Prolific writer Grant Morrison sat down with USA Today last weekend to talk about his upcoming finale of Batman Incorporated (check out previews here!), his writing habits, and his upcoming work on Wonder Woman: Earth One, a 120-page graphic novel with artwork by Yanick Paquette.
interior art by Yanick Paquette
“With Wonder Woman, I’ve been listening to tons and tons of Elizabethan music like Thomas Tallis and Palestrina.” Morrison continued, “I’ve got this idea of the Amazons being in the Age of Elizabeth, which was led by a woman, and it was a very psychedelic period with Shakespeare and all that sort of stuff. So there’s a little of that influence on the culture of the Amazons. I’ve been listening to that music to get that sense of a slightly alien culture but that’s really highly developed and has different aesthetics than we do but is able to really express itself. Think of the language in Shakespeare at the time, which was really elaborate and elusive, and the music was the same.”
When asked what readers can expect in terms of story, Morrison had these details:
“I’m really focusing a lot more on the mother and daughter story in it between Hippolyta and Diana. I want it to be that kind of book, a story about women.”
“I always felt one of the fundamentals of Wonder Woman in at least the last two decades is that she always seems to be on 
trial, and I don’t mean that in a story sense. Everyone’s always saying, ‘Why does nobody buy Wonder Woman? Why isn’t she any good?’ It seems like she’s always on trial, so I thought if I literalized that and made the story basically the Amazons bringing her back home after her first adventure away and putting her on trial, it’d be different from anything else you might see. The Amazons have their own ways of doing things.”
“It’s kind of asking Wonder Woman to justify herself, which I feel has almost been what the character’s had to do for a long time.”
The character has certainly had a tough time justifying herself as a profitable film property: David E. Kelley’s failed Wonder Woman pilot, the CW live action show Amazons indefinitely shelved, and DC Entertainment’s president Diane Nelson’s less than encouraging words about the character being “tricky” to adapt to the movie screen.
Grant Morrison weighed in with his thoughts on the matter: “People have just convinced themselves that that’s true. I know Warner Bros. isn’t particularly keen on launching movies with female leads, and most of the big studios aren’t. It’s just a thing in Hollywood — they have fears about this. They also believe the audience is composed mainly of 18- to 30-year-old men who don’t want to know about women.
The executives just run these things over in their heads and say, “I don’t know if it’s worth putting money into this. It’s not a surefire hit. The boys want to see Batman brooding.” Believe me, that’s what they think: “Boys don’t want to see a bunch of Amazons running around.”
Wonder Woman: Earth One is scheduled to be released in 2014, though no specific release date has been set. We’ll update you with more information as it becomes available!
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Source: USA Today
