Award winning comic book writer Grant Morrison has steered the adventures of two of the greatest super heroes in the world-Superman and Batman. He is currently heading up the relaunch of DC Comics’ longest running title, Action Comics featuring an updated Superman. I spoke with the best-selling scribe about the relaunch of the character and what we can expect from the title in the future.
Many long-time fans of Superman out there are very skeptical about the major changes made to their favorite iconic super hero. How would you address their fears and doubts?
Artist Rags Morales and I had a brief [meeting on how] to attract new readers to Action Comics which we’ve done by boosting sales from around 40,000 copies to over 200, 000 with the re-launch. This book was created specifically to attract a new audience to Superman comics but I’d like to think those old-time fans are still reading and that they’ll appreciate our efforts to keep our hero vital, relevant and popular. If they’ve been reading Superman as long as I have, they’ll have lived through all kinds of ‘major changes’ and experienced numerous ‘iconic’ versions of the character which have all been very different. Superhero characters stay alive by changing to reflect the times. If they didn’t they’d lose their potency and become mere nostalgia that was only meaningful to a diminishing older audience as time went by. Superman still stands for the best in us all but in this new take, he’s still a young man figuring out what that means.
How does it feel be able to take a classic super hero like Superman and in a sense go back to the beginning? Is it stressful? What are the biggest challenges?
The challenges, as ever, are all about staying true to the spirit of the character and the intentions of his creators while making changes that allow Superman to speak more directly to the times we’re living in. The only stress comes from trying to deal with all the fun I’m having.
What aspect of the new “Action Comics” excites you the most?
Getting to work with Superman again is the best part of this. He always seems to inspire my best. I’ve particularly enjoyed going back to Superman’s roots for this new portrayal and restoring his social activism.
Where do you see “Action Comics” heading in the next year or so? What can readers expect?
The first storyline shows how Superman got his familiar costume and explains why it’s important to him – and also why anyone would wear a skintight ‘superhero’ costume in the first place! We have a couple of interlude episodes by special guest artists which not only fill in some important back-story but also serve to give Rags a break!
After that, we’re switching to the modern day with a story where Superman meets his world’s first ‘superman’ and gets a new secret identity.
Explain to readers how “Action Comics” and the new relaunched “Superman” will tie together. What is the timeline between the two and that sort of thing?
Action Comics’ opening six-part story takes place 5 years before the adventures recounted in Superman. I’m starting out with an early years look at the character but I plan to tell stories from different periods in his life, with the intention of building up a kind of epic biography.
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Eric Shirey is the founder and editor of Rondo Award nominated movie and comic book news websites MovieGeekFeed.com and TheSpectralRealm.com. He also served as a news reporter for the award winning movie website GordonandtheWhale.com. His work has been featured on Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! TV, Associated Content from Yahoo!, DC Comics, StarWars.com, and other national entertainment websites. Besides his three decades long obsession with everything sci-fi, horror, and fantasy related in TV and movies, Eric has what some would call an unhealthy love for comic books. This has led him to interviewing and covering legendary writers and artists in the medium like Grant Morrison, Scott Snyder, Steve Niles, Bernie Wrightson, and Howard Chaykin. His personal website is www.ersink.com.