People can be incredibly arrogant wankers and still produce great work. By all accounts, Steve Englehart was an egomaniac of Shatneresque proportions, Mort Weisenger was a bully that liked to throw things at people when he was unhappy, and Stan Lee was an avaricious sociopath that turned his collaborators into impoverished assassins out to destroy him.
So, finding out Grant Morrison is a prentious snot doesn't make me any more or less nervous either way about ALL-STAR SUPERMAN.
I must confess, I kind of skimmed through this interview. It alternates between mind-destroying minutiae that would be thrown off even the most self-obsessed teenager's LiveJournal for being too trivial (how much water Grant Morrison drinks a day), and fanboy praise that is so gushing that it seriously borders on the homoerotic. It feels like that interview Barbara Walters gave Fidel Castro where she coyishly pushed her hair behind her ears, gazed into his eyes, and asked hard questions like "Castro, why are you so dreamy?"
AN: Your use of Metaphor has confounded numerous "Joe Six-pack" readers and thrilled many critics. Is metaphor the domain of higher levels of thought? If so, does that thereby threaten to alienate those readers who are unable to think upon those planes?
Almost at the start of the interview I heard a starter pistol shot. Let the self-congratulation BEGIN!
Yes, fanboys, YOU TOO can be as great as Grant Morrison in three easy steps:
1) Take an idea that approximately 1.7 billion postmodernist and magical realist authors have done before;
2) Put in a plot gleefully stolen from INDEPENDENCE DAY or whatever hit movie is big now;
3) Put in as many snarky, self-referencial jokes at the expense of iconic characters as possible.
Here's a tip, Grant Morrison: work is only intelligent if it is
good. Putting in your mind-boggling subtext and allegory does not make it a good story. Consistent Characterization, fast-paced original plots, and imaginative power make a story work, and not all the allegories to politics in the world will change that. I will give you credit, though: you're smart enough to know that you're not good at any of those three things and you don't try to, so you produce average work that is completely unoriginal and totally uninspired. This is fine; Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas, and Chris Claremont appreciate the company in the Club of "Just Okay" Comics Writers.
Take your JLA story that revealed that Angels are real, for instance. What a mind-blowing concept! Does that mean there IS a God, too? An afterlife? Does every human being on earth have a guardian angel (even superheroes)? Do robots have robot angels, and dogs have doggy angels? Imagine the possibilities for exploration that such a concept would raise. Imagine what a writer like Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman would do with this sort of idea. But, instead, what do you do? Turn it into just another alien invasion story where the climax is the JLAers catching an exploding blimp and Superman punching out a monster with eyes all over his chest. You wrote a story about angels and it felt like just another rehash of INDEPENDENCE DAY.
Words fail me.
What can I say? I'm not some big intellectual:
Gee, I never would have guessed.
Oh, and incidentally, there is a part where they ask Granty-boy "when comics will be accepted as a valid medium." He says that comics don't need external validation, and that their success in captivating the entire world's imagination is validation enough (I'm paraphrasing here). This is a shockingly intelligent and articulate statement from a man whose work is pseudo-intellectual and infuriatingly pretentious. This is going to sound like damning with faint praise, but I would never think Grant had the clarity and maturity to make such an insightful comment.
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