ANDREW WHEELER: Grant Morrison.

ANTONY JOHNSTON: Morrison.

ALASDAIR WATSON: Morrison Morrison.

WHEELER: Morrison Morrison Morrison.

JOHNSTON: God, it's like BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. Of course, the comic industry is getting to be like Being Grant Morrison, isn't it? He was probably the first famous shave-headed baldie. Now look at them. They are legion! So Andrew, as Alasdair and I are almost guaranteed to say INVISIBLES, due to our extracurricular interests, what's your favourite Morrison work?

WHEELER: I... don't know. I find it hard to say. I haven't reread INVISIBLES as a whole work, so I can't judge it that fairly, but I can say and have always said that I don't like people - even if they are Grant Morrison - posturing too much. And INVISIBLES is full of posturing. I prefer his work when he's using his ideas to build a story, whereas in INVISIBLES there's a faint representation of a story in order to present ideas.

JOHNSTON: I wouldn't disagree with that, and I love INVISIBLES.

WHEELER: One of my favourite Morrison works is MARVEL BOY. I really love KILL YOUR BOYFRIEND. I think his NEW X-MEN stuff is very good.

JOHNSTON: ST SWITHIN'S DAY?

WHEELER: I haven't read that.

WATSON: You had my copy in your comic boxes for eighteen months!

WHEELER: Exactly! I can't see through a comic box.

JOHNSTON: NEW ADVENTURES OF HITLER? ZENITH? DARE? I think DARE was his first revisionist work, beyond the pastiche cameos of people like Archie The Robot in ZENITH. And I actually don't think it's his strongest work at all. It was very much trying to turn things on their head for the sake of it. It's entertaining, but I don't think it's particularly important or valuable to the culture.

WHEELER: INVISIBLES made Grant Morrison's name...

JOHNSTON: Mm. Well, do you think maybe ANIMAL MAN did that?

WATSON: Or DOOM PATROL.

WHEELER: No, I think those things came while he was at the periphery. I didn't know who he was before I read INVISIBLES.

WATSON: I remember people banging on to me about his DOOM PATROL before INVISIBLES came out.

WHEELER: Yeah, but within a niche.

WATSON: I remember X-books readers banging on to me about his DOOM PATROL before INVISIBLES came out!

WHEELER: OK, then you disagree with... what I haven't yet said. Which is, I think I'm a fairly good metre of the mainstream, because at the time that I discovered Grant Morrison at all, all I knew was the mainstream. So, I think the majority of people didn't know who Grant Morrison was. This was in the age before the internet.

JOHNSTON: I'm in a terrible position to judge, because I knew who he was from the 2000AD days and things like ZENITH. I just find it ironic that something like INVISIBLES, something so utterly anti-mainstream, would bring him mainstream recognition.

WATSON: The thing is, I seem to recall him saying in an interview that the single work of his that made him the most money was BATMAN: ARKHAM ASYLUM. And the reason it was a big moneyspinner is that it came out at the same time as the movie. But I think a lot of people will have discovered who he was through ARKHAM ASYLUM. You talk about being a mainstream reader, but you read Marvel, not DC.

WHEELER: But if he was a big name at the time that INVISIBLES started, why did it struggle at the start?

WATSON: It didn't struggle at the start. It struggled when he started doing "Arcadia".

WHEELER: Which was how many issues in?

JOHNSTON: It was about issue eight or nine.

WATSON: If you look at the readership figures, it runs a fairly typical pattern until it hits "Arcadia", when it haemorrhages readers.

JOHNSTON: However, I do agree with Andrew's principle that if Morrison had had the sort of recognition then that he has now, it wouldn't have mattered.

WATSON: I don't think he could drag his new readers across to something like THE INVISIBLES.

'INVISIBLES is Morrison's magnum opus because he put so much of himself into it.' JOHNSTON: His profile now is so much higher than when he started THE INVISIBLES.

WATSON: It is higher. At the same time, I don't think it was just that "Arcadia" was obscure. What you had was Vertigo launching a series about the occult; your Vertigo readers were trying something new, and for the first six, seven issues, they got what looked like a pretty standard Vertigo story. A bit about Aleister Crowley and his mates. And suddenly it fucks off into hyper-weirdness.

WHEELER: I think INVISIBLES made Grant Morrison a brand, that's the point that I'm making. Look at two parallel careers, Morrison and Pete Milligan. Even with SHADE THE CHANGING MAN, which had a strong supporting niche, Milligan never established a brand. He's always had die-hard fans, but actually, X-STATIX may be the book that will make him.

JOHNSTON: I think a lot of that could be down to the fact that by all accounts Milligan is a fairly private person. He doesn't really do interviews, he doesn't issue press releases in which he rants and raves, he doesn't project himself as a weird person. He just writes very good comics. And yet, as you say, I've always thought it was a great shame and a great loss that Milligan never established himself in the way that people like Morrison and Ennis did.

WHEELER: INVISIBLES, to my mind, is where Grant Morrison set his stall. There is 'Before INVISIBLES' and there is 'After INVISIBLES', where Grant Morrison is concerned.

JOHNSTON: It's certainly the book that changed his life. I don't think you could not separate his life and work into anything other than before and after INVISIBLES.

WHEELER: He emerged a different skinny bald Scotsman than the one he went in as.

JOHNSTON: Anyway, I think it's his best work. Much of which is down to the sheer ambition of it. It's a hugely ambitious work, and it does sprawl, and some bits of it are a bit dull, but... it's so big, both in physical size and in its contents, that I don't think it can be ignored. I don't think THE FILTH will be the same sort of milestone.

WHEELER: And I do think with THE INVISIBLES Grant Morrison has probably done his major work.

JOHNSTON: Which is a scary thought. It is his magnum opus. I hope he's got another one in him.

WHEELER: A long form work tends to get regarded as the magnum opus, and most creators to date, if they've done one long form series, don't tend to embark on another.

JOHNSTON: I think you can also define INVISIBLES as Grant Morrison's magnum opus because it's obvious he put so much of himself into it. There is so much personal energy poured into that comic, which I don't think is present in as great a quantity in anything else. I think he may be enjoying writing NEW X-MEN immensely, but I don't think it would be accurate to say he's sweating blood over it and laying his soul open for the world to see.

WHEELER: I think the passion of THE INVISIBLES is enormously important, in that it does make it a very strong work. But it's also, in a sense, a work without an editor. And that's a problem. That makes its flaws that bit greater. It's exposing Grant Morrison warts and all.

WATSON: The closest other work to THE INVISIBLES that I can think of is THE ILLUMINATUS TRILOGY.

JOHNSTON: Which is also rambling and sprawling and is rife with holes. THE ILLUMINATUS TRILOGY is the set of books written by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea back in the 60s that hinge upon the enormous conspiracy of the secret Illuminati who rule the world, whom Morrison has made reference to himself in THE INVISIBLES and other works. INVISIBLES is his version of THE ILLUMINATUS TRILOGY, only with slightly less contrived absurdity - but more fundamental absurdity, I think. Ironically, I'd never made the connection before. I'd never thought of THE INVISIBLES as a version of THE ILLUMINATUS TRILOGY before. Or as a partner to it. And yet it is, it's quite obvious. In terms of the concepts and in terms of the way they're told. They both have a sort of manic energy to them. You could say THE ILLUMINATUS TRILOGY is lacking an editor as well. So what was the first thing of Morrison's that you read?

WHEELER: It was actually ARKHAM ASYLUM. Back before I knew who Grant Morrison was.

JOHNSTON: What did you make of it at the time?

WHEELER: I enjoyed it. I was quite young when I read it. My brother bought it as a birthday present. I thought it was good stuff, but I didn't take in who Morrison or McKean were. It was only later that I went back and said, 'oh, it was them'.

JOHNSTON: So what was the first thing you read when you were aware of who he was?

WHEELER: THE INVISIBLES. A friend of mine said, read INVISIBLES, it's fantastic. So I went out and read an arc of THE INVISIBLES, which was the first arc of volume two, BLOODY HELL IN AMERICA, and I thought, I see nothing here to distinguish this in any way and I'm not going to bother. Later on I read the earlier stuff, the start of volume one, and I enjoyed it more. I still don't think the start of volume two is all that remarkable or set apart. It may aspire to more, but it doesn't get there.

WATSON: Volume two aspires to be accessible.

JOHNSTON: It starts off with Morrison trying to be mainstream and accessible and not confuse people. Which is why I think it gets better as it goes along and starts confusing you. And you think, that's more like it.

WHEELER: Where he falls down in trying to make it more accessible is that the characters are kind of repulsive at the start of volume two. I read volume two and thought, I don't like these people, I don't wish to 'access' them. Whereas in volume one he does make them likeable, he does dress them up as heroes. I know that's all part of the bait-and-switch...

WATSON: I remember reading the first trade and not being grabbed, and then I read BLOODY HELL IN AMERICA and thought, fucking hell, this is brilliant.

JOHNSTON: What was your first Morrison?

WATSON: My first Morrison was bits of his DOOM PATROL, specifically the Brotherhood of Dada bits, which somebody said to me, you've got to read. Brotherhood of Dada where the characters he killed off because he liked writing them more than the heroes. Coincidentally, a lot of people said THE INVISIBLES was his excuse to write the Brotherhood of Dada as heroes. Thinking about it, the first Morrison I ever read was... the ANIMAL MAN thing...

'The closest work to THE INVISIBLES is THE ILLUMINATUS TRILOGY.' JOHNSTON: I thought you were going to say ZOIDS, for a minute.

WHEELER: Actually, that would have been the first Morrison I ever read. I just didn't know.

WATSON: The first Morrison I read is one of the ANIMAL MAN issues people keep bringing back as one of his great works. "The Coyote Gospel". I remember reading that when I was about eleven years old in the back of an English BATMAN reprint and thinking it was brilliant. I bought it for the Batman story and almost never looked at the Batman story again. I read and reread "The Coyote Gospel", which I just thought was fantastic, without really knowing what happened at the end. I remember reading that last panel as it pulls back and you see the paintbrush and thinking, what's going on here? It's only reading the end of Morrison's run that that makes sense.

JOHNSTON: One thing I don't understand about Morrison... I cannot understand his absolute unashamed childish love of superheroes.

WHEELER: It's part of his pop sensibility. Which, while superheroes aren't all that pop, taken in a wider context...

JOHNSTON: Although ZENITH did exactly that and turned a superhero into a rock star, long before he was talking about pop culture and what have you.

WHEELER: Underneath all this grand depth in INVISIBLES is this tremendously shallow Grant Morrison who just loves pop. The last issue of INVISIBLES mentions X-MEN as one of its cultural touchstones - such is the prescience of the man.

WATSON: On the other hand, the last issue is also about four dimensional beings in a three dimensional universe. There's no reason you can't do both at the same time.

WHEELER: No, absolutely not. But people often ignore the pop and focus on the grand mad, beautiful, crazy blah blah ideas.

JOHNSTON: Don't you sometimes wish Alan Moore had never said "mad, beautiful ideas"? It's one of the things that should be banned from comics' lexicon forever.

WHEELER: Like "widescreen".

WATSON: We want dull, bland comics! None of these mad ideas!

WHEELER: Small panels! Cramped action. Morrison is not actually as wholly esoteric as people make out. He's actually trying to stay in touch with what people know. I think he wants to be accessible. I think he wants to be a barometer that people can reference.

WATSON: Ali Crowley cut back and forth between very accessible and accessible only to an initiate, and indeed often did both at once. I'm not saying Morrison's trying to be Ali Crowley...

'I suspect that among Grant Morrison's gods are S Club 7.' WHEELER: Is he your personal friend, Ali Crowley?

JOHNSTON: My mate Ali. I think Morrison is extremely well read in the esoteric, and has obviously practised it a little and possibly a lot, but I think he wants to be mainstream. The problem is, he started off on the left-hand path so early on...

WHEELER: I think the difference between someone like Morrison and Moore is that at 7:30 on a Friday night, Moore is probably out covering himself with goose fat and chanting to the moon, whereas Morrison is probably watching Top Of The Pops.

JOHNSTON: I actually think Moore is more likely to be down the pub.

WHEELER: Possibly. But communing. He's communing with his Gods, and Grant Morrison's communing with his. And I suspect that among Grant Morrison's gods are S Club 7.

JOHNSTON: Or even if they're not, he'd claim they were.

WHEELER: He's the man that prays to John Lennon rather than Jesus Christ.

JOHNSTON: I don't think he's ever said that he prays to him. He's said plainly that he did it, but he didn't pray.

WHEELER: Some would say prayer is an invocation.

JOHNSTON: Yes, but invocation isn't necessarily prayer. You of all people should not make that assumption.

WHEELER: What am I, The Pope?

JOHNSTON: Have you seen him lately? He can barely lift his head, he's so old.

WHEELER: Time for him to go.

JOHNSTON: Poor old Karol. Sorry, where were we? Prayer. Invocation.

WHEELER: Invocation. S Club 7.

JOHNSTON: John Lennon. The Pope. Now we're talking like a Grant Morrison comic. Is there anything other than these mad ideas that you immediately associate with Morrison? If you picked up NEW X-MEN and there was no credit, would you have known it was Morrison?

WHEELER: Is it "Morrrisonesque"?

JOHNSTON: That's another one that should be banned.

WHEELER: I would have known NEW X-MEN was a change, but I probably wouldn't have known with any certainty that it was him. But I would have known it was someone of his ilk. By which I mean the likes of Pete Milligan... and... OK, that's quite a short list...

JOHNSTON: Possibly Mark Millar. I don't think I could necessarily pick up a Morrison comic and know that it's him. But people talk so much about where he takes over a mainstream comic like ANIMAL MAN or X-MEN or JLA and stamps his individuality on it. Would you have known that MARVEL BOY was Morrison if he hadn't put his name to it? I haven't read MARVEL BOY, but from what I've read about it in advance I think I probably would have.

WATSON: It's a disaffected teenager with a very pop sensibility about it, who else could it be?

JOHNSTON: A sort of punk whimsical absurdity is what I associate with what I know of MARVEL BOY, and that is very much a theme of Morrison's. The punk theme; don't take anything - including yourself - too seriously. And the absurdity of things like cockroach DNA in a man.

WHEELER: There are moments when it seemed too puerile for Grant Morrison.

JOHNSTON: Really? Well that's what I mean about whimsical. There are moments, even in INVISIBLES, where I think, that's not in there for any purpose except to make Morrison laugh.

WHEELER: I used to wonder about that, when I was reading INVISIBLES. Does everything have to mean something? Am I missing things? And then you read something like MARVEL BOY and think, oh, OK, probably not. Or maybe it does all mean something, but it's beyond my bother to try and work it out.

JOHNSTON: No, I don't think everything's meant to mean something to anybody other than Grant. And maybe a couple of his close friends. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, because it does create a certain enigma. It increases the verisimilitude of a story that is essentially absurd, surreal.

WHEELER: So, Grant Morrison, genius or goat? Would you say, unqualified, that he is a genius?

WATSON: On the strength of what some of his comics have made me consider, yeah. I am particularly thinking of INVISIBLES, DOOM PATROL and ANIMAL MAN. What you throw up as a weakness in INVISIBLES, that it's a plot loosely there to provide a vehicle to expand his ideas, frankly I'm delighted with that, because I think his ideas are fascinating. More people should have them drummed into their heads with chisels.

JOHNSTON: Drummed in with chisels?

WHEELER: The ideas can be, but I think a spoonful of sugar does help the medicine go down, and a lot of the time it's just castor oil in THE INVISIBLES.

JOHNSTON: Myself and Alasdair have got more of an interest in the subject matter of stuff like THE INVISIBLES, so we're a bit predisposed to it. I would qualify Morrison as a genius, especially if you take the definition that a genius is someone who does something completely new with the medium and leaves the field very different to how he entered it, and I think Morrison's achieved both those things.

WHEELER: I think so has Neil Gaiman, so has Chris Claremont, so has John Byrne, and I would not qualify those men as geniuses.

JOHNSTON: Has Byrne really done things with the medium that hasn't been done before? Maybe we need to narrow our definition, then.

WHEELER: We'll rewrite the criteria for who is a genius just so we can exclude John Byrne and Chris Claremont from consideration. "Well, is he bald and Glaswegian? Yes? Well, then, genius."

JOHNSTON: Call it gut instinct. Which is stupid, I know.

WHEELER: "My gut instinct tells me he's a genius."

JOHNSTON: I have rarely been so affected upon reading a work of fiction as by Morrison's stuff. That's good enough for me. Alan Moore's probably the only other person who has affected me as much.

WATSON: Morrison and Moore are the sort of people who both express the sort of ideas I find myself groping towards in my thinking on life, expressing the ideas I'm developing much more clearly and succinctly than I've been able to. While I haven't always agreed with their entire expression of it, it's always clarified my own thinking on the matter and helped me move that next step on.

WHEELER: To my mind, at present, I would say Alan Moore is comics' only true genius. Grant Morrison? Very clever goat.

Wheeler, Johnston and Watson are the Ninth Art editorial board.

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