Grant Morrison Talks About The Death of Comics, and Gender Imbalance.

There’s a new Rolling Stone interview with Grant Morrison, and it has some tasty cuts from my Spiritual Guru. Aside from some gossip where he continues to astral karate chop Mark Millar and Alan Moore, he has some very surprising words about the death of comics.

Comics Alliance:

The most striking and timely remarks of the interview — putting aside the gossipy desire to hear creators talk about their problems with each other — involve Morrison’s thoughts about the declining sales of comics that are widely believed to have inspired the DC Comics relaunch next month. Asked whether he thinks this is the “death spiral” of comics, he replies, “Yeah, I do,” and describes his feeling that the energy of comics and the medium’s ability to transmit ideas may now be eclipsed by more “effective” platforms like movies — where Morrison himself is working now as well — and video games:

Comics sales are so low, people are willing to try anything these days. It’s just plummeting… There’s a real feeling of things just going off the rails, to be honest. Superhero comics. The concept is quite a ruthless concept, and it’s moved on, and it’s kind of abandoned, the first-stage rocket… and moving on to movies, where it can be more powerful, more effective.

Also of interest to us — since we’ve talked about this a lot — were Morrison’s remarks on the gender imbalance of creators in superhero comics, and the accusations of misogyny against storylines like Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis, which retroactively added a brutal rape to the backstory of character Sue Dibny:

It’s hard to tell because most men try to avoid misogyny, really they do, in this world we live in today. It’s hard for me to believe that a shy bespectacled college graduate like Brad Meltzer who’s a novelist and a father is a really setting out to be weirdly misogynistic. But unfortunately when you’re looking at this beloved character who’s obviously been a**-raped on the Justice League satellite, even saying it kind of takes you to that dot dot dot where you don’t know what else to say.

Hearing Grant Morrison pontificate about the forthcoming death of comic books and more ‘effective’ mediums is seriously, seriously, seriously disheartening to me. It’s also quite the about-face for Morrison, who spends a good amount of time in his own documentary talking about the power of the comic book. A power he claims is solely bestowed to the form, and manageable only in the odd realm where images and words collide on paper (or digital paper?). For him to come out and claim that movies are more effective is a bit of a shocker, and not one I agree with.

There’s a certain specialness to comic books that comes with a medium. It isn’t a matter of one medium being more effective than the other, since they both bring such different aspects to the table. I have to believe that there is something about the medium specificity of comic books that allows it to do different things  than movies or video games. The form unto itself, the very physical form, dictates that reading a comic book offers up something that you cannot see in a movie. I don’t object to Morrison commenting on the spiraling sales figures, but rather his decision to correlate that with some sort of medium superiority over in the world of movies.

Thoughts?