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| Grant Morrison |
AR | Annihilator feels less packed with surreality than some of
the things that I remember you for. It seems more traditionally designed and plotted.
GM | You’re absolutely right. It was deliberately designed to seem more like a
Hollywood thing, and that’s why it was the perfect project for Legendary, who are
a Hollywood movie studio. So when they came to me and we talked about doing comics
with Bob Schreck and Thomas Tull, this was the idea I thought was most appropriate
for Legendary, because it was about filmmaking, it was about Hollywood, it was about
the movies. So yeah, I mean, it’s a lot more real than some of the stuff that I
write. But also it, as you’ll see, it goes into pretty bizarre areas. But I find
that the mundane and the fantastic are pretty closely linked anyway, so I kind of
enjoy doing both.
“IT’S A TOWN OF PEOPLE SELLING THEIR SOULS FOR FAME OR SUCCESS OR MONEY.”
AR | Ray Spass reminds me a little of the Stephen King
prototype, the down-and-out writer.
GM | The thing about Ray is that he’s not entirely down and out, he obviously
has a little bit of money because he buys quite a nice house at the beginning of
the book. But I think morally he’s down and out, and creatively he’s down and out.
But he was based very much on a bunch of different people that I actually met in
Los Angeles and found quite fascinating. People who’d live and work in Los Angeles
on a pretty regular basis. So I was kind of basing it on my observations of people
in the town.
AR | You’ve talked about how Annihilator is sort
of all about Los Angeles.
GM | Absolutely. As I’ve said, obviously you start to cover similar ground, but
I find the place fascinating. I’ve got a house there, and I’ve spent a lot of time
there and I have a lot of friends there, and while there’s a certain softness and
glamor and glitter to Los Angeles, I think what’s really interesting is what’s underneath.
It’s a very dark place, and it has connections to this strange occult stuff, the
whole Church of Satan and Anton LaVey, which I’ve mentioned before, or the Jack
Parsons Jet Lab connection, or the Manson family, of the Doors and the Snake and
the underground caverns that they used to talk about. And I think it’s got a very
strange undercurrent that I find quite fascinating, because it’s completely at odds
with the way most people think of Hollywood, probably.
And it’s a town of devil deals, it’s a town of people selling their souls
for fame or success or money, so I think it’s got a very strange atmosphere. I tried
to capture that, with Frazer [Irvine’s] help, in Annihilator.
AR | It’s an incredibly dark comic.
AR | There were a couple of bits that were really fantastic.
I loved the “cure for death” page, because it totally captured something being fantastic
and then going to the next page and saying, “Wow, that’s also really overwrought
and dramatic. But still great.”
GM | That was like, the period at the end of that sentence, which sounded so full
of bravado, and then you turn the page and have the sense of everything as a vast,
black hole that doesn’t go away.
AR | How do you approach creating an archetype like
Max Nomax, compared to just using an actual existing character? You’re reinterpreting
both, but how do you deal with them differently?
GM | I was trying to do Ray Spass as a contemporary screenwriter who’s working
in Hollywood right now, and right now, Hollywood, as you know, is pretty obsessed
with superheroic characters or, as you see, pretty archetypal characters. It’s easy
to understand what Batman represents, for instance. So I was, I wanted to show that
he was doing that kind of movie, that he was trying to create a hero for the 21st
century, in these fraught and fretful times we live in.
So then I got to thinking about characters like Batman, and Hamlet, and that
kind of high-cheekboned, Byronic, antihero character that’s kind of haunted all
of our literature and so many of our movies and books and TV shows, and it was really
just about going back. Because ultimately I thought that all tracks back to Milton’s
Satan to be honest. So I kind of was telling a story about a devil, through the
medium of science fiction. And I think the character came to me through these different
angles, and then I thought about the different portrayals of that character in popular
culture, so we connected them to Fantomas, you know, the early 20th-century surrealist
hero who was kind of a pulp fiction character, or to characters like Diabolik from
the 1970s Italian comic books, or Criminale, who was another, a character who dressed
in a skull suit and went around robbing people and shooting things.
They were very dark antiheroes, and I was kind of trying to track the lineage
of those guys right back to the original, and build up Nomax from basically Milton’s
Satan via lots of these other portrayals of the ultimate rebel antihero poet dissident
character that we’ve been haunted by.
AR | What’s the difference to you between something
like this, an archetype of something classic, and just a cliche?
GM | Who knows? I think it just depends on how you deploy them. Perhaps it can
easily shift into cliché — I mean, as long as I don’t feel it’s a cliché, then I’m
fine with it. But I think if other people start to see that, then yeah, obviously
it becomes embarrassing. So hopefully Nomax won’t be a cliché. We’ve tried to give
him a personality that’s pretty strong and pretty direct, and again quite funny;
he’s got a certain take on things. So I think the only way to do it is to be aware
of its origins, and kind of the ubiquity of these figures, but at the same time
give them enough personality that… Max Nomax is very different from the other iterations
of the dark man I’ve mentioned, so hopefully he has his own personality as well.
AR | The female characters that I’ve seen so far tend
to be love interests and prostitutes. I’m wondering if that’s something that’s going
to change?
GM | It’s actually about that; there’s a character who comes in in Issue 3 who’s
really central to the entire thing, and it’s kind of about the attitude of men to
women in Hollywood. Again it’s something that you’ll see unfold, but actually part
of the story is about the way men treat women. About how the screen treats women.
GM | By making the character strong, and by giving her things to do, which aren’t
necessarily the traditional things that happen in stories like these. And that’s
honestly what it’s all about, as you’ll see, I think. The female character who enters
this story is very important to how it plays out.
AR | Do you think these themes and myths are all something
that are already set, and we’re just going back to a monomyth? Or are we still developing
new archetypes, and new myths, and new ideas?
GM | I honestly… from having observed it, I think we keep going back to what are
basically six human default personalities. We have these different characters: there’s
the comedian, there’s the lover, there’s the stern judge, there’s the critic… I
think people have always developed gods and ideas like that around these basic default
states of the actual human personality. I think it’s just part of how we’re made
up. It’s almost like the periodic table of being human. And I think no matter how
modern these characters look, I’m not entirely convinced…
I think certain things like the atom bomb created a new archetype, and we
saw how that appeared in fiction, and in pop culture. So yeah, there’s probably
the potential for new technologies and new ideas to create their own archetypes,
but I honestly think the human personality hasn’t changed much over our entire span
of time. I know I live in the 21st century, so I have no idea what people felt like
in the 1300s!
But that’s kind of my take on it, right or wrong, I kind of think we do go
back to the same well often, because I think these are the characteristics we recognize
in ourselves and others as being kind of universal.
AR | Are there types that you wish you’d been able to
write so far that you haven’t? Or that you’re interested in?
GM | I guess as a writer you’re often drawn to characters like Nomax the rebel,
because a lot of writers like to self-imagine themselves as rebels against society
when in fact most of the time we’re just part of society. I’ve kind of tried to
write about characters that I felt at least some connection with, but I think through
my life I’ve always written about people who are slightly at right angles to society,
and maybe that’s just... maybe I need to write more about kings and queens and dukes.
AR | You were talking about Annihilator and darkness
and this being a place that we are culturally right now. Do you think there’s something
that follows that, something that we’re going to be moving into?
It’s hard to say, because we seem to be very enamored by darkness. Things
just keep coming out like True Detective, which came out earlier in the year
and was really talking about darkness and nihilism, and that obviously was inspired
by a lot of the same books I read when I was working on Annihilator. But
that was a great show and it really seemed timely and important and modern. I think
whether it’s created by the media — because really as we know, most people are living
better lives now than they have at any time in history, most people are safer, especially
in the Western world, the child mortality rate has gone down, the chance of dying
has lessened — so we actually live in a much better world, but our entertainment
seems really very interested in the dark areas of experience. It goes all the way
from the zombies to the obsession with war and violence that we have. I don’t know
if it’s just because we’re so comfortable we can afford to play with these things,
or if there is just something wrong with humanity.
AR | Besides True Detective, what are you looking
at right now in terms of contemporary artists, authors, etc.?
GM | Not an awful lot of stuff. I tend to just lock myself away and work. But
again a lot of stuff kind of relates to what I’m doing. I picked up a book quite
recently called Luminarium by Alex Shakar, an author, and it just seemed
to be talking about the same stuff that I’m talking about in Annihilator.
It’s all about the abyss at the center of our lives that we try to forget about
and we make stories about and we orbit around. So I’m just… I’ve been reading a
lot of that, and then nihilism, like Raymond Brassier, the nihilist philosopher,
and Thomas Ligotti, because I really wanted to get down into the dark areas of human
experience.
AR | If it doesn’t sound too grandiose, what kind of
stuff do you think people are going to be mining your work for, and everybody else’s
work for, in 40 years? The way that we’re looking back at things from the mid-20th
century and reinterpreting them?
GM | I don’t know. I think honestly it will just be more Batman. I think a lot
of us will be forgotten in 40 years. I really don’t expect — my work is talking
about the world I’m in, with the people that I live in the world with right now,
so I never think about the future. I honestly think I’ll be forgotten in two generations,
and what will be there is Sherlock Holmes and all the stuff that we’re kind of fascinated
with, unless people break out of their nervous fear of the future and start to innovate
again. Right now it seems like everybody’d kind of rather look backwards than forwards,
because forwards seems a bit scary.
*****
EDIÇÃO COMEMORATIVA | CENTENÁRIO
DO SURREALISMO 1919-2019
Artistas convidados: Frank Miller,
George Herriman, Grant Morrison, Katsuhiro Otomo, Max
Andersson, Moebius, Neil Gaiman, Paul Kirchner, Robert
Crumb, Tsuge Yoshiharu
Agulha Revista de Cultura
20 ANOS O MUNDO CONOSCO
Número 140 | Agosto de 2019
editor geral | FLORIANO MARTINS | floriano.agulha@gmail.com
editor assistente | MÁRCIO SIMÕES | mxsimoes@hotmail.com
logo & design | FLORIANO MARTINS
revisão de textos & difusão | FLORIANO
MARTINS | MÁRCIO SIMÕES
ARC Edições © 2019
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