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Tag: grant morrison

Published May 30, 2013

Karen Berger: Mother of ‘The Weird Stuff’

“It’s the weird stuff… The stuff that makes you different.”

The New York Times interviews Karen Berger, the former executive editor of Vertigo, whose departure from DC Comics has raised questions about the imprint’s future:

When Ms. Berger joined DC straight out of Brooklyn College in 1979, she was simply “another English major looking for a job” and admittedly no fan of superheroes. “I just fell into the company, fell into the business and fell in love with comics,” she said.

Inspired by the publisher’s more offbeat anthology series, like “House of Mystery” and “Weird War Tales,” Ms. Berger cultivated stories that were sometimes more human and sometimes decidedly not of this earth.

After becoming the editor of the “Watchmen” author Alan Moore, she gathered a lineup of young British writers who were eager to break into American comics and who found Ms. Berger receptive to their ideas.

“She was our generation, and not only that, she was offering us what we wanted,” said [Grant] Morrison, who gave new lives, full of angst and existential uncertainty, to discarded DC characters like Animal Man and the Doom Patrol. “It was a perfect storm for a bunch of creative punks from Britain who were suddenly being taken very seriously.”

New York Times

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Published October 3, 2011

Monday Miscellany

I’m sorry for the lack of a weekend post, but to make up for it, here is a Monday round-up to get your week started right…

Owned — Josh Davis AKA DJ Shadow interviewed on the Intelligent Life blog:

My sense of value comes from the fact that music is my life… People always think it’s about money or my personal wealth or something like that. It’s about this art form that’s taken a drubbing in the last decade. I’m not talking about what a wonder it is that music has been democratised. Music between 1960 and 1970: how can you even chart that progress? Music between 1970 and 1980: entire genres come and go, massive leaps. Music between 2001 and 2011: I don’t think there’s a massive difference… We have access to all this music now and I’ve been hearing for 12 years what a miracle that’s going to be and how it’s going to revolutionise music. But I work in the clubs and I’m not seeing any evidence of this shift. People seem to think we own the internet as a collective brain-trust. We don’t own the internet. The internet is owned by the same people that own everything else. They make money from the advertising that you’re being shown as you look at somebody’s life’s work, and they’re not being given a dime.

You can listen DJ Shadow’s new album The Less You Know, The Better on NPR.

And on a semi-related note: Chuck Klosterman on music and nostalgia for Grantland.

The Idiot — Cartoonist Daniel Clowes interviewed at Flavorpill:

If I ever met a young cartoonist who is really amazing I would say just don’t do any interviews, don’t do any public appearances. Just remain a mystery. Because once you do one, then that becomes your opinion on record. Unless you get it exactly right that first time, you have to keep modifying it over the years, because I’m certainly not the same person I was when I did my first interview. I was probably 26 years old. I was an idiot.

Playing the Part — Grant Morrison’s Supergods reviewed at Robot 6:

[M]any creators Morrison discusses are his peers, rivals, colleagues and bosses — it’s nice to get a book like this that’s unafraid to engage in industry gossip from a working creator, but, at the same time, it makes one suspicious of the writer, who becomes an unreliable narrator of his own career. This is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that early on in the book, Morrison says he was acting a part, an invented persona as a sort of demonic, enfant terrible punk early in his career, publicly sneering at Alan Moore’s work and engendering animosity. How does a reader know he’s not still playing a part?

And finally…

From Business Week: Amazon, the company that ate the world:

Although the decision to design and build its own hardware is a high-stakes bet, it’s equally true that Bezos had no choice but to enter the tablet business. About 40 percent of Amazon’s revenues comes from media—books, music, and movies—and those formats are rapidly going digital. Amazon was late to understand the speed of that transition; Apple, which launched the iPod in 2001 and iTunes two years later, wasn’t. The iPad has only strengthened Apple’s hold over digital media. There’s a Kindle app for the iPad, but Apple takes a 30 percent slice of all content that app makers sell on the tablet and has restricted Amazon from directing iPad users to its website in order to avoid giving Apple its cut. Doing business on the iPad threatens Amazon’s already thin profit margins.

Bezos claims he doesn’t think defensively. “Everything we do is driven by seeing opportunity rather than being worried about defending,” he says. Given Apple’s inroads into the media business, that’s hard to believe. Bezos is magnanimous toward Jobs. “On a personal level we have a tremendous amount of respect for Apple and Steve. I think that’s returned,” he says. “Our cultures start in the same place. Both companies like to invent, both companies like to pioneer, both companies start with the customer and work backwards. There’s a like-mindedness.” Pause. “Are two companies like Amazon and Apple occasionally going to step on each others toes? Yes.”

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Published August 25, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Lumps of Language — John Sutherland reviews The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture by Gary Saul Morson for Literary Review:

We think of our use of language as ‘fluency’. There are, however, congealed lumps floating in it and, if we look beneath the surface, often more lumps than liquidity. Put another way, most language is pre-owned. The previous owners are, as Gary Morson instructs us, often worth knowing about.

Hard — Cartoonist James Sturm finds out just how hard it is to get a cartoon in The New Yorker:

I don’t normally draw gag cartoons; I’m what’s now called a “graphic novelist.” I’m not really considering a career change, but I was dealing with the mid-career blahs and wanted to try something new. It takes me several years to write and draw a book. The book’s subject determines and limits what I can and can’t draw. I enjoy the process, but it’s a slog. I wanted more spontaneity in my creative life. So in March I decided to fill a sketchbook, 90 pages, with New Yorker-style cartoons—one cartoon a day for three months. No excuses.

Much linked to elsewhere: A sad (and slightly bonkers) interview with Grant Morrison about his book Supergods in Rolling Stone.

Dan Nadel at The Comics Journal responds.

And finally… While were on the subject of comics…

Here’s an neat primer on comics journalism, in the form of comics journalism, by Dan Archer (via The Ephemerist).

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Published August 15, 2011

Grant Morrison | All Things Considered

Author and comics writer Grant Morrison talks about superheroes and his new book Supergods with NPR’s All Things Considered:

NPR ALL THINGS CONSIDERED: Grant Morrison Supergods

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Published July 29, 2011

Something for the Weekend

A Period of Digestion — Music journalist and author Simon Reyolds talks about his new book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its Own Past with the A.V. Club:

[S]o much happened in the 20th century and things moved so fast, and you had this enormous capitalist engine generating all these toys and gadgets and things that became rapidly obsolescent. It’s all piled up, hasn’t it? And you think of the sheer amount of recording that went on. It always blows my mind whenever I go record shopping how many records I’ve never seen before. I’ve been in record stores forever, decades I’ve been looking through them, and I still see things I’ve never seen, artists I’ve never heard of. The sheer amount of recording that was done, it is almost like this universe of music. Daniel Lopatin in the book actually says it’s a period of digestion, we’re digesting and processing all this stuff that happened musically and in other senses in this really runaway, fast period of time of production. And perhaps that’s fine. Perhaps that’s what we need.

And on a not unrelated note…

A wide-ranging interview with Alan Moore about his new book, Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969, comics and popular culture, for Wired:

[T]he overall legacy of the first decade of the 21st century has been one wherein culture mirrors what was going on in our politics during those years. We had a form of politics that was concerned with spin and surface at the expense of any kind of moral or even rational content. In keeping with our well-spun political landscape, I think a lot of contemporary art, if it has a concept it is a concept in the advertising sense. It’s a little mental pun, something that you can use to sell cars or burgers. But in terms of art, once you’ve got the idea of joke, if you like, there is absolutely no need to ever look at those works again.

And sticking with comics…

From Superheroes to Superbrands — Paul Gravett on Grant Morrison’s new book Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero and the poor treatment of the original creators of the comic book superheroes (thx Ed):

How easy is it for fans and pros today, so hypnotised since childhood by these ubiquitous, constantly repromoted properties, to ignore their tarnished histories? I’ve talked recently to some fan readers who are troubled when I mention this horrific, disfigured portrait lurking beneath the polished profiles, masks and capes, hidden in the attic, but who can’t seem to help themselves from still wanting to follow these perfect-looking, super-powered Dorian Grays, no matter what. Morrison prefers to elevate the superhero as an indestructible concept, almost an independent, self-actualising entity, acknowledging only slightly its murkier commercial side, but glossing over the exploitation rife in this business, then and now. Unlike earlier ‘public domain’ gods and goddesses from antiquity and religious faiths, Superheroes are as much Superbrands, properties that must make profits for DC, part of Time-Warner-AOL, and Marvel, bought by Disney. While Morrison and his ilk earn tidy sums from endless, spiralling makeovers of these franchises, both publishers are aggressively fighting lawsuits over ownership against the estates of Siegel and of Jack Kirby, joint architect of the Marvel Universe.

And finally…

A fascinating article by Adrian Hon on ‘cargo cults’ and Unbound, a crowdfunding site for books, in The Telegraph (via Waxy):

Unbound isn’t some fly-by-night operation; it was heavily promoted at the Hay Festival, it’s received gushing praise across the media – yet it may end up with a one in six success rate.

So, why was Unbound set up in the first place? It’s because they constructed a cargo cult, believing that if they mimicked the superficial elements of successful crowdfunding, they could enjoy the same success as others – but perhaps even more, thanks to their relationships with publishers, agents, authors, and the media.

It is perhaps a little unfair to single out Unbound. Traditional publishers who jump on the latest genre bandwagon without truly understanding what made the original popular are just as guilty.

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Published July 22, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Potential for Infection — A lovely essay by Alan Bennett on books, libraries, and bookcases, in the LRB:

‘Books Do Furnish a Room’, wrote Anthony Powell, but my mother never thought so and she’d always put them out of the way in the sideboard when you weren’t looking. Books untidy, books upset, more her view. Though once a keen reader herself, particularly when she was younger, she always thought of library books as grubby and with a potential for infection – not intellectual infection either. Lurking among the municipally owned pages might be the germs of TB or scarlet fever, so one must never be seen to peer at a library book too closely or lick your finger before turning over still less read such a book in bed.

Not A Sexy Trend Story — Dennis Johnson’s scathing must-read post on the Borders bankruptcy (and the way it is being reported) at MobyLives:

[T]his is a story that has become about some desired and sometimes advertiser-driven trend, and not the more complex reality — which is that what’s happened is not good for either print or digital books.

If there’s anything to take away from the Borders story, it’s this: It doesn’t at all represent that fewer people want to buy print books. It represents that fewer big corporations want to sell them.

19th Nervous Breakdown — Jonathan Ross reviews Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero by Grant Morrison for The Guardian:

Shaving your head before dragging up in full fetish gear and wolfing down a magic mushroom omelette may well open the door to another realm, or give you access to demons and guardian angels. I have never tried it so I can’t say with absolute certainty. But I am pretty sure that what Morrison was experiencing and is describing is a cross between a nervous breakdown and a common-or-garden trip.

See also: David Itzkoff reviews the book (less sympathetically) for The New York Times.

And on a related note… Joe Carducci reviews Absolute Dark Knight by Frank Miller for the LA Review of Books.

And finally…

Typographical reference guide FontBook is now available on the  iPad:

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