Summary
Grant Morrisonis unquestionably one of the greatest writers to ever work in the comics medium. Yet for all the masterpieces the writer has put out through the years, there are an equal number of scripts and concepts that never saw the light of day. Morrison recently shared their script for an unproduced story, and the wildly-ambitious comic might just be their unseen masterpiece.
Morrison explains their radical approach to the story, originally intended forHeavy Metal’s “Psychedelic” issue:
“I’d decided to take the brief seriously and do something ambitious – with the result being this 62-page script for a 14-page comic. My big idea was to create something that could be read in a multitude of ways by cutting and folding panels together.”
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According to Morrison,Heavy Metalwasn’t able to affordMorrison’s longtime collaborator Frank Quitelyto provide the artwork for the story. Subsequent artists failed to work out for one reason or another, leaving Morrison’s monumental script unrealized.“Dors of Perception” would have been an impressive conceptual piece, with the page layout including dotted lines along the panel for the reader to cut. Morrison explains that they realized “the 9-grid would be ideal for cutting and folding,” thus allowing readers to fold panels back in ways that would allow the story to be read in a completely new context.
The Doors of Perceptionis Aldous Huxley’s 1954 memoir describing the author’s early experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.
In many ways, “Dors of Perception” aims to be a compacted history of LSD in western culture, touching on many important figures who experimented with hallucinogens. Morrison includes many of these real-life figures in the story itself, with the title being both a reference to Aldous Huxley’sThe Doors of Perceptionand British starlet Diana Dors. According to Morrison, the writer sought to identify “the different strands of the acid experience,from the Satanic desert dark of the Doors to the Carrollian whimsy of the Beatles and Syd Barrett etc.”
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This history of LSD extends to Morrison wanting to “recreate the feelings and cascading conceptual storm of an LSD trip” for the story itself as a piece of the reading experience:
“I wanted the strip itself to be tactile and interactive, so that it could change every time you played with its flaps. The folding panels meant that whole new meanings and narratives could be created with each crease or cutaway – in many cases, and with so many panels to play with, it was possible to create multiple readings of the story (which meant I had to make all the possible alternative readings coherent and meaningful).”
Sadly, “Dors of Perception” remains unpublished to this day. While it’s a shame that Morrison’s conceptual experiment remains nothing more than a concept, it is nice for fans to be able to read the original script, at the very least. Morrison describes the script as “about the most pyrotechnic thing I’ve done,” but also leaves the possibility of it appearing somewhere else down the line. “I really love this one,” Morrison writes. “Perhaps one day it will get the treatment it deserves.” With any luck,Grant Morrison’s“Dors of Perception” will see the light of day eventually.
