Hoy vi a una señora empezar a insultar a un tipo porque sin querer, estando simplemente parado en el metro le pasó a llevar sus lentes de alguna forma despegándolos del marco. Entonces recordé la entrevista que había leído ayer al maravilloso guionista Grant Morrison por la también increíble Laura Sneddon (Comic Book Grrrl), y sus palabras respecto a cómo los comics entregan un aspecto positivo, amable y incluso inocente de la vida que día a día se va perdiendo. No se trata de pensar como niñ@s saben, pero un poco de bondad no le haría mal al mundo:
In the book you talk about how people in general are subjected to nihilistic mass media, and we’ve seen a lot of social unrest in recent months with a lot of anger. Supergods is very much the opposite of all that…
Grant: It’s the return of the repressed you know and I think as I said in the book it’s why the superhero films are popular because they at least give some exit strategy from all this, because if we do get better, if we do put on the capes, if we do switch into the tights then maybe there’s some chance that we can progress. Because nobody now believes that our current course is gonna lead anywhere but disaster. We have been sold this idea so hard that we’re doomed. There is no hope, the environment will collapse, you will all be hunted down eventually by somebody, we’re all going to break some law sooner or later. So the idea of that is so prevalent, like I’ve said in interviews, if you try being positive to people they freak out! In the days of punk, if you wore a nazi armband people would freak out. Now if you say “no, what if you’re wrong, what if there’s a chance, what if everything’s okay, what if it’s meant to be like this and these are just stages” but they freak out! So you know kind of that optimism that comics bring is a kind of form of outrage now and it quite appeals to me because of that, it’s so against the prevailing trends to say that “hey maybe everything’s okay”, people just lose their shit if you try to tell them that maybe we’re part of larger scale processes that are working themselves out that we barely have any comprehension of. But you know, you can’t say that.
But as I say, comics bring that kind of, that dimension, that slightly utopian dimension, the cosmic dimension, or the transcendental dimension, that we don’t get in a lot of other forms of entertainment. You know maybe Doctor Who provides that which is quite interesting because it is such a big programme. Most of what we’re given by the media is just nightmarish because they want to make you keep watching so it’s run like a, it’s like a thriller, you know they can spin out a very small crime over an entire day if you wanted by interviewing all kinds of people and they can make the world seem like its a terrifying and doomed place when in actual fact most people in the West are living easier, safer, more successful and better off lives than they ever have in the past just because of the way things work. But I dunno, there’s a kind of, I think we’re fighting against a weird… there’s an obsession with the culture of crime, you know, or violence even where the games we play, it’s always about people who are on the front line of violence. We play at being soldiers, we play at being cops, we play at being gangsters, and it’s this real obsessive need to be, to pretend to live lives that in a million years we would never choose to live or want to live. So it’s kind of, it’s indoctrinating people you know and you watch Big Brother and it’s like the exultation of idiocy, like genuine like, you cannot believe anybody’s that dumb but she’s successful (laughs) or he’s successful or they’re getting away with it, they’re actually being sold as something to aspire to. And god, I mean that, it’s hard to pose alternatives to that because it is so popular but you know the superheroes kind of do it a little bit, and it’s small, it’s in a small crude way but at least its doing it.
¿Qué más voy a decir? Que los comics de DC no nos estén dando mucha calidad no quiere decir que el concepto de superhéroes apeste. Creo que Morrison lo deja claro.
* Me dí cuenta que esta entrevista es tan buena, que iré tirando extractos de vez en cuando.