GRANT MORRISON'S BIG-TIME RETURN TO THE DCU

[MattBrady]

You didn’t think that Seaguy, Vinamarama, and We3 was going to be it from Grant Morrison at DC, did you? If you did, go stand in the corner. For those left, Morrison stopped by Newsarama for a chat about his two rapidly approaching DCU projects, Seven Soldiers and the first arc of JLA: Classified.

A bit of background on Seven Soldiers project – massive in scope, the entire story will span across 30 issues, divided into two bookends and the other 28 issues divided into miniseries. It’s all interrelated, but at the same time it’s not. As for the characters, think of the cast as Morrison at play in the fields of DC circa just before and then during the Carmine Infantino years, when franchises and directions were being tried at a frantic pace. Characters Morrison will use in the storyline include The Guardian, Mister Miracle and the Spider, as well as ten formerly mothballed franchises, and heaps of new characters.

On the other hand, JLA Classified is the new JLA title editor Mike Carlin had been hinting about recently, the location where the rotating creative team concept on the JLA will have a home. Morrison will team with Ed (Superman/Batman) McGuiness for the inaugural arc.

But enough exposition.

Newsarama: First off Grant, let’s talk Seven Soldiers. The name’s a familiar one for long-time DC readers, but what’s come out about this to date suggests it’s a whole-cloth re-envisioning, with only the name holding on. What’s the high concept here, and where did it come from?

Grant Morrison: The Seven Soldiers are a group of mostly new and inexperienced 'heroes' who must somehow band together to save the world from an extinction level threat at the hands of some new, old villains from an entire culture dedicated to rape and pillage.

No big deal, you might think but these reluctant heroes have to do the job without actually meeting one another! Lucky for them, every action has long-ranging consequences in Seven Soldiers; a chance decision made by a character in one book can, and usually does, reverberate through all the other titles and profoundly affect other characters in the story.

The idea for this kind of huge ensemble, Robert Altman approach came first, as a development of the kind of long-range connected narratives I'd been experimenting with on The Invisibles and New X-Men in particular. Once I had the seven minis worked out, it occurred to me that DC owned the name Seven Soldiers of Victory and that Seven Soldiers would make a perfect overall title for this project, so that's how it emerged. The team that never meets but fights together.

NRAMA: The seven you’re using – why them? Obviously, there’s some appeal of a partially blank canvas, but are there roles that they fulfill for you in regards to the larger story?

GM: Before I came back to dc last year I’d been working up a bunch of mini-series ideas and ended up with about twenty potential 're-imaginings'. New characters, new powers, new settings, old names. More series, in fact, than the market could reasonably sustain unless I made some effort to streamline them down and link them all together into a much bigger and more absorbing storyline that said something new and useful about the 'superhero' and his place in the modern world. And so it went, growing quite organically as all the subtle links began to emerge and bind the story together.

Once I’d decided to tell one big adventure using lots of little ones, the whole project really started to catch fire. I chose my seven favorites, threw the others in as supporting characters and created some bad guys I think are my best ever. So yes, in the end, the characters developed to fill certain key roles - the doomed one, the traitor, the uncertain hero, the leader etc.

NRAMA: As you mentioned earlier, your storytelling will owe more to Altman than say, other comic creators in Seven Soldiers. Can you explain that a little more?

GM: It's a 'modular' approach, in the sense that every first issue is a complete origin story with a cliffhanger and ever subsequent issue delivers a stand-alone adventure. You can read any of the books as singles or as 4-part series. if you only want to read Shining Knight, for instance, you'll still get a good 4-part complete story of young Sir Justin in the 21st century, and each book also sets up a potential ongoing series if the character proves popular with readers.

The fun really starts when you combine all the books like a 30 piece jigsaw to reveal the epic story behind it all, with a cast of hundreds, criss-crossing and affecting one another's lives. I think it adds up to the most intricate and ambitious single superhero story anyone's attempted.

My hope is that each of the books has a different enough flavor for all of the seven to find their own special audience - there's hip hop psychedelia, full-on fantasy adventure in modern day Los Angeles, a gritty, hard luck heroine book, a rollercoaster techno-thriller, a sci-fi western, vampire knights from hell riding giant spiders and more fresh new superheroes than anyone has a right to expect. This is a huge mega-novel, cape fiction's own Lord of the Rings. It could just as easily fall flat on its face but I’m hoping there are enough people out there who want new kinds of thrills.

The current vogue in superhero comics, post-“Hush” is for the 'definitive' take, which tends to manifest itself as creators playing it safe by cherry-picking and re-packaging all the best and most popular elements of an already successful feature. It's a commercial strip-mining kind of approach to a given property that seems to make a lot of sense until you realize it can really only work once before you find yourself in the awful position of having to make up stuff again. Seven Soldiers is an attempt to clear some new ground and make stories for people who want something a little different from 'greatest hits' reworkings of books they've already read.

Obviously these days it's a lot harder to sell comics with new ideas and untested characters and it's clear why it would be easier just do a 12-part Batman or JLA book but someone has to be willing to take chances with original material and sometimes it has to be me.

NRAMA: Did DC have any qualms about the characters you’re using and/or what you were planning to do with them?

GM: Not so far. In most cases my intention was to recreate the characters as more viable commercial properties, so I think dc is happy to let me overhaul these old trademarks if I can get make them run properly again and get some fresh mileage out of them. It was a lot easier to update the costumes, motivations, powers and settings of neglected characters than it would be to do the same kind of radical work in a Batman or Superman book, so I’m pleased with how it's worked out. These are very different kinds of superheroes and each book is a genre all its own. They’re all very strong and they all deal with super powers in a way that's never been explored previously.

Having said that, where possible I’ve made sure I’ve been faithful to current DCU continuity; my version of the golden age Spider character, for instance, follows directly on from Geoff Johns’ recent reintroduction of the character. Otherwise, as in the case of Witch Boy, I’ve started from scratch and can only apologize to Peter David, who at least tried to keep this particular property in continuity. I’ve thrown all previous versions out to create the poster boy for the Puritan Goth weird horror genre. Klarion as Marilyn Manson.

NRAMA: Your work tends to always embody a larger metaphor – its an exploration of where you are at a moment, what you’re thinking. What would you say Seven Soldiers’ larger metaphor is…or is there one?

GM: This time around, I’m going to leave metaphors in my drawer at home. Many readers tend to overthink my work when I give them too much theory so I’d prefer to pitch this as the biggest, wildest most groundbreaking, baddest assest comic book adventure you'll ever read. If you like comics for any reason at all, you'll love Seven Soldiers. It's got everything.

NRAMA: With what you said about working within DCU continuity as best you can…these are fully set within the DCU, then?

GM: It takes place in the DCU but these characters are so far down the super pecking order that they're unlikely to interact with anyone famous. They have to save the world all on their own and I hope readers will find them interesting and fascinating enough to want to watch how they do it.

NRAMA: So – to put the final nails in the coffin as it were…30 issues, one story, but several stand alone tales, and it’s all coming out within the span of a year?

GM: Yes. Seven Soldiers will own 2005.

NRAMA: Moving on then - as for your and Ed’s story in JLA Classified – what brought you back to the JLA? Was it a particular itch to write the League and its heroes, or the story came first, and it fit with the characters?

GM: As if I didn't have enough to do with Seven Soldiers and the other stuff, I wanted to make sure I put out some new superhero work this year and Dan Didio suggested a brief run on the new JLA: Classified book. I was very reluctant at first; I don't like to revisit old haunts much but I came up with this “Island of the Mighty,” idea and this seemed like a good place to try it.

NRAMA: So tease away – who’s involved in “The Island of the Mighty?” All new players, or are you revisiting earlier concepts?

GM: Except for Batman, the JLA don't appear at all until the second issue - I figured that people have seen me do the JLA before so they might just be willing to let me away with the novel idea of a JLA comic which doesn't have the main characters in the first issue at all. Most of the opening act concerns the Ultramarines team I introduced back in JLA #24. They've come back for a brutal ass-kicking as a kind of cheeky analogue of the best Avengers/Ultimates team you could hope to imagine. I hope readers will have fun matching up the Ultramarines characters with their marvelous counterparts.

NRAMA: Is this a story set in current continuity, or retro-back in your original run, or…when? What’s the threat for the team?

GM: Aquaman has no beard and John Stewart is Green Lantern so it's pretty much set in some kind of current continuity but I’m afraid it's not the gloomy 'adult' world of Sue Dibny's shredded lycra pants so keep well away if it's attempted rape you crave. Cannibalism, yes, rape, no. My DCU is a day-glo, non-stop funhouse, where the world is threatened every five minutes and godlike beings clash in the skies like fireworks.

The threat is multi-fold in “Island of the Mighty,” using the supercompressed Western manga style I’m trying to develop - mad flesh-eating Gorilla Grodd has hijacked Superbia, the floating city of the Ultramarine corps and plans on using the captured heroes as unstoppable terror weapons in a war against civilization. To do this he enlists the aid of a cosmic monster - a killer of superheroes named Neh-Buh-Loh the Hunter, who ties directly into the upcoming Seven Soldiers stuff...and finally there's Black Hand, the old Green Lantern villain, who's invaded an experimental micro universe very much like our own, where superheroes don't exist and he's the only supervillain. It all happens very fast and very hard and leaves lots of damage.

There are robots, liquid men and jet apes and we get to see the Batman's “science fiction closet.” I wanted this book to taste like rocket fuel and make the reader feel like a beam of coherent light fired from the barrel of a laser gun. Don’t expect slow-paced character build-up in this one...

I've never really done a 'fight' book before so I wanted to set up the 'ultimate' violent super hero brawl with the JLA against the Ultramarines and no holds barred. The third issue is all fight, in fact, which has been fun for me to choreograph.

NRAMA: Personally speaking, what’s the appeal of working with Ed for you? Did you request him for this story, or was this someone at DC’s idea?

GM: It was Dan Didio's idea, but I was very happy to get a chance to work with Ed. We're playing around with fast-moving page layouts and unusual scene transitions as an alternative to the storyboard approach we see so much of these days.

NRAMA: What’s it like to come back to DC’s icons after being away for as long as you were? Did the X-Men run have a palate-cleansing effect in any way, and make these characters seem new, fresh?

GM: It was strange. I felt like I didn't know them anymore and the intimate character-based style I’d developed on New X-Men just wouldn't work with the JLA. The only way around it was to make the league even more remote, godlike and scary in this story. They are shadowy and often terrifying in this particular adventure.

NRAMA: And, these two projects – safe to call them “a start?”

GM: Yes. I'm also working on a 12-part series featuring one of DC's main characters. You'll hear more about that shortly, I imagine.

[Jimmy_Helter]

Seven Soldiers sounds great, but it's really tricky to know with Morrison.

It could be JLA Good or Aztek Bad. Since it's going to involve 7 different types of heroes, I'm thinking it will have a strong chance of being great.

[blackandwhite]

blimey. can't wait for all this. man 2005 is too far off. this is killing me

[arthur pendragon]

Originally posted by MattBrady
GM: Yes. I'm also working on a 12-part series featuring one of DC's main characters. You'll hear more about that shortly, I imagine.

I think it's a safe bet that it'll be Grant on Ubermensch!

[bottleHeD]

Grant should be writing Kyle...

[BoomBot]

This is all kind of disappointing.

Seven Soldiers sounds good but I don't know how it'll hold up when it comes out, to me at least.

His JLA: Classified story seems kind of grounded in traditional superheroics rather than the more adult work that I like. Hopefully, his major run on a DC character will satisfy.

[Kolimar]

This sounds great but I will have to settle for the bookends. sigh.

[RussLee74]

Anybody else disappointed that DC didn't pair Grant up with Jim Lee for Lee's Superman run? I'm not an Azzarrello basher by any means -- I think the guy's a helluva writer -- but Morrison/Lee would have been magic.

[DrTzinTzin]

I thank god it's next year...I have a trip to the U.S. to pay for.

[Graham Vingoe]

I trust Grant Morrison to deliver on his promises with Seven Soldiers, so I have added the entire thing to my pull-list. My one minor concern is the fact that nothing at all has been mentioned about collaborators on the titles. Hopefully, they'll be good - pity about Mcguiness on the JLA story though- his work doesn't appeal to me in the slightest.