On sale now, the May 2012 issue of Playboy features a new illustration by Frank Quitely depicting frequent collaborator Grant Morrison, as well as an interview with Morrison that includes characteristically provocative remarks from the frequent Batman writer, including his belief that the Batman concept is "utterly gay," that there is "nothing noble" about Magneto, and an update on his long in-progress Wonder Woman story. The excellent Quitely illustration includes many characters strongly associated with the writer including Zenith, the Morrison and Steve Yeowell superhero who I don't think Quitely has drawn before; a seemingly Playboy-ified Zatanna from Morrison and Ryan Sook's Seven Soldiers of Victory: Zatanna; and Flex Mentallo, star of Morrison and Quitely's classic Flex Mentallo: Muscle Man of Mystery, which was recently reissued as a deluxe hardcover.

Click on to see the Playboy artwork in a higher resolution and preview some of Morrison's remarks from the interview within.

Click to enlarge

Entitled "The Super Psyche," the Gavin Edwards feature revisits material that is familiar to longtime Morrison fans -- such as his estimation of superheroes as models for humanity and the future, and his reported encounter with aliens from another dimension -- but includes a section where Morrison offers commentary and trivia about his work, characters and ideas, some of which are quite interesting and provocative.

On Batman:

Gayness is built into Batman. I'm not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay. I think that's why people like it. All these women fancy him and they all wear fetish clothes and jump around rooftops to get to him. He doesn't care -- he's more interested in hanging out with the old guy and the kid.

On Wonder Woman:

The article indicates that Morrison is presently at work on "a stand-alone Wonder Woman graphic novel" for DC Comics. Presumably this is the material Morrison spoke about last year, a Wonder Woman story that deals with the character's feminist and fetishistic origins.

On Magneto:

The X-Men fans hated me because I made him into a stupid old drug-addicted idiot. He had started out as this sneering, grim terrorist character, so I thought, Well, that's who he really is. [Writer] Chris Claremont had done a lot of good work over the years to redeem the character: He made him a survivor of the death camps and this noble antihero. And I went in and sh*t on all of it. It was right after 9/11, and I said there's nothing f**king noble about this at all.


You can read much more in the May 2012 issue of Playboy, on sale now in print and digitally.

EDIT: Playboy has put the feature online. The link is safe for work.