The Invisibles, a new monthly comic to rival Batman, Superman and The Hulk has hit the streets. Its Glasgow creator GRANT MORRISON talks nihilism and anarchy with Thom Dibdin.
id you see The Invisibles was on the Big Breakfast TV news last week?’ burbles Grant Morrison. ‘They had an MP on demanding it be banned!’ he adds with the excitement of a teenager who has just survived his first brush with authority. Except that at 33 Morn‘son has been attacking authority all his professional life — and a long time before that too.
Those who have a glancing interest in the English language comics scene will be aware of Morrison — even if they don’t always recognise his name. Ridley Scott does. Flushed with the success of Blade Runner: The Director ’5 Cut, he commissioned a treatment for a Dan Dare film script on the strength of Morrison’s acutely modern rendering of the 505 hero in a 19905 Britain which combined the art-deco atom age wonders of the original with a Thatcherite dictatorship.
‘lt’s lust Dennls the Menace boosted up and slightly closer to reality. In the world today klds steal cars, take E and don’t really want to obey the laws of the land.’
Madonna knows of him too. He wrote a film script for her as a fetish-clad superhero. The film work has disappeared into the Hollywood ether, from where it may one day emerge, but it is for his comics that Morrison is most renowned. He both enraged and delighted Batman fans with his revisionist version of the caped hero: Arkham Asylum. He raised the hepes of a generation with his Thatcher assassination fantasy St Swithin '5 Day. For eight glorious weeks last summer he took over the pages of 2000 AD with fellow Scot Mark Miller, tearing up the script, remixing it with samples
and spitting it out in a blaze of irreverence.
Now we have The lnvisibles, written. created and owned outright by
Morrison. ‘The whole idea for me was to do something that I wouldn’t get bored with, so I tried to make the concept as wide as possible,’ he says. ‘You have this secret society that claims to have existed from the dawn of time,
16 The List 26 August—8 September 1994
Invisible yearnings
anyone who is involved in some kind of rebellious or subversive activity can belong to it. So there’s a lot of people who don’t even know they belong but are considered members by the people who do. Even a wife who is secretly poisoning her brutal husband could be an Invisible, just because she is fighting back against some sort of control system. That means I can tell stories about anyone, basically because they will fit into that wide scale concept.’
The first book of The Invisibles, ‘Dead Beatles’, sees the secret society recruiting a rebellious young Liverpudlian, Dane McGowan, into their ranks. At first he resists, but ends up getting involved as his only way to stay alive. ‘He is the character I am most interested in because he doesn’t have the vocabulary to talk about the
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ideas in the comic.’ says Morrison. ‘Because I am dealing with things like
anarchism and human rights and freedom and the way those have been taken away, if I
had used someone who is familiar with all the great names of the past then it would come across as a
tract. Instead I deal with it through some kid whojust does it because that’s the only way to live
and because that is what makes him