No Guru, No Method, No Teacher: “Grant Morrison” and GrantMorrison™

‘The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work’

(Yeats, ‘The Choice’)

The Author, like Varese and Zappa’s modern-day composer, stubbornly refuses to accept Barthes’ declaration of death. The role of author as celebrity has never been stronger than in the era of 24/7, global web fandoms, and comics are not immune to this phenomenon, as we see in the deliberate and careful cultivation of public personae by writers such as Warren Ellis, Neil Gaiman, and the subject of this article, Grant Morrison. It comes as no surprise that a writer whose work plays so often with shifting identities and roles should display consummate skill in presenting and controlling his own image, and what I shall do here is examine Morrison’s self-presentation as character, both within and beyond his works, an act of auto-fictionalization which is playful, inspirational, and, as his recent position in Alan Moore’s critical cross-hairs shows, often contentious.