Grant Morrison
Grant Morrison
Grant Morrison, MBE is a Scottish comic book writer, playwright, and occultist. He is known for his nonlinear narratives and countercultural leanings in his runs on titles including DC Comics's Animal Man, Batman, JLA, Action Comics, All-Star Superman, Vertigo's The Invisibles, and Fleetway's 2000 AD...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth31 January 1960
spiritual ocean self
If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it's only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean.
couple real smart
It's always interesting to see what the real enthusiasts think, but they're rarely representative of the tastes of the wider audience, so I tend to write for myself, for an imagined smart 14-year-old, and for a couple of friends who are still big comics fans.
real heart artist
Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world.
running jobs nice
The more I think about it, the more I realize that schools are just factories for turning out robots, that's all. They get you when your small and vulnerable and they take all the human parts away, bit by bit, until you're just a wind-up toy. Turn the key and set it running. And the toy goes to university, gets a job, settles down with someone nice...
boys palaces
There's a palace in your head, boy. Learn to live in it always.
writing trying want
I'm a fan myself, so I try to write the kind of comics I want to read.
beautiful jesus real
Because it all derived from Superman. I mean, I love all the characters, but Superman is just this perfect human pop-culture distillation of a really basic idea. He's a good guy. He loves us. He will not stop in defending us. How beautiful is that? He's like a sci-fi Jesus. He'll never let you down. And only in fiction can that guy actually exist, because real guys will always let you down one way or another. We actually made up an idea that beautiful. That's just cool to me. We made a little paper universe where all of the above is true.
real artist generations
Actually, it's as if [Superman is] more real than we are. We writers come and go, generations of artists leave their interpretations, and yet something persists, something that is always Superman.
dream sometimes wonder
Sometimes you wonder, in an interconnected universe, who's dreaming who?
writing sculpture dozen
I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction.
magic way doe
Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. 'Life' plus 'significance' = magic.
character play different
These characters were like twelve-bar blues or other chord progressions. Given the basic parameters of Batman, different creators could play very different music.
children cutting mass-extinction
We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another.
cutting editors careers
I'm at a stage in my career where I don't expect or get too much editorial input into what I'm doing. I have a proven track record of success, so my editors are willing to cut me some slack even when a particular approach is not to their personal taste.