Final Crisis

February 4, 2009: Grant Morrison Talks with IGN

In an extraordinarily lengthy interview with IGN, Grant Morrison explores the meanings and ramifications of Final Crisis. He talks about the meanings behind many of the creations, and explores myth as interpreted by his work.

    IGN: So that kind of answers my question, which is that the Monitors all seem like analogs for storytellers. There seems to be this never-ending cycle of the stories affecting the storytellers and the storytellers affecting the stories and on and on.

    Grant Morrison: Yeah, it's a bit of that. It's also the idea that they're like angels as well. For me, the cool, essential idea of all stories being real creates this great cosmology to play with. It's the notion that the white page itself is a void, and in the context of the DC Universe, well that's God or The Source. In the white page, or the void, anything can happen, everything is possible. As I dug down closer to the very root of the activity I find myself engaged in as a career, I was thinking "what is the basis of the comic book story? What actually is it?"

    In the case of comic book stories, it's the war between white page and ink. And who's to say that the page might want that particular story drawn on it? [laughs] What happens if the page is a bit pissed off at the story that's drawn on it? So I thought of the page as God. The idea being that the Overvoid - as we called it in Final Crisis - of the white page as a space is sort of God. And it's condensing stories out of itself because it finds inside its own gigantic white space, self-absorbed pristine consciousness, it finds this little stain or mark, this DC Multiverse somebody has 'drawn'. And it starts investigating, and it's just shocked with what it sees, with all the crazy activity and signifying going on in there. It then tries to protect itself from the seething contact with 'story' and imagines a race of beings, 'angels' or 'monitors' (another word for angel, of course) to function as an interface between its own giant eternal magnificence and this tiny, weird crawling anthill of life and significance that is the DC Multiverse.

Morrison also clarifies the issue of Obama as Superman in the opening pages of Final Crisis #7:

    I was thinking, because I wrote that obviously last year, was that Obama was getting in in February, and I realized this comic would be out right around that time. I knew it was going to happen. And so Final Crisis #7 has Darkseid defeated, and the good guys have won and everything is bright and optimistic again, I knew that the feeling in America was going to be the same. When Final Crisis started, I wanted to talk about the kind of crushing horror of the George Bush/Tony Blair axis we all had to live through. Final Crisis was my fictional diary of how it felt to live through the early years of the 21st century.

    By the end of that, there's this wind-of-change feeling that Obama brings to America and by extension everyone else - as to whether things actually change, we'll see. I wanted to open Final Crisis #7 with that feeling that the weather had changed. And it's the DC Universe, where anything can happen so here's a black President Superman and we're off! I think this guy's a little better looking than Obama, though. I mean, Obama's a fine-looking fella, but I don't think he could fill out that Superman suit. [laughs] This guy is more Muhammad Ali. So we have him, and we also have Beyonce as Wonder Woman. That's Beyonce at the microphone.

Read the full interview here.


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