This is Part 4 in a series of posts looking at why Alan Moore doesn’t like Grant Morrison.

Part 1: Grant Morrison’s First Ten Years of Comics (1978-1987)

Part 2: Karen Berger, the Berger Books, and Vertigo (1981-1993)

Part 3: Grant Morrison Writes Spoofs About Alan Moore and Says Nice Things (1980’s-2010’s)

Part 4: Comics Written by Alan Moore, then by Grant Morrison (1980’s-2010’s)

Part 5: Grant Morrison Says a Lot of Things about Alan Moore (1980’s-2010’s)

Part 6: Alan Moore Says What He Thinks of Grant Morrison and Morrison Issues a Fierce Rebuttal (2012)

Part 7: Alan Moore Describes the “Persistence of Grant Morrison” and Morrison Shuts Up About Moore (2014-2018)

Spawn

In 1992, seven superstar artists left Marvel to form Image Comics. While their comics were a runaway success right off the bat, they faced criticism that the writing wasn’t very good, since the artwork took priority.

In response, Image’s Todd McFarlane invited four of the most critically acclaimed comic book writers to each write an issue of his series Spawn. In this highly publicized event, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave Sim, and Frank Miller were set to write Spawn #8-11, respectively.

Promotional advertisements for Spawn #8-11 (1993)

Here’s Neil Gaiman describing McFarlane’s plan:

NEIL GAIMAN: Todd had called me and asked me to write an issue of Spawn back in the early days because the way he explained it was the people at Image Comics, the comic company, were artists and they were getting a lot of flack for writing and he wanted celebrity writers and he got me, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and a guy called Dave Sim — and Alan, Frank and I were the top writers in comics at the time — to write guest issues.[1]

Here’s how Grant Morrison felt about the situation:

GRANT MORRISON: Alan Moore returned to the mainstream of superheroes with a curious and telling piece entitled “In Heaven” from Spawn no. 8. After the collapse of his own Mad Love self-publishing venture and the abandonment of the ambitious, nonsuperhero series Big Numbers, there was nothing left for Moore, then in his early forties, but to go back to the place where everybody knew his name. He had branched out into performance and declared himself a magician—describing it as an alternative to going mad at forty—but when he returned to the superheroes he’d made such a show of leaving behind it was clear that he needed money to back up his small press experiments. […] It was hard to read this and not imagine Alan Moore in that throng, sealed inside a superhero suit he couldn’t seem to peel off, manacled and bound as he was frog-marched back into the tenth circle of the abyss, the factory, the cold engines of the industry. In the end, superheroes were bigger than he was.[6]

Shortly after McFarlane had announced this, Dez Skinn (Grant Morrison’s friend and former publisher) wrote a fake headline in his magazine Comics International stating that Morrison was also going to write Spawn.

Morrison used this “misunderstanding” as a reason to contact McFarlane.

GRANT MORRISON: The funny thing about it is, I got the assignment thanks to a misunderstanding at Comics International; I came back from holiday last year to find that they’d run a cover-story about how myself and George Perez would be following the Moore/Gaiman/Sim/Miller issues of Spawn. It turned out to be a completely unfounded rumour but I got in touch with Todd McFarlane and he liked the fact that I had the same surname as Jim Morrison and suggested I write three issues. So, thanks Dez, you’ve made me a MI££IONARE!!![2]

It was some of the easiest work I’ve ever done and the most lucrative. […] McFarlane paid ten times more than anyone else at the time and reinflated a bank account that was beginning to diminish, as I blew the Arkham Asylum royalties.[6]

Aged thirty-three, like Jesus in a post-Cold War international thaw, at large in a charmed area of dancing and hugging and doing what thou wilt in exotic latitudes, I was happy, I was cured all right, and my straight-edge years had left me looking ten years fresher than I actually was. Another minifortune arrived in the mail courtesy of those three issues of Spawn for Todd McFarlane, and it looked as though I could fund this boho lifestyle indefinitely. I imagined writing one hundred pages of comics a year and making enough wedge to live large for another five.[6]

WildC.A.T.s

In 1995, Alan Moore began writing Image Comics’ superhero team, WildC.A.T.s.

In 1996, Grant Morrison began writing DC Comics’ superhero team, JLA.

GRANT MORRISON: It seemed that we were finally doing comics for kids again. I think we’ve left out the kids for the last ten years, and have been going more for the adult reader.[3]

LEFT: Moore’s first issue of WildC.A.T.s (1995)

RIGHT: Morrison’s first issue of JLA (1996)

Moore left WildC.A.T.s in 1997, and within months Morrison had the two teams meet in an intercompany crossover special: JLA/WildC.A.T.s.

ARTICLE PROMOTING JLA/WILDCATS: Coming this July to a comic store near you. JLA/WildC.A.T.s will arrive alongside other cool JLA products. […] But even though the project is conveniently nestled amongst this plethora of JLA merchandise, one shouldn’t think of it as just some clever marketing ploy. In fact, according to Grant Morrison, it’s the last word in company crossovers. “I was reading Alan Moore’s run on WildC.A.T.s last year,” Morrison says, “and I was really starting getting into these characters. That’s when the idea behind the project came to me.”[4]

Years later, in 2006, Morrison rebooted WildC.A.T.s after DC Comics had acquired the characters. In his series proposal, Morrison explains the motivation behind his new WildC.A.T.s:

GRANT MORRISON: First off, having heard the phrase for decades, I really started getting into the idea of ‘adult superheroes’ and what that might really mean. […] What might we get if we take an ‘adult’ approach?[5]

LEFT: Morrison’s JLA/WildC.A.T.s (1997)

RIGHT: Morrison’s WildC.A.T.s (2006)

Swamp Thing

When Moore took over Swamp Thing in 1983, he turned the character’s entire premise on its head. In its initial concept, Swamp Thing had been Alec Holland, a man who was transformed into a swamp monster. In the classic storyline “The Anatomy Lesson,” Moore revealed that Swamp Thing was not in fact Alec Holland, but actually a swamp monster that only thought it was Alec Holland.

When Morrison (along with Mark Millar) took over Swamp Thing in 1994, he planned to turn the character’s entire premise on its head once again.

GRANT MORRISON: Mark and me are co-writing a four issue story which strips all the baggage away and returns Swamp Thing to his origins as a monster. We felt that everything since Alan Moore’s run has been barnacles on his yacht, so we scraped off the barnacles and then torpedoed the boat.[2]

They revealed that Swamp Thing was in fact Alec Holland, and had only thought that he was a swamp monster who thought he was Alec Holland. But then a mysterious bearded wizard-like guy with a walking stick reveals to Holland that he really is just a swamp monster after all!

In essence, this new twist on the character was the inverse of Moore’s famous twist on the character ten years earlier. Then a reversion back to Moore’s twist.

Swamp Thing by Morrison, Millar, and Hester (1994)

From Hell v. Bible John

This one isn’t the same comic, just a very similar idea that Grant Morrison came up with (Bible John) shortly after Alan Moore had announced and begun work on From Hell.

Following his departure from DC in 1988, Alan Moore announced three new projects he would be creating and publishing independently: Lost Girls, The Mandelbrot Set (which became Big Numbers), and From Hell.

From Hell (debuting in serialized form in 1989) focused on the never-solved murders of multiple women by an infamous British serial killer dubbed “Jack the Ripper” by the media at the time. There were numerous theories as to his identity, and the murders gave rise to an extensive police investigation. The comic set out to explore not only the identity and motivations behind the killings, but also the effect and connections it had with the society as a whole.

Bible John (debuting in serialized form in 1991) focused on the never-solved murders of multiple women by an infamous British serial killer dubbed “Bible John” by the media at the time. There were numerous theories as to his identity, and the murders gave rise to an extensive police investigation. The comic set out to explore not only the identity and motivations behind the killings, but also the effect and connections it had with the society as a whole.

Despite the similarity of subject matter, Morrison and Vallely’s Bible John featured cut-up collage style artwork that was very different from Eddie Campbell’s artwork in From Hell.

Eddie Campbell’s interior artwork in From Hell

However, in From Hell’s 1989 debut in the anthology Taboo, there’s rare artwork by Alan Moore in the form a From Hell cut-up collage piece on its inside back cover.

LEFT: From Hell artwork by Alan Moore (1989)

RIGHT: Title page for Morrison & Vallely’s Bible John (1991)

Watchmen/Charlton Characters

In the mid 80s, when Alan Moore began formulating what would turn into Watchmen, he had initially hoped to use Archie Comics’ Mighty Crusaders (consisting of The Shield, Black Hood, and others). He wanted a relatively generic superhero team he could use as a blank slate for his and Gibbons’ self-contained political murder mystery.[11]

Then he learned that DC had just acquired the Charlton characters (consisting of The Peacemaker, Blue Beetle, and others), so he swapped them out and wrote up a proposal called “Who Killed the Peacemaker?”

DC had planned on adding the Charlton characters to their regular universe, so they suggested that Moore and Gibbons come up with original characters instead. DC then added the Charlton characters to their regular universe in 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, and Moore and Gibbons created their own, using the Charlton characters as archetypes (the patriotic Peacemaker became the Comedian, the gadget-utilizing Blue Beetle became Night Owl, etc).

Twenty-five years later, Grant Morrison had an idea for a comic called Pax Americana.

GRANT MORRISON: The mad notion I came up with was to do the Charlton characters in a story I’d construct as an update on that ludic Watchmen style – if Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had pitched the Watchmen now, rooted in a contemporary political landscape but with the actual Charlton characters instead of analogues![12]

I’m writing it at the back end of everything else. I want it to be the best thing I’ve ever done, so I’ve been taking my time with the issues.[13]

It’s my Citizen Kane, this comic, I’m so proud of it. We’ve really worked hard to make it worthy of not only its source but to do all that in 38 pages and in a new way. So yeah it’s a big deal.[14]

Captain Atom when he was a Charlton character, Captain Atom #87 (1967)

Doctor Manhattan from Moore & Gibbons’ Watchmen (1986)

Captain Atom from Morrison & Quitely’s Pax Americana (2014)

I don’t think people will be upset by it, in the way that they’ve been upset by Before Watchmen which even though it’s good does ultimately seem redundant.[14]

Instead of Watchmen’s nine-panel grid, we have an eight-panel grid.[15]

We’ve done this thing that is probably the best thing we’ve ever done in superhero comics.[15]

Marvelman/Miracleman

When Grant Morrison read Alan Moore’s Marvelman in the early 1980s, it changed his perspective as to what the comics medium was capable of.

GRANT MORRISON: Before I broke into comics, I started out wanting to write novels. I even wrote a couple when I was a teenager, but nothing really came out of it. Then I saw Alan Moore’s work on the Marvelman strip (reprinted in the States as Miracleman by Eclipse Comics) that ran in Warrior. ‘Finally,’ I thought to myself, ‘you can do comics and write them as well as you’d write a novel.’ Alan’s work inspired me. […] After reading Marvelman, l realized you could apply those same ideas to super-heroes — so I did.[4]

I was drawn back to comics. For me, Marvelman was the next stage. […] It looked like a good time to get back into the scrum. Perhaps at last, this could be a way of making enough money to quite the dole and get noticed.[6]

Morrison wrote an unsolicited six-page Marvelman script featuring Johnny Bates (Kid Marvelman) and took it to the publisher. Having yet to get work in mainstream British comics, he wanted his big break in comics to be writing Marvelman along side Moore. Unfortunately, Moore and the artists weren’t looking for another writer to jump into the middle of the story they were currently creating (and winning Eagle Awards for), and declined Morrison’s unconventional request.

Reflecting on the matter many years later, in the 2010 documentary about his life, Morrison expressed bitterness about the situation:

GRANT MORRISON: I remember reading V for Vendetta and thinking, this is what I wanted to do, this is the way comics should be. One of the first things I did was go down to see Dez Skinn in London, the publisher of Warrior. I had taken this story, which was a Kid Marvelman spec script, and he bought it straight away so, again, that was a really good jump for me. Then Alan Moore had it spiked, and said it was never to be published. Thus began our slight antagonism, which has persisted until this very day.

They asked me to continue Marvelman because Moore had fallen out with everyone in the magazine, and taken away his script, and they said “Would you follow this up?” And to me that was just like, oh my God – the idea of getting to do Marvelman, following Alan Moore, “I’m the only person in the world who’d really do this right,” and I was well up for it. I didn’t want to do it without Moore’s permission, and I wrote to him and said, “They’ve asked me to do this, but obviously I really respect you work, and I wouldn’t want to mess anything up, but I don’t want anyone else to do it, and mess it up.”

And he sent me back this really weird letter, and I remember the opening of it, it said, “I don’t want this to sound like the softly hissed tones of a mafia hitman, but back off.” And the letter was all, ‘but you can’t do this,’ you know, ‘we’re much more popular than you, and if you do this, your career will be over,’ and it was really quite threatening, you know, so I didn’t do it, but I ended up doing some little bit of work for Warrior.[7]

Whether the content of that letter is what Morrison says it is (or whether the letter even exists in the first place) is uncertain, as Morrison has never actually showed it to anyone.

It’s also odd that Morrison says:

They asked me to continue Marvelman because Moore had fallen out with everyone in the magazine, and taken away his script, and they said “Would you follow this up?”

Presumably the “they” that Morrison says asked him to continue the series is Warrior publisher Dez Skinn?

But that doesn’t make sense.

It’s true that Moore had a falling out with Skinn in the mid-80s, but he didn’t stop writing Marvelman. Moore took the series to an American publisher, Eclipse Comics, and continued writing Marvelman for years (which was retitled Miracleman).

Comics critic J.C. Macek III, from his detailed history of the Marvelman/Miracleman copyright saga, provides the order of operations:

J.C. MACEK III: Miracleman #1 appeared in 1985 with an August cover date (mere months after the final Warrior appearance). Eclipse reprinted the Warrior stories in the first several issues of Miracleman, replacing (almost) every appearance of the word “Marvel” with “Miracle”. After the reprint run had ended Alan Moore returned (without Davis, who signed away his share of the rights to Leach) to complete his take on the hero.

Already greatly praised in the USA by this time (thanks, in part, to his revitalization of Swamp Thing not to mention the Miracleman Reprints), Moore’s new run (with artists John Totleben, Chuck Beckum and Rick Veitch) took the bright and childlike character into a much darker place even than he had during the Warrior run.[4]

After leaving Warrior, Moore actually ended up writing almost twice as much Marvelman material (as Miracleman) for the American market than he did when Marvelman was part of Warrior.

Elizabeth Sandifer, author of The Last War in Albion, gets into the specifics of Morrison’s claim that he was offered the title when Moore left Warrior:

ELIZABETH SANDIFER: But this in turn raises a major question about Morrison’s account of events, specifically his claim that he was offered the opportunity to take over as the regular writer of Marvelman after Moore’s departure. Simply put, this seems virtually impossible.

For one thing, it is notable that neither Skinn nor Moore offer any support for the claim, instead treating the question of Morrison and Marvelman as a topic consisting purely of the script to “October Incident: 1966” [Morrison’s unsolicited six-page script].

For another, it does not fit the established timeline of events for Marvelman/Miracleman at all – the idea that Skinn was simultaneously negotiating a US continuation of the comic with Eclipse (a deal signed in September of 1984, the month after the last Moore/Davis Marvelman strip was published) and attempting to negotiate a continuation in Warrior with a completely unknown and untested writer is ridiculous on the face of it.

Skinn stood to get far more money out of a US sale, that having always been a major part of the Warrior business plan, and would surely not have endangered that deal by offering Morrison a job, especially given that it wasn’t his to offer in the first place.[9]

In short, Morrison is claiming he was offered the job writing Marvelman in 1984 when Moore left Warrior, but there was never actually a vacancy regarding a writer for Marvelman in 1984. When Moore left Warrior, he took Marvelman with him to Eclipse, where he continued writing the character (as Miracleman) for four years.

It’s also a bit odd that Morrison says:

I’m the only person in the world who’d really do this right.

and

I don’t want anyone else to do it, and mess it up.

While that may very well be how Morrison felt, what he doesn’t mention is that when Moore actually did stop writing the comic (four years later, in 1989), he passed the writing reins, along with his stake of ownership in the character, to Neil Gaiman, who went on to have a very critically acclaimed run on the title.

LEFT: Miracleman #16, Moore’s last issue (1989)

RIGHT: Miracleman #17, Gaiman’s first issue (1990)

Thirty years later, Marvel Comics had acquired the rights to the character, and began republishing the classic runs by Moore and Gaiman.

Morrison, who still had his unpublished Marvelman script, gave it to Marvel and finally got to see it illustrated and published as part of a one issue spin-off accompanying the reprints in 2014.

Per Morrison’s script, Kid Marvelman Johnny Bates was drawn to look exactly like young Grant Morrison.

GRANT MORRISON: I made the teenage mod Johnny Bates look exactly like me, forever damning myself as Moore’s Devil![10]

LEFT: Photo of Grant Morrison from 1984

RIGHT: Morrison’s script called for Kid Miracleman (Johnny Bates) to be drawn to look like a young Morrison, All-New Miracleman Annual #1 (2014)

Ultimately, over the course of his career Grant Morrison went on to write more comics-that-had-previously-been-written-by-Alan-Moore than any other writer in the industry.

Titles written by Moore, and then by Morrison, include:

Warrior (Moore in 1982, Morrison in 1985)

2000 AD’s Future Shocks (Moore in 1981, Morrison in 1986)

Doctor Who (Moore in 1980, Morrison in 1986)

Captain Britain (Moore in 1982, Morrison in 1986)

Swamp Thing (Moore in 1983, Morrison in 1994)

John Constantine/Hellblazer (Moore in 1985, Morrison in 1990)

Batman (Moore in 1987, Morrison in 1989)

Superman (Moore in 1985, Morrison in 2005)

Spawn (Moore in Feb 1993, Morrison in Dec 1993)

WildC.A.T.s (Moore in 1995, Morrison in 1997)

The Charlton characters using Watchmen’s storytelling techniques (Moore in 1986, Morrison in 2014)

Marvelman/Miracleman (Moore in 1982, Morrison in 2014)

Green Lantern (Moore in 1985, Morrison in 2018)

NEXT: Part 5 – Grant Morrison Says a Lot of Things About Alan Moore

SOURCES

[1] Neil Gaiman’s Testimony for Gaiman v. McFarlane (2010)

[2] Grant Morrison Interview with Comic World #18 (1993)

[3] Grant Morrison Interview with Wizard Magazine #63 (1996)

[4] Grant Morrison Interview with Riot #0 (1997)

[5] Grant Morrison’s Proposal for his Reboot of Wildcats (2006)

[6] Supergods by Grant Morrison (2011)

[7] Grant Morrison in Talking with Gods (2010)

[8] The Super Miracle of Captain Marvelman

[9] The Last War in Albion Part 88 (2015)

[10] The Strange Case of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore As Told by Grant Morrison (2012)

[11] Before Charlton (2012)

[12] The Comics Cube’s My Thoughts on Multiversity (2009)

[13] Grant Morrison Interview with io9 (2010)

[14] Grant Morrison Interview with The New Statesman (2012)

[15] Grant Morrison Interview with Collider (2013)

The images above are the property of their respective owners and are presented here for not-for-profit, educational purposes only, under the fair use doctrine of the copyright laws of the United States of America. The lyrics at the very top are from the song “Blame It On The Tetons” by Modest Mouse.