I remember, as odd as this is, a point where I was noticing the names of the writers and artists of my favorite comics, but hadn’t quite gotten my head around it all just yet. Paying attention to names started, I think when I really got into the X-Men — a point when I was… maybe 10 or 11 years old, and had decided with the confidence and certainly that you feel at that age that I was collecting comics now, this was a thing I did — and it seemed like a sign of my newfound focus on comics as a thing that I was into. Yet, years later, all of these people whose names I recognized month in, month out (or week in, week out when it came to the British comics) seemed… unearthly. Unreal, somehow. They weren’t real, they were unattainable. They were as fictional to me as Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne themselves.
At some point, in what was apparently early 1988 from looking back at publication dates — I would’ve been 13 at the time — DC house ads started appearing, advertising the upcoming launch of Animal Man, written by Grant Morrison. I knew who Grant Morrison was, having enjoyed his Zenith in the pages of 2000 AD for awhile, but the concept of the same man managing to write both British and American comics broke my brain entirely. That, I decided in my unformed brain, was surely impossible. Far more likely, I deducted, was that there were two entirely separate men both called Grant Morrison who both wrote comics. What an unlikely coincidence, I told myself!
I can’t remember how long I held this impossibly dumb idea in my head; certainly, by the time Animal Man was actually coming out, I’d realized the error of my ways. (There was probably something in an early issue emphasizing that it was, in fact, the same man.) The dscovery that someone from Britain — from Scotland, not that far from where I lived, even! — could write for American comics was something that, in its own way, changed the way I saw the world. Somehow, everything seemed a little bigger, a little more possible. If you could come from where I did and do that, what else could you do, I asked myself?