Along with Warren‘s words, the documentary also features Academy Award-winner, Dame Helen Mirren, Patton Oswalt, Joss Whedon, Darick Robertson, Ben Templesmith, Matt Fraction, Joe Quesada, Wil Wheaton, Brea Grant, Claudio Sanchez, Stoya, Andy Hurley, as well as a Warren Ellis Muppet! His acerbic wit and core belief in humanity comes across like never before, revealing the unique perspective that has made him such a pivotal and influential figure to his massive audience, comprising of artists, journalists, scientists, and fans alike. Morrison, a charismatic writer with a wild imagination, works on a wider canvas with bigger ideas and characters than most novelists.Synopsis: ‘ Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts’ features the most extensive interview ever given by the main man himself. He is, says the author, "a bit like God, a bit like Dad, a bit like a celebrity". Meanwhile making Superman interesting, as Morrison does, is a cosmological project. With Morrison let loose on DC's biggest characters and Mark Millar the prime writer at Marvel, this is also one industry in which the Brits – or, to be precise, two Glasgow lads – have actually cracked America. As Morrison, who took them on when he wrote the giant story strand mashup series Final Crisis, puts it: "These long-running universes have a weight, and a reality, that is greater than mine." But it also presents amazing narrative challenges. There are drawbacks: practically no one ever properly dies, which does lessen the sense of risk. The Fantastic Four alone probably has that licked by now. In the 19th century, a penny-dreadful series called The Mysteries of London ran to 4.5m words over 12 years. In terms of longevity and complex continuity (all those monthly stories have to dovetail), there's nothing I can think of in the whole history of narrative comparable to the universes of Marvel and DC. Why not inhabit their worlds rather than flee from them in embarrassment?Īs well as that link to primal storytelling, superhero comics have a heritage of their own. As the best writers in the genre recognise, these myths have real force. The Iliad is a superhero story, as are Beo-wulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Morrison approaches it from the other end: "He wanted to bring us into super-world." As one interviewee in Talking With Gods points out, Moore was interested in placing superheroes in the real world – giving them sexual neuroses, bad breath and anxiety disorders. Morrison, although he shares Moore's occult interests, is much more into the biff-pow-bang. But, rather than being sombre or preachy, it's rollicking good fun.Įver since mainstream comics "grew up", with Alan "Watchmen" Moore as instigator, the way they tended to show their maturity was by ditching ass-kicking in favour of ideas. Its themes are: order v chaos (the Invisibles are fighting the Archons of the Outer Church, a race of inter-dimensional beetles with obsessive-compulsive disorder), time and timelessness, occult magic, and psychedelic or hallucinatory experience. No summary can do justice to how mind-bending and bizarre – and yet compellingly in earnest – this comic is. But Morrison's masterwork remains The Invisibles, a series about a cell of existential resistance fighters – including a transsexual shaman, a grumpy Scouser, a telepath from the future and their bald-headed leader King Mob, who is the dead spit of Morrison himself. His Doom Patrol featured a gang of supervillains called The Brotherhood of Dada, a sentient piece of roadway called Danny the Street and a painting that ate Paris. They are exhilaratingly strange, and kind of puckish. He's matter-of-fact about it: "Anyone can contact the scorpion gods."Īt their best, Morrison's comics are crammed with ideas. And it works! These fuckers, they will turn up!" Morrison practises magic, and encourages his readers to do the same. The only reason he was abducted by aliens in Kathmandu in 1994, says Morrison, is "because I went to Kathmandu in 1994 to be abducted by aliens. Morrison's friend Warren Ellis, another excellent comics writer, points out that Morrison's occultism is actually very pragmatic. This was a properly interesting – albeit rather worshipful – portrait of one of the most interesting writers in the comics medium. Morrison, who is in the DC comics stable, certainly plays up to his own myth with his shaved head, shades and trenchcoat.
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