Batman for so long, I've known Batman for so long, since I was a little kid, that it almost feels as great there, but in a very different way because Batman's not my character. But at the same time, he's a character who belongs to everyone, so it's almost the same kind of dreamland that you're dealing with. It's hard to separate the two because there's a connection with both.
 
I recall you discussing something similar about your personal involvement with The Invisibles and JLA, and crossover between the two.
 
Well, with The Invisibles I think that was a different kettle of fish because I was so personally immersed in that, and the whole thing that I was doing with The Invisibles was to kind of involve myself with the text at an extraordinary and dangerous level, so I was much more involved with that. I think with The Invisibles I was much more personally attached to it than anything else around at the time, but Joe the Barbarian for me is almost an exercise, because I wanted to do a fantasy graphic thing but in a way I hadn't seen before. It's less of a diary or an ongoing personal thing than something like The Invisibles, so yeah, it has a different feeling because of that. It's almost like an exercise for me.
 
Since both are parts of classic fantasy genres then, is there crossover or bleeding between Joe and 18 Days?
 
There's a little bit in the battle scenes of the next issue of Joe the Barbarian. I guess I was kind of influenced by Mukesh's stuff, but apart from that, no. Joe was conceived as a kind of Alice in Wonderland or Wizard of Oz or Elidor or the Phantom Toll Booth, the idea of the kid going into an alternate reality, and really in all of the stories I was familiar with, the alternate reality was this metaphor for the kid's life, or his adolescence. So for Joe, I wanted to make that absolutely literal where the house itself is the site of the fantasy world. In 18 Days, if it connects to any tradition, it would be of the big Tolkien epic tradition, which would be different from that type of children's fantasy I was going for in Joe.
 
Since you're producing for so many artists at the same time, what considerations regarding story organization do you have to toy around with when writing? Does the structure of your scripts depend on the character and the assigned artist, or do you have a set approach that you, and I hate to use the word tweak again, tweak for specific collaborators?
 
It's the word of the day (laughs).
 
There we go. Is it something you have to work around to keep the story flowing between writing, say, 18 Days or Batman & Robin?
 
Yeah, there's a bit of that. You try to play up the artist's strengths, so scripts are composed, maybe something like the last issue of Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #5, which is the next one to come out, was done as a kind of noir story. So, Ryan Sook very deliberately did it in this high-contrast, chiaroscuro style. So once I saw what he was able to do, I could then ask for more of that and then really tailor it more to what he was capable of and get an even deeper atmosphere into the whole thing. Yeah, I especially like it when I get to see a couple of pages before I've finished because I'm working so fast, I'm supplying so many pages at a time.
 
In terms of that process, then, for a single issue, how does that work out as you go back and forth with the artist? Do you send the script and then rework it according to what you get back from the artist?
 
Yeah. I mean, the way I've come to work was to write a kind of combination of the Marvel and DC methods. I used to do a film script and all the dialogue complete, but then as I started handing in scripts with preliminary guide dialogue, but all of the panel descriptions in place, all the visual information was there, but the dialogue was just purely to let the artist know where the beats came or who was talking first. And once I got the art back, I would then kind of tailor the writing to suit the artwork, and it allowed me to take out a lot of excess, which was good—because once you saw the artist was doing the acting and the nuances of expression really well, you could often drop a lot of the expository stuff. So it allowed me to streamline the process. And, like I say, in this particular period where I'm doing three Batman books simultaneously, which thank goodness is almost over (laughs), I've been doing the same thing, but this time it's been going in six and eight pages at a time sometimes, so I'm seeing chunks of each issue coming in all the time.
 
I can't imagine how that all works out.
 
Well, the story is already there as a kind of structure in my head, and it comes into view. I always compare the way I do this stuff to a photograph developing. I kind of know what the photograph is going to be, but as it develops, I start to notice things about it that I hadn't seen before and only by the very end, when I put the last line on it, I get what exactly it's been about (laughs). So it tends to work with that sort of weird way, the work comes into focus for me. It's almost like bringing it into the light.
 
So, with something recent, like the DCU blog preview of the nonlettered Batman & Robin #14 pages, is that how your process works in terms of what you'd get back from Frazer Irving or another artist and then tailor the story accordingly?
 
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, obviously I've written it first and Frazer does his own version of things, of panels that I've asked for, which has made it better, and then it comes back to me and I put dialogue on it depending on how the expressions look or what would be most menacing or most fun for someone to be saying, and yeah, I think it's a much better method because it can cut out a lot of the excess that you sometimes find when the writer and the artist are fighting one another.
 
Okay. I know a lot of writers produce when there’s inspiration, when there's an impending deadline, or when they've scheduled themselves to write. First, can you tell us a little about your writing process, and how does it vary depending on what type of story you are writing? Second, do you find yourself being more or less disciplined now in regards to your writing and your output at this stage in your career?
 
To a certain extent, I've always had that Scottish Presbyterian work ethic, so I've been pretty disciplined. But the last 10 years, I've definitely had to do more work than ever before, and it's kind of turned my whole thing into more of an industry. So really, it ended up I was doing a lot of projects and I tend to take on everything, because everything is interesting, so certainly it's been very busy for the last 10 years. And the process now is to get up in the morning and do it (laughs).
 
Do you have a set writing time?
 
My set writing time is all the waking hours of the day (laughs). Normally, and to be honest, when things calm down, which they will, I tend to find that I write anyway when I relax and I don't have deadlines and I get more ideas when I‘m not stressed on a deadline. Writing is just my natural condition.
 
Since you've worked on both creator-owned and corporate books and have talked a lot in prior interviews about what needs to be done with comics, I'd like to know your feelings about what seems to be a recurrent problem when a new writer comes onboard. One of four outcomes usually occurs: One, they abandon everything. Two, they ignore certain aspects of the history or continuity that don't fit in with their vision. Three, they wax nostalgic for the old stories they used to read and now retell those same stories again. And four, and this is the rare one unfortunately, a harmonic blend of these three is produced with innovation versus imitation. Do you think this is something endemic of the comic profession itself, something changing for the better, or affecting your work at all?
 
No, I think particularly having written a book, that all of these things seem to emerge from social conditions. People write certain types of books at certain times and there are always good ones, there are always books, even though they may be done in a different style than the previous generation's high water mark, that are kind of really appropriate to the times and have something to say to us, and to use the symbolic matter of comics in a way that's actually meaningful rather than just the kind of slam-bang collector/hobbyist (laughs) catalogue aspect of comics, which has sometimes prevailed, particularly with superhero stuff. I think there are always great works and, you know, they're very different each time. And they just sum up the times. I think anything that tries to do that or does it even by a complete unconsciousness streak is going to be interesting; it will always be around. You know, there are comics right now that are talking about the world we live in and I would think superhero comics are trying to make sense of a post-Obama America, the Heroic Age and the Brightest Day and those kind of things from DC and Marvel are trying to imagine a new upbeatness for America right now. So whether they are personally appealing, you know, it may not be to your taste but I think there's always a superhero comic that's grappling with issues of the day.
 
Is it harder with the more established characters to do this? Superman, for example, is always popular, but there's always a new origin or definitive origin to generate attention that either works really well or doesn't, and do you think that's because the character has been around for so long? Do you think Superman is a hit and miss character and why?
 
Well, I think in terms of the comics, definitely. There have been successes, and not too long ago the Death of Superman was selling millions of comic books. In fact, you'll notice that the Death of Superman is always the most successful Superman story (laughs). When we did the same kind of thing in All Star, it was the most successful Superman comic in the last however many years. The Death of Superman story always seems to be popular in comics, because I think the comic readership have particularly seen a lot of different interpretations and deconstructions and reconstructions of superheroes and Superman has lost a little of his primal power. Sometimes we only realize how much we like something when it‘s threatened. But he's certainly as popular. As you say, the TV show Smallville has been on for 10 years now and it's a very successful show, and before that they had Lois & Clark, and before that there was the Superboy show, and then the movies, and so he's kind of always been around and always been popular, but I think he is more popular as a TV character than anything else. So maybe that's what they should be looking at. And I think people prefer him to be grounded, for some reason that I disagree with. I think Superman should represent the ideal, Enlightenment Renaissance human being taken to the limit, but there's always an appeal because Superman has always been a kind of blue-collar character. He started out as a Socialist champion fighting for the rights of the common man, and I think that's part of his appeal, but it's a difficult appeal at a time when we worship celebrity and money, so someone like Batman is this fetishistic, wealthy man who has a butler and is a more popular hero than Clark Kent, who has a boss who yells at him and who goes home at night, even though he is Superman. He has to put up with these sort of ordinary situations at work. So I think he doesn't have the appeal to a current audience that someone like Batman does because he exemplifies this kind of Simon Cowell ideal of the self-made multibillionaire who can do whatever he likes.
 
I would never have imagined Simon Cowell and Batman together in my head, and now I think it's going to scar me for life.
 
Imagine them kissing (laughs).
 
(Laughs) No! Are there books or moments in your career that you can point to as key efforts on your behalf to do something truly special or monumental with the craft that either paid off or didn't pan out like you had wanted?
 
I guess most of them worked out (laughs). I started out with the attitude of not really trying to do works for the ages, so everything I did was part of—I kind of used to look at it as a type of improvisation or live performance, like jazz or prog rock or something, so all the works bled into one another and were really about whatever I was going through at the time. Even the mistakes, I treasure the mistakes, because they led me up new alleys and I wasn't really trying to do something that was flawless, so I kind of like the ones that didn't go quite as well. I'm trying to think—it's mostly places where I didn't have enough space and even though I'm kind of happy with the results, if I'd had 10 more pages, I think I'd be much happier with the results. Even the mistakes have taught me things. More recently, I've tried to things that are more…I mean, All Star Superman is something that is intended to be a bit more timeless or immortal than what I usually do.
 
Are there any mistakes that you thought, “Oh, I should have done this” or tried to improve upon yourself?
 
Most recently, I think it was possibly not having enough pages for Final Crisis. Even though I like what I did the more I go back and read it, because I've been orbiting around it for the new Batman stuff. But I just wish I had a couple more pages so that I could maybe have some big double-page spreads that had five panels instead. In that last issue, I really could have used spreads for the arrival of the Green Lantern Corps or the staking of Mandrakk the Cosmic Vampire.
 
What did you take away from these experiences, and how has it shaped your outlook and approach to the medium?
 
Yeah, each thing gives you a new idea, as I've found since doing The Invisibles. There's a sequence where two characters are in a train traveling through a bizarre, hallucinatory landscape underneath the New Mexico desert. And Phil Jimenez drew it in such a way that the panels were arranged in what was three-dimensional space rather than the usual two-dimensional plane of the comic page, because normally panels are only facing on to us directly and it feels like they're on a screen or a surface. Phil did this thing by angling the panels perpendicular to one another. It created a sense of a three-dimensional space, which really excited me. It gave me a lot of ideas for the techniques that Frank Quitely and I used in We3, where it was treating the page surface not as a surface but as a space and placing panels in importance in order of steps and configuration on the page. So stuff like that. These are things that are not intentional but might spark an idea that becomes an aesthetic or a new way of trying things. I find that every project seems to lead on to something new like that.
 
That's great. Currently, with such a high creative output, do you ever feel or fear the work suffers (and I'm not suggesting that it does by any means) because of the amount of books or projects you deal with on a monthly basis? If so, how do you combat this?
 
No, the horrible thing is that it doesn't. The more pressure and the more time you have to spend thinking about it, the better it seems to get. It’s like practicing a martial art. And the work actually suffers when you're not doing a lot. It's what I've discovered. So no, it doesn't. I'd actually have to say it's almost quite the reverse. We're operating at such a white heat of productivity that all kinds of interesting things seem to happen without your consent or understanding, so as I say, I think it tends to be much better. And it's not the way I'd want to do it. Preferably, I'll be taking the next six months off slightly to do other things, but those are more specific, single projects like scripts or screenplays, so you know, I think they deserve a little more time. You know, comics for me is all about improv and the speed between thinking of something and actually having it in the streets, which is just a couple of months.
 
In reflecting back on your career, where do you feel you still need to go as a writer? How do you challenge yourself to be better, to improve?
 
My challenge is to try other media and learn other ways of doing things, and always to meet new people, to travel. I mean, these are the things that give me new ideas. So it's all of that stuff, and I don't think of myself as a writer who needs material. Life is constantly supplying me with material all the time, so presumably there will always be things to write about until I'm no longer capable of making any sense (laughs). That's how I see it. The challenge is, what's a superhero comic when you're 50 because they're mostly written by people in their 20s and 30s (laughs). So there's all kinds of new things and you think, “Okay, now I know this, I understand this about human nature, and we haven't seen that before in a comic book or in a superhero story.”
 
What, in your opinion, is the most important thing you would like readers to take away from your canon of work?
 
That's a cruel question. That's just the sort of thing that Anubis asks you at the gates of the underworld. Okay, sum up your life in one sentence or we'll throw you to Am-Mit the Cosmic Crocodile (laughs)! Honestly, that's so hard for me to answer that I think it's for readers and posterity to decide. If I'm going to be cute about it, I hope they take what they need (laughs).
 
Well, for the stories that you invested a lot of personal time in or as you mentioned about your favorites, is it something about an emotional connection with the reader?
 
I hope people can be aware of the fact that they're interacting with a comic book and with someone who has created a comic book, and that was what I hoped I always brought to comics, which was to take the idea of the realistic superhero to its ultimate conclusion. To say quite clearly that the only realistic superheroes are the ones you can hold in your hand and they're made out of paper. They're real in that absolute sense. As I never tire of saying, the DC Universe is 70 years long. It was there before me and it'll still be there when I'm gone. So, it has a certain reality beyond mine, a certain integrity and time I simply don't have. So that to me is really the exciting, weird thing, the fact that I can create a story and an artist can draw it and all it really is is ink scratches on paper, but you can connect your consciousness to a reader maybe 10 years from now, 50 years from now, tomorrow. And everyone who is reading that page is going to be connected together in that story and it can make you cry, it can make you laugh, it can get you excited—ink on paper and consciousness collaborating. That kind of weird, cosmic aspect of reading as comic book. I hope some of my stories have been able to express that.
 
You mentioned in some ways not writing for the ages or to make them timeless, but I guess in that way, it is timeless, even if that wasn't the original intention.
 
Well, I think part of the interaction with these superhero characters is that you certainly have a little taste of myth, and as I said, even in reference to the earlier question about writers recreating stories—these superhero stories, their universes, they do keep recycling tales—but I began seeing it as the way aboriginal painters would go in every generation and refresh paintings on the walls of the cave. And some of them would have probably done it in quite a shoddy way, some of them would have done it really beautifully, and somebody would say, “No, the tradition is that it always has got to be red.” Or if some guy said, “No, if we make it blue, it would be cool,” and that's what these comic universes are. They're weird, like The Simpsons, these timeless recurring spaces where there's always a death of Superman and the origin of Superman, but in between there's this sort of textual existence of the character.
 

-- Nathan Wilson

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