Riders on the storm approaching! Coming this October, Leah Moore is bringing the story of the ‘60s to comic form with a little aid from some rock legends in Morrison Hotel from Z2 comics. A tale not only of the revolutionary music of The Doors, Moore recently said that she was also inspired to write these stories about the dramatic and shifting world of the ‘60s, how it ended up in the darker and more perilous ‘70s and how this small kernel of history and the societal struggles it highlighted still resonate to this day.
Z2 had previously announced the publication of the work in June, an anthology graphic novel which featured an examination of the music of The Doors and the culture of the ‘60s that fostered them, leading up to the 1970 release of their 5th studio album, the eponymous Morrison Hotel. In a recent virtual panel discussion, Moore discussed her approach as a fusion of the experiential aspects of The Doors' psychedelic fare and the tumultuous times that generated them. “I was thinking ‘this is going to be hard’ ‘cause I know history in places but I’m not y’know amazing at it,” she said, but later found that the stories “just slotted into place” with the mixture of history and music. “There’s these little, like, layers and threads that have been suggesting themselves.“
At a Z2 Comics-organized virtual panel for Comic-Con International, Moore and The Doors guitarist Robby Krieger both noted the resonance of that brief time in the late ‘60s in terms of the fight for social justice and racial equality for marginalized groups in American culture. “We’d like to say we were unpolitical and we tried to stay out of all that stuff,” said Krieger in an in-house interview with journalist Ryan J. Downey. “But, you know, that’s pretty hard to do.” Krieger said that he was optimistic about the direction of the cultural zeitgeist after watching how young people stood for social progress in recent protests.
[The Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison] was talking about how at that time, there were more people under 30 than over 30. So in his mind, we could just take over just from the sheer numbers. And it’s kind of looking like that today. You see all these young people out in the streets, free speech and doing their thing, and it looks like things might actually change, I hope for the better.
Moore stated that, in examining the period leading up to 1969 through the music of The Doors, she found parallels between their personal story and foibles and the story of American culture as a whole. Rather than simply writing about the music itself, she says this motivated her to use the music as more of “the jumping off point,” with the larger questions posited being “what are the songs soaked in, what is it that you getting from the songs? What is it that they putting in that you are then getting out of it?”
Moore also said that she was surprised how contemporary the world of the ‘69 seemed despite being over half a century gone. “Every single thing that you think of in American culture seems to have had a seed from 1969, right there, she said, echoing Krieger’s sentiments regarding the similarities between that bygone era and our own. “I only wish that it was less thematically linked now.”
It’s been claimed that rock n’ roll can never die, and perhaps this is proof. Morrison Hotel goes on sale in October from Z2 Comics in three editions, including a special deluxe edition limited to 5,000 copies, which includes a 50th Anniversary Edition LP of the album itself, remastered by original mixer Bruce Botnick.