Following up to this week’s feature review.

The Morrisonites at Barbelith.com recently compiled a linklist of Grant Morrison interviews that are available on the web.

During the hype period for the comic book serialization of the work, Jen Contino of Comicon.com’s news subsite, The Pulse, posted an interview with Grant Morrison, where he talks about his 7 Soldiers of Victory project in more depth than you usually get from these kinds of interviews on these kinds of comic book news/PR sites. His description of the origin of the idea caught my attention, just because the original pitch sounds (to me anyway) so crappy, compared to where it ended up:

Morrison said this project began as a Justice League spin-off. “I started off in 2002 with the idea to do a JLA spin-off called JL8, which featured a bunch of C-list characters getting together as a DC analogue of the Avengers or Ultimates,” he said. “Guardian was in from the start as my Captain America guy, Mister Miracle was Thor, The Demon was the Hulk, Zatanna was the Scarlet Witch and so on. As I developed from this basic premise it soon became clear that the concept was turning into something a lot bigger and more ambitious than a simple DC version of the Avengers. I worked on the material for the next two years to turn it into the Seven Soldiers concept as it finally emerged.”

Morrison’s in company-man, on-message, push-the-book mode throughout the Pulse interview. That’s not his usual mode, to say the least. Alex Ness’ lengthy interview with Morrison on the subject of craft, though it has some boring stretches (I don’t really need to know what’s in Grant Morrison’s CD collection — at least, not in such detail), has some good moments. Here’s how he describes his creative process and its consequences, for example:

Words and voices come out of my head when I ask them to and I write them down and show them to people, at which point the stuff from my head miraculously converts into money, then the money turns into houses and cat food and trips abroad and clothes and savings. I view the process as pure sorcery and treat it with the respect and devotion it deserves.

The Suicide Girls interview also contains a choice bit or two. In particular, here’s Morrison’s explanation of his conception of New York City in the DC Universe:

Most of the stories are set in a DC Universe version of New York City. Many Marvel Comics are set in New York but we’ve rarely seen it in the DC Universe. We usually see stories in Gotham City, Metropolis, Star City or some other made up place. The New York in Seven Soldiers is known as ‘the Cinderella city’ because it’s got two ‘ugly sisters’ on either side – Batman’s brooding Gotham City and Superman’s futuristic Metropolis. What we’ve done to make the location even more distinctive is finish off all of New York’s big architectural projects that were never completed. So there is the huge Chinatown development with Confucius Plaza, which was an idea that was floated once and never followed through. There is also an impressive hotel as proposed by Gaudi himself, which we’ve got standing proudly in our fictional city. There’s Frank Lloyd Wright’s proposed Ellis Island development, which is an amazing futuristic domed city idea and turns up as the location for The Guardian issue 3. Then we have the Mid-Manhattan Expressway which again was never built but which runs directly though this fictionalized New York City. For this series, I wanted to create a world that’s very textual and tactile almost like a virtual reality. The location is very important.

I knew that the New York City in 7 Soldiers was nifty in a Silver Age comic-book kind of way, but I didn’t realize that the gee-whiz futuristic stuff we see there had an actual real-world backstory. That’s brain junk-food of the highest order.

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