Posted in: Comics, Current News, Pop Culture | Tagged: frank quitely, grant morrison, robbie williams

When Grant Morrison And Frank Quitely Worked With Robbie Williams

When Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely worked with Robbie Williams... and made him their Jimmy Olsen for All-Star Superman

Published Mon, 30 Dec 2024 07:57:08 -0600

by Rich Johnston

Last updated Mon, 30 Dec 2024 09:05:48 -0600

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Article Summary

Robbie Williams' 2005 album Intensive Care features tarot art by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely.
Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely turned Robbie Williams into a superhero for his Intensive Care tour.
Unaware by DC lawyers, Robbie was the nmodel for Jimmy Olsen in All-Star Superman by Morrison.
Morrison described Williams as someone closer to being a superhero than we might think.

With the release of the movie Better Man, a biopic of international popstar Robbie Williams, international that is everywhere except for the USA, more attention has been brought to his back catalogue. Such as Intensive Care, the album by Robbie Williams, released in 2005 with the singles Tripping, Make Me Pure, Advertising Space and Sin Sin Sin, and a world tour. The album was co-written with Stephen Duffy over two years, and had tarot design artwork designed by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, in response to Williams' request that they "turn him into a superhero" for the tour. The "talismanic images" and "witchy hieroglyphs" include a "sigil" that, in Morrison's words, "can be activated by finding the CD in the shops or pulling the cover up on-screen and pressing Rob's finger. If enough of us do this the world will most certainly enter a new Golden Age of peace, creativity, and prosperity!"

When Grant Morrison And Frank Quitely Worked With Robbie Morrison — Robbie Williams Intensive Care

So that didn't work then. At the time, Grant Morrison also said "We met Robbie Williams, that guy's involved in so much stuff, he's practically single-handedly saving the planet. We might actually be closer to superheroes than you think." Sadly the collaboration between Morrison and Williams did not make it into the movie Better Man, so there were no scenes of a CGI monkey facing down a shaven-headed David Tennant talking about naked chaos magick. Any of that will have to be left to the first edition of Bryan Talbot's Naked Artist tome.

Here's the look of Jimmy Olsen in All-Star Superman. Robbie Williams had asked if he could be involved in it somehow and, without clearing it with DC Comics lawyers who would likely have said no, used him as the model for Jimmy Olsen in the comic. Safe in the knowledge that no American editor or publisher would know who the hell he was… could he have been an All-Star Better Man instead?