10 March 2013

Grant Morrison on the Dynamic of the Duo

Last month Kevin Smith’s Fat Man on Batman podcast featured a three-part conversation with Grant Morrison as he retires from scripting Batman, Incorporated. Most of the discussion appears in episodes #26 and #27, with five minutes about the imminent death of Damian Wayne moved to the start of #28 to avoid spoilers in a story that DC Comics eagerly spoiled.

About 31:30 into the second installment, Morrison once again explains his approach to the Batman mythos, deciding that every era of stories happened (in some form) to Bruce Wayne:

The feral young Batman from 1938 [sic] who’s out there with guns in his hands, and is fighting vampires and crooks, and I thought, well, imagine that’s Batman when he’s twenty. And then he meets this kid when he’s late twenty-one, and the kid’s this little working-class circus kid, who’s totally cocky, and this introverted young-Norman-Bates Batman is suddenly, “Wait a minute, this is the kid that died in me…this is everything I wanted to be.” And the two become friends, and it’s no creepy, no way, it’s just like, “He’s my best friend, my brother, and he’s everything I wish I could be,” and the kid’s looking at him and saying, “He’s everything I wish I could be.”
I had to transcribe and share that passage.

If you download the whole series, don’t miss the exchange at the end of #27 (starting at 55:50) about Morrison’s accent. Smith admits that he worried about being able to understand the interview. Morrison responds by demonstrating “the hard-core killer Glasgow accent.” Try it at home!

3 comments:

Icon_UK said...

Luckily, I don't need to try a Scottish accent, mine comes naturally!

J. L. Bell said...

Can people from other parts of Scotland understand hard-core Glaswegians?

Icon_uk said...

Not always, but perhaps more often than non-Scots, since we'd use many of the same words.

In fact Glaswegian isn't even the most incomprehensible accent, that belongs to the North East, around Aberdeen. The local dialect is known as "Doric" and is quite something, even when spoken at normal speed the words themselves are different from the norm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr0erVo3EP8&list=PLE992B0A51B931DF1&index=7