In anticipation of Grant Morrisons final Batman issue out tomorrow (Weds 31 July), Batman Incorporated #13, the legendary comics writer has been sharing his views on Batman, Wonder Woman, and the latest Superman movie Man of Steel in an interview with
USA Today. Morrisons 7 year run on Batman comes to an end tomorrow with Batman Inc #13 though fans expecting an extra-long finale issue will be disappointed as he says he could only get an extra 4 pages for his last Batman comic, so it will be 24 pages long.
My thing about this was to do all of these in 20-page chunks and also I don't want to do a big long one at the end. It was all about condensing certain elements of Batman down into new forms. said Morrison. It's actually just the finale story but hopefully says a couple of new things about Batman and a couple of things you've never thought before.
Looking back at the last 7 years he said:
Certainly for me, it's been a really exciting project. I read all of them before I did the last one. There's a lot of stuff in there that people could spend a lot of time looking at. In the way that the Superman stuff I've done is emotional and physical, Batman has been intellectual. It's been about puzzles and weird storytelling tricks and doing stuff that doesn't normally get done, that even I don't normally do. Because of that weird intricate coursework puzzle nature of it all, a lot of people still haven't figured out all the stuff in there. It'll keep people talking for a long time.
He also talked about getting into the head of the Dark Knight, which apparently made him depressed and paranoid, and listened to heavy metal and techno while writing. Morrison is also writing Wonder Woman: Earth One with artist Yanick Paquette and talked about his take on the iconic character:
She's very different, and I'm really focusing a lot more on the mother and daughter story in it between Hippolyta and Diana. I want it to be that kind of book, a story about women. I grew up with my own mother and sister in the house, and it was watching that and the way women can tear each other apart and lift each other up at the same time. I wanted to do a little bit of my own experience with those characters. Diana's a lot more defiant in it and she's not sent to man's world she runs away to it so there's a very different dynamic between her and Hippolyta, and the entire thing basically takes place around a trial. I always felt one of the fundamentals of Wonder Woman in at least the last two decades is that she always seems to be on trial, and I don't mean that in a story sense. Everyone's always saying, "Why does nobody buy Wonder Woman? Why isn't she any good?" (Laughs) it seems like she's always on trial, so I thought if I literalized that and made the story basically the Amazons bringing her back home after her first adventure away and putting her on trial, it'd be different from anything else you might see. The Amazons have their own ways of doing things. It's kind of asking Wonder Woman to justify herself, which I feel has almost been what the character's had to do for a long time.
He also discussed a possible Wonder Woman movie, stating that all of the studios, not just Warner Bros., have fears of female-led movies, especially as he thinks the studios feel their audience is composed mainly of 18-30 males who want to see Batman brooding. On the subject of superhero films, he was asked about what he thought of Man of Steel and talked about the questionable ending where Superman kills Zod.
I kinda liked it and kinda didn't, to be honest It's a credible Superman for now. But I'm not sure about the killing thing. I don't want to sound like some fuddy-duddy Silver Age apologist but I've noticed a lot recently of people saying Batman should kill the Joker and, yeah, Superman should kill, he should make the tough moral decisions we all have to make every day. I don't know about you, but the last moral decision I made didn't have anything to do with killing people. And I don't think many of us ever have to make the decision whether or not to kill. In fact, the more you think about it, unless you're in one of the Armed Forces, killing is illegal and immoral. Why would we want our superheroes to do that? There is a certain demand for it, but I just keep wondering why people insist that this is the sort of thing we'd all do if we were in Superman's place and had to make the tough decision and we'd kill Zod. Would we? Very few of us have ever killed anything. What is this weird bloodlust in watching our superheroes kill the villains?
Morrison also briefly mentioned his next creator owned project, Annihilator, with Legendary Comics and Multiversity which will be an 8-issue run of several stories set in parallel worlds that he says will be accessible as each story will be self-contained.
Batman Incorporated #13 by Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham is out this Wednesday