Grant Morrison won't shut up!

This week several excellent interviews with Grant Morrison have popped up online. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Morrison and his work, he's a comic book writer, a magician, a musician, and a damn interesting dude. He's probably best known for his run on The Invisibles, a semi autobiographical adventure/conspiracy tale that is still being dissected and studied by those with much more time on their hands than I.

The first interview goes into his writing process and although the interviewer does seem a bit fanboyish, it's a great read. In the second interview, he outlines his ideas for Hypertime, a concept he has come up with to help explain the tangled continuity of the DC Comics universe, but it goes much further than that...

'Hypertime' was the name Mark Waid gave to a concept of cosmic geometry I'd come up with, one bleary night in San Diego - given that the DCU has a Time LINE, the idea started as a consideration of what might exist beyond the Time Line, on the Time PLANE, or even in the mysterious Time CUBE . The theory allowed every comic story you ever read to be part of a larger-scale mega-continuity, which also includes other comic book 'universes' as well as the 'real world' we live in and dimensions beyond our own. It was also about how the world of fiction relates literally and geometrically to the world of 'reality'. Some of its basic features have even been echoed in current cosmological ideas emerging from the field of superstring research and M-Theory. Skip the rest of this answer if you can't be bothered with crazy talk.

We all live in Hypertime - in our 3-Dimensional level of Hypertime, which can be seen as CUBE TIME in relation to the DCU's LINE TIME, we can pick up comics and leaf through them, flipping in any direction - 'time traveling' back and forward through the 'continuity' like some new Doctor Who! I have a suspicion, based upon experience, that in HYPERCUBE TIME, there exist intelligences who stand in relation to our 3-D universe as we stand in relation to the 2-D universe of our comic book, film or TV heroes and who can leaf through our lives and times with the same ease we can leaf through Superman’s history but that's just me.

Heady stuff, that.

If you want more there's an interview about his current mega-opus Seven Soldiers here. The New York Times, even did a story on the architecture in Seven Soldiers, which is no longer available from them for free. Luckily, the text of the article is here.