Justin here, today we'll be looking at the very recent documentary about famed comics writer, Grant Morrison.
For comics people, it can be a bit annoying when you talk to someone and it's Alan Moore this and Alan Moore that. Don't get me wrong, I do like Alan Moore A LOT, but I personally think his reputation is over blown and I'm sick of hearing about Watchmen. Alan Moore is like The Beatles, people that are just getting into the medium can latch onto him/them, but if that's all you're into, you're going to miss out on the really important things. To carry that analogy a little further, I'd say that that would make Grant Morrison The Velvet Underground to Moore's Beatles. Morrison's work is more experimental, more out there, more interesting, and has influenced more comics that I care about. I'd go as far as to say that Grant Morrison is my favorite comics creator working today, and second only to Jack Kirby in the history of comics. That's my personal bias, and what I came into the documentary working with.
This documentary was directed by Patrick Meany, he made it in tandem with a book he wrote about Morrison's most significant series, The Invisibles, which came out this summer. As far as documentaries go, this one was relatively conventional. A good thing considering that the subject matter is pretty out there. Grant Morrison doesn't fit the profile of your average comics writer, he dresses in very nice suits, looks like he's from the future, and talks freely about past drug use and his unabiding love for chaos magic. He's ridiculously cool and could be a comics character himself - a feat he routinely pulls off by basing characters on himself and even appearing in one of his early comics.
The movie starts by talking about Morrison's unconventional childhood and moves through the major periods in his life before ending around the time Batman and Robin #1 came out in June 2009. Along the way, Meany interviews a variety of comics professionals, mostly ones who have worked with Morrison or who have been influenced by him: Jill Thompson, Frank Quitely, Phil Jimenez, Matt Fraction, Jason Aaron, and Geoff Johns to name a few. There aren't many documentaries like this. It's pretty rare that I actually get to watch footage of my favorite writers and artists talking about their craft, so that was a joy in and of itself.
Meany keeps the production relatively clean of tricks or post-production work, which was a welcome change. I recently watched, Dreams with Sharp Teeth – a documentary about Harlan Ellison, which included segments of him reading his work with flash animation flourishes behind him – it was weird. In spite of my bias for the subject matter, this was also a much better documentary than The Mindscape of Alan Moore, which came out a few years ago. Mindscape came off more as a vanity project and seemed rather superficial when dealing with Moore's works. The appeal in Talking with Gods for long-time Grant Morrison fans is to see some of the background that went into his comics. I was personally moved by Morrison's explanations about why he wrote The Filth and Final Crisis.
Morrison has always had the great quality of illuminating his work and explaining what his intention was when making it. The biggest complaint a lot of comics readers have about Morrison's work is that it's very challenging and at times can be oblique - a charge that Morrison answers here. I have two hopes for this movie, one is that it will get those readers to give Morrison another chance. When I first heard The Velvet Underground, it took me YEARS to like it as much as I do now. My other hope is that people who are not regular comics readers will see this and become interested in reading some of Morrison's comics.
My wife also watched this movie with me. She is much less familiar with Morrison than I am, having only read his Animal Man comics. She enjoyed the movie as well even in spite of her ambivalence to most of Morrison's comics - to her credit, she attempted to read The Invisibles at my urging and found it wasn't to her liking. Her enjoyment of the movie was due to the wackiness of some of Morrison's anecdotes. While he was writing The Invisibles, Morrison claims, he began to live like the characters in his book. He went to the same exotic locales, imbibed the same substances, and went on adventures to the extent that the comic was as much a memoir as a book following a group of super hip magic anarchists could be.
Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods is a solid documentary and is highly recommended for any Morrison fan or people looking to get into his work. My one complaint is very minor – the copy I watched didn't have subtitles for Morrison. Morrison talks with a very thick Scottish accent and can sometimes be a little hard for us Americans to understand. However, I have heard that the commercial release will have subtitles for the portions that are hard to understand.
You can purchase a copy here
Bonus Link: Grant Morrison's Pop Magic, his introduction to chaos magic