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Wednesday, December 22, 2004
SuperScot
No doubt this isn't going to be the only blog that will link to and go over Grant Morrison's interview about his upcoming Superman run. Dorian has already posted some good excerpts, so has Kevin (who has a neat contest you might want to enter) and Tom Spurgeon has also gone over it a little (and he links to me elsewhere on the site. Thanks, Tom!).
I do think there's enough interesting ideas in that interview that it warrants looking at. First off is the fact that Morrison and artist Frank Quietly are free of dealing with continuity in their Superman book as it will be under the All-Star line. I'm sure this line of books, like the Ultimate books Marvel has, is something that will be around for a few short years and then forgotten almost entirely afterwards. My question is why does DC even need to come up with a whole new banner to put books under when they want to have "continuity-free" books? Why can't creators just take whatever property they have, keep the basics and then do whatever they want with it? What's the point of weighing down creators with stories created long before they came on the character? I mean there are some creators who have weaved interesting enough storylines from a character's continuity but whether a writer wants to do that should be entirely up to him or her. I think it's better if we just take a character's stories on a creators-by-creator basis. Here's Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly's Superman, here's John Byrne's Superman, here's Jerry Siegel and Curt Swan's Superman. Think of them as every creator's version of telling a tall tale, one passed down from storyteller to storyteller throughout decades. Conflicting versions of the same character can easily live side by side with each other. It's the great thing about telling fictional stories.
The other part of the interview I like is just gearing up for what seems to be a pretty cool version of Superman. The fact that Morrsion name checks Jules Feiffer, Will Eisner and Jack Davis(!) in this interview tells you that he's thinking about this better than most creators, many of whom can't look far back enough to the late-80's when it comes to influences. Morrison's talk of the Superman stories during the Mort Weisnger years may be more romantic than those comics deserve, but that's one of the things I love about reading a Morrison interview and he does make some good points there as well. His quotes about the distribution of superhero comics makes sense as well. I'm sure DC and Marvel will listen to this lucid and well reasoned plan and take action immediately. Or they won't.
In the end it looks like we're going to get a bunch of Superman comics that will be a fun ride. Not to much ask for really, so why has it taken so long?
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