Preliminary note - this is certainly not intended as a criticism of any of the people mentioned below. I think Grant Morrison has created some hugely impressive work, Scott Thill has every reason to be proud of his success as an online publisher and writer, and Patrick Meaney has added something to the culture here for which I'm sure there is desire and real interest.
This article about Grant Morrison, or more accurately about an upcoming documentary based around Grant Morrison (it's a minor gripe, but I think "biopic" should be kept to describe a film in which actors play real people in a fictionalised account of a person's life), got me thinking about celebrity. I've met or spoken to, in various capacities, people whose work has impressed me very much, although most of them wouldn't count as celebrities. When I've met proper celebrities socially, I get the same impulse that I get with authors - to say something nice about their writing, or in this case whatever they are famous for. I have no idea why this is instinctual; possibly it's because I have built my sense of them around what they have built their identity around, so it feels cruel not to mention it in a positive light; like not telling the chap in the piano-key necktie in a regional office that he's the life of the party. That is, of course, counterbalanced by an intense awareness that this is what everyone must feel, because humans are pretty generic, and a corresponding, and equally predictable, desire either to behave as if the celebrity in question is just a regular guy (he puts his pants on one leg at a time, but it just happens that once he has put his pants on he makes gold records, baby, in essence) or to demonstrate a more refined perspective on the whole thing by finding something which the celeb is more interested in than the media, as an attempted differentiator (Lance Henrikssen's pottery, Morten Harket's work for the United Nations, Jennifer Anniston's acting and so on). Which is of course also what everyone else feels. Sometimes progress is about acknowledging feelings and trying to minimise any lurch into stupidity they might drive.
There are some people around whom I imagine I would really struggle not to become basically a gibberer - Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, Nelson Mandela, the usual suspects; people my admiration for whose work is combined with a weight of public knowledge and approbation - the sense that this is no longer so much an individual as the weight of millions of opinions. Then there are people my esteem for whom is so high that they provoke a fan reaction - Doug Engelbart, say, or William Gibson or Alison Bechdel. Actually, when I met Alison Bechdel I was broadly coherent, but it was a close-run thing for a second. One of the things I really love about writing is that it encourages me to meet and talk with people who are interesting in themselves, and who do interesting or impressive things.
Which are boxes definitely ticked by Grant Morrison; he has a very impressive body of work, and he is apparently genuinely charismatic in an environment where the bar to charisma is pretty much set at a brightly coloured shirt. Scott Thill's piece is interesting to me because it's essentially a fan documenting a fan documenting a creator, and I think that sets up some interesting patterns. The narrative line is essentially that comics have overtaken Hollywood (I think this must be an American usage meaning "taken over" in British English, since sales of comics certainly haven't overtaken sales of movie tickets and DVDs), and therefore that the star creators of comics are now getting biopics made about them - sort of like Pirates of Silicon Valley, I guess, when the tech industry became... no, I'm sorry. I can't use Pirates of Silicon Valley in a metaphor, even to win the bet. I'm not sure this exactly works - people have made films about Alan Moore and now Grant Morrison, but these are recognisably in the field of fan culture - the intention isn't to broadcast them on TV, but to sell them on DVD or by download to a small but dedicated community in specialist stores and at specialist events. The comparison isn't Boys Don't Cry, it's Life, the Universe, and Douglas Adams. Nothing wrong with that, but it is what it is.
Personally, I see that small, cranky and devoted community as one of the real strengths, or at least distinguishing features, of the comics market - not that it isn't fascinating when creators or works move into the mainstream, but that mainstreaming isn't really the key feature. Alan Moore's works are, it turns out, attractive properties for filmmakers, but his very open disavowal of remakes suggests that he doesn't see these as extensions of the Alan Moore brand. Frank Miller is a different proposition, as anecdotally he was involved in writing Sin City, and of the several dozen lines of dialogue in 300 the graphic novel a good few make it into the film, but again this isn't really comic books taking over Hollywood so much as Hollywood treating comic books as a useful source of intellectual property for movies, both as banner blockbusters - Iron Man or The Dark Knight - and mid-tier or less mainstream presentations like 30 Days of Night, A History of Violence or, going back a little, Ghost World. It's probably worth noting that toys are used in the same way - the Transformers and GI Joe have both put a lot of buttocks on banks of seating recently.
So, I suppose there's a philosophical difference here about how much comic books are entering the mainstream and how much the mainstream is taking the ideas and to some extent the talents involved in comic books and applying them in their much larger industry (although arguably a writer is a writer is a writer - many comic book writers have sidelines writing TV, backgrounds for computer games or genre novels, and genre novelists and film and TV writers are increasingly crossing over into comics). I think either of those positions are valid. However, I don't think that having a creator, of whatever genius, giving a long-form interview which is then released as a DVD is necessarily a sign of anything except the probable existence of a viable fan community which will hopefully support that release.
This started with being a fan and a journalist, didn't it? Looping that one back, the other thing that has on occasion struck me when talking to people whose work I admire is the desire for them to like me. I think of this as the hair-braiding impulse, although Penny Arcade captured the feeling very well with a slightly different metaphor. Recently, an interviewee was talking with great passion and fluidity about the British history of invention and his desire to revive it, for the greater good. "But," I replied, "for every Trevor Bayliss there's a Barnes Wallis, and for every Blue Streak there's a Blue Bunny." Which sounded good, but was basically a dick move. However, it did at least open up another area, unlock a level, give me another perspective on his thoughts - even if it was the perspective of someone responding to a dick move. I think that impulse in unavoidable, and it can help to drive relationships which can ultimately be very creatively profitable, but it's good to be aware of it and resist it where it stands in the way of the right question. I sort of hope that when Patrick Meaney told Scott T. that Grant Morrison had an abduction experience in the 90s where he was taken outside time and shown the nature of the universe, the quote is cut off before he adds "and this was a great opportunity to ask what that was all about, what the nature of the universe actually is, how that knowledge has been useful to him and then to stare at him for a long time and say 'Dude, really? Aliens?'". Because letting that go would be a real shame - although something it would almost certainly be hard to resist. Matt Webb identified two very useful supplementary data about charismatic people - that they generally only know they are charismatic from the effect they have and that they don't notice the charisma of others - which make a lot of sense, and explain a number of situations I've encountered.
Then again, "Alien abductee, genius brainiac and counterculture hero poised to conquer Hollywood" is a better headline by a factor of about infinity than "Man produces good work in niche medium with above-its-weight cultural impact, may impact larger culture, is of considerable interest to fan community", and therefore the writer thereof a better fan and, as it transpires, also a better journalist than me. Also, give Seaguy a shot, if you haven't. Seriously. It's terrific.
(And, for a proper cartoon-to-film conversion where the creator was intimately involved in writing and directing the film, how about Persepolis? And then possibly indulging in a small moan about how much more sophisticated the French attitude is to the Ninth Art, and how you can call it the Ninth Art in France without people openly mocking you.)
Page from a choose-your-own adventure game about free will
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4 comments:
As the creator of the doc in question, this was a pretty interesting article to read. In response to your question about "Dude, really? Aliens?" I did try to delve beneath the surface mythos of Grant and figure out, what was actually perceived when he says he was taken outside of time, on what level was it experienced. Grant himself is very self aware of how crazy this stuff sounds, and qualifies things with the fact that it's his experience of these events that matters, so he was abducted, but not in an X-Files way, it was more internal.
As for the loop of fan commentary, I can't deny I'm a fan of his work, that's why I chose to approach him as the subject for the doc. But, I'm trying to make something that would work just as well for someone who's never read his comics as a long term fan. Will anyone who doesn't know his books want to see the film? I don't know, but I guess we'll see.
Yes, definitely; I think that's absolutely an imponderable - and the line between fan culture and the quote-unquote mainstream is more friable than ever given that the geeks have sort of won the culture wars, at least on some fronts.
What I find interesting about comics is precisely that they have a disproportionate impact on other media - disproportionate in terms of their own sales, that is: I think that Final Crisis (from memory) sold something like 150,000 copies a month, and I'd suspect that the sales of many other superhero comics in the same month came from that same set of people. Something like We3 - well, I don't have the figures, but somewhere in the mid-tens of thousands? So, you have this relatively underwitnessed medium, which nonetheless punches above its weight in terms of the IP it creates for films, TV series, Saturday morning cartoons and so on.
Personally, I find the medium more compelling than the lives of individual creators, but I think that's a matter of personal taste; I belong to the school that sees the biography of the creator as essentially marketing collateral to the work rather than an integral part of how it should be viewed, although it's not a simple line (whether or not Morrison was abducted by aliens, the language of alien abduction crops up as a recurring motif in his work - along with advertising, memes, hallucinogens and mood-altering headgear, to name but a few). However, biographies are written or filmed across genres, so that in itself certainly isn't unique to comic book culture. People are interested in people, and long may it continue to be so.
The short version is that there are certainly people who will want to see an authorised long-form documentary/interview with Grant Morrison, shot in a documentary style, and best of luck with the production and release (and to reiterate, if it's a fan phenomenon I certainly don't see that as in any way a bad thing). I think that the element I was more picking up on was that the feedback loop started getting tricky when the existence of a long-form documentary/interview with Grant Morrison was being cited as an example of and a first step towards the conquest of other media by comic books, and specifically by comic book creators- I don't think that the release of the documentary on Alan Moore had much of an impact on the mainstream perception of Alan Moore, and if there were a documentary about the life and creations of Frank Miller, (a) it would have to be directed by Associate Producer Mike from the Best Show on WFMU and (b) it probably wouldn't much affect the perception of him by people outside the catchment area.
Also, which has nothing to do with your documentary at all, there's a risk of forgetting that comic books have in many ways crossed over into the mainstream- just not in the US and not in the specific genre of superhero comics (or, if we want to spread the net a bit, colourful representations of action and violence by inhuman or superhuman characters). Persepolis, which was not just using Marjane Satrapi's characters but was written and directed by her, was a successful film, Fun Home won a passle of awards and was serialised in Libération and so on. If you were asking me to venture an opinion (and you're not, but it's my blog, so...), I'd probably suggest that it's not that superheroes are making a comeback driven by the work of Morrison, Fraction, Slott et al, although these are all fine writers of comic books. People have always been interested in experiencing the moral and dynamic bigness of superhero narratives - just not in large numbers in the format of 28 pages a month for $2.99. What is changing is the technology of representation elsewhere - you can make superhero films more quickly and more cheaply (for what you're getting) which look more impressive. So, more - vastly more - people are going to see the next Batman movie, or play Arkham Asylum on their XBox 360 or Playstation, than are going to read Batman and Robin comics, and that's probably about right and logical within the culture
I'd agree with those basic points. I can see the feedback loop idea, but I think that's true of a lot of media, where you do a story about how people are going crazy anticipating Twilight, then more people get into it because of hearing about how many people are into it. But, on some level, the interest is a consequence of what the media chooses to focus on.
And, yeah, the 'cross over' of comics is much more concepts and general perception of the medium than the books themselves. It's crazy to me that Seaguy, a book by Grant Morrison, could sell about 10,000 copies in its single issue release. Similarly, the numbers on new Alan Moore League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stuff are really low, and these guys are as big names as are out there. Comics may be cool and have cachet now, but it's more the ideas and characters than the books themselves. You can buy a Green Lantern or Flash t-shirt in more places than you can buy a Green Lantern comic book.
As for your definition of crossing over, books like Persepolis have sold a bunch, but in terms of viewers and buzz, there's no comparison between the Persepolis film and something like Iron Man or The Dark Knight. So, as you say, people love Batman, but no one reads his comics. Hell, DC knows so few people read the comics that they let Grant write Batman getting dosed with heroin and running around with Batmite in a purple and yellow costume when The Dark Knight film comes out.
Ultimately, at this point, and Grant talks about this in the doc, is that comics are one of the few media left where you're able to do stuff without significant corporate interference, and that may be why they remain an idea factory for other media. Movies would never take the risks that Grant's Batman does. I loved The Dark Knight, but it's not as bold a work as Grant's Batman or even Miller's All Star Batman. What movies do is take the ideas that work in comics and hone them into an easily digestible form for the masses, so you don't have to read thirty years of Spider-Man comics, you can just see the two hour film. And, I think for most people, that two hours of Spider-Man is all they need.
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