All-Star Superman: Grant Morrison Discusses the Adaptation of His Comic Maxi-Series

What follows is an excerpt from the interview:

COMIC BOOK RESOURCES: What were your thoughts on them turning your story into a film? Some people often argue that comics, especially something like "All Star," simply can't be translated into a movie.

GRANT MORRISON: I don't know. I think comics is kind of a movie of a different kind. They both share the same idea of a good story. Everyone likes a good story, so I think it's one of the things of translating from one medium to another. That was why I was interested in seeing it. I was always interested in seeing everything moving and that transformation that it goes through. It was an experience for me to see what they could make out of it and I was very pleased with the results.

COMIC BOOK RESOURCES: When talking about "All Star Superman," people often refer to it as the Silver Age Superman with Modern Age sensibilities. But if you look at the comic, there are so many different eras of Superman present in the issues. When you originally sat down to write it, what went through your head as you created the Superman we ended up seeing on the page?

GRANT MORRISON: It was really trying to get down, "What is the essential Superman?" There are really three different eras, and I read all of them, from the 1938 Superman, the scrappy socialist who can only leap an eighth of a mile, to the 1950s Superman, who is always in major peril but his problems were still human problems, whether losing his hair or getting fat or growing old. He was kind of the most normal of them all. Then, the superhuman Superman of the 70s, who is just a scorecard of a guy fighting bad guys and other superheroes.

I tried to think about, "In all through these versions, what stayed the same?" Because something always stayed same. Every writer who does Superman has to make it seem like this is the new definitive Superman. So, even if there has been a lot of different versions, for me it was about finding the core of it. I found that in some of those '50s and 60s comics, what made them great was, just as I said, they were about real human emotions and real human stories, but played out in this huge scale of other planets and people from the future and relatives from other worlds and monsters and robots.

But really, it's about walking the dog and going out with a girl and messing things up. I think that's why maybe people think of "All Star Superman" as a bit more Silver Age in the sense of trying to do new, modern real human stories, but on the giant scale of Superman. That's the most interesting thing, is the "man." The best stories are just about this guy trying to make sense of stuff and the girl doesn't like him as much as he wishes she would. The bad guy hates him, but he likes the bad guy. That real, small human emotional stuff works great when you blow it up to cosmic proportions.

COMIC BOOK RESOURCES: A lot of people who aren't Superman fans always complain that he's not interesting because he's so powerful. "How is there drama when he can punch a planet in two?" But like you said, it's about the events being cosmic, but the story being about the man.

GRANT MORRISON: The best Superman stories, particularly in that era I was talking about, is stuff like "The Death of Superman" and "Superman's Return to Krypton." There were really love stories or stories of grief, but as I said, you do them on a biblical scale with cosmic weaponry and space ships and it looks great. I think comic books should be about that stuff. I love the comics that have big energy and superheroes in big conflicts. As you said, Superman can be as powerful as you like, but his heart can be broken and that's why it doesn't matter if he can throw planets. If you break his heart, he's useless. The emotional stories are always the big thing with Superman.

For the full interview, follow the link.