![]() #BATMAN ARKHAM ASYLUM POSTER MOVIE#GM: Ultimately, all of us who stay alive long enough will face that moment when we fully understand that we are here to be replaced in the end, that we are no longer the glamorous young stars of the movie but now must assume secondary ‘character’ roles! There’s a fear there obviously but also a kind of relief. What were you thinking about in terms of capturing the passage of time? MO: Luda is often a contemplation of aging and fear of replacement. Pantomime’s simulated, artificial world of gender and culture confusion appealed to me as the setting for the novel a perfect microcosm of our world where everyone is in drag, filtered, mediated, curated, acting out ideal selves in a world of chaos and confusion. Originally a story from the Thousand and One Nights collection of Middle Eastern folk tales, the pantomime Aladdin is set instead in in Peking where the young Aladdin becomes the son of Widow Twankey, a Chinese washerwoman! Of all the pantomime ‘Dame’ roles, traditionally played by men in drag, the formidable Widow Twankey is the gold standard, so tackling that character meant going to Aladdin. It’s one of those things so deeply baked into a typical British childhood that we tend to take it for granted. #BATMAN ARKHAM ASYLUM POSTER TV#Every year we’d be taken to see a motley collection of TV and screen stars make flamboyant fools of themselves in these deranged and lavish musical spectaculars. GM: As a kid in Scotland, pantomime was a staple of growing up. The idea of a single label adequate to that process seems absurd. Grant Morrison: At the simplest level, I suppose I want to say that ‘identity’, at least from my point of view, appears to be conditional and refuses to be contained by any label how does the ‘identity’ of a person as a two year old child square with that same person’s alleged ‘identity’ as a 40-year old or as a dying 90-year old in a failing physical frame – our bodies and minds and how we feel about ourselves, and who we are within a larger constantly shifting and rearranging system, are subject to such radical transformations over decades that were we to speed a human life up to last ten minutes rather than 80 years the result would resemble a radical metamorphic shifting of shape and size, intellectual capacity and ‘personality’. What did you want to say about the identities we are assigned, and assume? Molly Odintz: Luda is all about the instability of identity, exemplified by drag. Morrison was kind enough to answer a few questions about genre, gender, drag, and the art of pantomime. Their debut novel, Luda, is the story of an aging drag queen usurped by their promising protégé while performing a pantomime. Grant Morrison is best known for their innovative work on comics, from the graphic novel Batman: Arkham Asylum to acclaimed runs on Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the X-Men, as well as their subversive creator-owned titles such as The Invisibles, Seaguy, The Filth, and WE3. ![]()
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