Friday, July 09, 2004
Obligatory Linkblogging
Warren Ellis: "If I ran Marvel
You can't publish things just because, you know, you've always published them. You don't keep a tumour in your head because, well, you've had it for years. THOR. No-one cares about THOR. No-one's ever cared about THOR. I wrote THOR. I wrote Thor in bed with a blonde woman wearing nothing but thighboots and opera gloves drawn by Mike Deodato. And still no-one cared about THOR. No-one's cared about THOR since Walt Simonson did the book. And what was the first thing Walt did? Got rid of Thor and replaced him with a horse from space. And the sales quadrupled.
God bless that man. Any man who shares my hatred for Thor is my brother.
You know this by now, but: Really lengthy, intelligent, and in-depth interview with Grant Morrison
When I had all the raw pitch material laid out for SEVEN SOLDIERS, my nose for conceptual glue drew me to DCs short-lived but fascinating 'Weird Adventure' phase of the early 70s – those gothic romance books with girls running in long dresses, bearing flickering lanterns across haunted moors, Kirby’s disturbing ‘Spirit World’ and ‘In The Days of The Mob’ books, Alex Nino’s pirate strips, Fleischer’s ‘Death Wish’ iteration of the Spectre, ‘Black Orchid’, ‘Jonah Hex’, ‘The Vigilante’, ‘Doctor 13’ and all those odd little stories of mad swamis, ghost-breakers, haunted mesas, doomed adventurers and creepy mansions – which, although it was a wave I mostly hated at the time, now seemed ripe for reconsideration and re-appraisal. I saw a chance to pitch a new aesthetic off the back of the strange feelings I got from this discarded bric-a-brac, so yes, there’s a definite attempt to take the SEVEN SOLDIERS material and infuse it with some of that bizarre diversity, re-seeding some old and worn-out genre pastures with memetically-modified corn in the GM style. Hard-hitting modernist epic super-drama ensues with pirates of a very unusual kind, psychological sci-fi, ‘Lord of The Rings’ fantasy in modern day Los Angeles, Puritan goth horror, a talking bloody horse and just about everything else I could think of. A big new range of super- flavours that has something for everyone, all-new kinds of thrills and not an old-style ‘superhero’ in the bunch.
The Mad Scotsman goes on to reveal that the series will involve, in some way, Guardian, Mister Miracle, and Spider. Particularly worthwhile in the interview are the not too subtle digs at Claremont's and Byrne's not subtle at all digs at Morrison's New X-Men.
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