Empire Online reports Grant Morrison is attached a film based on the 2000AD character Rogue Trooper:
With all eyes on the incoming Judge Dredd movie, it makes sense that savvy producers would be looking to legendary British comic 2000AD for further inspiration. Hence the news this morning that a Rogue Trooper film is in development at Sam Worthington’s production company, and that cult comics writer Grant Morrison (Arkham Asylum, Final Crisis, Superman) is at work on the screenplay. […]
Morrison never wrote for the strip, but did provide copious Future Shocks, Zenith, and a handful of Dredds, so has plenty of 2000AD heritage. The news of a film and of Worthington and Morrison’s involvement is buried in a Daily Record story that mostly concentrates on Dinosaurs vs Aliens, the property that Morrison is currently working on with Barry Sonnenfeld. It’s an aside so sketchy that it doesn’t even come with a Morrison quote to back it up, so whether Worthington is developing the film with a view to personally slapping on the blue paint remains to be seen. We’ll bring you further details as they emerge.
The first superhero comic ever published, Action Comics #1 in 1938, introduced the world to something both unprecedented and profoundly familiar: Superman, a caped god for the modern age. In a matter of years, the skies of the imaginary world were filled with strange mutants, aliens, and vigilantes: Batman, Wonder Woman, the Fantastic Four, Captain Marvel, Iron Man, and the X-Men—the list of names is as familiar as our own. In less than a century they’ve gone from not existing at all to being everywhere we look: on our movie and television screens, in our videogames and dreams. But why?
For Grant Morrison, possibly the greatest of contemporary superhero storytellers, these heroes are not simply characters but powerful archetypes whose ongoing, decades-spanning story arcs reflect and predict the course of human existence: Through them, we tell the story of ourselves. In this exhilarating book, Morrison draws on history, art, mythology, and his own astonishing journeys through this alternate universe to provide the first true chronicle of the superhero—why they matter, why they will always be with us, and what they tell us about who we are.
It’s now available for pre-order. No cover art yet, though.
You have just over 24 hours to sign-up for The Invisible Community College if you have not done so already. Please see this post for more information. Enrollment ends at 5:00 PM PST January 23, 2011.
The Invisible Community College is a study group dedicated to Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles moderated by Popjellyfish, Trevor Blake and me. Weekly reading assignments will be sent to a mailing list for one year beginning January 23, 2011. If you would like to participate, you must sign-up for the mailing list before then.
There will be monthly public, in-person discussions in Portland, OR based on the reading. Those in other cities are encouraged to organize their own study cells.
Registration is Now Closed
Curriculum:
‘The Invisibles’ by Grant Morrison.
‘Our Sentence is Up’ by Patrick Meane
‘Anarchy For The Masses’ by Patrick Neighly
‘Grant Morrison’ by Patrick Meaney
The Invisibles
Available as individual issues, in digital form for the iPad, collected trade paperbacks and in an incomplete form in German-language trade paperbacks. Individual issues out of print, include letters to and from GM not collected in trade paperbacks. Trade paperbacks in print, include art not found in individual issues.
Individual monthly issues published by DC Comics 1994 – 2000:
Volume 1 Issues 1-25: September 1994 – October 1996
Volume 2 Issues 1-22: February 1997 – February 1999
Volume 3 Issues 12-1: April 1999 – June 2000
Individual Digital Issues
Available through DC Comics app for the iPad
Trade Paperbacks (English):
1. Say You Want a Revolution. (ISBN 1-5638-9267-7)
2. Apocalipstick. (ISBN 1-5638-9702-4)
3. Entropy in the UK. (ISBN 1-5638-9728-8)
4. Bloody Hell in America. (ISBN 1-5638-9444-0)
5. Counting to None. (ISBN 1-56389-489-0)
6. Kissing Mister Quimper. (ISBN 1-5638-9600-1)
7. The Invisible Kingdom. (ISBN 1-4012-0019-2)
Reference:
Patrick Meaney: Our Sentence is Up / Seeing Grant Morrison’s The
Invisibles. Book. (ISBN 978-0578032337)
Patrick Neighly and Kereth Cowe-Spigai: Anarchy For The Masses / The
Disinformation Guide To The Invisibles. Book. (ISBN 0-971-39422-9)
Patrick Meaney (director): Grant Morrison / Talking with Gods. DVD.
This is the poster for the psychedelic revenge thriller Sinatoro, for which comic book legend Grant Morrison will be writing the screenplay. […]
The film’s producers are Zdonk with video director Adam Egypt Mortimer on board. Grant Morrison describes the film as “a hallucinatory road-trip into the American psyche, and it evolved into a unique and genre-busting project, worthy, we hope, of a new way of thinking about movies.”
For the 18 Days version, we took the Mahabharata’s descriptions of vimanas and astras very literally as accounts of ancient advanced technology and created a vision of the battle at Kurukshetra which combines traditional images of the Mahabharata with a kind of Vedic sci-fi approach which adds a new freshness and modernity to the story. This version is less about trying to create a historically-accurate representation of conflict in ancient India and more about emphasising a timeless, universal and mythic vision that has as much to say about the world we live in today as it does about the past. The transmission of the Bhagavad Gita at the heart of the story opens the way for a metaphorical spiritual understanding of the conflict as the war between desire and duty, the material and the spiritual, that is fought every day by every human being.
The Gita, with its direct, no-nonsense guide to living in the odd universe we all share, is at the very heart of the story, in the sense that everything else revolves around that moment when Krishna lays it on the line for Arjuna.
AVC: A lot of your writing deals with bizarre, speculative concepts. Is that informed by your reading of nonfiction? Do you read a lot about cutting-edge science?
GM: I read loads of science stuff. Science, anthropology, occult stuff… just weird fringe ideas. Those are always helpful to people who do superheroes. So yeah, that stuff goes in. But to me, it’s mostly about experience. The books are helpful to maybe provide metaphor, but for me, it’s about real life. If my dad dies and I’m writing about something like that in All-Star Superman, suddenly I’ve got a story which I may never have had if my dad hadn’t died. So what is the Faustian pact in that one? [Laughs.] But it’s mostly that. It’s things that happen in real life, and feelings that you have that you’ve got to get out, and I think that superhero comics in particular are really useful for talking about big emotions and feelings, and personifying and concretizing symbols.
AVC: Back when you were writing Animal Man, you mentioned that a lot of what you were writing in the book ended up happening in your life shortly afterward, as though you were conjuring events.
GM: Yeah, because I think the only way you can get something out is to invest some real emotion into it, which means you’re already writing about what’s going to happen to you, whether you know it or not. That’s why I’m always surprised when people talk about writer’s block. Because to me, it can’t be stopped. Every news item you see, every thought you have, every strange soap-opera event that happens in my life can be translated into a story and make that story mine. So for me, all that stuff… that’s me, that’s my life. That’s where the engine comes from to write it. I don’t only get it from books.
