La Comiquera

Leyó bien. El número de mayo de la revista Playboy viene con una ilustración exclusiva de Frank Quitely mostrando a su colaborador Grant Morrison junto con muchos de los personajes en los que ha trabajado como Zatanna, Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Lantern, Flex Mentallo y muchos más.

Acá click para verla en mayor resolución:

El artículo incluye además comentarios de Morrison sobre su trabajo, algunos de los cuales comparto acá con ustedes.

Sobre Batman:

I got interested in the class element of Batman: He’s a rich man who beats up poor people. It’s quite a bizarre mission to go out at night dressed as a bat and punch the hell out of junkies. And then he goes home and lives in this mansion. There’s an aspirational quality to him—he’s an outlaw and he can buy anything. He has a new Batmobile every movie. He’s very plutonian in the sense that he’s wealthy and also in the sense that he’s sexually deviant. Gayness is built into Batman. I’m not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There’s just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he’s intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay. I think that’s why people like it. All these women fancy him and they all wear fetish clothes and jump around rooftops to get to him. He doesn’t care — he’s more interested in hanging out with the old guy and the kid.

Sobre Wonder Woman:

William Moulton Marston, the guy who created Wonder Woman, was a noted psychiatrist. He’s the guy who invented the polygraph, the lie detector. He was one of those bohemian free-love guys; he and his wife, Elizabeth, shared a lover, Olive, who was the physical model for Wonder Woman. What he and Elizabeth did was to consider an Amazonian society of women that had been cut off from men for 3,000 years. That developed along the lines of Marston’s most fevered fantasies into a lesbian utopia. Although they’re supposedly a peace-loving culture, all these supergirls’ pursuits seem to revolve around fighting one another, and this mad, ritualistic stuff where girls dress as stags and get chased and tied up and eaten symbolically on a banquet table. The whole thing was lush with bondage and slavery. Wonder Woman was constantly being tied up or shackled—and it was hugely successful. When Marston died in 1947, they got rid of the pervy elements, and instantly sales plummeted. Wonder Woman should be the most sexually attractive, intelligent, potent woman you can imagine. Instead she became this weird cross between the Virgin Mary and Mary Tyler Moore that didn’t even appeal to girls.

The article indicates that Morrison is presently at work on “a stand-alone Wonder Woman graphic novel” for DC Comics. Presumably this is the material Morrison spoke about last year, a Wonder Woman story that deals with the character’s feminist and fetishistic origins.

Sobre Superman:

When Superman was created during the Great Depression, he was the champion of the oppressed and fought on the side of the working man. He was lawless. If you were a wife beater, he’d throw you out the window. If you were a corrupt congressman, he’d swing you from the rooftops until you confessed. I think it appealed to people who were losing their jobs to machines: Suddenly you had Superman wrecking machines and punching robots. But his popularity has declined—nobody wants to be the son of a farmer now. American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he’s too powerful; you can’t give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman’s relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it’s still a story about your relatives visiting.

Sobre The Joker:

I identify with the Joker to a certain extent—at least the way I write him, which is as this cosmic fool. He’s Batman’s perfect opposite, and because of that he’s as sexy as Batman, if not more so. When the Joker was introduced in 1940, he was a scowling homicidal maniac. Then they took out the violence and death, and he became the chuckling clown, driving around in his Joker-mobile. Then he was the giggling mental-patient version from the TV show: Cesar Romero with his mustache covered in greasepaint. Suddenly in the 1970s he was killing his henchmen again. And in the 1980s he was a gender-bending transvestite. I said, Okay, we’ve had all these varied versions of the Joker. Let’s say it’s the same person who just changes his head every day. I rationalized that by saying he’s supersane, the first man of the 21st century who’s dealing with this overload of information by changing his entire personality. I quite like him, because he’s a pop star—he’s like Bowie.

Sobre la Justice League of America:

The Justice League is like the pantheon of Greek gods. Hermes made more sense to me as the Flash. Wonder Woman means so much more to me than Hera or Aphrodite. I could make a much quicker connection with the archetype of Zeus in the form of Superman. Aquaman is Poseidon, of course. Batman is Hades, the god of the underworld. People like Aleister Crowley have written down rituals for summoning Hermes, because if you want to contact the spirit of magic, you’ve got to talk to Hermes. But doing magic, I would use the characters from the comics because they meant more to me. Because I do magic all the time, it’s part of my normal life. I know for most people it’s outlandish and impossible. So I tell people that if you are truly skeptical, do the rituals and prove to yourself that it doesn’t work. And you’ll get the shock of your life.

Sobre Magneto:

The X-Men fans hated me because I made him into a stupid old drug-addicted idiot. He had started out as this sneering, grim terrorist character, so I thought, Well, that’s who he really is. [Writer] Chris Claremont had done a lot of good work over the years to redeem the character: He made him a survivor of the death camps and this noble antihero. And I went in and sh*t on all of it. It was right after 9/11, and I said there’s nothing f**king noble about this at all.

Sobre el “supercontext”:

In Kathmandu there’s this temple with 365 steps, one for each day of the year, and apparently if you can go up in a single breath, you’re guaranteed enlightenment. It’s easy to do if you’re young and fit. I just took a deep breath and ran up. Three days later I was visited by five-dimensional aliens. (I’d eaten a bit of hash, but honestly, it wasn’t a drug trip. I ate a lot of things afterward to see if I could make it happen again, and I never could.) I was in this azure blue space, and there were grid lines of silver flashing through it, but the beings looked like chrome blobs. And they were just moving about, plugging into these grids and exchanging information. I saw the entire universe from beginning to end: You had Shakespeare over here and the dinosaurs over here. Time became space, and I was bigger than both of them. Later I put that in The Invisibles and called it the Supercontext.

¿Cuánto más hay que esperar para ver esa novela gráfica sobre Wonder Woman de las que nos vienen hablando hace eones? POR FAVOR!

Acabo de actualizar este artículo y estoy alucinando. Dénme tiempo para procesar todo esto.