Speaking recently at an Edinburgh International Book Festival event, comic book writer (Batman, All-Star Superman) Grant Morrison surprised his audience by admitting: “I’m bored of superheroes!” Speaking to a packed […]
Speaking recently at an Edinburgh International Book Festival event, comic book writer (Batman, All-Star Superman) Grant Morrison surprised his audience by admitting: “I’m bored of superheroes!”
Speaking to a packed tent of comic book fans as part of the festival’s Stripped event on graphic novels and comic books, Morrison said: “I’m getting bored of superheroes. Superheroes have been soldiers for a long time. We’ve made the mistake of confusing them with soldiers, which is why people are asking for Batman to kill the Joker, or Superman to kill Zod. Those are things that soldiers and members of the armed forces do. That’s not necessarily what superheroes are about.”
Morrison continued: “I think vigilantes shouldn’t really be encouraged to kill people. The minute Batman killed the Joker, Commissioner Gordon would arrest him. That’s just the way it is. The same goes for Superman, really. For me, it is very strange to see all these superheroes being positioned as arms of the military-industrial complex: Tony Stark, The Avengers, they’re all soldiers now. I think that’s getting a bit tedious.”
The superheroes-as-soldiers trope is not something Morrison sees changing much in the near future, and he offered a reason why he thinks it has happened: “I’d like to see the superhero going back to just helping people, stopping bank robbers, but clearly what we’re looking forward is the soldier. In the threatening world that we live in we’re looking for these people that are trained and can handle any emergency and punch a terrorist across the world without smarting. I think superheroes are going to be stuck there for a little while, at least until the West stops being so scared of itself. The superhero cinema of the West stands in relation to 9/11 as the ‘kaiju’ [Godzilla and other giant monsters] cinema of Japan stood in relation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think these things are always responses to trauma.”
The entire hour-long Edinburgh Book Festival event is available to view below:
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Excellent point about the militarization of superheroes and how that’s problematic! Grant Morrison, come back to writing for Doctor Who comics!