Grant Morrison explains his Man of Steel
When it comes to writing, the most interesting aspect of iconic comic-book characters is the flexibility of intepretation. Writers representing wildly different ambitions, genres, generations and cultural backgrounds have been able to make their ideas fly with success, which is why there's enough room, somehow, inside Batman's cape for Bob Kane, Frank Miller, Tim Burton, Adam West, Bruce Timm and Christopher Nolan.
But there's can be downsides in the comic books, however. These are ongoing adventures, at least on some level, and readers often reflexively look for some sort of continuity. There's also the numbing clutter of so many competing mythologies through the years -- not to mention some pretty bad fashion choices. What's a writer to do if he or she wants to achieve something that is both fresh but alo "true" to the character? Grant Morrison reveals a lot about the choices a writer must make when approaching a character like Superman during this looooong answer to a question posed by Zack Smith about the starting-point context for Morrison's highly regarded run on "All Star Superman," which took the Man of Steel into a setting that was entirely new but, as it turns out, quite familiar.
'All Star Superman' could be read as the adventures of the ‘original’ pre-'Crisis on Infinite Earths' Superman, returning after 20 plus years of adventures we never got to see because we were watching John Byrne's 'new' Superman on the other channel. If ‘Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?’ and the Byrne reboot had never happened, where would that guy be now?
This was more to provide a sense, probably limited and ill-considered, of what the tone of the book might be like. I never intended 'All Star Superman' as a direct continuation of the [Mort] Weisinger or Julius Schwartz-era Superman stories. The idea was always to create another new version of Superman using all my favorite elements of past stories, not something ‘age’ specific.
I didn’t collect Superman comics until the ‘70s and I’m not interested enough in pastiche or nostalgia to spend 6 years of my life playing post-modern games with Superman. 'All Star' isn’t written, drawn or colored to look or read like a Silver Age comic book. 'All Star Superman' is not intended as arch commentary on continuity or how trends in storytelling have changed over the decades. It’s not retro or meta or anything other than its own simple self; a piece of drawing and writing that is intended by its makers to capture the spirit of its subject to the best of their capabilities, wisdom and talent.
