Winning Friends And Influencing People: Grant Morrison On Batman

Grant Morrison was in Playboy this month. He was young, he needed the money. Thank you folks; I’ll be here all week… I live here.

But seriously: one month after featuring Michonne’s origin story from The Walking Dead, Playboy’s latest issue features an interview with Morrison that’s based around short blurb quotes about characters Morrison has written. Playboy seems to have a sudden enthusiasm for comics these days; perhaps Hef has realized that comic book fan are amongst the only people actually buying printed periodical magazines these days… although it’s more likely that he saw a picture of Rogue by Jim Lee and wheedled, “Get that big boobed girl for the centerfold! And someone change my diaper! We are at full boom-boom alert!” But I digress.

Morrison has some interesting things to say about characters he’s had a hand in – particularly King Mob and Fanny from The Invisibles – but he saves his most… shall we say, interesting… comments for Batman:

[Batman]’s very plutonian in the sense that he’s wealthy and also in the sense that he’s sexually deviant. Gayness is built into Batman. I’m not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There’s just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he’s intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay. I think that’s why people like it. All these women fancy him and they all wear fetish clothes and jump around rooftops to get to him. He doesn’t care—he’s more interested in hanging out with the old guy and the kid.

Oh Grant… there’s nothing more heartwarming than to hear a comic book creator say things about one of my favorite comic book characters that sound eerily similar to what the jocks in junior high school used to say about him, usually while bending me over a toilet and applying a vigorous swirlie. Which in and of itself was totally not gay (I quickly learned to say that in order to avoid a second swirlie).

While I recognize that it is not an insult to refer to someone as gay, that is because I am an adult. Grant Morrison has just supplied ammunition to every school bully with access to his dad’s Playboys to torment young comics enthusiasts for the next 20 years: “See, geek? Even the guy who writes Batman thinks he’s a homo! And by extension, you must also enjoy the company of men! Because you read Batman! Ha ha! (flush)”

Whoops! Sorry, for a second I thought it was still 1982, back when some kids still read comics. Or Playboy.