Grant Morrison Writes ... (Part 3)

[T]he Justice League
kind of represents order,
and the Invisibles represent chaos ... .

O.K., let me ask you another question about continuity. In the past, you’ve done a lot of work with DC’s continuity. In Animal Man, you pulled a lot of it together and made it work. In Justice League every month you’re busy balancing the continuity of the characters with where they’re appearing, and you’re trying to balance the League’s history with its present. In Doom Patrol, you brought back Mr. Morden.

[Both laugh.]

So—do you actually enjoy playing with all that continuity?

Oh, yeah, I do. It’s kind of an jazzy thing. In your head, there would be no jazz gauge or blues gauge. But in reality, you’ve got the twelve-bar blues—and the six-, or whatever you want to use to play it—but within that framework, you can go creative. That’s kind of what Jimi Hendrix did for me. And it’s kind of approaching a comic in the same way.

That’s a refreshing thing to hear when so many people are talking about continuity as a necessary evil.

Yeah, well, you know, I have a lot of problems with it. But there’s also lots you can do with it. I think it should be a lot more flexible in a sense. For some things, I feel.

You know, someone was talking to me about Justice League 5, and I had Metamorpho’s funeral in there. You know Java, who’s the old manservant of Simon Stagg from the first series in the ‘60s? I had him at the funeral, but someone said to me, "You know, Java’s dead." No, I didn’t know it at all.

Continuity can be difficult because it’s just impossible to know everything when you’re working for a company that spins 800 books a month. So I can’t. I’m winging it a lot of the time, hoping it works out.

You were talking about playing the blues—

Yeah.

—and you’ve talked a lot over the past couple of years about the punk musicians and their influence on rock-and-roll.

Mm-hm.

This an arguably comics-related question: Do you consider yourself a punk writer? It seems to show a lot—

Ah, yeah, I guess I do. [Laugh.] Yeah, I mean I grew up in that period. ... [T]here’s no nostalgia in it to me when I look back on it or when I hear the idea of the Sex Pistols reforming, but those attitudes kind of formed me when I was a teen-ager, so I guess it’s still there. In things like The Invisibles and even Justice League, you can see it. You know, there’s all this gung-ho, but at the same time I think, hanging around, there’s paranoia.

Since you’re talking about both The Invisibles and Justice League, here’s a question I’ve been wanting to ask you for quite a while: Between the two books, it seems like you’re tackling the whole idea of the team book from two completely different directions.

Yeah.

And you’re doing it at the same company, which is a nice thing to see.

[Laugh.]

Ten years ago I don’t know if that would have been possible. What are the similarities and the differences that you can see between the two books?

Ahhh. The similarities are that there’s a team, and both teams are pretty much super-heroes, as such. The Invisibles is set in something like the real world. I don’t know anyone who can do that level of magic or telepathic stuff to that degree, so obviously they’re super-heroes.

[Laugh.]

The Invisibles is a comic book aimed at adults but pertaining to young people. But in actual fact—maybe you’ve asked me this question before, now I think of it—I’m actually telling the same story in both books, you know.

The same ideas and the same responses to the world are going into both books, even though the Justice League kind of represents order and the Invisibles represent chaos. ... But beyond that, I can’t know anymore. Obviously there’s less similarities that differences, but from where I am, you know, I’m writing one one day and then one the next day.

I was just wondering if that was intentional when you began Justice League, since you are planning to bring both books to their climax[es] in 2000, or thereabouts.

Yeah, I don’t think it was intentional, but it’s almost as if it’s psychologically intentional, because somewhere deep down part of your brain is saying, "Do this, do this."

It’s overwork.

End everything when everything else [ends], I guess.

Yeah. If I can, I kind of trust in that. [Laugh.]

I didn’t really make plans for it, and obviously I didn’t think when I sat down, "I’ll do Justice League like The Invisibles" because the two just aren’t the same. But there is a certain spirit from The Invisibles that’s crossing over to Justice League. Also, some of the weirder speculations of Invisibles are coming up in Justice League—in a lot more simplified form.

That’s interesting. It reminds me of when Gerard Jones was doing the Justice League Europe book at the same time he was writing [Green Lantern:] Mosaic. I don’t know if you read either of those books—

Yeah.

—but there were similar themes handled differently in both books. It was quite a thrill to see how he juggled both of those at the same time.

Yeah, well, now that’s something that I do like to see, but most writers (and particularly in America) will—you know, they’ll either stay in the mainstream or they’ll do the undergrounds. And never the twain shall meet. And I kind of like to see someone doing both.

Let me get back to Justice League for just a moment.

Sure.

There’s been a lot of talk about the "mysterious twelfth member." When are we going to see him or her [Morrison laughs] finally joining the League?

Issue 15.

Fifteen!

Yeah.

So that’s going to come at the conclusion of the big epic?

Well, no, it’s actually—sorry, issue 15 is the one that’s following the epic. And that’s going to essentially start off a story called "Camelot," and it’s going to involve the team dealing with a new big villain. (We’re going to introduce him.) And it’s the first time we’ve seen the big, bad twelve.

Well, Mark Waid recently told us that the twelfth member had indeed been a member of the League in a previous incarnation.

Yeah, it turns out he has—after me, I made such a point that he hasn’t.

O.K. I just wanted to make sure there was some truth to that.

Well, I can say that this is one of those things [where] you’ve got to know your Justice League from the top.

[Laugh.] Which has everyone around here running back and forth looking for old issues of the Justice League and making guesses.

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