The dream: I was in a supermarket, standing near two men whom I vaguely recognised. A small child went up to them and said, "You must be the fathers of Grant Morrison and Pat Kane." He was wrong, though -- as soon as he said that, I instantly realised that they were Grant Morrison and Pat Kane. I also knew that both of them felt bad about having grown so old that they could be mistaken for their own fathers.
They went upstairs to a small cafe, where they discussed the project they were working on, which was the plot outline for the new season of Dr Who. They both agreed that the Daleks had become terribly unfrightening since the series was brought back, and that overuse had more or less finished them in their present form. "Remember the old days of Dalekmania back in the 60s?" said Grant. "Those Dalek comics were so colourful and fun, with their strange Dalek-shaped spaceships and assortment of weird Dalek attachments, and that big, bulbous-headed emperor Dalek." Pat Kane saw where Grant was going, and realised that the only way to make the Daleks interesting again was to recreate them in a sort of crazy pop-art style. This was going to be the best season of Dr Who ever.
Notes for Freudian Interpretation: My, this is a nerdy one. You might not be familiar with Grant Morrison, but he writes comics. I was a big fan of his back in the 80s, when he wrote such great scripts for 2000AD that I suspected he must be Alan Moore using a pseudonym, but he turned out to be an actual, real-life person in his own right. I haven't read anything by him since the DC series, Doom Patrol, in the 1990s, but the day I had this dream, someone had told me that they'd really enjoyed his recent 12-issue run on Superman, which, apparently, returned to the series' classic, 50s/60s mythology and tone.
One of the things that interests me about the Superman revamp is that the creative team are all Scottish. Not only that, but one of them (the colourist, but still) was a couple of years ahead of me at high school.
I like Pat Kane considerably less than I like Grant Morrison. In the 80s, I couldn't stand the band he was in, Hue and Cry, but I also found special reason to dislike him in his stupid decision to resign from the magazine he wrote for, The Cut, because they refused to stop publishing a Grant Morrison strip called The New Adventures of Hitler, which he didn't like because, it seemed to me at the time, he was a humourless, unimaginative, pompous dullard. I think I might have been right, too.
The day I had the dream, I'd heard Pat Kane's wife (a journalist) talking about AC/DC, who she didn't like. She was proud that her husband hadn't written anything as morally reprehensible (by which I understood her to mean "fun") as AC/DC's "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", and I told her that I bet he wished he had. But she couldn't hear me, as she was on the radio.
If I think about Grant Morrison, there's a chance I'll be reminded of Pat Kane, and if I think about Pat Kane, I'll definitely be reminded of Grant Morrison. The day I had the dream, I thought about them both, which is why they showed up in the dream later on. I don't think that Daleks featured in the day at all, but I could be wrong. However, I entirely agree with dream-Grant that they were better in the 1960s comics than they are now. Look at this old Dalek annual, for example -- it's got dinosaurs and everything!
Comments