How delightfully heteronormative.
With Grant Morrison interviews, you get used to brutal top-overing and simplistic piss-taking; it’s all part of the fun—and I’m pumping my fist right along with the basic fuck-yeah point:
As I said earlier, in this last decade, everyone’s been swinging for a better-paying job in the movies, so we’ve been writing comic books that were a bit like classic Robert McKee Hollywood pitches. But we all got to go to Hollywood. Every big name in comics has some kind of work in Hollywood and still loves comics enough to stick with them. So I’m just saying, “Look, we got the gig. We’ve convinced them we can write fucking action movies. Let’s get back to blowing minds.”
And there’s of course the dizzying moment of contrarian backspin, the wellyesbut:
Like I said with Superman, in imagination there exists someone who won’t stop what he’s doing until everyone’s okay, until everything’s okay. Everybody wants that feeling—it’s what you get when you meditate on the Amida Buddha but in Pop Art drag. It’s why a lot of kids who have come from broken homes like to read superhero comics. Fictional idols don’t fall and if they do, they just get up again. A superhero is a guy who just will not let you down. He or she’s our best, most aspirational image of ourselves as people. Our future potential in cartoon form. Of all the Watchmen characters, people love Rorschach most because he’s the real superhero. He’s the one who wouldn’t let you down.
But this sort of thoughtless just-so bullshit really falls flat:
IGN Comics
As much as any other theme, the idea of “the love story” plays a pivotal role in Final Crisis. There’s Lois and Superman, Weeja Dell and Nix Uotan, Mandraak and Zillo Valla, and Dinah and Ollie to a certain extent.
Grant Morrison
And even the Super Young Team. The super-compressed soap opera going on with them is a love story too. And Barry and Iris. Wally and Linda. Jay and Joan. Hourman and Liberty Belle. Tattooed Man and his wife. Even Hawkman and Hawkgirl. There are a lot of couples. They’re the binary pairs, the opposites who attract rather than repel or battle one another. They show what happens when the page starts to fancy the ink!
IGN
Not to simplify things too much, but is this kind of your way of saying “love makes the world go round?” [laughs]
Morrison
Yeah, that too. It’s also that the basic human story is about attraction, it’s about the need for contact. It really boils down to that in the end. Behind the hero story—after the fight with the villain is over—is the story of “I just want to find someone who understands me and connects with me.” That’s the basic human story, isn’t it? It’s in all our poems and our songs and our movies. Matter itself, everything we know, is created by the attraction of “particles” to one another. So yeah, the basis of this universe is a love story if you want to look at it that way. And think of the inescapable attraction of the big dualities to one another—you don’t have Good versus Down, Good always hangs around with Evil, Black looks most black when contrasted against White… and they both know it! Symmetries, as Captain Adam called them.
In which case, why not Mr. Terrific and Superman? —I know, I know. But let’s call it what it is: chickenshit commercial considerations. Not pretend it’s some grand universal organizing principle.
