Getting towards the end of our conversations with the key players of DC�s
52, we sat down with Grant Morrison.
From the start, Morrison was something of the wild card in fans� eyes. After all, the other writers knew and worked together, but Morrison�he was most often seen as someone who did his own thing in his own way, and that way was usually talked about in hushed tones.
Not to denigrate
52 in any way, but something like a weekly comic series starring B and C list characters in the DCU sounded almost�pedestrian for Morrison.
But � it wasn�t. By all accounts, Morrison roared into the project along with the other writers, lending his voice and views to the story, forever putting his stamp on it, while blending seamlessly with the others to produce a unified voice.
Newsarama: We've heard from Greg, Geoff, Mark and Dan on how they got involved with the project, but what about you? When did you first hear about it, and what were your impressions at first blush?
Grant Morrison: Dan Didio called and asked if I would be interested in getting involved in his ambitious new venture. When I heard Geoff, Greg and Mark were in, I couldn't say no. I generally trust Dan's judgment when he offers me something and the idea of collaborating with three of the best writers in mainstream comics was too cool to refuse. I'd worked with a couple of other writers before but they've generally been in an 'apprentice' role; this was an unmissable opportunity to work with three of my peers at the height of their talents.
NRAMA: What were your expectations going into the project?
GM: I was feeling pretty pumped up and felt ready to handle anything.
52 seemed like a breeze going in. Oh hahahahaha......
NRAMA: It's been said
52 built the weekly "machine." What was the biggest surprise to you about how the machine worked?
GM: The biggest surprise was how quickly and effectively the whole team meshed, including Keith Giffen and J.G. Jones who were with us at all the meetings in New York. We all have our own individual voices and perspectives and it could easily have gone wrong or led to misunderstanding. I knew Mark well and I'd known Geoff for about a year but I'd never met Greg and the best thing I'll take from
52 is the strong friendships that have formed between us. When all the writers went to Vegas together in March to celebrate finishing the
52 scripts, it was like an episode of
Entourage.
Otherwise, I always knew we could make it work. I cut my teeth as a writer on weekly comics, doing serialized stories in 5-8 page chunks for
2000 AD. The idea of the weekly is certainly not new in the UK - practically all of our comics are weeklies and most of us who learned our craft here are familiar and comfortable with that format.
I'd also just finished
Seven Soldiers, which was a year long
bi-weekly series of 30 issues, all written by me.
Seven Soldiers was, in many ways, a blueprint for what we did in 52 - the idea of one big, extended epic, featuring a bunch of C-list heroes, and comprised of interlocking story arcs and plot threads had already worked very successfully there.
NRAMA: We�ve heard from the other writers about how much of a juggle the series became in terms of other work. Was it that way for you?
GM: It was fine at first but as I say, after fairly intensive runs on
New X-Men (42 issues in 3 years) and then
Seven Soldiers, exhaustion finally set in and there were times near the end of 52 where I became really miserable and felt I'd never be able to look at a comic book again let alone write one. The demands of the weekly format meant that
52 always had to be prioritized - above everything else - and the Wildstorm stuff I was working on really suffered for that. I've only just cleared the decks sufficiently to get back to those books and I have to apologize, not only to my collaborators but to everyone who's been looking forward to reading the finished product.
NRAMA: Do you have any personal harrowing stories of deadlines? A timeline almost missed?
GM: There was one week somewhere in the mid-late 30s where I went into total meltdown - I was working on five issues of
52 at the same time, as well as plotting future issues with the guys and doing proofreading and corrections on the upcoming stories. On top of that, there was double duty on
Batman with scripts for both Andy Kubert and J.H. Williams going on at the same time. I was writing
All-Star Superman #8 at that time too, as well as
Authority #2. And in the same year, I wrote four movie pitches and the screenplay for the
We3 adaptation. It makes me shudder just to think about it.
When we started writing, we were handing in scripts 10 months ahead of their release date but by the time issue
52 rolled around, the finished dialogue went in three weeks before publication! Luckily, it wasn't called
59 or you might have seen that NASCAR crash Keith always talks about.
We all had lots of other work to do and we all had at least one nervous breakdown each over the course of the series but fortunately if a problem arose which one person couldn't handle, the other guys were always there to keep the train on the tracks.
NRAMA: The others have pointed to you for asking, "What if Skeets were evil?" once the process had begun, which caused a whole new element to be included...how much did that shake up the story that was originally planned?
GM: I'm not sure. I feel as if it was already implicit in the story and it just took me to point it out. Why else was Mister Mind depicted watching TV in issue #2? Based on that alone, he had to be the big bad and Skeets had to be involved, mostly because Mister Mind fits so nicely inside that little robot shell. It added some extra drama and made the big ending possible, although I originally wanted Mister Mind to metamorphose into a goofy-looking little butterfly wearing glasses. I thought it would be scarier if this tiny, supremely evil creature could do absolutely
anything but I was overruled on the grounds that our lead characters wouldn't look very cool running from an angry Red Admiral with a two-inch wingspan.
NRAMA: Were there changes for you when Steve Wacker left?
GM: As I said at the time, and dragging out the band analogy one more time, it was like The Beatles when Brian Epstein died. Or perhaps more like that bit in 'The Rutles' when Leggy Mountbatten goes AWOL.. We were shocked. And stunned. And shocked. Really shocked. And stunned. Did I mention stunned ?
I remember an initial sense of panic and doom when Steve called with the news he was leaving - some of the guys were even talking about quitting because Steve had been such a fundamental element of our whole group dynamic. Steve is a brilliant organizer, a genius editor, and a great friend. It became important to remember that he hadn't died but had, in fact, just moved downtown. We were all set to edit the bloody thing ourselves but fortunately Mike Siglain stepped up to bat and did a remarkable job at a very difficult time. Big respect to him and to all our artists and production people who knocked themselves to make sure we didn't miss shipping once.
NRAMA: You�re doing I right there � describing the group with the rock band metaphor. Describe what it was like to be part of a collaborative group like this�using that rock band analogy.
GM: Well, it was me who started that one, so I guess I'd have to agree. I've played with a few bands and the mesh of personalities here was very reminiscent of that. I always mention the Beatles but the truth is we were more like one of those 'supergroups' comprised of guys who are already successful in their own right, like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, or the Raconteurs. There were no divas, no demands, no stroppy behavior between us. We were all dedicated to making the book as good as it could be, given the time limitations.
The roles also shifted around a little as we progressed. Everybody always describes me as the 'big ideas' guy but they only ever mention one of my ideas (Skeets is evil...oooooo) and you rarely get to hear how much of my time was spent cheerleading my way through the weekly phone calls. Everybody likes to typecast Mark as the staunch traditionalist when in fact he's a supersmart, witty and literary writer with no respect for authority and he probably had more confrontations with editorial than any of the rest of us. Greg's supposed to be the angry, street level guy who grounds everything in reality but he also has a lurid pulp imagination and is very thoughtful and gracious team player. Geoff is often seen as the white collar go-to company guy at DC when he's actually a bloodthirsty, restless innovator who continually pushes for characters to experience the new, different and deadly and he has no real loyalty to previous ways of doing things at all. On a long-running project like this you get to see past everyone's surface projections to the meat and bone beneath. I came away from
52 with a huge respect and admiration for all my collaborators and I've picked up a few writer tricks I'll be using in my future work.
NRAMA: We�ll talk about the fellow writers in detail in a little bit, but before that, what have you learned about your readers? Has the constant and immediate reaction to and feedback
you've received about
52 influenced your perception about comic book fans in general and their expectations?
GM: It's hard to say anything about comics fans in general based on what you read online because the majority of comics fans don't post. Of the 100,000 plus people who bought
52 every week only a tiny proportion ever commented on what they read and even fewer did so on a regular basis. The online community, nice as many of its members are, is not necessarily a representative cross-section of our readership, so while I always value and appreciate the genuine delight of the enthusiasts or shake my head in despair when I read the cranked-up-to-11 sociopathic onslaughts of the haters, I don't use the internet to judge my talent or gauge the popularity of my books.
As for their expectations, some of the people who appear to criticize the loudest are actually the ones we can most count on to buy the books week in, week out, so it's hard to rely on message board commentary as a barometer of success or failure. Remember it was the online community who insisted Daniel Craig would be the worst James Bond ever, (to the point where Craig himself was close to giving in to hopelessness), while the general audience has acclaimed him as possibly the
best. Hardcore fans, while always welcome in my neck of the woods, are a very tiny, very specific subset of the audience which consumes popular entertainment and they don't always know what the public wants.
While we're on the subject of online commentary, I have to make one last point which has been amusing me recently and this seems as good a forum as any to bring it up. One of the most damning online criticisms I see of writers in comics is that he or she 'phoned it in'. Umm...has no-one grasped the irony or the concept of the internet modem here? You think we put our scripts and artwork in envelopes and send them pigeon post?
Here is wisdom -
everyone phones their scripts in!!!!
NRAMA: Okay � good, if overly semantic, point. Speaking of the whole experience, perhaps one of the more controversial moments came outside of the series when Dan Didio revealed that the multiverse still existed as the secret of 52...was that planned?
GM: Not at all.
NRAMA: Do you feel it affected the momentum of the series?
GM: It blew what should have been a thrilling reveal to end the series but what can you do? Fortunately no lives were lost as a consequence of Dan's rash decision.
NRAMA: What's your opinion on the staying power of the weekly format? Can it survive?
GM: If
Countdown delivers, then I expect we'll see much more of the weekly comic format. As I said somewhere else, I think
52 demonstrated that art-driven, prestige books which come out every six months are not the only way forward for the industry.
NRAMA: Is there anything you regret looking back on the experience? And on the flip side, what are you most proud of regarding your work on
52?
GM: Regrets ? Now that it's over, I'm glad I was involved but if you'd asked me this question back in January, I might have had a different answer. Now that we can relax, I'm able to see
52 for the achievement it was. I'm most proud of our 'sound', the way we all meshed to create a composite voice.
NRAMA: Focusing on the story now -- how did the idea to focus on these nine characters in particular germinate? What characters out of that group interested you the most when you started -- and which ones grew on you as you went?
GM: After the first story conference, I remember thinking that all the plot threads were so strong I wouldn't mind writing any of them. I wound up with the space team because Animal Man was in there and the only way Vertigo would allow us to use Animal Man prominently was if I wrote the character.
NRAMA: Were there large changes to the story as it rolled?
GM: There were never any large changes - all the broad strokes were plotted at the first meeting in June of 05 - but we were coming up with new details every week and honing the material constantly.
NRAMA: Were there ever disagreements either with editorial or within the creative ranks on what should happen with these characters and in this comic?
GM: Boring as it sounds, there really were no significant disagreements. We're all adults and professionals and this was never one person's baby. Nobody went away thinking,
'He shouldn't have been allowed to do that, the bastard!' Sometimes we'd chew over motivations and plot points but creatively, the whole project proceeded in the most painless way. We all bonded immediately and got to work.
NRAMA: Okay � over to your fellow creators. What are your favorite moments someone else wrote and why?
GM: In some cases, even I'm not sure who wrote what, so there's stuff I like that I wouldn't know who to attribute to but of the bits I know for sure....
I loved the really off the wall, creepy scenes Mark would do - like the wicker Sue Dibny in issue #13 - but my favorite Waid moments are in the final issue. When Booster starts calling the plays and yells �Go long!' it's such a great, grounded moment in the midst of all this weird Star Trek-y cosmic jargon stuff. It made me want to cheer. And when Sue Dibny said 'Honey, your nose is twitching,' a tear came to my eye and I grinned like an idiot. We all practically made a demonic pact to rescue Ralph Dibny from misery and it was great to finally see it happen on the page. Oh, and the Gingold reveal was great; even I was convinced that Ralph's flask contained booze
My favourite Geoff moments - when the Teen Titans turn up in issue #21 and Power Boy exclaims
'By Darkseid's testi--' and Little Barda cuts him off by saying
'--POWER BOY, watch your expressions. They 'sugar-coat' them on this planet'. That's such a brilliant Jack Kirby line. I loved the whole 'Happy Black Marvel Family' build-up and I loved the awful moment of truth when Sobek dines on Osiris.
Favorite Greg moment - the relationship between Rene Montoya and the Question was so beautifully constructed and played. The slow decline and death of the Question was something I found very affecting. Especially in issues #34 and #38.
I also really liked issue #24 with the short-lived JLA. That was an issue I didn't work on at all, so I was able to come to it as a regular reader.
NRAMA: Okay � ego aside for a moment � the favorite moments you wrote and why?
GM: Most fun for me were all the scenes on Oolong Island. I never tired of those mad science geeks and the only scene I didn't write for them was the one Greg did in issue #26, which had the great
'I knew a girl once' line. I love writing cowardly, petulant, irascible supervillains much more than I enjoy writing evil truly ones, so this whole plot strand was a joy from beginning to end. And I'd been waiting for my chance to do Will Magnus and the Metal Men since I had him in
Doom Patrol back in 1992.One of my all-time favorite comics is Steve Gerber and Walt Simonson's
Metal Men #46, which is where the Plutonium Man comes from.
NRAMA: What do you look back on with pride in terms of story elements that you put in there?
GM: I'm pleased with the introduction of the Great Ten who grew out Paul Levitz' desire to see more international superheroes. After the first
52 story meeting I went home, dug out the reference material on Chinese history and culture I'd used to help create the backstory for the 'Xorn' character in
New X-Men and hammered out a huge document complete with detailed origin stories and backgrounds for every member of the Great Ten, as well as some details of the Chinese Government's 'super-functionary' program.
The same pitch also introduced two new Japanese pop-culture inspired superteams - the venerable monster-huntin' crew of Big Science Action and the Super Young Team (whose members include Most Excellent SuperBat, Big Atomic Lantern Boy and Shy Crazy Lolita Canary) - both of which will appear in my next big DCU project in 2008.
I'm also pleased that I was able to revitalize Doc Magnus a little, paving the way for the return of the
Metal Men. It's one of DCs strongest concepts and it would be great to have a really good monthly book featuring those characters again.
And Egg Fu! I finally did it! I rehabilitated Egg f****** Fu! My evil work is done...
NRAMA: Did your story elements play out as you had originally envisioned them? What changed, if anything?
GM: Things worked out pretty much as planned. Only details were changed as we came up with better ways to do things.
NRAMA: Would you have changed anything?
GM: If there had been space in the last issue I would have included a coda to the Super-Chief story. I had plans for John Standing Bear's return but we couldn't fit them in when issue #52 went from 52 pages to 40. I'm sure he'll turn up somewhere else. I also had a good twist on the OMACs and Brother Eye and lots more ideas for Red Tornado's absurdist journey home but we couldn't squeeze them in either. Maybe it's just as well.
If I could have changed anything it would have been Lady Styx, not because of any particular flaw in the character but mostly because I'd spent the previous year writing
Seven Soldiers which also had a creepy female uber-villain who commanded legions of murderous troops. The characters felt too similar so I shied away a little from doing much with Lady Styx. You'll notice she never speaks when I'm writing her because I didn't want to do yet another Evil Queen from Snow White voice. Having said that, the Captain Comet sequences in issue #31 were some of my own favorite pieces of writing from the series.
I'd also like to point out here that my character the Bulleteer CANNOT FLY! Repeat BULLETEER CANNOT FLY!
Apart from that there are a couple of glaring omissions and oversights which will either make it into the trade or get picked up in other books - to save Newsarama readers a wait, I can confirm that the 'cocoon' spun by Mister Mind doubled as a matter transporter, which allowed him to beam himself inside Skeets after seeing him on TV. Starfire isn't dead, she just fainted after her long, energy-draining journey to Earth. Doc Magnus' Plutonium Man will probably turn up again in the forthcoming
Metal Men series. And the parallel Earths you see in issue #52 are
not the familiar pre-Crisis versions. If you think you recognize and know any of these worlds from before, you'd be wrong. We all wanted to do something new with the multiple Earths so what you've already seen in
52 is simply the tip of the iceberg - each parallel world now has its own huge new backstory and characters and each could basically form the foundation for a complete line of new books. If you like the ongoing soap opera dynamics of New Earth, you can watch Mary Marvel turning to the dark side as her skirt gets shorter and shorter, or you can buy the Earth 5 line of books featuring more iconic versions of the Marvel Family. If you miss Vic Sage as the Question, you should be able to follow the adventures of Vic's counterpart on the Charlton/Watchmen world of Earth 4.
The idea behind the Megaverse is to basically create a number of big new franchise possibilities. It's like having several comics companies and universes under one umbrella, so, as I say, there could be one book or a whole line of books spinning out of the new Earth 10 (I handled that particular revamp, so I can tell you that the original concept of the Freedom Fighters on a world where the Nazis won World War 2 has been greatly reconsidered, expanded and intensified into something that's a bit more Wagnerian and apocalyptic and a bit more adult) That's how I'd like to see the Megaverse played out as we move forward. And no crossovers! Each of the parallel universes should exist in its own separate stream with no contact from the others - not until we have a story worthy of bringing them together.
NRAMA: Whoa. Okay. How did you go about choosing the main characters for the story? Was there a give and take for you in the selection process? That is, you'd look the other way if someone wanted _____ to appear, as long as they looked the other way so you could bring in ____?
GM: Paul Levitz came along to the first
52 meeting with the idea that he wanted the book to function as a kind of travelogue or Rough Guide to the DCU, taking in politics, religion, technology, media etc. so we selected characters who could represent or take us through different areas of the Universe (Steel as technology, Booster as media, Black Adam as global politics, Montoya as ground level humanity and so on). I've had the idea about doing a story set on an island of mad scientists for a long time and it finally found a home here, I'm glad to say. We all agreed that we wanted to rescue Ralph and Sue Dibny from the land of grim 'n' gritty, so we knew he'd be in there.
Otherwise, we all just kind of agreed which plot strands we'd tackle on day one and that's how we did it. Geoff did almost all the Black Adam bits, Greg did all the Montoya bits, Mark did all the Ralph Dibny scenes except for a couple in issue #30 which I wrote. The point is we were all playing together to create the 'music' in any given issue of
52 and the 'who wrote who' question is largely irrelevant to the overall feel of the book.
I liked the idea that we could have so many different types of storytelling in there: there's comedy in the Oolong Island stuff, there's tragedy with Black Adam and the Question, there are space opera, horror, mystery, detective and cosmic strands to this extended narrative which is why some people can have a hard time explaining the 'high concept' or applying Hollywood storytelling jargon to
52. This was never intended to be a movie; it was a comic and proud of it. It is its own unique thing and will tend to defy convenient pigeonholing.
Books like DC's
Infinite Crisis or Marvel's
Civil War are played out as a blockbuster movies with A-list stars, and you have to admit that Iron Man vs Captain America pretty much sells itself. If it compared to other media at all,
52 was more like a couple of long seasons of a TV show featuring stars you've barely heard of. We didn�t have the marquee names or the $100,000,000 budget, so as with, say,
Lost or
Heroes, we had to engage the audience straight away with characters and story. I think
52 was very human and accessible in that way. In the end it wasn't about making pseudo-political points or staging yet another huge brawl between superheroes, it was about loss, and love and death and transcendence and the sprawling lives and emotions of people who just happened to have superpowers.
NRAMA: Pulling back to the characters one last time, for you, what's the draw of Animal Man? After all, it'd been years, but in the scenes where he showed up it's like no time had passed since the series all those years ago...
GM: Well, having met the guy personally, I can only say he's an absolute joy to work with!
The draw at this stage is obviously the semi-nostalgic opportunity to revisit the character who made my name in US comics. It was like hanging out with an old friend and it seemed right somehow that when he got lost in space, Buddy Baker was able to trust his writer pal to ensure a happy ending. Someone else might have killed him. I like the directness of the Animal Man story - he starts in space light years from home and slowly makes his way back across the gulfs of space and time and death to be with his wife and family. Simple.
NRAMA: That said, if you had all the time in the world, who or what would you like to follow up on coming out of
52?
GM: I'd like to do more with Will Magnus and T.O. Morrow but probably won't. There's a great relationship there to be explored further. Hopefully
Metal Men will touch on that somewhere. There are other strands from
52 which I actually will be following up in my new project but I can't talk about that one until it's announced.
NRAMA: Finally Grant, could you ever see yourself doing something like this again?
GM: No. It's a bit like having sex with a jellyfish: once might an interesting experiment, twice would be perversion!
Previously:
Previously:
Mark Waid
Geoff Johns
Keith Giffen
Dan Didio
Linear Mode
