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| Grant Morrison | ||||
| Birth Date | January 31, 1960 | |||
| Birth Place | Glasgow, Scotland, UK | |||
Grant Morrison started working for DC Comics in the 1980s when the publisher accepted their proposal for an Animal Man comic. They went on to write the acclaimed Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, upon which the Batman: Arkham Asylum video game is loosely based. Work on Doom Patrol and Invisibles followed before they were tasked with revamping the Justice League of America with JLA in the 90s. More prolific titles would follow, including: 52, All Star Superman, Batman, Final Crisis, Action Comics, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman: Earth One.
“In the Wonder Woman book I’m doing, for instance, I’ve actively avoided writing the boy hero story that’s so ubiquitous as to seem inescapable — the familiar story of the One, the champion, the Joseph Campbell monomyth thing that drives so many Hollywood movies and YA stories. We’ve seen it. The Lion King. The callow youth loses mom or dad, or his comfortable place in the tribe, and he has to fight his way back to save the kingdom from its corrupt old leader, before claiming the captive princess and becoming the new king and… ad infinitum. The Circle of Life if it only applied to boys. I thought, where is the mythic heroine’s story? In Ishtar Rising, Wilson talks about the myth of Inanna, and how she goes down into Hell and has to give up everything of herself to gain the wisdom and experience she can bring back to her tribe. Privileging the network rather than the sovereign individual.”
—Grant Morrison, Mondo 2000 interview, Ocotber 26, 2020
“Like many young boys who read superhero comics growing up, Morrison “just didn’t like the Wonder Woman comics,” ... He points out that her comics of the 1960s were “pretty horrible stories, where she was always pining for the hand in marriage of Steve Trevor.” However, when Morrison finally read the original comics of Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston, from the 1940s, Morrison was “blown away. I was just so interested in how far the character had drifted from that vision. So it was a kind of restoration job to see how much of that I could bring back into a modern idiom and add to it.”
For Morrison, this odd origin fit right in with his ongoing interests in mythology, magic, archetypes, and secret histories. “Unlike Superman or Batman, where other people seem to be able to write the character, once Marston stopped, [Wonder Woman] lost a kind of charge. I’m convinced that it lost the sense of alternative culture, queer culture, polyamorous culture, and early feminism. No one was able to do that again.”
Morrison knew taking on this misunderstood figure was tricky, but “when I first took this approach to Wonder Woman there wasn’t quite as much heavy debate along these lines. So it was only as we got closer to [publication] that it began to seem this could be quite controversial for a lot of different reasons,” he acknowledges. “I think we’ve been very faithful to the original, but our version is quite matter-of-fact about things, whereas the Marston version is quite feverish. I would say it’s a cool, cerebral take on sexuality. Of course people get irritated, but that’s a mark of something that’s making an impact.””
—Making Wonder Woman Interesting: Grant Morrison, Publishers Weekly, April 22, 2016