Hey, did you hear? Grant Morrison did an interview with Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone. And it’s been the talk of the comic book Internet for the past 24 hours, due to some rather blunt remarks on the state of the industry and some of his fellow comic creators, including former collaborator Mark Millar, who Morrison stated (jokingly, one assumes) that he’d like to hit in an automobile:
He still lives in Glasgow, is there a chance of bumping into him?
There’s a very good chance of running into him, and I hope I’m going 100 miles an hour when it happens.
He also turned his sights a bit on Acme Novelty Library‘s Chris Ware, saying that his work is beautiful but his “attitude stinks”:
I can appreciate someone like Chris Ware for his artistry, which I think is beautiful, but I think his attitude stinks, it just seems to be the attitude of somebody really privileged, and honestly, try living here, try living on an Indian reservation and shut up, and really seeing all that nihilistic stuff, it really makes me angry, it’s unhelpful to all of us, and it’s coming from people who have money and success to talk like that and bring those aspects of the way we live in favor of all the others, and it’s indefensible.
As harsh as he might have been on them, the most pointed words in the Q&A were for the comic book industry as a whole, which he says has a feeling of “going off the rails.”
Do you think this is the death spiral?
Yeah. I kind of do, but again, you can always be wrong. There’s a real feeling of things just going off the rails, to be honest. Superhero comics. The concept is quite a ruthless concept, and it’s moved on, and it’s kind of abandoned, the first-stage rocket.
No matter what your stance is on Morrison’s comments, it’s encouraging to see a mainstream publication go in-depth into comic book industry issues in an interview, rather than the usual, generic, “Pow! Bam! Superman is flying back to where it all started — no, not his home planet Krpyton, but a brand-new Action Comics #1! And this time, he’s exchanging his trademark red underwear for a t-shirt and jeans!” The whole interview, including comments on Identity Crisis and Alan Moore’s use of rape in comics, is here.
August 23rd, 2011 at 3:36 pm
Where, on the body, is the car, exactly? =)
August 24th, 2011 at 7:49 am
Going a 100 miles per hour in a car seems unlikely, what with traffic and all. I’m thinking he meant a low flying plane, North by Northwest style. Or maybe a bullet train? That might be cooler.
August 24th, 2011 at 9:06 am
However it happens, I just hope someone is filming it.