Question, the first. Art, commerce, media, history, reality. Just One Question.
For me, one of the hardest things about regarding comics as a business is actually regarding comics as a business. It's often hard to imagine creative individuals getting into a biz they love only to find themselves working for projects when their hearts aren't in it. Of course those same people have bills to pay and children to feed. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to choose their projects, have you ever found yourself in such a position? Does it seem like comics are becoming more and more about the money and less about the stories?
There's always been that money-grubbing element in comics, it's just like every other business conducted in the commodity culture of the Capitalist Marketplace we call home. The sad thing is, there's actually not a great deal of cash to be made from comics, so anyone attempting to seek their fortune doing their own small press books or even working on franchise revamps is barking up the wrong sequoia; you have to write an awful lot of comic books to get within smelling distance of rich and no-one gets paid enough to sell out. Most movie options don't amount to much more than a few thousand dollars at best. I wouldn't be running around like a loony on 27 different projects if I were rich. I wouldn't be sitting here answering this! I'd be fast asleep on a hammock in the Indian Ocean.
Anyone choosing comics as a profession has their own version of the story so I can't present my case as representative. I don't have kids, so I suspect the lack of that kind of responsibility makes me less susceptible to commercial pressures and more willing to take chances with my bank balance and my reputation by releasing material which is slightly ahead of its time and hence unfashionable, like The Filth.
Truthfully, the job security in this business is uncertain, the hours are long, long and lonely, the audience is increasingly small, fickle and dissatisfied, like 3 of the 7 Dwarves, respect is nonexistent, success fleeting; you'd be better off in a boy band, where at least you'd get laid before they made you obsolete. It's a miracle traditional American comics get made at all (and still with the same characters they've had since the fucking Boer War or something. Mister Terrific! How can these things still exist? What monstrous act of love and will keeps a comics 'universe' alive for so long, against the odds?). They're the last bastion of something, that's for sure, but it's hard to imagine them, through the compound eyes of future eons, as anything other than a curious example of primitive, hand-drawn 'virtual reality' technologies. Most of the people who do this kind of work, do it out of love, like the love you'd show to an ailing friend.
This creeping unease a lot of fans are feeling isn't so much about people wanting to get paid for their labour but about a kind of devaluing of comics as a form, which has been going on. As the rush to convert comic books into handy illustrated movie pitches becomes less chaotic and more transparent, I think we've all become aware of a kind of betrayal, a public strangling of the exotic strangeness and uniqueness of American comics, as publishers, creators and readers confuse their media and expect comic book stories to conform to Hollywood storytelling conventions.
Wise up: the more comics imitate movies, the less need movies will have for comics as a source of imaginative material; let's remember that the movie industry is ONLY NOW learning to simulate the technology and imagination Jack Kirby packed in his pencil 40 years ago. As I've been saying to the point of boredom for the last couple of years, our creative community owes it to the future to produce today the insane, logic-shattering, side-splitting day-glo stories which will be turned into all-immersive holographic magic theatre experiences in 40 years time. The comics medium is a very specialized area of the Arts, home to many rare and talented blooms and flowering imaginations and it breaks my heart to see so many of our best and brightest bowing down to the same market pressures which drive lowest-common-denominator blockbuster movies and television cop shows. Let's see if we can call time on this trend by demanding and creating big, wild comics which stretch our imaginations. Let's make living breathing, sprawling adventures filled with mind-blowing images of things unseen on Earth. Let's make artefacts that are not faux-games or movies but something other, something so rare and strange it might as well be a window into another universe because that's what it is. Let's see images which come directly from the minds of inspired artists, not from publicity stills. Superhero comics are way too expensive for the mass market and the brand of garish, violent pulp they were once the only source for is available these days in more attractive media. We should get real about this and stop dumbing down, stop stunting our artists' creativity and stop trying to attract a completely imaginary 'mainstream audience'. The best way to consolidate comics as a viable medium is to make them LESS like other media, not more. Let our artists go wild on imaginative page layouts. Let our writers find stories in their dreams and not in the newspaper pages, at least for a little while again. Aim for the cool, literate 'college' audience, as Stan Lee did to great success in the 60s.
And let's also clear something up - people like superhero movies, not because they like superheroes or comics, but because they like movies. At best, they remember Spider-Man and the Hulk and the others from TV shows and cartoon series, not from comic books. There is NO significant crossover market as comics sales figures indicate. We're dancing like fools for pennies and there's nobody there who wasn't there already. How about a return to some pride in our medium and its singular qualities?
I was lucky enough to get my first big mainstream exposure and success - with ANIMAL MAN, DOOM PATROL and ARKHAM ASYLUM - at a time during the 80s when experimental superhero books, inspired by Nicolas Roeg movies, Dennis Potter plays, Brecht, Joyce, Warhol, Beuys, Burroughs, sex, drugs, transcendental philosophies, and the Theatre of Cruelty were actually fashionable AND lucrative. It was possible to make money with ambitious work which thumbed its nose at the rigidly enforced styles of Hollywood writing and honoured comics as a medium of expression in and of itself. Now it's like Joyce never happened. It's like Picasso and Kerouac never happened. It's like Bill Sienkiewicz never happened. Mainstream comics storytelling has allowed itself to become mired in the conventions of the 18th century novel and the Hollywood flick, which seems such a comedown.
There's room for everything, of course, that's what they keep telling me, but there's just not enough of the comics I'd like to see right now; I enjoy a few things here and there, which I ought to mention, like Gail Simone's 'Rose and Thorn', Milligan, 'Planetary' when it comes out, Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier' book, 'Plastic Man', Waid's Superman and a few other attractive tumbleweeds but otherwise, there's a strange 'within budget' quality to so many post-Ultimate books. Leave the biz where it belongs, I say - in the hand of mad visionaries, acid trippers and all the other colourful eccentrics who produce narratives that are NOT inspired by Hollywood movies or HBO shows.
And I'll say this one more time until it's the next new 'movement' before you know it; even films don't look like films any more - why should comics be expected to remain in some pre-digital mode of image presentation? To attract our amazing imagined, moronic 'mainstream audience'? Well, why not lower the collective IQ all the way and see if our audience gets bigger with the addition of all those 'slow' learners out there...'See Captain America run! Run Captain America! Run!'
Fuck, it sounds brilliant doesn't it?
What was the question again?
'Faster Wonder Woman! Kill! Kill!'
You would, wouldn't you?
Can you see yourself doing anything outside of comics or music? For instance, some artists often have nightmares about their hands getting hurt and not being able to draw.
Some of them already do that jes' fine without having their hands hurt.
As for me, I've always worked outside comics, as I'm sure you know, but I'll just use this as a golden opportunity to pimp out my wondrous CV to the congregation.
I've been a successful playwright, short story writer, published journalist, travel writer and TV screenwriter. I'm a card-carrying member of the Writer's Guild of America, and got paid to write 'Sleepless Knights' for Dreamworks SKG. I've done two video games, including the upcoming 'Predator' release from Vivendi/Universal, with more on the way. Right now I'm finishing a novel - the IF - with initial interest from at least one major mainstream publisher in the U.S. New productions of my plays are in negotiation in both Britain and the US. I'm involved in pitching another new version of THE INVISIBLES, this time for American television. I'm waiting to hear more about plans for an operatic version of my Lewis Carroll play 'Red King Rising' with Alison Goldfrapp suggested for the Alice role but these things come and go all the time. I get paid to do regular talks and summits on science, creativity, technology and magic all around the world and on TV and radio - next is at the Omega Institute, upstate New York, on the weekend of August 13-15 with Doug Rushkoff, Howard Bloom, Paul Lafolley and Richard Metzger. I keep close links with just about every area of the arts, from animation to theatre, opera to academia, comics to independent film-making, poetry to textile design, etc. Kristan and I run our own throbbing, unruly business venture in the form of gmWORD Ltd. AND we have a band called FUCK STAR which is recording new material next month. This is in addition to the comics arm of the business and the 15 series I'm working on this year.
See that bit in the very last issue of Invisibles where we get a hint of what King Mob's been up to with 'Technoccult'? That's me, that is and if I sound a little pleased with myself then that's because I am. I like to keep busy. I've been describing myself as a writer and getting away with it since I was five. I'll do it as long as I can hold the pen or grunt dictation.
Comics is the best gym in the world for exercising the old imagination, certainly, and this is where I feel most comfortable and free to fuck around with daft, unrestrained head jam - but I could probably survive without them if I really had to, which I don't, so what would YOU do if five Nazi assholes were about to rape your woman and you only had one bullet, hotshot?
Guess I should have said outside of 'entertainment' then comics, but I can't see it much. If not writing then perhaps acting, hell, even being a media advisor is a performance. Maybe a teacher.
I've done a bit of acting but I'm crap at learning lines and only good at improvisations. And I'd be the worst teacher in the world; I often find myself encouraging people to do better by mocking all their faults. I like kids but I'd never be able to teach them anything except how to talk shite in a flamboyant and amusing way.
Is writing comics getting harder? When killing Gods has been done and with appearances in the real world of girls in Russia with x-ray eyes, 'demons' infesting electrical appliances in a small village in Sicily and the U.S. planning to fight wars in space with Transformers robots, does this force you to go back to basics or to try and push further? Both?
Comics are never hard to write. My problem is I just don't have enough time to write them ALL, although I'm going to try. So far, I have fifteen black Daler notebooks filled with my own characters and company franchise revamps - hundreds of pages of drawings and stories and ideas for The Atom, Doctor Strange, Moon Knight, Iron Man, Freedom Fighters, Captain Marvel Jnr. blah blah blah. Every wee sparkly fish drifting through my head gets a pat and a polish from me on the way past. I love my job, it has to be said.
And it seems to get easier all the time, to tell the truth. My upcoming stuff for DC has been planned and written almost effortlessly, in a gushing pearl necklace of new concepts, characters and locations. For me, this field allows for the kind of subsidised self-expression unavailable anywhere else and I also get to create extended, occult narratives or hypersigils to help exercise my magical will. Comics are so far in advance of any other popular entertainment form - they're more relevant and modern than movies and still just about edging out video games for interactivity and sophistication.
How does it feel to have someone writing a biography about you?
Somehow inevitable. I used to always imagine it being written and tried to live my life accordingly. I'd say to myself or whoever I was with, 'It'll look good in the biography.' and then I'd go ahead and do whatever daft thing it was - like taking acid on the sacred mesa or doing the bungee-jump, getting the haircut, dancing with the stranger, talking to the crowd - whatever I was 'scared' of mostly, or fancied doing, or never dared before, I'd try it on the basis that it would make for a more interesting read one day. I craved experience so that I'd be able to write and talk about something other than the brainy book-stuff and intellectual chit-chat I'd learned to emit at school. I wanted my writing to grow out of things I'd done, not things I'd read, and I tried to live according to templates established by my 'Romantic', 'Beat', musical or counterculture heroes and role models, with sex, music, magic, travel my watchwords. Oscar Wilde and Gilbert and George turned their lives into Art. I thought they'd found a great way to enliven existence, was inspired and decided to turn my own life into Comic Art. If Kerouac could burn out a novel in a single session, I could finish 48 pages of Really & Truly scripts in a single day with the help of a tab of E and so on.
My life's had this weird public and media dimension since I was a little kid photographed on protest marches and picket lines with my mum and dad and recently I felt it had become necessary in my head to 'kill Ziggy', if you like. And move on.
So, in these end times of Big Brother, it seemed like laughter in the dark to include one last big expose before I get on with the next chunk of my life; this final revelation, this naked kiss-and-tell, behind-the-comics shocker that will have everyone quacking like Donald and sick of it all by the end. Truth will be revealed. Empires will crumble. The tabloid element is already rampaging roughshod over what remains of pop comics journalism so I wanted to come up with the goods in a proper bare-all, Jordan-style tits-out expose of the comics biz and the freaks who live there and you can win a night out with me at a top London nightspot! Whether or not it turns out quite that lurid remains to be seen.
The POP Mag!ck book has a much more subjective, HUD view of the life and wanderings of the ah-dist to this date. So somewhere between those two books and between the collections of columns and interviews I plan to release around the same time, the big picture will emerge - it's easy to make anything sound great or dull - an evening after a gig with friends can be an acid-drenched, never-ending party in a strobe-lit glamorous Andy Warhol world, or it can be a bunch of slacker losers nobody's ever heard of pissing about in funny clothes because they have nothing else to do. It depends how sensitive and imaginative Craig [Craig McGill, Author of the biography] is prepared to be.
How do you put across those magic moments? I think of smells and bells as I'm watching some student performance of Javanese mythological dramas in Jogjakarta, with the gods and heroes all wearing shades. Drowning in the shimmering universe of possibility opened up by that G chord on a white Rickenbacker 12 string. Or dying, hallucinating on septicaemia and boiling with Gnostic fever. Waltzing with Ian McKellen, passing curse runes to Gaspar Noe at the 'Irreversible' premiere party, head-butting Dominique Swain or dining with Marilyn Manson as the names drop like prolapsed wombs. The parties, the fetish nights, the champagne and mushrooms, the spicy food, the vomit. The hysterical 'Big Night Out' that was me and Millar in the 90s. The tranny witch years in high heels, PVC and Paloma Picasso red lipstick. The aliens and demons. The beautiful girls. The lovely cats and houses and nights of upside down stars on the other side of the world etc.
Without the sweetener of poetry which memory can add, it can all become cheesy tabloid fodder, Qlippoth. Magic turns into the deranged antics of a global mental case. The potential to be damned is strong and always worth flirting with, so we'll see how it all comes out. At any rate, it's sure to shatter a few myths and inspire some new ones. The biography is what the Tibetans call chod - I'm handing over my old life to be torn apart by demons in the form of Craig's pen; all the little moments that meant something to me reduced now to gossip and schizophrenia. According to the Tibetans, this should free me from any lasting attachments to my 'Ego'. Fuck only knows what that is. I'll be totally see-through after this.
As Wilde said 'Those who want a mask, have to wear it.'
Or also appropriate "All art is at once surface and symbol, those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril."
Oh so true, but what peril! I must admit to being increasingly deranged by the kinds of bizarre myths which have grown like moss around my name in comics fan circles - I keep coming up against this idiot savant image; me reflected back at myself as a shambling, incoherent drug addict, wanking and drooling out meaningless gibberish which can only be understood by 'those lying bastards' who claim they can see 'Magic Eye' 3-d pictures and wee men reading the news on the TV. I can hardly read my name in Wizard without some reference to illicit narcs stuck on the arse end. Mainstream comics fashions jump when I whistle but the US comics industry still treats me with nothing but disdain and suspicion even after all these years; I can't fathom why my name's always so conspicuously absent from Awards Nominations forms, why my obvious peers and imitators crawl miles over glass to avoid mentioning my name and influence in interviews, why my long service record and my achievements are often overlooked or mocked. Trying to smile through that kind of wearying, inexplicable prejudice can sometimes be hard work and if, as I often suspect, I'm being dissed for some imagined drug-related sins which violate Puritan ethics, they're picking on the wrong writer.
I like psychedelics as well as the next man (if the next man is Timothy Leary and I did a ton of them for 'research' and vision quest purposes in the 90s) but I sampled some LSD once in the spring of 2003 and before that, in 1999 when I went to see The Matrix in Melbourne. I'm clean, officer. I was resolutely straight-edge all through my teens and twenties and had only limited contact with any drugs (that's including all psychedelics, all stimulants, booze, tea or coffee) until I was 32 but inside my head has been mostly 'psychedelic' since I was born. My mum reads tea leaves. We used to all live in a nice modern haunted house in bloody East Kilbride. I've been a practising magician since I was 19. The weird shit is just how it is round our way. It's nothing to do with drugs. It's worse, much worse than just drugs!
More plain truth? McGill's book looms...
A word we started throwing around a few years back to describe the evolving superhero archetypes was post-super human which has since been integrated into comix-speak. Post this, neo that. Do you find these labels still hold true?
I don't know if I ever did.
Anyway, what about the Praeterhuman? He's surely the toughest of all of these rogue synonyms.
All I know is that right now, there's not much difference between the current comics and the early 70s 'relevant' books. The same social currents drive early 70s glam rock and The Darkness or 70s terrorist chic and the new Middle East version. Things repeat themselves on these predictable and fairly-easy-to-plot cycles. Which is why the 'realistic' phase of the comic books will, starting this Spring, be finally superseded entirely by another 'cosmic', 'psychedelic', 'surrealist' or 'weird' phase of some kind, as I've been saying for a few years. Probably this will be started by the praeterhumans as the first gambit in their chilling 'annexation' of our world.
Expect the rightful, long-awaited canonization of Brendan McCarthy, like that bit with Aragorn in the third [Lord Of The Rings] film.
Are there any aspects of sequential stories you'd like to experiment with, appearance wise? Colouring has come a long way but facets such as lettering certainly have potential to evolve.
I'm mostly interested in playing with page depth at the moment, rather than with the particulars of lettering etc. On We3 in particular, Vince (Frank Quitely) and I have been working together in a close but manly way to develop and extend some of the very fast, hi-res digital comics effects I'd been starting to play with in books like Marvel Boy. We3 has experiments with page space, time edits and motion rendering. Particularly in the second issue when perceptions shift from human to animal modes. We're going past the page 'surface' and using the page as a 3-dimensional space. Some of the narrative and design ideas Chris Weston and I were using in the Filth - like the idea of surveillance camera images creating 4-d mosaic layouts - are further developed in We 3. Hopefully it shouldn't be too self-conscious or obtrusive either.
For my action books, I've spliced the MTV model of fast digital cuts and effects with the kind of 3-dimensional depth effects familiar to us all from computer games - the TV screen or VDU is as much a flat 2-plane as the comic page, there's no reason why we can't fake the same depth of field on our pages. There's no need to treat the comic page as a flat plane surface upon which images float. There's no need to arrange panels only on the passive 'surface' of the page space - dynamic panel arrangements can rise from the page depths, recede, rotate through three dimensions and fold.
As for all this talk I keep hearing about how 'ordinary people' can't handle the weird layouts in comics - well, time for another micro-rant, but that's like your granddad saying he can't handle all the scary, fast-moving information on Top of the Pops and there's really only one answer. Fuck off, granddad. If you're too stupid to read a comic page, you shouldn't be trying to read comic books and probably don't. As creative people, I feel we need to call time on the relentless watering down of comics design and storytelling possibilities in some misguided attempt to appeal to people who WILL NEVER BE INTERESTED in looking at or buying hand-drawn superhero comic books.
Anyway, now I've finally got that off my hump, there's an amusing aside regarding 'experimental' work and that 'difficult' rep of mine, I read a piece by Stephen A. Meller recently where both my ARKHAM ASYLUM book and the 1940 Batman story 'Batman vs. The Joker' were subjected to the Flesch Reading Ease Test. The 'simple' Golden Age tale scored 78.25 for reading comprehension while ARKHAM ASYLUM came out ahead with 91.28 - as Meller says, 'ARKHAM ASYLUM is a lot more easily read than BATMAN VS. THE JOKER'.
How much leeway do you get with this new contract, are you allowed work outside DC presuming you produce a certain amount of content for them? How about Humanoids considering DC's recent partnership with them?
I get all the leeway I want to do any kind of writing outside comics but for two years I have to produce all of my comics work for DC. Which is fine by me because the deal's set up so that I can create all the new characters and stories I want at Vertigo and also play out my superhero fixations and 'sentient universe' theories in the bustling DCU.
I've spoken to Humanoids in the past but to be honest, nobody in the business can match the ownership deals and the long personal friendships I have at Vertigo so I tend to launch any new work there.
One of the recent changes at Vertigo I was glad to hear about was the addition of Jonathan Vankin to the editorial staff, if for anything, the potential of talent he can bring to the table. How do you feel about Jonathan's new gig? How about yourself, when you hear of or meet talented people outside comics who are interested in the medium, do you encourage them to get involved?
I've known Jonathan for a few years and like him a lot so I hope he gets a chance to really make his mark. Now is the time for high intelligence and catholic taste in comics - a time of psychedelic renaissance. King Kirby Konkers Konvention. I'm always encouraging talented people to get involved in comics but it's as hard for them to get a break as for anyone of the young unknowns with brilliant scripts in their bags. Brendan McCarthy couldn't sell his incredible 'House of Ideas' project to Marvel. I couldn't get Marvel interested in Doug Rushkoff's 'Eternals' mini-series pitch and my efforts to get a Steve Aylett comic going at Vertigo foundered on the rocks of disinterest, even though I think a straight adaptation of 'Slaughtermatic' would make brilliant comics. Maybe Jonathan can do something about that. What do you think, readers?
It's interesting to me to see many people who have no need to work in comics express an interest only to receive a bad response from publishers. For years we've been name-dropping Rushkoff here at PopImage and I know Marvel has contacts for the likes of Quentin Tarantino, and M. Night Shyamalan 'cause we gave it to them. Hell, Noam Chomsky is doing his first ever comics work soon and it's not for either of the big two. At least with Vertigo you see some breaks from the usual suspects every so often. Not just with the likes of Jonathan but also Si Spencer and Tara Mcpherson. There are popular TV and film writers working in comics, but there are also writers and artists that a lot of people have never heard of but who will, wherever they go, draw a crowd of people willing to wait outside for three hours in the rain just to meet them. So don't stop there, keep going. Push for covers by the likes of Mark Ryden, Paul Booth, Joe Coleman, and if anything, keep checking out your friends. I bet even Richard Metzger has a comic idea or two.
I agree with you but I still think the manga format is going to be where the big action is and that Tokyopop is currently setting the pace as far as remaking comics into something attractive to the mainstream goes - they've already got Courtney Love writing for them, haven't they, and surely she knows a bandwagon when she sees one trundling around the corner ?
One of the upcoming projects I was really looking forward to was the planned collaboration between yourself, Douglas Rushkoff and Genesis P. Orridge. Is this still happening? The more I learn about each of you it's interesting to see how much you have in common and that together you make up a modern cultural magick trinity.
This project got stalled for various reasons some practical and some magical. I've only seen Doug a couple of times since then and I've had no real contact with Gen at all during the whole period of his transformation into a stunning she-male. The whole 'Abyss' experience since 2001 has taken me out of the picture for a couple of years. I'm currently in the process of rebuilding my network.
Daniel Pinchbeck and I are supposed to be doing some kind of interview/discussion thing soon. There was talk of 'Rolling Stone' and then there wasn't but we'll see what happens. His amazing book 'Breaking Open the Head' is a seminal text of the new psychedelic wave and a must read. He's working on a new one.
When working on titles featuring high profile characters, do you pay attention to the fans at all? Or for that matter, comments by other creators? I found it really disheartening to hear comments made by John Byrne towards your New X-Men run, particularly considering you essentially spent a lot of time paying homage to his work.
I didn't read John Byrne's comments and never want to but I'm absolutely sure that, no matter how it sounded, what my teenage art hero actually MEANT to say was that he just about LOVED my run on New X-Men!
In a far more magnanimous gesture of artistic solidarity, I heard from DC recently that Arnold Drake, the gentleman creator and brilliant writer of the original DOOM PATROL stories (among many other things), cited my version of the book as the one most faithful to his own creative vision.
Thank YOU, Mister Drake. I tried very hard to update and preserve the soul of the book and it's nice to be appreciated by the originator of these fascinating and enduring characters. Check out the trade paperback collections later this year.
Yo momma.
Did you see New X-Men as a sigil or can that now be said of all your work? I remember an interesting article a fansite had did examining the number of times the word 'sex' appeared in the art.
That says more about the fans than it does about me.
Or does it actually say more about 'Erotik' Ethan Van Sciver and 'Filthy' Frank Quitely, who filled the book with subliminal penises and hidden sweary words, like two giggly wee boys drawing hairy fannies in their physics textbooks. Those merry pranksters are 'dirty' like Christina's soiled thong.
All the comics are sigils. 'Sigil' as a word is out of date. All this magic stuff needs new terminology because it's not what people are being told it is at all. It's not all this wearying symbolic misdirection that's being dragged up from the Victorian Age, when no-one was allowed to talk plainly and everything was in coy poetic code. The world's at a crisis point and it's time to stop bullshitting around with Qabalah and Thelema and Chaos and Information and all the rest of the metaphoric smoke and mirrors designed to make the rubes think magicians are 'special' people with special powers. It's not like that. Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. 'Life' plus 'significance' = magic. See Pop Mag!c for more.
There were a number of issues with late artists, do you feel you collaborated well with them? Anyone particularly so?
Quitely, Silvestri, Jimenez and John Paul Leon did my favourite stories.
How do you feel about the use of characters you created after you've gone? Fantomex and Dust for example? Didn't you originally plan to do more with the Dust character?
They can do what they like with them and will, I'm sure. I'd originally intended to have Dust play a more prominent role but in the end, she just didn't fit very well with the way the story was developing into the available page count.
When I planned to continue NEW X-MEN with Scott and Emma as head teachers (this was before the decision to quit, and I'd plotted six issues of 'new direction', following on from issue 154, with the return of the school uniforms etc. The opening story was about the first human student at Xavier's - he gets mercilessly mocked as a throwback by the pupils until it turns out he's the best guitarist anyone has ever heard - so good that his talent might just as well be regarded as a mutant power...and so prejudice is defeated and everyone bursts into song. Gag. If I was doing it now I'd make it more realistic; the new student would be a pedigree hamster who could play the piano like Richard Clayderman but only on the three nights of the full moon) the plan was to have Dust in a very prominent role as one of the new term's intake of students. The X-Men stories are set in an ongoing soap opera continuity so I knew that I could safely leave a few character threads dangling and perhaps help to enrich the franchise. I'm sure the new writers will have plans for her - she has a great power and immense possibility as a character.
So you were going to return the uniforms? That's interesting 'cause when they announced the decision to do so after you left I thought it was a huge step backwards from what you'd done with the characters.
It wasn't my idea; Marvel made the decision to go back to bright superhero style costumes, partly as a way of appeasing licensors - I was asked to find a way to make it convincing and then, in the end, I didn't have to and it became Joss Whedon's job to find a way to make it convincing. Which he's done quite effectively.
One line of dialogue that stood out to me in New X-Men was a comment made by Fantomex to Magneto. "Is everything you say a clichés?" was this perhaps a critique of the way the character was written? Or a comment made concerning the rising popularity of 'decompressed storytelling,' which often involves quick action mixed with clever, well placed single lines of dialogue? Some of which often are, or become, clichés.
The 'Planet X' story was partially intended as a comment on the exhausted, circular nature of the X-Men's ever-popular battle with Magneto and by extension, the equally cyclical nature of superhero franchise re-inventions. I ended the book exactly where I came on board, with Logan killing Magneto AGAIN, as he had done at the end of Scott Lobdell's run. Evil never dies in comic book universes. It just keeps coming back. Imagine Hitler back for the hundredth time to menace mankind. So, in the way that something like 'Marvel Boy' had that insistent 'teenage hard on' engine driving its rhythms, 'Planet X' is steeped in an exhausted, world-weary, 'middle-aged' ennui that spoke directly of both my own and Magneto's frustrations, disillusionment and disconnection, as well as the endless everything-is-not-enough frustrations of a certain segment of comics aging readership. In hindsight, I think I overdid the world weary a little but, you know, my loved ones were dying all around me while I was working on those issues, so I'm entitled to a little stumble into miseryland. Fantomex's line summed up my own cynicism at that moment, definitely and seems justified by subsequent plot developments. In my opinion, there really shouldn't have been an actual Xorn - he had to be fake, that was the cruel point of him - and it should have been the genuine Magneto, frayed to the bare, stupid nerve and schizoid-conflicted as he was in Planet X, not just some impostor. There's loads of good stuff in Planet X - it's just that miasma of bleakness and futility which hovers over the whole thing.
What people often forget, of course, is that Magneto, unlike the lovely Sir Ian McKellen, is a mad old terrorist twat. No matter how he justifies his stupid, brutal behaviour, or how anyone else tries to justify it, in the end he's just an old bastard with daft, old ideas based on violence and coercion. I really wanted to make that clear at this time.
Before the X-Men took centre stage in Grant's portfolio, he and Chris Weston were co-creating the Vertigo maxi-series, The Filth. Recently collected in trade, the Filth proved to be too dark or too peculiar for some audiences who were more used to the sexy, shiny heroic figures that took precedence in works such as The Invisibles or the JLA. Greg Feely, the main character of the Filth, didn't wear red tights or know kung-fu, he watched over his cat, picked his nose and watched porn. For more on the Filth, read our recent Review.
But something else happened around the time the Filth was being made, when I first read about it, it was a sidenote. A slight mention. A comment which simply seemed to go unnoticed as if unimportant. But it was, it was very important, and it scared me.
It was the sort of thing I would never want to hear come from the lips of someone of such creative genius as Grant Morrison. When this interview began it was the one question I knew I had to ask, you can read the results below.
Recently released in trade-paper-back format is the Filth collection. Though not as widely publicized as the Invisibles did you feel the series to be successful as to how you wanted it to come out?
Artistically I'm really happy with the Filth and I keep going back to it with wonder and affection. It's about the 'tightest' piece I'd ever done. It saw me through some bad times and did everything I wanted it to but I have to admit I was very disappointed by the lack of intelligent critical engagement with the piece. I keep reading stuff by people insisting that there was no story, no plot, no characterization etc in the face of all evidence to the contrary. I'm utterly fucking baffled sometimes by the denial response to what seemed to me a very straightforward, funny, visually beautiful, inventive and direct piece of satire.
Anyway, I predict a rediscovery of the Filth now that the trade paperback is out.
Everyone who liked The Invisibles should read the Filth if only for the reason that if you follow the conclusions of The Invisibles to their limits, you will NEED The Filth to make sense of what happens next in your life. There is no 'magic'. We're all going to die, like all our heroes. It's already happening and is just a question of waiting for the moment. Life is an in-between state, a bardo where consciousness sees its own reflection in matter and hopefully learns something painfully beautiful about its nature and purpose.
One thing I found rather disturbing was a comment you made in an online interview, which seemed to go unnoticed by the site, you mentioned you had felt suicidal at certain points during the series creation.
THE FILTH comic was created as a filter or cleansing plant - a colourful pseudo-kidney, if you like - a disordered Qabalah of failure and exploitation through which I could pass and purify damaging and seductive ultra-violet left-hand material and examine all the bad feelings and images I was coming to associate with life at the start of the new century - the skin crawling paranoia of surveillance film set reality, the endless mass murders in the name of stupid causes that weigh less than farts, Western culture's frightening self-hatred, its increasingly obscene fascination with entertainment inspired by the results of poverty and ignorance, the use of pornography as a narcotic and its subsequent impact on how men now regard women, the incoherent narcissism of 'reality' TV. These were all trends I thought were worthy of satire and mockery, dangling unprotected bollocks of our culture calling out for a brutal conceptual kicking - so I saw The Filth as the visible 'art' part of a much wider-ranging attempt to process so-called 'qlippothic' or 'negative' energy during a 'crossing' of the ABYSS, as it is known to magicians.
To ease the passage, I immersed myself in books about anti-life, death and decay, shame, dirt, chaos, nervous breakdown, mind control porn, humiliation, cruelty, schizophrenic art and disease pathology and fed the sickness back in the form of a cartoon narrative inoculation - no wonder so many people hated it (the project achieved a kind of weird dissonance in monthly form and very few of the people who commented seemed able to extract any meaning from the simple images and words before their eyes. It was fucking bizarre for me to read people saying, of this very meticulously planned and executed story, that 'the structure is a complete mess' or 'The Filth has no discernible plot, characters or themes.', or the meaningless phrase I hate more than any other 'Weirdness-for -weirdness' sake'. I've yet to see anyone attempt to denigrate WATCHMEN as 'superheroes for superheroes sake' or MAUS as 'the Holocaust for the Holocaust's sake' and get away with it). We all hated polio booster injections, didn't we? Nobody likes to feel a prick, after all, even if it's for their own good.
Anyway, I was bigging up The Filth in my own head as a devastating vivisection of Where We Are Today and as usual, I used my life and my work as a laboratory and wrote down the results in the form of a story. Although I was familiar with The Abyss or the 'Ring-Pass-Not' as a concept from various 'Rising on the Planes' meditations way back when I was doing my early Tree of Life and Enochian 'Aethyr' experiments, I was almost unprepared for the ferocity of the state of consciousness which engulfed me and transformed my world. I entered the Abyss shortly before 9/11, I think - on that morning, I woke up in a terrible state, roaring and crying uncontrollably and that's around when it all kicked in. Things became their own opposites - all thoughts, all concepts, all possibilities came equipped with their own annihilating negatives until there was no meaning in anything that was not erased by this process. It became impossible to think of anything at all without also imagining its corresponding, negating complement, all of the time, until eventually all this conceptual particle-smashing vaporised 'me' to fuck and released enough energy to fuel the birth of an inner sun, which then stabilized into a very odd new view of reality (this 'Choronzonic' consciousness and beyond is a hallmark of the Abyss experience). Prior to the atomization, every illusion I had ever entertained about myself and the world was ground to powder and particle in that brutal mill, I have to say. During the period of writing The Filth, which coincided in part with my tenure on New X-Men, I was so distressed and affected by what was happening and by the 'dark' material I was trying to process and resolve, that I hurled myself at a 3rd floor balcony in a hotel on Sunset Boulevard only to be hauled back by Kristan, scarred my chest and stomach with a jagged metal broom handle, and slashed at my own wrists ineptly but with sheer class, using a broken champagne bottle. Among many other idiotic and self-mutilating tangos with madness, designed, you might think, to look good in the biography (please, please, please don't try this at home, folks. the people on stage are professionals and experts, we are assured.). I was NOT MYSELF for a lot of the time and prey to all manner of obsessive disorientations. The same thing that pulled me through when I was dying in hospital in 96 saved me again here; context and the inexorable demands of Real Life. My 'reality tunnel', as Robert Anton Wilson calls it, is one that allows me to conveniently frame every experience and state of consciousness, good or bad, in the context of my magical initiation and progress. The disciplines of magic bring structure, meaning and pattern into the apparently unstructured, senseless and painful times of anyone's life. As do the grounding disciplines of earning a living and sharing a relationship.
To truly embrace Chaos, of course, is to surrender to the ultimate, inflexible expression of Law and Order in our universe - Here Everything Changes. That's about as much as I can say about it until Pop Mag!c comes out with all the wild theory and visionary malarkey. Craig was interviewing me through the worst, darkest period of all this folderol so I'm sure it comes across like a bad smell in his book. You'll literally split your sides laughing.
I have to say I did come to the 'end' of all magic as I'd known it and been practising for 25 years and, like a man standing blinking and dazed, ears ringing at ground zero of a nuclear blast, I'm trying to find novel ways to explain what has happened and present it to the world in the form of Blank Magic. The Filth was written from the eye of the experience. All the really good stuff is still to come.
For anyone who cares to keep up with these things, (and I'm sure many of my readers are practitioners), the Qabalistic wisdom I carried home from The Filth Working is very simple and profound and is expressed by Greg Feely in the scene behind the flower shop - the Crown Is In The Kingdom, and The Reverse Is Also True. And for Enochian magic enthusiasts, Greg can be read as Nemo tending his garden if you like.
Of course it took me a long time and a lyric from the new Monster Magnet record to finally get the real message of the Abyss.
'Shut your mouth, you big fucking baby!'
So I will and Horus, crazy Child-God of the Aeon, will too, if you tell him. IAMIUHUAMI.
Well hopefully you're over that, still hurts I know but you can't freely climb the tree if you confine yourself to the dirt.
Of course. I feel a whole lot better now but times were fucked up for a while and it's shaken me right down to my boots.
Seaguy is a 3 issue limited series. Usually a work of this length would be in a graphic novel or prestige format series, but instead you're going with the regular comic format. Is this being done in the vein of the Pop Comics idea, ala Warren Ellis' own recent series for DC?
Seaguy, We3 and Vimanarama were all conceived as 96 page complete stories in the 'Earth 2' hardback graphic novel format - Karen Berger then decided to release the books first to the specialist comic market as three monthly editions of 32 pages each. So, yes, broadly speaking the idea behind these books is to do stand-alone stories that anyone can read. It's the kind of work I like to do between big projects - a decade ago there were the one-off books like 'Mystery Play' and 'Kill Your Boyfriend' - and this time I wanted to create what I'm calling 'Western manga' for want of a better phrase at the moment - super-compressed, innovative, fast fusion cuisine for fast brains. The idea is to make sophisticated material which can be enjoyed by smart five year olds, middle aged ladies and cool teenagers alike. This new stuff that's coming out this summer has been very influenced by my time in Hollywood and Japan, fairy and folk tales, Miyazaki, Pixar and Dennis Potter.
And yes that's 'supercompression; get it here while stocks last. Beware of imitations.
The solicitation for Seaguy makes mention of sinister brand names, when all the great battles have been fought what enemies are left? Evil cola companies?
There's no evil left to fight in Seaguy. The world is 'perfect'. The heroes in this story are up against the lensed, bleached and xeroxed flatness of 'reality', as that word has now been ruthlessly defined by the media. The nauseating, shapeless lurch of unscripted lives, (our own), in a world where EVERY house is the Big Brother house and we're all perfectly infantilised and keeping an eye on one another for our masters, whom no-one can even identify any more - remember way back when I said 'In the future everyone will be famous 24 hours a day'? Who's the fucking daddy?
I'm really pleased that people seem to like Seaguy so much and I hope all the goodwill means DC will let us do the next nine issues soon - 'slaves of mickey eye' and 'seaguy eternal' are the next two 3-part stories to come and that's BEFORE we get to 'cosmic adventures of seaguy'. I think 12 comics might tell the whole story in the end but I'd work with Cameron forever on this if the ideas keep coming.
As for the surveillance cameras, and this is something I've brought up before, because it's not just about reality TV and security cams but also about reality itself. Everyday more and more cameras cover the landscape, and even what you wear, so much so that everyone is on camera and as it's been said before "All the worlds a stage".
The character Reuben Zion in The Invisibles was created as a comment on this - he was someone who saw the cameras-everywhere society as an opportunity to turn his dull life into an ongoing performance art masterpiece - because that's what our lives are now. Policemen sit agog before multi-screens, watching the great and endless reality show of our Friday night wanderings through the town centre. We should dress up for them, stage weird dramas in city streets, perform inexplicable one-act improvs depicting scenes of arbitrary kindness, perversion and bizarre revelation. If we must have cameras recording our every move, let's live up to all this attention.
There have actually been theatre troupes doing just that, usually for the surveillance cams in subway stations. Seaguy is also described as a post-utopian world, and you've often described yourself as a utopian. What does this really mean to you? While there are many grand solutions, like some of those presented in Thomas More's Utopia, for the most part the concept is primarily a personal vision.
I think it was me who described it as post-utopian (the current buzz phrase among academics, I'm told, is post-colonialism so I probably had my tongue up me) in the sense that, here in the world of Seaguy, a recognisably 'utopian' facade is achieved at the cost of significance and meaning. There really are no villains in Seaguy, no conspiracies, just expediencies, and blanket attempts to 'provide' for human needs and to do what's 'best' for us - a kind of mollycoddling swollen unchecked into monstrous tyranny. A perpetual childhood for the world.
As far as my own ideas about 'utopia', I've declared myself utopian in the past because the word suggests to me a kind of shiny, blue optimism about things turning out okay, even the bad things. It implies some kind of faith in the natural, fundamental processes of which we're all an undeniable part but which most people don't care to think about until they have to - life, death, the elaborate connections between the macro and micro worlds all around us and inside our bodies - all the stuff we're taught to ignore. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I believe that things are going exactly as they're meant to be going and that we have nothing to worry about except the often painful decay and passing of our meaty, huffy, puffy 'time suits'. Although nobody seems to worry too much about being born or morphing wildly into a twelve year old and then a twenty-year-old body, do they?
Also, I'm a super-fit, highly judgmental, skinhead perfectionist when I feel like it and that's when I most appreciate the song 'Utopia' by Goldfrapp, which is to me the theme song of the MARVEL BOY series. 'I'm a super-brain. That's how they made me, fascist baby.'
Vimanarama seems as though it will act as a bit of an introduction to middle Eastern history and religion for those unfamiliar, but do you feel it'll have the same appeal to Middle Eastern readers as it might to North American readers?
It's not any kind of history or religious lesson. The main players are from a large Pakistani family living in modern-day Bradford and the story is a big, operatic, science fiction romance. The Arabian Knights via Asian Dub Foundation, Jack Kirby and Monster Magnet, for a contemporary audience. It grew out of rambling chats I've had with Steve Chandra about a big Asian cosmic rock opera fold-out Roger Dean gatefold sleeve type prog project and whether or not Steve and I [could] ever actually collaborate on anything like that, VIMANARAMA! is a version of some of the ideas I started to play with while listening to ADF's last two albums. Phil Bond's work is incredible. Immense widescreen shots of London in ruins and a sky filled with the monstrous flying machines of the Rama Era. 'Daleks Invasion Earth'. All that kind of stuff. I've never seen him do anything like it. It's epic artwork. You'll see.
But to answer your question, no, I can't really imagine anybody from Iraq braving a hail of bullets to order 'Vimanarama!' at their local 'mom and pop' comic store.
So far, the majority of your new projects for DC, that have been announced, are mini-series. Do you feel you need to take a break before jumping into another long serial?
No. I'm doing tons of stuff as I mentioned before and it all links up into something bigger than a serial. Very diverse, very new, very sexy - you want?
What are you, bitch-fucking me? Of course I want.
Currently you have two projects planned with Frank Quitely, We3 followed by an unnamed DCU project. Frank seems to be attached to a number of projects as several writers have him. What is the appeal for you, aside from his art abilities, is Frank just the type of person you can hand a script and just know that he'll 'get' it?
The 'several writers' you mention are actually Mark Millar pretending to be a crowd of suspicious men. Frank is working with me on We3, then we're doing a 12-part series for the DCU. He's done a few covers for Vertigo too.
Vince draws the way I wish I could draw - he can pin down my dreams and my most nebulous ideas in lifelike detail on the skin of the 2nd dimension and I can talk to him about art history, explain things in terms of classical references, colours or shared memories, so it's very easy to communicate my ideas to him and have them understood. I feel privileged to be able to collaborate regularly with such a master of the form, whose work will be studied as long as there are sensory organs. He's my artistic soul mate, really, my most perfect collaborator. Only Cameron is coming close. What's the Quitely appeal? Haven't you seen him? He's gorgeous, luv!
We3, from the early ideas revealed I was guessing the series focused on 3 people who are survivors of grim military experiments. Turns out I was wrong about the 'people' part. When I heard the focus was animals I immediately thought of the CIA's Acoustic Kitty experiment. Can you reveal anything about this upcoming series at this point?
It's best just to read this one. There are hardly any words in it, so for a change I don't have much to say about what it all means. No big symbolic structures here. It's mostly from the perspective of animals. Otherwise, the original idea grew up out of a wish to do more with the surgically-augmented angry critters in The Filth, it then got married to a nice New Scientist article about remote-controlled rats being used for military purposes, and gave birth to my lifelong wish to create a classic animal story in the 'Incredible Journey', 'Watership Down' mold but with the added ingredient of trademark Quitely hardcore graphic ultraviolence. The rabbit slaughter sequence which opens the second issue takes the churning of stomachs to new queasy heights.
I read lots of books on animal communication and, in no time at all, I was able to use the skills I'd picked up to grunt, paw and whine my story ideas directly to my collaborator, in return for bananas and vodka. The entire premise of We3 is neatly explained on a few pages of the first issue and after that all words become superfluous for most of what occurs. This is my 'Straight Story'. I wrote it for my ten year old self, so there's no bullshit. It's like tadpoles turning into frogs.
How is your novel 'The IF' currently progressing?
Slowly but with great dignity and a love of the AAAAAArts. We have some mainstream publishers taking an interest, (I'll know more in August after the book fairs) and it looks like it will be finished this year. 'Harry Potter' meets 'A Clockwork Orange!' is what I keep telling them but it's much better than that.
You've mentioned that, in addition to your creator-owned work for DC, you'll also be tackling a number of DCU characters. Is DC pushing for more revivals of old properties or are you more drawn towards some of the company's mainstays?
After finishing New X-Men and fleeing from the tight confines of the Xavier school and its heated emotions, I had a mindfucking headstorm of new ideas last August and pitched DC a massive project called SEVEN SOLDIERS intended to re-build the 'superhero' concept from the ground up once again, for my own amusement and that of my readers. Why not? What the fuck else are we to do with 'the superhero concept' these days?
I realised that there wasn't much I could do to radically alter any of the existing DC 'icons', using my new techniques, so I turned to the back catalogue and was allowed to 're-invent' several obscure super-non-entities, in an attempt to prove that all characters have in them the spark of franchise greatness - even if its only the name. I'm splicing up a few NEW and memetically-modified genre cuttings here and stretching the notion of what a 'superhero' comic can be into some more diverse areas, I hope. It's been great fun.
I've developed a 'modular' storytelling technique for the new work, which I think is quite new. This is a large and ambitious project, as you'll see when it's announced. And I'm very grateful that DC is so open to new ideas and so willing to take a chance on what are essentially ALL-NEW characters using all-old names. I've already written about half of it but I don't think it'll be out until early 2005. Keep an eye on news for details etc
Of course, I do also have big plans for some DC 'mainstays' before and after that but that's all I can say while the marketing departments prep their summer ad campaigns.
When you say you're trying to stretch the idea of what a superhero comic can be into more diverse areas are you referring to other genres or niches? Such as a romance or mystery title which just happens to feature these characters? Or some higher storytelling technique or purpose?
It's a little bit like that, so no need to apologise – the universe of the SEVEN SOLDIERS is a dense and intricate tapestry of stories woven by the lives of a group of ground-level super people – the sort of characters who can’t get into the JLA, who can’t get gigs in the Fifth Dimension and can only dream of one day saving the world. This is the DC Universe seen from the grass roots and the bottom up, from a strata of existence far below the glamorous world of lunar hideouts, secret headquarters and global press junkets. Men and women with weird powers but generally no strong motivation or qualifications to fight crime or help people – the way most of us would be in their situation. The Seven Soldiers characters all begin as entertainers, refugees from bizarre cultures or working joes trying to make a buck using the unusual abilities fate has landed them with. They all wind up going through life-changing or life-ending experiences, of course, which bring them and us to some of the limits of what we mean by a ‘superhero’.
When I had all the raw pitch material laid out for SEVEN SOLDIERS, my nose for conceptual glue drew me to DCs short-lived but fascinating 'Weird Adventure' phase of the early 70s – those gothic romance books with girls running in long dresses, bearing flickering lanterns across haunted moors, Kirby’s disturbing ‘Spirit World’ and ‘In The Days of The Mob’ books, Alex Nino’s pirate strips, Fleischer’s ‘Death Wish’ iteration of the Spectre, ‘Black Orchid’, ‘Jonah Hex’, ‘The Vigilante’, ‘Doctor 13’ and all those odd little stories of mad swamis, ghost-breakers, haunted mesas, doomed adventurers and creepy mansions – which, although it was a wave I mostly hated at the time, now seemed ripe for reconsideration and re-appraisal. I saw a chance to pitch a new aesthetic off the back of the strange feelings I got from this discarded bric-a-brac, so yes, there’s a definite attempt to take the SEVEN SOLDIERS material and infuse it with some of that bizarre diversity, re-seeding some old and worn-out genre pastures with memetically-modified corn in the GM style. Hard-hitting modernist epic super-drama ensues with pirates of a very unusual kind, psychological sci-fi, ‘Lord of The Rings’ fantasy in modern day Los Angeles, Puritan goth horror, a talking bloody horse and just about everything else I could think of. A big new range of super- flavours that has something for everyone, all-new kinds of thrills and not an old-style ‘superhero’ in the bunch.
Could you tell us more about this 'modular' storytelling technique? If I were to guess I might veer towards lots of cuts, or maybe instances reverberating from one title to the next?
Each issue is stand alone, each mini-series can be read complete and the whole thing assembles like a jigsaw into one huge epic with multipie, criss-crossing storylines, ranging across a swathe of genres and human emotions. Imagine it all floating before you with a gigantic ensemble cast of superhumans, monsters, villains and ordinary folk and an extinction level threat to the wrold The high concept for the Seven Soldiers team themselves is a killer, as they say in the Force. There’ll be more details from DC shortly I believe.
Of the seven characters chosen to be the soldiers, had you gone into the project knowing exactly who you wanted or was it a matter of looking through the DC catalogue to see who fit the project?
It grew organically. I had this rough idea in my notebook a couple of years ago – Dan Raspler asked me what I’d do with the JLA if I came back and I had no idea at all, which kind of nagged at the back of my mind until it came out as drawings and notes. My original intention was to do a team comic called JL8 which would be a Justice League book with no big icon characters at all. I figured, however, that if the Authority could work instantly with a bunch of new characters, wouldn't it be possible to take a bunch of old characters, polish them up,‘re-imagine’ their origins, powers, look and motivations and pass them off as if they were new guys too. Additionally, as a way of giving the JL8 roster a hidden backbone of familiarity, I based the whole thing on the classic membership of the Avengers and went looking for obscure DC character analogues to loosely fit the bill - Mister Miracle as Thor, the Demon as the Hulk, the Guardian as Captain America, the Enchantress as the Scarlet Witch, the Spider as Hawkeye and so on...as the project developed and changed beyond recognition from all this, a bunch of characters dropped out (my version of the Demon which I loved, was knocked back for being too far removed from Kirby’s original. It was a good high concept and I’ll rework the draft scripts somewhere else I expect. Then there was MANHUNTER – which blended DC’s Manhunter concept with J’onn J’onnz, Manhunter from Mars to pleasing effect – which has now been replaced by the much more more powerful and amusing FRANKENSTEIN comic, derived in name only from Mike Kaluta’s ‘Spawn of Frankenstein’ series) and others were drafted in to occupy the more complex roles of SEVEN SOLDIERS – an altogether more ambitious attempt to do fast, large scale narrative adventures. Big Western manga.
The only characters in the upcoming SEVEN SOLDIERS series left over from that original JL8 concept are The Guardian, Mister Miracle and the Spider, who’s there but in a smaller and very different role. There’s a monstrous regiment of players in this series – apart from the main seven, I resurrected and completely recreated another ten DC archive franchises plus a squad of new guys and some of the best and scariest villains I’ve ever come up with, I think. I’m very excited about this. It’s 30 issues – including two double-sized bookends – which is almost three years of comics stories squeezed down into a one year-long microwave blast of pure adrenalin and intelligence. Hopefully it should provide a very diverse, unusual and absorbing read.
One character you've chosen, Mister Miracle has actually been slated for a Wildstorm Superhero revival for some time now, will their series affect your title? Or vice versa?
No idea. I haven't heard anything about this so it certainly hasn't impacted the scripts I've already submitted. My Mister Miracle isn't the Scott free character and the whole approach to the New Gods elements of the story is very different.
While some people are more familiar with his comics work, Grant is also a musician and has written for film, stage and even video games. But underlying, intersecting and bridging all those mediums is Grant's efforts in the field of Magicks. Developing his own style known as Pop Magic, Grant shows that everyone can do magick. Further details can be seen on Grant's website or by picking up the Book Of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult available from the fine people of the Disinfo Network.
Do you find that certain writers or individuals involved with magicks can inspire coincidences in your own life? You can make all sorts of analogies with that idea, that people are simply conductors or that the magicks are viral, etc. The last time I interviewed you I had everything printed out and was editing it on paper at my apartment and around the same time I was re-reading the Kissing Mister Quimper trade and I started to notice how a lot of what you said in the interview mirrored ideas brought forth in that volume. Even now as I interview you again, I've been with a girl who happened to have a scorpion tattooed on the base of her spine.
I see magic, as I've mentioned, as a kind of 'special attention' - the magician watches and listens to the world very closely and uses his/her knowledge of the obvious to do things which seem baffling or supernatural to people who have not been trained to be quite as closely observant. Remember that human consciousness - that is EVERYTHING WE CAN THINK ABOUT - occupies a very narrow bandwidth. Of the 11 million bits of information our senses receive from the environment every second, the conscious mind edits out 10,999,984 bits, leaving 'us' with very little to think about and to look at - only 16 bits of information per second, in fact. Let THAT sink in. The world around us is seething and swarming with multitudes of things we refuse to or don't need to process into conscious awareness - hence those troubling 'sub'-conscious tremors and blinks we call feelings, intuitions, hunches, deja vu. There's also a half a second time lag between any given external 'event' and our consciousness becoming aware of it. Everything we see and do is actually happening half a second ago and we've already done it before our mind catches up to our actions and assigns them a meaning in our ongoing self-narrative. 'Conscious awareness' offers only the tiniest of perceptual pinholes on the universe and yet we tend to think we have it all worked out. The truth is that we're scantly aware of what's happening all around us, quite literally, as science has shown. The magician tries to bring a little more of this 'dark' unconscious life into conscious light and thereby learns to 'see' the universe better and to work with its mechanisms, to more profitably enrich his/her own experience and that of others. Magic only seems 'spooky' because it often deals with these normally-veiled areas of awareness.
Everything else, all the dress-up, the rings, the secret languages, that's more to do with creating a fashion 'glamor' around oneself than it has to do with magical practise; we're all familiar with the image of the 'magician' or warlock as good Gandalf, or sinister Anton LaVey, with his staff and pentagrams and Eurasia Crafts cloak. But honestly, the more you look closely at the world and the people around you, the more 'magical' it will naturally seem to become and the coincidences will seem to accumulate until you realise it's all a co-incidence, as shocking, unexpected and breath-taking as the best conjuring trick. You soon realise you don't need the pointed hat or the grimoire, although they might help you to get in the mood at the beginning, before you've realised what it is you're actually doing. As you practise more and become more aware of how 'coincidences' work together to make up the world, you'll learn how to 'cause' them to happen and astonish or discomfort people who haven't been taught or don't care to learn how easy it is. Do aboriginal lawmen have to learn the order of the Qabalistic sephiroth in order to accomplish their highly-advanced magic? Do the Tibetan monks of the Dzogchen tradition use Latin, 'angelic' or Hebrew phrases? Of course not, because magic is simply a way of living and it arises spontaneously as a response to our circumstances.
Let's all go out today in state of heightened attention and become aware of how many things we all see or hear which connect or 'coincide' directly with ideas discussed in this article. Magic will abound.
Everything is literally entangled, it can all be communicated with and affected 'at a distance' because there is no distance, only a simulation of apparent separation which our limited consciousness feeds us second by second at 11 bits. The 'telepathy' which brings people together is no more or less supernatural or unlikely than the 'telepathy' which brings two of your fingers together when you think about it. Patience, participation and constant close observation of what's going on, on the inside and on the outside will soon make you a fine sorcerer, if that's what you want to be.
One of the good things about your outline for Pop Magic is that it allows itself to be open to interpretation and experimentation as opposed to the old 'do this, do that' way many come across. For instance, you refer to Invisibles as a hypersigil with each issue being a component of that sigil. Any person could do something similar at home without having to publish seven trades worth of material, a supersigil as it were. We'll take your instructions of turning a desire into a sigil, for instance, something like this:
But we don't stop, we continue, creating another. And another. Until you have as many as you want, then you take those sigils and combine them to create another sigil wherein the supersigil is comprised of one of each of the previous sigils, thus creating something like this.
And I learned this just from reading what you had to say, but then my only concern would be if combining the sigils into one large one would lessen the charge of the individual sigils had you simply charged them on their own.
I'm not sure if a sigil becomes more powerful the more complex it becomes or less; you'd have to be careful with the recipe. It's definitely an area to experiment with. Do more and let me know the results. These could be the hydrogen bombs of the sigil age, who knows? The Invisibles style hypersigil, requires a very close personal involvement with and surrender to processes occurring within the text, which sets up a bizarre and wholly 'magical' feedback between the 'real' and 'imaginary' worlds until it becomes impossible to tell them apart.
And lastly, perhaps the question I should have asked first, how you doing Grant? Because your fans want to know, how are you doing? Just remember that whatever medium you may be working in, you inspire others and there's not as many people around to do that as they're used to be.
I miss my dad and I miss my wee familiars. I'm down to the bare frazzled neuron, bitter, battered, bruised by events and a bit of a moaning old zombie cunt right now but I should be right back to my perky self after [my recent] nice honeymoon in the sun with Kristan. Give me a colourful reality transfusion and I'll be jes' fiiiiiine. Thanks for asking.
And thank you for participating in this interview and on behalf of all the PopImage staff, and all the people reading this now, our fondest wishes to you and Kristan. Congratulations.
