"Grant Morrison is proof that comics are a wonderful thing..."

I swear Morrison's interviews are almost better than his comics. Excerpts, from Pop Thought:

AN: Why do you write?

GM: I write to live and to make sense of things. Words and voices come out of my head when I ask them to and I write them down and show them to people, at which point the stuff from my head miraculously converts into money, then the money turns into houses and cat food and trips abroad and clothes and savings. I view the process as pure sorcery and treat it with the respect and devotion it deserves.
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The weird thing is that I did many of these things force the sole purpose of having experiences worthy of putting into stories, so, if I hadn't wanted to include Australian magic, Jeet Kune Do, or the tawdry allure of transvestite glam in The Invisibles, I might never have gone there or done that. Instead, I've been round the world three times on my own and with friends, visited a ton of countries, and had loads of mad relationships and weird experiences. This is how a hypersigil works to change the world around you. This is total surrender to the text, total immersion and deliberate self-annihilation. I'm not doing 'stories', I'm desperately writing biography to celebrate life in this world and to negotiate with depression and meaninglessness. I become possessed by characters and texts to the point where my own 'personality' is reconfigured and it's partly what gives my comics their particular, occult, and often irritatingly 'cultish' flavour, I reckon.
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All I can say is, there may just be some readers who are TOO DUMB for comics but they're not a part of my audience.
So Joe Six-Pack? He can f*** off for a start.
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All stories are filled with metaphor, like all of human life... My own personal taste doesn't run to literal work or stuff where everything's neatly explained to me and tied in a 'clever' bow. The world's a big, wild mess and I like to reflect that. As a reader, I like to join in and not just watch, if you see what I mean, so as a writer my intention has always been to create experiences which deliberately raise questions or suggest further, untold stories and don't necessarily have one easy solution or outcome. I like to leave people with something to talk about and fire their own imaginations and I'm trying to capture the real patterns of real life.

To elaborate on that, in real life, people say things they don't actually mean and they don't have little thought balloons or captions hovering nearby to explain what they're really thinking: even if they did, they'd be thinking several contradictory things at once and in different voices, with pictures and scribbly feelings attached. In real life, we judge people by how their actions and their words match up. In real life, we don't get all the facts but have to use our logic and emotions and sense of smell to draw our own conclusions. In real life, two people can appear to be having the same conversation while actually discussing several quite different things.

In real life, conversations are peppered with weird dead ends, misunderstandings, interruptions, surrealist non sequiturs and in-jokes. In real life, you don't get neatly-controlled dramatic set-ups and resolutions. In real life, the writer isn't nearly as clever as he'd like to appear on the page. And so on.
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As I said, metaphor occurs naturally in ANY story. The fact that Tolkien's Ring can easily stand in for the Bomb, or for Addiction, or for any number of things - which it can - doesn't seem to hamper people's enjoyment of the elephant fights in 'The Lord of the Rings', so metaphorical content shouldn't be looked upon as anything highbrow or unusual. I tend to see it everywhere, but that's just how I'm wired up. I don't know about you, but I can't look at Godzilla without seeing the atom bomb over Nagasaki, the screaming, hyper-enthusiastic shopgirls of Shibuya, Tokyo, and the devastating smile of the goddess Amaterasu, among other things, all piled on top of one another and representing the very same something.

Metaphor's there to be read or applied if you want to enrich your experience of art. It can just as easily be ignored if all you want to do is watch the action and look at the weird, cool pictures. The same is true of my comics, or anyone else's. There's subtext everywhere, but you don't have to bother with it if it's not your thing. Just dance to the beat of the story, and if you don't 'understand' everything, well, good. It'll stand you in good stead for the real world - a place filled with people and events you will NEVER entirely understand. You don't have to understand an experience in order to have it. You will, in fact, DIE not understanding most of what goes on in the world and why. Don't sweat it. Dance with it.
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Politics, in the sense of party antics and showbiz elections, is just misdirection and bullshit to divert our attention from the real work of the world, which is all done by very rich people we don't get to see much of. Once you've watched a couple of governments do their pathetic dance and come and go, you've really seen it all. The same kinds of people do exactly the same kinds of things and continually try to keep us interested in their daft, unconvincing shtick. I lost interest once I realised how boring, repetitive and stage managed the whole circus is, with even a new Bush cropping up every generation. All I want my elected officials to do is make the trains run on time and stop spending my tax money on useless weapons of war, so I'm already screwed.
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Seaguy is about a naive, would-be hero in a super-commercialized world where a state of permanent, ignorant happiness is ruthlessly enforced by a mysterious, well-meaning, but misguided, elite who have reduced the population to an infantile level and somehow neutralized all the superheroes by making them feel stupid and out of date. Perhaps that's too close to reality for some readers, but otherwise, what's not to get?
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AN: What is the goal that you have for the work that you do?

GM: To make contact and Find the Others. Something like that, maybe.
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What can I say? The world may be going to hell, but I'm having a great time.