Kevin Smith v. Grant Morrison

On Batman and how to gain enlightenment in this life.

Hello, Old Sexy!

She's wearing a TARDIS.

(via f-yeah Grant Morrison)

Grant Morrison in Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone has a nice post-Supergods interview with Grant Morrison, including a description of his magical invocation of John Lennon:

"I put all the Beatles albums in a circle, a magic circle, wore my clothes from the band, tight trousers, Beatle boots, had a Rickenbacker guitar, and I had 'Tomorrow Never Knows' on a loop and I just played it, and I took this tiny lick of acid, just to give an edge. Basically, I got this image, this thing, like a huge Lennon head made out of music. It gave me a song – it's a pretty convincing John Lennon song."

At a Los Angeles book signing for Supergods with Way in late July, Morrison whips out a guitar and plays the song given to him by the floating Lennon head. "Keep taking the pills/Keep reading the books/Keep looking for signs that somebody loves you," he sings in a rough tenor. The audience laughs at first, then falls silent. He gets to the bridge – "One and one and one makes two/If you really want it to" – and the melody suddenly sounds like it could be on the White Album, or at least pass for Oasis.

Way, for one, is convinced. When Morrison performed the song in front of his two-year-old daughter, she started to dance – something she'd never done when her dad played guitar. "I was like, 'Well, clearly this is a John Lennon song,'" Way says. "Clearly!" Or maybe not. As Morrison observes in Supergods: "Things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa."

Links for Later

1. General Petraeus' move to the CIA




2. Psychology of winning




3. Clinton supports the constitutional debt ceiling option




4. Grant Morrison on Supergods

Weirdness on Weirdness

Former Ugly Betty bit actor chops up his mother with a ritual sword while ranting Masonic nonsense. Nasty.

I think the most interesting part in the article is this piece of Grant Morrison-esque detail--the first cops on the scene called a special unit of the NYPD for help:

[T]hey saw Brea gripping the sword, and a trail of blood leading to a closed door.

They retreated and called Emergency Service Unit cops, although a supervisor remained at the door and kept his eye on the suspect, which the NYPD said is standard practice.

ESU cops are "trained psychological technicians. They have additional equipment that enables them to perhaps better protect themselves," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

Grant Morrison Biopic

Grant Morrison gets the biographical documentary treatment by director Patrick Murphy.



Money quote: "Is this world hell? I've said it before, this is the part of heaven we're able to touch."

“His life is just as interesting as his work,” said Meaney. “In the ’90s, he went through an abduction experience, where he was taken outside of time and shown the nature of the universe. He used The Invisibles to explore the ramifications of that experience, and even lived a crazy rock-star lifestyle that was largely intertwined with that of King Mob, The Invisibles‘ main character.”

After 52

Grant Morrison on Multiversity

Grant Morrison's Sexy Apocalypse

Grant Morrison talks with Wired about the thirty (!) ongoing projects he's starting, working on, or just finished, the indestructability of the Superman story itself, and the importance of weird physics theories to art.

Morrison: Final Crisis was much heavier, much harder to write than The Filth, which at least came with massive doses of surreal black humor to sweeten the bitter pill of the subject matter. On Final Crisis, I spent months immersing myself in the thought processes of an evil, dying God who longed for nothing less than the degradation, destruction and enslavement of all of DC's superheroes, along with every other living thing in the universe and beyond!

To get into his head, I had to consider people like him in the real world and there were no shortage of candidates. The emissaries of Darkseid seemed to be everywhere, intent on crushing hope, or shattering human self-esteem. I began to hear his voice in every magazine headline accusing some poor young girl of being too fat or too thin. Darkseid was there in the newscasters screaming financial disaster and planet-doom. It was that sick old bastard's voice terrifying children with his hopeless message of a canceled future, demanding old ladies turn off their electric blankets to help "save the planet," while turning a blind eye to corporate ecocide.

Up against that, all we had to offer were the wise words of Pico Della Mirandola and Superman singing a song to break your heart. I had to grind America's superheroes down so hard there was nothing left but diamond in the dark. Everything was falling into a black hole, even the story structure ... and fans on message boards were going to war over the thing, screaming "genius" and "gibberish" at one another. It was quite unpleasant to be at the heart of all that but also strangely exhilarating.

I like Final Crisis a lot now that it's all over. I think it's the closest I've come to creating the type of DC superhero comic I most want to read.

Wired.com: Like continuity, is crisis itself becoming obsolete? Disaster scenarios seem to just get heavier and more mind-blowing, but they also are becoming more ubiquitous. Are we too inured to apocalypse and crisis these days to be scared of it anymore?

Morrison: I don't know if we're so much inured to apocalypse as almost sexually obsessed by it. We could only love apocalypse more if it had 4 liters of silicone in each tit. Think of all those videogames where the Earth's overrun by insect-aliens or there's been an atomic war and we're stumbling in the ruins with a gun we stole from a zombie. We should be grateful that we live in a culture so insulated from true horror it can afford to play with fear as entertainment.

Waiting for a Superman.

Zack Smith conducts a post-mortem on the luminous comic book miniseries All-Star Superman, in the form of a 12-part interview with its creator, Grant Morrison. In the process of retelling the classic Superman story, he also works in a lively subtext of magic, love, life in the face of death and Renaissance philosophy.

I see Superman in this series as an Enlightenment figure, a Renaissance idea of the ideal man, perfect in mind, body and intention.

A key text in all of this is Pico’s ‘Oration On The Dignity of Man’ (15c), generally regarded as the ‘manifesto’ of Renaissance thought, in which Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola laid out the fundamentals of what we tend to refer to as ’Humanist’ thinking.

At its most basic, the ‘Oratorio’ is telling us that human beings have the unique ability, even the responsibility, to live up to their ‘ideals’. It would be unusual for a dog to aspire to be a horse, a bird to bark like a dog, or a horse to want to wear a diving suit and explore the Barrier Reef, but people have a particular gift for and inclination towards imitation, mimicry and self-transformation. We fly by watching birds and then making metal carriers that can outdo birds, we travel underwater by imitating fish, we constantly look to role models and behavioral templates for guidance, even when those role models are fictional TV or, comic, novel or movie heroes, just like the soft, quick, shapeshifty little things we are. We can alter the clothes we wear, the temperature around us, and change even our own bodies, in order to colonize or occupy previously hostile environments. We are, in short, a distinctively malleable and adaptable bunch.

So, Pico is saying, if we live by imitation, does it not make sense that we might choose to imitate the angels, the gods, the very highest form of being that we can imagine ? Instead of indulging the most brutish, vicious, greedy and ignorant aspects of the human experience, we can, with a little applied effort, elevate the better part of our natures and work to express those elements through our behavior. To do so would probably make us all feel a whole lot better too. Doing good deeds and making other people happy makes you feel totally brilliant, let’s face it.

So we can choose to the astronaut or the gangster. The superhero or the super villain. The angel or the devil. It’s entirely up to us, particularly in the privileged West, how we choose to imagine ourselves and conduct our lives.

We live in the stories we tell ourselves. It’s really simple.