Grant Morrison: Deconstruction, Superheroes, and Controversy

The Career

Grant Morrison was born on January 31, 1960, in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1978, fresh out of high school, he published his first comics in Near Myths, a pioneering British alternative magazine. However, he spent much of the eighties focused on his band, The Mixers. He would return to comics only halfway through the decade, writing for Warrior, Doctor Who Magazine, and 2000AD. It was in this last magazine that he created, alongside Steve Yeowell, his first notable work: Zenith. There, he explored some of his obsessions: fame, the emptiness of a frivolous protagonist, the multiverse, and the notion of eldritch horrors seeping into reality through a thin membrane. In 1986, DC Comics editor Karen Berger, one of the great champions of British authors in the United States, traveled to England to scout talent, and Morrison pitched Animal Man and what would eventually become Arkham Asylum. Both were accepted, and he began his journey into the North American mainstream.

In this first phase, he created his first two masterpieces: the aforementioned Animal Man, a comic that starts as an environmentalist manifesto and then transforms into a metafictional exploration with heartfelt sincerity. On the other hand, there’s the eclectic mix of Doom Patrol, an ode to freaks, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized, sprinkled with a ton of references to Dadaism, Jorge Luis Borges, Ken Kesey, Charles Atlas, the CIA, and a thousand other things. He also wrote the convoluted and pretentious Arkham Asylum, which became a huge success, allowing Morrison, who had signed a very lucrative royalty contract, to travel the world and indulge in drugs galore.

Then came a period dedicated to shorter works, most of which were fueled by an anti-Thatcher sentiment: St. Swithin’s Day (which revolves around an assassination attempt against her), the anachronistic The New Adventures of Hitler, imagining Adolf in Liverpool, and the revamp of Dare, an English space hero reimagined as an icon of a fascist government. This would mark a constant in Morrison's career: following long and more ambitious projects with short, experimental “palate cleansers.” The other constant is alternating between works created for mainstream superhero comics and those with a more indie tone.

Between 1994 and 1996, he launched a new phase of his career, marked by two complementary works: The Invisibles and JLA. The Invisibles is the Morrisonian bible: it follows a cell of countercultural anarchists who confront the forces of order and control. Encounters with entities, Lovecraftian horrors perched in political power, nonlinear narratives, double, triple, and quadruple agents, ultraviolence and zen, pop icons turned gods… The Invisibles is a one-way street. JLA, on the other hand, took a very simple idea (let’s put all the most iconic heroes back in the Justice League) and amplified the stakes and the Big Moments to stratospheric levels, a comic that is pure enthusiasm, emotion, and sugar injected into the eyes. It also marked the beginning of his interpretation of a hyper-efficient Batman, almost superhuman in his preparation. This duo should also include Flex Mentallo, for its beauty and for being the first collaboration with Frank Quitely: a comic about the love for superheroes and the disillusionments of adult life, rendered in full technicolor.

Then, he would make a big splash: moving to Marvel for the first and only time. In the context of the renewed Marvel under Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada, Morrison was given the X-Men, and true to his style (searching for the heart of the premise of a title and maximizing it in conjunction with his intellectual interests and a brilliant, bizarre aesthetic), he created a comic with strange mutants, with a culture, numerous queer references, a subtext of the struggle between the young and the old, a soap opera about counterculture that managed to push comics and its themes beyond Chris Claremont's setup. He also collaborated with Quitely here.

But this phase would be short-lived. Lured back by DC, Morrison returned, leaving Marvel in a bad way. There’s a famous anecdote of Joe Quesada yelling at Morrison at San Diego Comic-Con, to which Morrison replied, “Fuck you, fuck your company, and fuck your boss who’s the biggest arsehole I’ve ever met.” At DC, Morrison returned to indie: The Filth, a sort of spiritual sequel to The Invisibles, follows secret agent Greg Feely, who is also a habitual loser in charge of his dying cat. Here, old themes of Morrison returned: the viral and degrading condition of late capitalist consumer culture, the idea of the need for emotional connection with other living beings to get by, and the post-humanist themes of the relationship between humans and animals. This theme was also expressed in We3, another masterpiece in which three domestic animals are kidnapped by the United States government and turned into weapons. Again with Quitely, his artwork is an explosion of action scenes decomposed into thousands of fabulous and kinetic panels.

But the bulk of Morrison's work in this 2000s phase at DC would be a mega-epic and intricate saga that began with Seven Soldiers, continued in Final Crisis, intersected with his bombastic and expansive seven-year run on Batman, and concluded with The Multiversity. What began in Seven Soldiers as a proposal to revitalize a group of forgotten characters turned into a journey through all corners of the DC universe: through multiple lands, through magic, through monstrous super-action, through the depression that is Darkseid, and the brilliance and childlike sense of wonder of Shazam. They are also structurally very innovative series: Seven Soldiers is a “modular” series in which the seven characters never meet and defeat evil by working together but separately; Final Crisis is an exercise in narrative decomposition; The Multiversity is a tour through the various historical and aesthetic iterations of superhero comics. This saga is, in some way, Morrison's opera of superhero comics.

Simultaneously, Morrison took on Batman and wrote him for seven years. Morrison employed, once again, a maximalist approach and took Batman through a wide range of possibilities: the sexy adventurer, the dark detective, the science fiction superhero, the family man, the franchise. All supported by the basic philosophical idea of Morrison's Batman: Batman cannot lose because his superpower is being always prepared, having plans within plans without limit. And, on top of that, he invented the great Damian Wayne, the bratty and troublesome Robin who is his son. And as if that weren't enough, during this period he also birthed, once again with Quitely, his most accessible, Apollonian, classically narrative, and beautiful work: All Star Superman. Twelve issues in which the Scots go deep with the idea of Superman, exploring his variants and alternatives while contrasting him with other muscle-bound characters lacking his morality and intelligence, delivering a plea for an eternally curious and kind Superman. Alongside these projects, as always, Morrison released some short miniseries, among which stand out: Nameless, a cosmic horror project with Chris Burnham; Annihilator, with Frazier Irving, a meditation on creation and its dangers inspired by the writings of Thomas Ligotti; and Klaus, an adventurous and superheroic Santa Claus with Dan Mora.

His last act, for now, at DC was writing runs on Green Lantern and Wonder Woman. The former, alongside Liam Sharp, began as an attempt to tell short stories in a police-science fiction style, and ended up being another cosmic extravaganza with elements of heroic fantasy and a baroque drawing style reminiscent of 1960s and 70s science fiction covers. Wonder Woman: Earth One, on the other hand, with Yannick Paquette, revisits the ideas of liberation through submission of William Moulton Marston, her creator, to reflect on contemporary sexual politics and toxic masculinity.

After that, Morrison semi-retired from comics in 2021. He published his first novel, Luda, a story about drag and magic, in 2022.

The Hustler

Like with Moore, understanding Morrison requires more than just a reconstruction of his career. One of the elements that has generally clashed with fans is his quality as a hustler, his tendency for self-promotion and his bombastic statements. Morrison claimed that the DC Universe would gain consciousness, and also that Alan Moore stole Watchmen from an unknown novel. Every time he launched a new comic, he hyped what he was doing to the roof. With a bit of the old hucksterism of Stan Lee, Morrison is an author who knows how to sell himself, whose interviews were often very entertaining, and this is one of the reasons for his success. This is also a result of a key influence on Morrison: pop music and English music criticism. Like pop stars, he knew from the start that he had to project a larger-than-life image that was part of his work. Like English music critics, many of whom competed with musicians for notoriety, he knew that to carve out a name for himself, he had to have a controversial attitude, go against established knowledge, stir the pot, and present an alternative canon. In the eighties, he even had his own opinion column, Drivel, in the fanzine Speakeasy, where he aimed to be as controversial as possible.

The Poptimist

Morrison truly believes in the characters he writes, believes in the surface of the comic medium in general, and in the superhero genre in particular, to traffic ideas and aesthetics that reshape consciousness, change identities, and, above all, provide pleasure. Throughout his career, he has dedicated himself to reassembling superheroes from the paradigm of the often adolescent adulthood into which the poor imitations of Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns had plunged them, towards a more hopeful idea, drawing from the absurd concepts created during the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies but revitalized as metaphors for the anguish of human existence and the possibility of escaping it through community and the remodeling of consciousness in a cooler, more fluid way. Generally, he takes a series, analyzes its concept, and files down everything he considers secondary while repopulating it with concepts to generate a feeling of consuming a hybrid of cocaine and sugar on paper. His comics are also filled with sentimental moments in which heroes take two forms: the other, the human bond, the possibility of goodness; or the liberation of the creative act. This is probably why he always felt more comfortable at DC: more archetypal characters, more cast in bronze, which are also immersed in a multiverse full of variations. However, this belief in corporate creations that have ultimately been wrested from their creators, the blockage of the political economy angle of them, has often led him to be accused of being neoliberal, with his philosophy of constant updating through the colorful surface of creations with a simple conflict resolution questioned as regressive.

The Collaborator

Morrison is a great collaborator with artists. Throughout his career, he has not only woven long-standing creative duos, but he has also had a tremendous eye for selecting rising artists who would become stars. Steve Yeowell, Chris Weston, Phil Jimenez, Chris Burnham, Dan Mora, Yanick Paquette, Igor Kordey, Frazier Irving, Cameron Stewart, Lee Garbett are some of the standout talents featured in his work. Morrison started as an all-encompassing author, often sketching out storyboards to guide his artists. He also sketched costume and cover designs. It is this graphic ability that, I believe, makes him such a sought-after collaborator. His scripts tend to be quite descriptive, though not to the excess of Moore's. At the same time, he seems to perfectly understand each artist's strengths: he gives Paquette those works that need pin-up art, horror to Burnham, and color and iconicity to Mora. And there’s one collaborator with whom he has forged a unique symbiotic relationship: Frank Quitely. Over more than 30 years, they produced a series of monumental works, in which Mozz's desire to experiment with the fragmentation of panels perfectly combines with Quitely's attention to detail, fine lines, and fluidity of action. Their range is very broad: from the ultra-violent, hyper-detailed manga style of We3 to the vast open spaces of All Star Superman, through the circular and open work, brimming with panels, of Pax Americana.

The Diverse

Morrison came out as non-binary in 2020. But long before this, his work was filled with reflections on sexuality and diversity. The character of Rebis in Doom Patrol is a hermaphrodite resulting from the union of a man, a woman, and an energy being, whose name references an alchemical mythological creature symbolizing the union of opposites. Lord Fanny, one of the protagonists of The Invisibles, is a fabulous Brazilian shaman. The representation of this character was questioned as insensitive, but for me, she is the star of one of the hottest and most beautiful dance scenes in comic history, and at 16, it meant seeing a positive representation of a trans woman almost for the first time in fiction. His entire run on the X-Men explodes the mutant metaphor as a symbol linked to ableism and its rejection, but also to coming out, infused with sexual tension and dramatic relationships. Many of his female characters, such as Bulleteer, Emma Frost, Wonder Woman, and Shining Knight are variations around the rejection of sexism in comics. On the other hand, there are photos of Morrison in the nineties clearly participating in fetish and kinky events, and he has described himself as a “crossdresser.” The kinky dynamics of BDSM often reflect in his comics, both in their iconography, filled with characters dressed in leather and large boots wielding whips, and in a recurring trope: submission as a form of abandoning the self, often presented as dangerous and annihilating of will (but at the same time hot: there are countless situations of submission in Morrison's comics that evoke a peculiar mix of morbid fascination and seduction), but sometimes as something pleasurable, as in the relationship between the repressed Cyclops and the dominating Emma Frost, an affair realized only in the mind during one of the high points of his run on X-Men. The way Morrison presents the loss of control, the service to the other, as something pleasurable indicates his interest in kinky spaces and practices.

The Chaos Magician

Morrison, unlike Moore, is a chaos magician. Or, as they have described themselves, a pop magician. Chaos magic is a branch that stands in contrast to ceremonial magic, as it considers that the latter has become too much like a religion. Its aim was to strip magic of its ritualistic and theological status, turning it into a tool. Furthermore, its main foundation is the rejection of objective truth: the entire universe is made up of belief, and magic is the manipulation of belief to alter the universe. Chaos magic relies on the use of sigils, empowered by gnosis. A sigil is a symbol, usually abstract, often the result of synthesizing a phrase or thought into an icon. Gnosis is a moment of absolute mental concentration, during which one focuses on the sigil and “launches” it into the world. This gnosis can be achieved through the use of ritualized sex, drugs, masturbation, or surrendering the body to musical stimuli. This is why chaos magic has a deep connection with the English underground music scenes, with one of its most recognized practitioners being Genesis P Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. Orridge actually founded one of the most well-known lodges, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, and wrote The Psychic Bible (here in Argentina published by Caja Negra), a sort of manual made up of fragments in which he outlines various practices to “deprogram reality.” Morrison studied and practiced magic at the Temple.

Morrison's most famous magical work is the one he performed to save The Invisibles from cancellation. In November 1995, in the letters page of the comic, he asked his readers to masturbate while thinking of a sigil on Thanksgiving Eve. The result was that sales began to rise, and Morrison was able to complete his story. He has often referred to his comics as “hypersigils” of enormous complexity.

In the early 2000s, Morrison wrote a document titled Pop Magic, in which he lays out the principles of chaos magic for a new audience, renaming it pop magic. For Morrison, there are ideas that are very powerful and transcend time and civilizations, ideas that have as much reality as “reality” itself. This is encapsulated in his phrase, “Before the bomb was a bomb, the bomb was an idea.” This means: before the nuclear bomb was a threat and the destruction of Hiroshima, the nuclear bomb was a notion in the minds of some people, a Behemoth slowly crawling towards Bethlehem to be born. The idea evolves to affect belief and, in doing so, modifies the real. This also connects with Morrison's strong notion that language constructs reality, a concept that, like the control technologies he deploys as villains in many of his works, he borrows from William Burroughs and his idea that “language is a virus from outer space.” But it also has points of contact with the Lacanian notion of “the real”: a space we can only access through language. Many scenes of torture in Morrison's comics are related to the manipulation of symbols and words that affect the perception of the one being tortured.

Similarly, many great ideas, for Morrison, manifest in the form of different “costumes” of gods: Hermes, Ganesha, Ares, etc., are representations through which we give meaning to more universal ideas. Morrison proposes that if we could see the universe as it truly is, from outside of time, with time as one of its dimensions, we would see our lives as a kind of worm composed of all the moments we experience, connected by our bodies. Following the same logic, there is nothing to indicate that the world of fiction, of comics, is any less real than our own; it simply lacks the third dimension, which the characters cannot perceive but we can. This is why Morrison believes in “fiction suits”: avatars of oneself (King Mob, one of the protagonists of The Invisibles, is one) that creators can use to “descend” into the fictional world and interact with their creations.

The Postmodern

All of this brings us to the final point to highlight: Grant Morrison's postmodernism. If Moore is a modernist, someone who, for better or worse, still believes in the symbolism of progress and in the progressive emancipation of creative technique in a constant evolution, Morrison arrives “after the end of history” and takes advantage of the new logics of postmodernism: metafiction, stories as geological layers, self-awareness, fragmentation resulting from techniques like cut-up (while Moore's narrative voice feels like that of a teacher, a wise figure narrating with a deep voice, Morrison's is more akin to postmodern poetry, or to the neural overload of coexisting with hundreds of media outlets turned on at the same time), and the possibility of employing the entirety of culture as a repository of signs and references to be deployed when needed. Additionally, there is a healthy irreverence for the divisions between high, middle, and low culture: everything is equally valuable if combined in elegant and enthusiastic ways. His is the aesthetic of magpies. Morrison improvises a lot while writing, and this is evident in the quality of his comics, which is why many readers who are not used to contemporary narrative or theory say that “it doesn’t make sense.” In reality, he seeks an effect of estrangement and wonder, and he writes as someone who lets themselves be carried away by a feeling, a tone, or a scene. Moreover, Morrison's comics aim to take advantage of the temporal simultaneity of the comic page (and of comics as artifacts) to, as theorist Marc Singer says, “embed stories within stories and worlds within worlds, ascending or descending through different levels of magnification and nesting” (Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics, pp. 19). Like Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, or Jorge Luis Borges, for Morrison, the world and narrative are always fractals, and there is no ontological difference between the various levels.