Editor's Note: Special Thanks to Jason Louv, Webmaster of King Mob, who taped this interview at the San Diego Comic Convention (22 July 2001), and then transcribed its 23 pages. Also check out our book Anarchy For The Masses.

Disinformation readers should be familiar with Grant Morrison--after all, Richard Metzger has called him "the rightful heir to William Burroughs," and he may be right. Morrison, on the other hand, is a lot more fun than Uncle Bill ever was. I've been reading his comics since the age of nine, when I picked up Arkham Asylum, his tale of Batman and psychoanalysis. I've stuck with him since that early trauma: his epic work The Invisibles, which boils down a century's worth of paranoia, magic, and cultural theory, was a point of obsession during my high school years.

Morrison attended the annual Comic Convention in San Diego (where I live) this year, promoting his current work on New X-Men and Fantastic Four: 1234 for Marvel Comics. Made a bit wobbly-kneed by the close proximity of my hero, I clutched my shiny green press badge and set about trying to arrange an interview with him after a panel discussion on the X-Men which he was a participant in, wearing a black T-shirt that read "Think Punk" and bore the outline of the Apple logo pierced with two dozen nails.

After the panel, Morrison stood outside with his lovely girlfriend Kristan and politely spoke to a minor herd of characters who kept telling Morrison he was "appearing in their dreams" and other such Lone Nut-isms. I hoped that my suit and tie would set me apart, but it didn't: Morrison was just as polite to me as he was to his other fans. Amazingly, he seemed interested and agreed to an interview on the last day of the convention.

The day came, and astoundingly, Grant had actually remembered me and showed up at the time we picked. The sheer graciousness of it had me floored for a few moments, until we decided to find somewhere to sit and spent about fifteen minutes combing the convention center for a seat; eventually we found a sunny spot outside overlooking the San Diego harbor and the Coronado Bay Bridge, where Grant told me in a soft-spoken Glaswegian accent that I could interview him "until his bald head started to burn."

It turned out that it only took an hour of conversation for his head to burn and my mind to blow.

Jason Louv: You're obviously a very talented guy, you do art, you do music, and you're a very talented writer. I wonder what exactly it was about comics that attracted you to them, when it's a very unrespected medium, especially when you went into it.

Grant Morrison: Just because of the freedom, really; and of course I've always loved comics, I always did comics as a kid. In the seventies if you read comic books all the good stuff came from America and there was nothing happening in Britain. Then Warrior came out with Alan Moore's stuff. I was trying to write novels at that time; then Warrior came out and I looked at what the guy was doing, showing that a comic can actually do something else, could be something better, with a creative honesty to it, could be about anarchy and things like that. I thought, you know, I can do this, maybe I can start doing this stuff--the thing about wanting to do comics was the feeling that you could do anything. But there was no market, there's no money in it, it's just a kind of underground mode of expression, and suddenly I saw the mainstream potential in Warrior, and I got into it, I started sending stuff in. Like I said, I'd been doing comics before, and I'd also been doing a lot of sci-fi for DC Thomson which was kind of a kid's paper publisher in Scotland; they're very powerful in Scotland but I don't know if anyone knows them anywhere else. I'd just been doing apprentice work for awhile, doing this kind of weird avant-garde, sci-fi pornography stuff. I got in on the ground and learned how to write comic books and write plots. So it was really good that I came through doing mainstream comic books, and I've always thought that's the way to do it, man, you should always be coming through the underground up into the mainstream…

JL: That was your intention from the beginning, to work in the mainstream?

GM: Yeah, yeah, I wanted visibility, I don't want those ideas to be buried in small publications, and I thought that you could take them and put them out there, and it's great that the audience has finally caught up with them.

JL: I know you have several projects coming out, you're working on New X-Men right now, you've got a new Marvel Boy series coming out, The Filth and LeSexy which are very mysterious, and I wondered maybe if you can't talk about exactly what they're going to be, then maybe you can talk about the themes you're going to be addressing in them?

GM: I've kind of learned recently that's it's better to not talk about it and let the work speak for itself. In the period when I was writing The Invisibles I involved myself so deeply in the text--it was about me, the comic was about me, it impacted me so heavily, and in the letters page it was me actually responding to people who were reading it, I was creating this concrete atmosphere. But I did that, that experiment's over, so I really want to drop out. I've asked to not have my name on comics but they won't let me do it. I feel I just want to have no credit, that's not what it's about. I kind of feel like it's not important anymore. The work should speak for itself, and I like to see people's interpretations of the work, even when they're completely bizarre and wrong, they give it their own individual personality, so I'd rather see that then give someone the key or the secret or even the big hype, no. The thing's going to be fantastic, it's gonna be like nothing anyone's ever read.

JL: The Invisibles seems to me like the largest scale work anybody could attempt; I was wondering if you're going to try anything that big again?

GM: Not for awhile. Obviously other people did, during the nineties Neil Gaiman did a similar kind of thing with Sandman and obviously Garth [Ennis] did a similar kind of thing with Preacher; really huge, sprawling things which lasted six, seven years. I just don't know if the market can support it anymore. It was a strange time . . . I don't know, maybe. Right now what I want to do is just do quicker comic books, The Filth is twelve issues, a couple of one-offs, and just see what happens. It may well be that I get involved in something big and new and can go on that way. But I can't imagine ever working on that scale again.

JL: Thematically, I mean, a comic book about everything . . .