By Toney Tapia
Grant Morrison (born January 31, 1960) is a comic book writer and artist born in Glasgow, Scotland. He is best-known for his nonlinear narratives and counter-cultural leanings. He is often credited as being one of the most creative writers ever to work in mainstream comics.

TONEY TAPIA: You’ve worked for the biggest and the best -- Creating your own characters and reinvigorating core concepts from Marvel, DC and more. Describe your writing process for us on a typical day.
GRANT MORRISON: These days, I get up, check e-mails, and scan my three or four favourite websites to see if there’s any good gossip. Then I work out in the gym, just like my hero, big Bruce Wayne, go running up ’n’ down the hill in all weathers, meditate, have breakfast and read the tabloids. After that, I mess around and do biz with Kristan, or we go for lunch or whatever. All the while I’m organising plots and solving story problems in my head.

Finally, I get to work in the afternoon and I write. I build up a good head of creative steam in the early evening, which is when I tend to do my best work, then I carry on into the night and the wee small hours of morning if need be, pausing only for food, or to watch a top notch DVD, or Celebrity Big Brother (deceased). I like to be surrounded by the sounds of nature while I work, which means birds, waves, trees, and pop music. Currently I’m listening to Ladytron, The Go! Team, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Lady Sov, The Like, sandpipers, owls, redwoods, oriental spruces, rain, and frame-rattling winds, over and over again. But mostly I’m inspired by the Arctic Monkeys, and the songs thereof. Fresh-faced 19 year old lads who know the score. Now That’s What I Call Music!

That’s the typical DAY. Other days are different.

TONEY TAPIA: The Arkham Asylum Graphic Novel helped kick off the original graphic novel explosion and has won numerous awards and acclaim. Would you say this was your best work ever? If not, what is?
GRANT MORRISON: I like Arkham Asylum for all kinds of reasons – for Dave McKean’s amazing artwork, for what it taught me about comics writing, and for making a poor dole boy rich beyond his reasonable dreams by selling half a million copies at $15 bucks each, or whatever it was, and proving I could actually make money doing something I loved – but…I wouldn’t say it was my best work. I prefer the more absurd or emotional stuff.

Perhaps the story ‘Soul of a New Machine’ from DOOM PATROL, or ‘The Empire of Chairs’ from the same title, perhaps the FLEX MENTALLO miniseries, St. SWITHIN’S DAY, KILL YOUR BOYFRIEND, THE FILTH, or THE INVISIBLES. Perhaps ALL STAR SUPERMAN 3. I can’t choose.

SEAGUY: SLAVES OF MICKEY EYE was all set to be my best work ever, actually.
 
TONEY TAPIA: Do you remember the very first comic book that you read?
GRANT MORRISON: The first comic I remember was called ‘Teddy Bear’ and was a British weekly aimed at toddlers. The first superhero comic I saw was a ‘Marvelman’ black and white edition featuring a story where Marvelman meets Baron Munchausen. When I was a little older, I discovered the Flash, who became my favourite comic book character.
 
TONEY TAPIA: We heard that you are a practicing magician. Can you elaborate on the type of magic you practice and how does the magic interact in your writing?
GRANT MORRISON: I was inspired as a teenager by the ‘Chaos Magic’ current and, after some early successes, I got seriously into the possibilities of what I was playing with and spent pretty much every day from 1981 to 2001, experimenting very successfully with magical techniques from a multitude of different traditions, until, finally I gained enough personal experience and practical know-how to develop my own style, which I called Pop Mag!c. THE INVISIBLES comic remains the central grimoire of Pop Mag!c for the time being, at least until I finish the Pop Mag!c manual.

Following my initiation into a state of consciousness which some magicians describe as ‘Crossing The Abyss’, I now ‘practise’ something I like to call Blank Magic, which I relate to the Buddhist concept of Shunyata, or Emptiness – an idea explored at length in THE FILTH, the bible  of Transcendental Materialism. I still perform rituals, make spells, and summon angels, gods and demons regularly as well.

As for the second part of your question – the stories in ALL STAR SUPERMAN can be clearly seen as hymns to Apollonian solar energies and are part of a wider solar cycle of rituals I’ve been performing for the last two years. Frank Quitely and I are downloading Superman qualities if you like, summoning Superman into visible appearance. Why, you may ask, would we summon a sun god into our lives in the form of a cartoon strongman ?

Well, O my brothers, serious contemplation of Superman, daily meditation on his attributes, and, of course, reading his incredible new adventures in ALL STAR SUPERMAN will ACTUALLY make you a more rational, attractive, and positive person! And don’t forget, these qualities may actually become fashionable as we approach the end of a difficult decade and crawl out of that nasty little year Saturn-Pluto alignment that started in 2001.

TONEY TAPIA: If you were stranded on a deserted island, with a portable DVD Player that had enough power to watch one last film, what would that film be and why?
GRANT MORRISON: O Lucky Man! It tells you everything you need to know to survive in this life, the next and the next after that.
 
TONEY TAPIA: With the popularity of TV series like Smallville, Lost and many others, would you ever consider making one of your very own hits into a show? Which of your works would you love to see as a series and could you cast it for us?
GRANT MORRISON: Strangely enough, I’m working on a pitch for a TV show at Fox right now and it’s based on something I wrote many years ago.

I’ve also been putting together a spec series pitch for ‘The Mystery Play’, which works surprisingly well as a high concept TV show, but my dream would be to do a SEAGUY movie with Owen Wilson as Seaguy.
 
TONEY TAPIA: How did your work on All Star Superman come about?
GRANT MORRISON: DC CP Dan DiDio knew I’d wanted to write a Superman book for a long time and invited me to do just that when he came up with the idea of streamlining DC’s icon characters for the All Star line.
 
TONEY TAPIA: Where are you taking us with All Star Superman? Will this be a whole new reinvention of the DCU ala Marvel's Ultimate Universe or is this something totally different?
GRANT MORRISON: Although the Ultimate line eventually, and deservedly, turned Bendis and Millar into stars and internet auteurs, it started life as a way to repackage and represent Marvel’s early back catalogue of stories and concepts in a form more suited to the tastes of a 21st century audience, weaned on cable and DVDs. I’d say it was more about revamping the characters and set-ups than headlining the creators, at least initially. All Star, on the other hand, is driven by the notion of handing over DC’s biggest trademarks to popular writers and artists, then allowing them complete creative freedom to run wild and free from continuity and tell the kind of stories they like.

Frank Miller’s version of an All Star Superman, in the pages of ALL STAR BATMAN and ROBIN, is likely to be very different from my portrayal (ALL STAR SUPERMAN does take place many years after the events of ALL STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN, so maybe some plucky fan can make it all tie together) so, while I have a huge internal continuity going on in All Star Superman, so far there’s definitely no shared universe connectivity between the books in the All Star line.

As for where I’m going with it, Frank Quitely and I are attempting to create 12, as-perfect-as-we-can make them, quintessential  Superman stories which can be collected in a book people will still be enjoying long after we’re dead!
 
TONEY TAPIA: Last but not least, I was told that the best advice to give someone who is beginning a writing career is to write what you wanna write. What do you think of that advice and what's the best advice you would give someone?
GRANT MORRISON: It depends on what kind of writer you want to be. If you write only what you want to write, you may find that you’re working only for yourself or for a very small audience of enthusiasts. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that approach if it makes you happy and allows you to express yourself, particularly if you have another source of income. If you want to make a living as a career writer, you generally have to find a middle ground between what you want to write and the demands of the marketplace.

If you have any ambition at all, you’ll probably find yourself wanting to explore all the  different frameworks available for writers and storytellers, which means experimenting with the rules of different media.

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