Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods

Grant Morrison is a Scottish writer most well known for his work in comics where he has written some of the biggest selling titles - Superman, Batman, Justice League and X-Men -from the big two companies. Here in the UK he made his name writing the pop star superhero Zenith (UK / US) for 2000AD.

Over the last three and a bit decades he has amassed both an impressive body of work and a fearsome reputation within his field both for rejuvenating tired old titles and providing innovative new creations of his own.

I remember first reading Morrison when he appeared in 2000AD where the work he was producing immediately marked him out as a writer to watch.  With his move to the US based publishers his output inevitably slewed towards the superhero genre that is those companies' bread and butter.  Happily his take on the spandex botherers was altogether new and he immediately hit the ground running with the post modern hi-jinx of Animal Man (UK / US) and the gloriously strange Doom Patrol (UK / US) which I read in my late teens and early twenties as a newly psychedelicised young fella and which perfectly complemented my other reading of things like Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (UK / US), provided me with my first exposure to David Rudkin's Penda's Fen (UK / US) when he quoted it - “Child be strange, dark, true, impure, and dissonant. Cherish our flame. Our dawn shall come.” - at the end of the 'Brotherhood of Dada / Magic Bus' storyline and which has recently become an enjoyably daft TV show.  Morrison's creator owned work has, for a superhero ambivalent like me, been a source of reliable enjoyment with titles such as WE3 (UK / US), St. Swithin's Day (UK) & the Moorcockian magical anarchists of The Invisibles (UK / US) a series I've returned to again and again over the years.

The documentary below was produced by the Sequart Organisation who also made the Warren Ellis documentary 'Captured Ghosts' and as you'd expect provides a thorough overview of Morrison's life and career with contributions from a cavalcade of comic luminaries and along the way investigates his key work, his parents, his alien abduction and his interests in chaos magic and psychedelics.




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