https://boards.4channel.

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>This, I think, leaves us only with the herpes-like persistence of Grant

Morrison himself.
>The first time this name passed briefly through the forefront of my
consciousness before swiftly making its way to the latrine area would have been at
some point in the early to mid ’eighties. As I remember, I was in Glasgow for a
signing at local comics outlet AKA Books, although for a signing of what I couldn’t
possibly tell you. Bob and John, the proprietors, both very likeable and honourable
individuals, were taking me for a dinner at (I think) one of Glasgow’s many fine
curry establishments, and asked if a regular visitor to their shop who had
aspirations as a writer might be allowed to join us. Since I liked and respected
both of them and had no reason to suppose that any of their associates would prove
to be in a different category, I readily agreed. They were, after all, paying for
the meal, and an extra guest presented no inconvenience to me. Of course, with
hindsight…

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Anonymous 01/02/23(Mon)18:05:52 No.134804138▶

>At the restaurant I was introduced to Grant Morrison. I can’t say I remember
him making any particularly vivid or lasting impression on the occasion, in terms
of his appearance. All I can reconstruct at this distance is a blurred image of a
soberly-dressed and smallish man with tidy collar-length hair and no remarkable or
memorable features beyond a general pastiness of complexion, perhaps four or five
years younger than I myself was at the time, although this age-gap seems to have
somehow increased since then. As to his conversation, he was quite forthcoming in
his praise for my work, telling me how much inspiration it had provided and adding
that it was his ambition “to be a comic-writer, like you”. Looking back from my
present position, it strikes me that I may have only imagined that there was a
comma in that last statement, but at the time I took it at face value. I thanked
him for his compliments (as I recall he’d been most effusive with regard to V for
Vendetta, despite that might-as-well-call-it-a-rape in the first episode),
encouraged him in his efforts as much as I could without having seen any examples
of his output, and told him that I’d look out for his work in future. Short of
perhaps adopting him on the spot as my ward and rather elderly boy sidekick, I
don’t see what more I can be expected to have done for a complete stranger on such
a brief acquaintance, although it may be that he came from a background with a
different set of expectations and thus felt slighted in some way by the encounter.
Certainly he gave no indication of this at the time, and I’m only speculating based
upon what I perceive as his subsequent peculiar and creepy behaviour.

>>
Anonymous 01/02/23(Mon)18:06:53 No.134804152▶

>The next time his name arose would have been, I think, around the time that my
relationship with Dez Skinn and Warrior magazine was beginning to enter its down-
slopes. As I remember the occasion, I was approached by Skinn with an on-spec
submission from Grant Morrison, a Kid Marvelman story as I recall, which while I
had nothing against the story or its author did not fit into the storyline which I
was attempting to establish. Additionally, I was the author solely responsible for
Marvelman’s reinvention and was as puzzled by Skinn’s actions as I’m sure Steve
Moore would have been if presented with a script for a spin-off Zirk story by an
untested new writer. I held none of this against Grant Morrison, and simply told
Skinn to explain to him that the story didn’t fit with my plans for the character.
As intimated above, I was already starting to formulate an impression of Skinn as a
duplicitous and untrustworthy hustler by this point, and for all I know his initial
statement (via Lance Parkin’s book) to the effect that he’d called Morrison and
informed him that I’d rejected the story out of my growing possessiveness and
paranoia may be, uncharacteristically, a true one, at least in as much as it may be
a truthful account of the distortions that Skinn was trading in at the time. I can
say with some degree of certainty, however, that Grant Morrison’s colourful account
of the threatening letter which he purported to have received from me on the
subject is entirely the invention of someone whose desperate need for attention is
evidently bottomless.

>>
Anonymous 01/02/23(Mon)18:07:54 No.134804166▶

>From Skinn’s less-than-smooth revision of his account in order to synchronise

his notes with Morrison’s later publicity-ploy, I can only assume that these two
individuals are in approximately the same bracket in terms of their moral outlook (
I’m told that Skinn apparently sells my old Marvelman scripts to collectors,
presumably when he needs additional pin-money), and that there was thus a great
mutual sympathy between them. Anyway, since again nothing was raised at the time of
these non-existent events, I continued on my course with no knowledge of them and
thus no reason to bear any ill-will towards someone who, in all honesty, was not
really impinging on my awareness to any noticeable degree one way or the other.
>It was an unspecified amount of time later, perhaps further towards the
middle-’eighties, when I had ceased to be connected with Warrior and was already
some way into my run on D.C Comic’s Swamp Thing, that I noticed a superhero strip
written by Grant Morrison in 2000 AD, a periodical which I was only intermittently
looking at during this period. I followed it for two or three episodes, noting that
it seemed to have been influenced in several of its ideas and approaches by my own
work on Marvelman and Captain Britain. Since every beginning writer probably shows
undue signs of influence during their early career, I didn’t really see this as a
fault at all, and certainly not an insurmountable one. I reasoned that once he’d
found his own voice (as it turns out, an over-optimistic assessment) he might prove
to be an interesting writer.

>>
Anonymous 01/02/23(Mon)18:08:09 No.134804169▶

>>134804133 (OP)
You know what this thread needs? AN EDGY MIND NUMBING RAPE SCENE!

>>
Anonymous 01/02/23(Mon)18:08:56 No.134804181▶

>Since at this time I was still on good terms with at least Karen Berger, and
had only comparatively recently passed on to her the work of Neil Gaiman after he’d
interviewed me for a men’s magazine, she’d asked me to recommend to her any other
new British writers of interest whose work I happened to chance upon. I mentioned
Grant Morrison, describing him as someone still very influenced by my work who
could with time emerge as an interesting individual talent in his own right, just
as Neil Gaiman had managed to do. While I have no idea whether my recommendation
played any part at all in the decision to subsequently employ Morrison, I can’t see
that that it would have hurt.
>Shortly after this, as I was no longer really engaged with the British fanzine
scene (as I recall there’d been a couple of letters attacking me as an individual
by over-entitled superhero fans, which at the time I found to be a compelling
reason to sever my connections with that milieu), I had called to my attention a
number of unpleasant comments and insinuations regarding me and my work which Grant
Morrison was making in the promotional platform/fanzine column that he was
selflessly providing for one of these publications. This was somewhat annoying and
I concluded, not unreasonably in my opinion, that this was evidently some pallid
species of career-tapeworm that one might perhaps expect to pick up in the
parasite-infested waters of the comic business; a fame-hungry individual without
the talent necessary to satisfy his inflated ambitions who had decided to connect
himself with my name by simultaneously borrowing heavily from my work and making
studiedly controversial statements about me in comic-book fanzines grateful for any
free content from supposed professionals.

>>
Anonymous 01/02/23(Mon)18:09:57 No.134804200▶

>I decided that the best thing I could do about this needy limpet was to ignore
him and everything connected with him, reasoning that acknowledging his existence
by replying to his allegations would only be assisting his strenuous scrabble for
notoriety, and would be involving me in a debate with some feverishly fixated non-
entity (we didn’t have the word ‘stalker’ back then) in whom I had absolutely no
interest. I avoided his work, which seemed no great hardship as there was no real
reason to revisit ideas that it appeared either Michael Moorcock or I had
formulated several years earlier. On the rare occasions when his name came up in
interviews, I would give the formula reply that since I didn’t read or have any
opinions about his work, it would be unfair for me to comment upon it. It was my
hope that this tactic might eventually persuade my own personal 18th century
medicinal leech to clamp himself onto some more promising and responsive subject,
but it’s been around thirty years by now and I am seriously starting to doubt the
effectiveness of my own strategy. I’m frankly beginning to feel as if some more
conclusive approach might be called for.

>>
Anonymous 01/02/23(Mon)18:10:58 No.134804216▶

>And although he certainly implied that he’d only employed this ugly technique
during his disadvantaged entry into the field, as far as I can tell he never
actually stated in so many words that he’d stopped, or that he’d ever had enough
imagination to engineer another means of drawing attention to himself and his
otherwise unrewarding product. I presume that in the world which Grant Morrison and
his fellow mediocrities inhabit, where the worth of one’s work is a remote
consideration after one’s bank balance and degree of celebrity, these methods are
seen as completely legitimate or even in some way entertaining.
>It appears that he never developed to a degree where he felt he could safely
abandon either his sniping criticisms of my work or his Happy Shopper emulation of
the same. I remember some several months after my announcement of the fractal
mathematics-based Big Numbers, or The Mandelbrot Set as it was originally known, I
had someone call my attention to a Mandelbrot set that had been spuriously
shoehorned into the plot of an issue of Grant Morrison’s superhero comic Animal
Man. This may, admittedly, have been no more than trivial and unimportant
coincidence, and yet over the next year or so it would come more and more to look
like Morrison’s sole creative strategy and an obvious extension of his strange ‘I
felt they were really my ideas’ ethos. I remember Eddie Campbell advancing the
theory that Grant Morrison had arrived at most of his published works around this
time by reading my early press releases concerning projects which it would take me
years to complete and then rushing into print with his limited conception of what
he thought my work might end up being like. I announce From Hell and in short order
he ‘has the idea’ for a comic strip account of a historical serial murderer.

>>
Anonymous 01/02/23(Mon)18:11:59 No.134804229▶

>I announce Lost Girls, a lengthy erotic work involving characters from
fiction, and within a few months he has somehow managed to conceptualise a Vertigo
mini-series along exactly those lines. What I at first believed to be the actions
of an ordinary comic-business career plagiarist came to take on worrying aspects of
cargo cultism, as if this funny little man believed that by simply duplicating all
of my actions, whether he understood them or not, he could somehow become me and
duplicate my success. It would appear that at one stage, as an example, he had
concluded that the secret to being a big-time acclaimed comic-writer was to be
found in having a memorable hairstyle. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the possession of
talent, hard-earned craft or even his own ideas would seem never to have occurred
to him.
>Having removed myself as much as possible from a comic scene that seemed more
the province of posturing would-be pop-stars than people with a genuine respect for
themselves, their craft or the medium in which they were working, I could only
marvel when the customary several months after I’d announced my own entry into
occultism and the visionary episode which I believed Steve Moore and myself to have
experienced in January, 1994, Grant Morrison apparently had his own mystical vision
and decided that he too would become a magician. (It wasn’t until I read Lance
Parkin’s biography that I learned that as a result of Morrison’s apparently
unwitnessed magical epiphany he had boldly decided to pursue a visionary path of
‘materialism and hedonism’. Could I point out for the benefit of anyone who may
have been taking this idiotic shit seriously that this doesn’t sound so much like a
mystical vision as it does an episode of The Only Way Is Essex? How does this
magical discipline and philosophy differ in any way from the rapacious Thatcherite
ideologies of the decade in which Grant Morrison wriggled his way to prominence?)

>>
Anonymous 01/02/23(Mon)18:13:00 No.134804243▶>>134804486

>I’m reliably informed that he has recently made the unprecedented move of
expressing his dissatisfaction with the superhero industry, if only because there
isn’t as much money in it as there used to be, and I imagine that there is a very
strong likelihood that he will contrive to die within four to six months of my own
demise, after leaving pre-dated documents testifying to the fact that he actually
predeceased me.
>Through the early years of this present century, as he somehow managed to
perpetuate his career seemingly without the accomplishment of any major or
memorable works, he apparently still found it necessary to keep up his running
commentary on me and my writings through the very 21st century medium of a self-
aggrandising website. I would occasionally have easily-amused industry associates
insist upon passing on his latest hilarious sliver of Wildean wit, having conceived
of no earthly reason why I shouldn’t find it as rib-tickling as they had evidently
done. As I recall there was a particularly amusing piece where he’d suggested I
should put a naked picture of myself on the front cover of Promethea because he
(probably correctly) assumed that he and his discerning readership would very much
like to see a image of my ‘todger’. (For American readers, I should perhaps explain
that this is a cuddly, stuffed-toy-sounding euphemism used by British people who
are too well brought-up to resort to words like cock or even penis.) While I
understand that there is a large section of the superhero comic-book community who
can see nothing at all unusual in one man being unable to stop talking about
another, nor even in making a ‘jocular’ request to be allowed to look at his
genitals, they should probably be made aware that from the recipient’s perspective
this will obviously start to look like a genuine and long-sustained clammy
infatuation which is (barely) sublimating its sexual component in saucy Carry On-
style banter.

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Anonymous 01/02/23(Mon)18:14:00 No.134804261▶

>It became difficult not to see this decades-long campaign of trying to attract
my attention as some kind of grotesquely protracted schoolboy crush, or as a form
of thwarted and entirely unwanted love.
>This growing impression was only accentuated as I neared the end of my run on
the America’s Best Comics titles when I was called by a colleague who happened to
be related by marriage to one of Grant Morrison’s artistic collaborators and
associates. It seemed that Grant Morrison had insisted on employing these third and
fourth parties in order to ‘reach out’ to me and ask if we couldn’t perhaps be
friends. Now, I understand that to a certain strata of the people reading this, my
reaction of appalled incredulity will only provide more evidence of my apparently
unfathomable and wildly eccentric nature, but this really isn’t how men in their
fifties behave in the world that I come from. Why would I conceivably want to be
the friend of someone who had never even previously been an acquaintance, whom I’d
only previously ever met when he inveigled his way into a meal with associates in
order to see if I could help him with his career, and who had subsequently
orchestrated a campaign of abuse for the self-confessed purpose of making himself
“famous” without recourse to anything difficult like effort or ability? When I
raised these questions, it was suggested that Grant Morrison himself might argue
that he was just being “a bit Johnny Rotten; a bit Punk Rock”, to which I pointed
out that as far as I was aware John Lydon hails from a working class background,
and that by his own admission Grant Morrison had spent most of the Punk era in his
room for fear of being spoken to roughly by some uncouth person with a pink Mohawk
and a U.K. Subs t-shirt.

Anonymous 01/02/23(Mon)18:15:02 No.134804274▶

>It was at this point that I decided a more stringent anti-bacterial attitude to
both him and the modern comic-scene environment in which he appears to flourish had
become necessary. Without public fuss, I began to inform publishers of Grant
Morrison’s work, starting with Jonathan Cape, that they should neither contact me
nor send me any of their merchandise in future. Given the distance that I had
already withdrawn from comic-scene matters, it seemed probable that I’d also have
little difficulty in quietly disengaging myself from any people who considered
themselves a friend, collaborator or close associate of his, and in this way
further quarantine myself from a world in which I haven’t been interested for a
long time, just in case anyone hadn’t noticed. The announcement sometime later that
our neo-punk firebrand had accepted an M.B.E from the current pauper-culling
coalition government, naturally, only confirmed me in the wisdom of my decision: I
don’t want to associate with people I consider to be massively privileged Tories,
nor with anyone who doesn’t see anything wrong in doing so. I particularly wish to
avoid all of those who have struck rebellious or radical poses while always
remaining careful not to offend their employers or to make any kind of moral or
political statement that may later jeopardise their career prospects; all of the
rebels without a scratch.
>I think this brings us pretty much up to where we came in, with me arriving at
the launch of Magic Words having read my would-be friend Grant Morrison’s
characterisation of me as a writer with a rape in every single series he’s ever
written. And then, after what had seemed a genuinely pleasant event, being made
aware of the uproar orchestrated by the persons dealt with above (once more
exempting the American photographer who I feel may have a genuine grievance which
is in my opinion misdirected in this instance, although she is of course entitled
to think otherwise).

Anonymous 01/02/23(Mon)18:16:03 No.134804286▶

>I hope the fact that I’m answering at such wearying length over the Christmas
period – it’s now the 27th – demonstrates the seriousness with which I am taking
your questions; possibly a far greater degree of seriousness than many of those who
originally posed them. It might also indicate to a perceptive reader that I
wouldn’t be doing this, at my advanced age, if I had any intention of doing this or
anything remotely like it ever again. While many of you have been justifiably
relaxing with your families or loved ones, I have been answering allegations about
my obsession with rape, and re-answering several-year-old questions with regard to
my perceived racism. I don’t imagine that anyone who has been following my career
to even a cursory extent will be in any doubt regarding how I’m likely to respond
to that, given my considerable previous form in such unwelcome situations.
>As already stated, any publishers, friends, artistic collaborators or other
close associates of Grant Morrison or Laura Sneddon should not approach me in
future. Further to this, any periodicals or institutions which publish or have
published interviews with Grant Morrison should similarly not attempt to contact
me. To be brutally honest, I’d prefer it if, as with the Before Watchmen re-
creators, their associates and their readers, admirers of Grant Morrison’s work
would please stop reading mine, as I don’t think it fair that my respect and
affection for my own readership should be compromised in any way by people that I
largely believe to be shallow and undiscriminating. So far so predictable, perhaps,
but an outcry over my appearance at an event which I myself had not seen as being
specifically comic-related suggests that these measures are going by no means far
enough.