Grant Morrison’s earliest published works were for a science fiction themed comic magazine called Near Myths. He also found work writing a weekly comic strip about a Glaswegian superhero named Captain Clyde for a local newspaper and submitted stories to a Scottish comic book magazine called
Starblazer. His early work received little recognition and earned Morrison meager pay, but allowed him to begin forging connections within the British comic book scene.
In the 1980s a wave of British writers invaded the world of mainstream American comics. The figurehead of this movement was to be Alan Moore, whose work on the books
Marvelman and
Swamp Thing and especially his original series
Watchmen in 1986 brought the world of comic books into a new era. The comic book audience had grown up and the comics they read needed to mature along with them. Moore helped to establish the popularity of adult themed comics that were in closer contact with modern life. The success of Moore, along with other British comic writers, would open up opportunities for aspiring and innovative young British writers like Morrison, Peter Milligan, and Neil Gaiman.
In the mid-1980s Morrison’s career began to kick into gear. He found work with companies like Marvel UK, where he worked on a comic strip for a line of toys called Zoids, and wrote short comics for the future themed comic magazine
2000AD. It was with
2000AD that he would begin writing his first full-fledged serial comic, titled
Zenith.
Zenith was a deconstructive take on the superhero genre. Its protagonist was a brash, young superhero who had inherited powers from his superhero parents but was less interested in fighting crime than in achieving a wild celebrity lifestyle that embodied the frivolous indulgences of 1980s pop culture.
His success with
Zenith led to him finding work with DC Comics, where his first works were re-imagining an obscure character called Animal Man and a one off Batman story titled
Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth.
Arkham Asylum would become one of the successful graphic novels of its time. In
Animal Man, Morrison blurred the lines between his fiction and reality by placing himself into the story and having the protagonist become aware that his life was being chronicled as a story. His next work was on
Doom Patrol, a struggling comic series about a group of misfit superheroes. Morrison transformed
Doom Patrol with surrealist and psychedelic imagery. Characters fought against the nefarious Brotherhood of Dada who trapped the city of Paris in the recursive structure of a painting, and encountered a sentient transvestite street named Danny.
Doom Patrol became a cult hit and propelled his career onwards to new heights.
He would continue to write original works into the 1990s but, unlike most of his British contemporaries, was unashamed of tackling major, mainstream superhero comics. In 1996 he went to work on
Justice League of America. Rebranding it as
JLA, he restored the series which featured Superman, Batman and the most popular characters of the DC universe to the forefront of the comic world. Around the same time Morrison had begun work on his magnum opus,
The Invisibles. As a series, it combined all the disparate elements of Morrison’s life and career. It featured a group of renegade counter-culture terrorists fighting against a horrifying authoritarian enemy that was intent on stripping humanity of its individuality. The series relies heavily on psychedelic and surreal imagery as well as references to the occult, pop culture, and conspiracy theories.
After
The Invisibles, Morrison continued his work in mainstream comics with a well-received string writing
X-Men. He continued to write original comics such as
The Filth, which revisited themes from
The Invisibles,
We3 and
Seaguy. In 2005 DC Comics published his expansive series
Seven Soldiers which took obscure and offbeat characters from the DC universe and used them to create an intricate story that experimented with narrative structure. Also in 2005, Morrison began writing for
All-Star Superman. His run was extremely popular and earned him numerous awards. He moved from Superman to Batman and continued his success there through the end of the decade.
In 2010, Morrison published an original series titled
Joe the Barbarian, about a boy imagining an alternate life in a fantasy world. He continued to work on Batman and appeared in a documentary about his life called
Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods. In July 2011 he released a retrospective look at the significance of the superhero in our culture in his book
Supergods. In 2012 he has return to write for Superman in the rebooted series Action Comics. He has also written screenplays for several proposed movies including
Dominion: Dinosaurs vs. Aliens.
