Flex was the pre–Dark Age superhero delivered—with his simple morality, his kind and friendly nature, and his hatred of bullies—into a more sinister world. Rather than succumb, as the Watchmen characters did, to real-world pressures, he would overcome them with the sheer power of muscle mystery.
Each of the four issues took its thematic cue from a different age of comics, so the first, entitled Flowery Atomic Heart, dealt with the golden age of childhood memories and lost Edens. The second was the silver age of transformation and young adulthood, My Beautiful Head. The dark age and late adolescence were represented by issue no. 3’s bleak Dig the Vacuum, while We Are All UFOs, the final installment, anticipated that coming, as yet unnamed, age, which almost twenty years later we’re calling the Renaissance. In that respect, Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery can be seen as a template for Supergods. Together, the four issues told the story of the titular superhero’s quest through a night city built from what appeared to be the debris of half-forgotten comic-book memories, in search of his lost teammate, the Fact.
But these might also have been the dying hallucinations of a suicidal rock star tripping in a grimy back alley in the rain, while rambling over the phone to what he thinks is a Samaritans help line.
The book was part biography, real and imagined — the story of a life I might have led if the Mixers had been successful. I saw it as the memoir of an “Earth-2 Grant Morrison,” so I gave him my own childhood, and he inhabited a rough facsimile of my West End terraced town house. He was me with my cat and visiting girlfriend, my comic books, aliens, and white-hot blitzkrieg visionary nights. An odd, liminal alleyway near Charing Cross in Glasgow had often caught my eye on buzzed-up walks at three in the morning and became the setting for the main character’s life-saving hallucinations — or perhaps they were his genuine contact with a departed superworld that had always existed all around us, surfacing only in our fantasies. The book showed the influence of my occult experiences too, and tried to resolve them in the context of superhero fiction, using the symbols, archetypes, and characters that had formed in my imagination to construct a kind of superhero alternative to religion.
The first cover was plastered with graphic bursts and exclamations in a frantic Pop Art saturation that quoted Infantino’s great Flash no. 163 cover illustration : the hero’s hand outstretched to make direct contact with the reader.
“STOP! YOU MUST BUY THIS COMIC OR THE EARTH IS DOOMED!”
It opened with a nine-panel grid showing a Ditkoesque “hat and trench coat” character with a fizzing cartoon bomb in his hand. The thrown bomb arced into 3-D foreground in the second panel, to explode in the third.
This explosion was the big bang itself, as we understood when cosmic expansion slowed in panel 5 to show the familiar configuration of the constellation Orion and its brightest star, Sirius.
“FLIGHT 23 IS NOW DEPARTING THROUGH THE K-9 DOORWAY.”
Panels 6 and 7 began an immense reverse zoom from Orion out to the galactic spiral, seen from a distance of one hundred thousand light-years.
Panel 8 was blackness, with a single tiny white dot containing the whole universe, and in panel 9, the light of the universe itself vanished into what seemed eternal darkness.
But page 2’s continuation of the disorienting reverse showed that not even the darkness can claim absolute sovereignty, when the first three panels slowly revealed it to be nothing more than the shadow in the dimple of a felt hat. The same hat, in fact, worn by the bomb-wielding mystery man we met on the first page.
Now he was a drawing of a different kind on a different scale: a spindly pen sketch on the shell of an egg, which, in panel 6, was cracked against a pan’s iron rim.
“THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS.”
Panel 7 showed a hand emptying the egg into a frying pan.
“HAVE YOU SEEN THAT ADVERT?”
Panel 8 revealed a smiling chef who turned to look directly at the reader just as Animal Man had done but without the same alarm or existential confusion.
“EGGS, EGGS, EGGS.” He grinned. “WHO WANTS EGGS?”
The title page 3 was a full-page picture of our hero, smiling and winking. Flex was the superhero stripped back to his core appeal as an all but naked muscleman in leopard-print trunks and lace-up wrestling boots. He was as ludicrous, camp, serious, and completely dependable as we could possibly make him.
“EGGS? THAT’LL BE ME!”
Every single character was given his or her own distinct body language, and Quitely included twenty-three separate and distinct airport diners in the background of his splash, each reacting to the presence of this outlandish, grinning, egg-ordering muscleman with the notebook for recording his impressions. As the unreconstructed, good-hearted, unself-aware superman stood among them, some were disgusted, some were mocking, some were impressed, and some were frightened or surprised.
When a terror cell known only as Faculty X (British author Colin Wilson’s term for the hidden potential of the human mind) left a fizzing cartoon anarchist bomb — like the one from pages 1 and 2 — in the airport concourse, Flex leapt in to save the day, only to discover The Bomb was designed not to explode but to frighten and confuse. Faculty X uses bombs to “destroy not objects but certainties.”
As we looked down on Flex pondering the airport bomb in a majestically composed overhead wide-angle view, the story switched on a page turn to a detailed close-up re-creation of a tabletop in a well-heeled stoner’s apartment: bong, hash block, rolling papers, and a scatter of superhero comic books with titles like Outerboy and Lord Limbo, published by the fictional Stellar Comics line (named for my own DIY boyhood comics imprint). Here we were introduced to the real hero: the nameless, aimless unshaven rock star, drunk and on drugs, manically clearing out cupboards containing boxes of old comic books and his own youthful drawings of what turned out to be the adventures of Flex Mentallo. A realistically rendered scene of Mentallo in police headquarters blended into the same scene drawn by a talented ten-year-old as the story’s levels of fantasy and fiction began to interact.
Flex set out through a seedy, fallen Limbo that stood for the devastated postdeconstruction landscape of superhero fiction, where kid sidekicks bereft of adult hero supervision haunted the backstreets as brutal costumed gangs, part–Burroughs Wild Boys, part–Burgess droogs, or where junkies searched for an elusive kryptonite high that would confer upon them Captain Marvel – style cosmic consciousness and apocalyptic revelatory visions of superheroes swooping in their thousands from a hole in the clouds on the Day of Judgment. I imagined superheroes had become hearsay, glimpsed in blurred photographs like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.
A third tier of the story was set in a Platonic superhero universe that was being eaten out of existence by a godlike entity known as the Absolute. The surviving superheroes, known as the Legion of Legions, had devised a desperate plan that required the creation of a whole new universe into which they could escape. The only catch: The superheroes would have to become fictional in order to survive in this new universe with its less forgiving physics. The new universe they created was, as you may have guessed, our own. Our superhero stories were race memories of our own origins in this lost world.
Like The Invisibles, Flex was a direct product of that Kathmandu experience, to which we can now return and where, if you remember, I’d just been twisted off the surface of the universe into the fifth dimension.
Moving through the rich blue space of the beyond were more creatures like the silver blobs who’d brought me there. When one of them passed right through my substance, trailing a tidal wash of emotions, I heard my mother’s voice saying, “Next time I’ll be you and you can be me.” I saw from my own reflection that I was a mercurial hypersprite too and remembered that I always had been. I was fine with that. I understood that we were all holographic sections of something invisible to me in its entirety; I was reminded how to “plug into” the silver grid lines that zipped and glistened in and out of being all around me. These lattices, I knew, were for the input and output of pure information. There was time and space, but those were lower dimensions, useful for creating worlds in the same way that comic artists drew living worlds on paper. Here was an unending perfect day of absorbing eternal creation.
To help explain to my blown senses what was happening and why I was here, the beings were keen to show me the universe I’d just come from and how it looked. When they did, it was one of several, inside something I recall as a kind of stall of incubators.
The universe—the entire space-time continuum, from big bang to heat death, no less—was not a linear stream of events with beginning, middle, and end. That was only how it felt from the inside. In fact, the totality of existence looked more like a ball of sphincters, constantly moving through itself in a way that was hypnotic and awe inspiring to observe. There was Shakespeare scribbling King Lear on one wrinkled fold, and just around the corner from him, forever out of his line of sight, was the Cretaceous period and tyrannosaurs padding past his wife Anne Hathaway’s cottage.
And, as if to confirm that ours was not the only universe, it was explained to me that what I was seeing was a nursery of some kind. In order to grow their “offspring,” the chrome angels had to “make” time, because, as they pointed out reasonably, only in time were things able to grow as I understood it. Time was a kind of incubator, and all life on Earth was one thing, a single weird anemone-like mega-Hydra with its single-celled immortal root in the Precambrian tides and its billions of sensory branches, from ferns to people, with every single detail having its own part to play in the life cycle of a slowly complexifying, increasingly self-aware super-organism. It was as if I had been shown an infant god, attached to a placental support system called Earth, where it could grow bigger, more elaborate, more connected, and more intelligent. Growing at its tips were machine parts; cyborg tools made from the planet’s mineral resources. It seemed to be constructing around itself a part-mechanical shell, like armor or a spacesuit. “It” was us, all life seen as one from the perspective of a higher dimension.
I was told to return and take up my duties as a “midwife” to this gargantuan raw nervous system. It was important to ensure the proper growth and development of the larva and to make certain it didn’t panic or struggle too much when it woke up to its true nature as a singular life form. Incidentally, what we experienced as “evil” was simply the effects of inoculation against some cosmic disease, so I wasn’t to worry much.
I felt slammed into the sudden weight of my meat on the bed, the rasp of breathing, reeling as sounds returned and the room jigsawed itself backward out of the void, like a kit assembled by my opening eyes. The sense of loss, the fall from heaven, was heartbreaking, but it was my origin story too—my personal induction into the cosmic corps, the army of light.
My experiment was going very nicely indeed.
The next day, Ulric and I flew home via Frankfurt, where I locked myself in an airport hotel room to fill dozens of journal pages with my attempts to describe what had just happened to me in Nepal. If nothing else, I was left with enough ideas for comic books to keep me working for another fifty years.
But there was much more: I soon discovered that I’d been sent back to Earth with my very own superpower. I was now able to “see” 5-D perspective. It became impossible to look at a cup, for instance, without seeing it as the visible surface of something much bigger and even more astounding; something that was winding back through its progress toward my table and beyond, back through its manufacture. The cup was the tip of a string that, if it could be followed back through time, had an immediate physical connection to origins in prehistoric clay beds created by the weathering of primordial rocks, composed of elements spun from a cooling star that was itself one blazing spark of an unimaginable, still-occurring explosion at the dawn of time and being. This one cup had been all those things in time. One day it would break, but the fragments would continue forever. And if a cup was a spectacular, constantly shape-changing, disassembling, re-forming, never-ceasing process, what about the human body itself, morphing extravagantly and more totally than any special-effects werewolf, from small, soft infancy, to hard-bodied teenage self-replicating self-aware maturity, to sagging middle age, and decomposing dry-leaf seniority? How completely has your own body changed since you were five years old? Even when we die, our physical process continues; centuries reduce our bodies to dust, recycling every atom so that the air you breathe today might contain a particle that was once Napoléon. An atom of iron in your body might once have spilled from the brow of Jesus Christ.
I could see the shapes of things and of people as the flat plane surfaces of far more complex and elaborate processes occurring in a higher dimensional location. Every human life became a trailing extension through time, not just four-limbed and two-eyed but multilimbed and billion-eyed as it wormed back from the present moment and forward into the future: a tendril, a branch on this immense, intricately writhing life tree. This biota, as science calls the totality of life on Earth.
Adding time to the world picture was like adding perspective to Renaissance paintings or finding space in the spectrum for a billion new colors, or room on the airwaves for a trillion new TV stations. There didn’t need to be spirits or aliens. Everything was immortal and holy not as a result of some hidden supernatural essence but as a consequence of its material nature in time. We ourselves were miraculous, already divine in our glorious, ordinary impossibility. And it was consciousness that brought the whole thing to life, finding structure and symmetry in it, making it sing and weep and dance. I felt sure that in some way what we call consciousness would turn out to be the long-sought unified field.
I could see that the past had to exist somewhere in order for us all to be here today, but no one could take us there or even point to it. I was now very aware of myself as the front end or leading edge of something that was pushing forward into time. But more important, it stretched behind me, thirty-four years long, diminishing at the baby tail where it twisted up into my mother’s belly and curled inward to a seed, a bud, grown from my mum’s own thirty-year-long, multilimbed total physical existence from her birth to mine. She branched back into her own mother; and so it went all the way down to the dawn of life on Earth in a single unbroken line.
And the same was true for all of us. Everything that had ever lived was a twig off the same tree, a finger on the same hand. Add time, and it became blindingly obvious that the entire tree of life on Earth was alive and physically connected, even after three and a half billion years. Not in any metaphysical way but literally, materially, back through all time toward the root. The same primordial mitochondrial cell that began its eternal self-cloning process in the primordial ocean was and is still dividing inside each and every one of us.
Could mitochondria be science’s secret word for “soul”? Could the presence of an asexual immortal organism in the depths of our physical being be responsible in any way for the sensation we have of some indwelling, undying, and infinitely wise and fulfilled essence? Had my entire experience been some kind of dialogue with my own cellular structure? Was it some literal understanding of the Hermetic axiom “As above, so below”? Was I really just a cell, in the body of the earth’s sole life-form? Was my relationship to this primordial consciousness like that of a helper T cell to a human body, for instance? Were soldiers hunter-killer cells?
When I died, others just like me would replace me and do exactly what I did. There would always be writers, telling the same basic stories over and over. There would always be policemen and teachers, too; were there ever years where no policemen were born? Every one of the ten billion skin scales that flake away each day was once filled with life and industry, but who mourns those tireless workers who live and die in staggering numbers just to maintain a human existence over eighty years? The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.
Like a caterpillar munching its merry mindless way through a leaf, the global entity, the biota beast of which we were part appeared to be devastating its environment, but something else was occurring on a different scale. The creature was consuming to fuel its metamorphosis. Even global warming could be seen as part of the incubation period, a sign of larval development reaching its crescendo, forcing us all to wake up, get moving, and leave the planet to its recovery.
Whatever it was—however you, the reader, choose to interpret this information—the experience completely rewrote me. It was a life-changing, game-changing moment that altered the trajectory of my life and work. It even gave me a kind of unshakable faith in a private religion that satisfactorily explained everything about how things work.
I’d been cursed or blessed with superhero vision, a science fiction revelation that seemed to draw to a center all the strands of my life so that everything made sense. My interest in higher dimensions, my obsession with UFOs and aliens, my job creating stories for pocket universes—it all finally added up.
In the immanent blue world, all of this had already occurred. The baby was already being born, fully grown like a fly from a maggot. Some of what they tried to show me was simply too fantastic, too reliant on higher-dimensional topographies for a 3-D mind to contain. They kept telling me to remember as much as I could as best as I could because so many of their concepts were quite simply beyond my comprehension and would not survive a return to human consciousness. “They” being distinct over-my-shoulder voices that came from inside and from somewhere else.
Television talks about the “fourth wall” of the set as being the screen itself. If so, this was a glimpse beyond the fifth wall of our shared reality. Five-dimensional intelligences could, as a condition of their geometrically elevated positions, get into our skulls quite easily, and we might expect their voices to seem to come from inside. They, in turn, could hear our thoughts as easily as we can read Batman’s private inner monologues on a 2-D page. The interior of our skulls contains a portal to infinity. If my experience was not metaphor, might there be things living there, in that gargantuan ecological niche? Could fertile wet planets like our Earth really be nurseries where omni-anemones fed and grew to become quicksilver angels in a timeless AllNow?
This whole interlude, I can only repeat, was far more “real” than any other I have known before or since. Its colors were more resplendent, as if glowing on a celestial HD monitor. Its emotions were finer, its words expressed as huge, perfect, orchestral aggregates of symbol, emotion, and metaphor. The definition of things, especially feelings, was sharper, and the sense of being safely and finally home was devastating, haunting. Imagine the laser-edged precision and liquid crystalline hyperreality of computer graphics taken to powers of ten, and you will still be nowhere near this other place. The vast, star-spackled quantum dream room in which I sit and write as the warships parade up and down the sparkling sunlit blue of the loch might as well be a grainy black-and-white TV signal from the 1950s compared to the purity of Kathmandu’s dazzling science fiction Elysium.
Understanding that boundary-shattering experience became fundamental to what I was doing, and I began to lose myself, to blur the limits between what was real and what was conceivable.
What happened to me can be interpreted in any number of ways. To some, it’s sure to read as just one more trip story with no relevance to the material world. Occultists of a certain persuasion will recognize the knowledge and conversation of the holy guardian angel. My experience comfortably fit the profile for alien abduction reports, angelic contact, and temporal lobe epilepsy. None of these “explanations” for what I saw, coming as they did from a lower-resolution, flatter universe, could truly do my experience justice. Where higher dimensions are implicated, it’s wise to remember the story of the blind men and the elephant and assume that all attempts to frame Kathmandu in 3-D terms are in some way absolutely true. But if it makes it easier to deal with, feel free to assume I hallucinated the whole thing and went completely, gloriously, and very lucratively mad.
I stopped piling up rationalizations and instead dealt with what could be proven about this event, which was its undeniably positive effect on my life. Kathmandu fundamentally reprogrammed me and left me with a certainty stronger than faith that everything, even that which was sad and painful, was happening exactly the way it was supposed to.
All will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.
Years of living in a materialistic culture and of outwardly giving in to a kind of culturally enforced pessimism have left me with a more twenty-first-century, grounded view of that day in the Vajra.
Let’s say there’s a developmental level of human consciousness that was once almost mythical—Jesus, Buddha, and Allah experienced it—but which is now more freely available to a much larger percentage of the general human population, thanks to the easy bookstore and online availability of “magical” recipes and formulas, and of consciousness-altering methods.
Children of five are developmentally unable to see perspective, while children of seven can. Twelfth-century artists were unable to render vanishing points on two dimensions, while fifteenth-century painters had mastered the trick to create convincing simulations of reality. Do civilizations follow the same growth and decline curve as human organisms with the same holographic imprint reiterating through all scales?
I can see how the sudden shock of accessing a natural holistic five-dimensional perspective might strike an unprepared human nervous system as contact with an alien intelligence; a “higher”-order entelechy. As far as the brain is concerned, that’s exactly what it is. New neural pathways are being seared into the cortex by the demands of this way of seeing. I think the rational mind tries to make sense of its new perspective—as a child makes sense of the inner voice of dawning self-awareness by theorizing an imaginary playmate—by framing it in images of the alien, the uncanny, or the demonic. The fact that some people who’ve had this wake-up call report having seen aliens, while others saw Jesus, or the Devil or dead relatives, fairies or angels, suggests that the details are culturally determined.
What’s important about this experience is not whether there are “real” aliens from a fifth-dimension heaven where everything is great and we’re all friends. There may well be, but I have no real proof. Much of what I went through even makes sense within the current framework of string theory, with its talk of enclosed infinite vaults, its hyperdimensional panoramas of baby universes budding in hyperspace. The aliens are the least of it.
My Kathmandu vision of planet Earth’s singular living form, that cosmic only child whose brain cells we are, on the other hand, requires no belief in the supernatural. Simply add the time dimension to your contemplation of life, look backward down your own history and family tree, all the way to the original mother cell three and a half billion years over your shoulder from here, and tell me if you can find one single join, or a seam, or any break.
This for me was bigger than any ultradimensional or quasi-religious afterlife, which I wouldn’t be able to confirm until I died and either woke up back among the blobs or didn’t. I couldn’t deny that I was a tiny, short-lived temporary cell in something very, very big and very old. I even saw how that brute connection to every living thing might explain away the “supernatural” mysteries of things like telepathy or reincarnation as simple, direct connections between distant branches of the same majestic tree, like the tingle in your toe that sends a message to your brain, which launches your hand to scratch the itch.
I was deep inside my own story, further than I could have imagined. My sister covered my bedroom wardrobe with a collage of comics pages so that every time I faced my reflection, I appeared as one more panel in a tarot spread of scattered pages and images, part human, part fiction, a Gnostic superhero in PVC, shades, and shaved head.
As for drugs, I sampled various psychedelic compounds in the waning years of the nineties, hoping to re-create the Kathmandu connection. I was willing to write off the whole thing as some very enjoyable drug trip, but I never found a substance capable of reproducing that place, and I eventually gave up.
I was left with a stubborn conviction that when I died, my consciousness would start awake there, with the same shock of the utterly familiar, the same thrill-ride buzz of a job well done.
The initial shock of all this was replaced by a period of voices in the head, uncanny synchronicities, signs and dreams and remarkable new insights. I was haunted, inspired, possessed. I could lie on my bed, intone a homemade spell or evocation, and be transported to a convincing wraparound representation of a higher-conscious vibration where an infinite circle of golden Buddha beings solemnly overlook a white abyss into which the entire universe is funneling like water down a drain. It was even better than an issue of Warlock.
Each and every experience, even the ego-destroying blind terrors, went into the work, enriching The Invisibles and JLA a thousandfold. It was proof of the old saying “Where there’s muck, there’s brass.” In an imagination economy, where ideas, trademarks, and intellectual properties held incalculable value, the coruscating quarry face of the interior world was the place to be. There was gold in them thar ghost mines.
I even tried to consider Kathmandu in terms of the fashionable idea that temporal lobe seizures could trigger authentic “religious” experiences. This sounded even better than 5-D angels. If science had identified a purely physical brain trigger for holistic god consciousness, would it not be in our own best interests to start pressing this button immediately and as often as we can? What would happen to the murderers and rapists in our prisons if we could stimulate a temporal lobe god-contact experience that caused them to empathize with everything in the universe? If electrical spasms in the temporal lobe are indeed capable of such remarkable world-transforming effects, let’s see them become more than just another stick with which to beat an absent God to death. Push the button!
The 1990s was also the time of the ubiquitous alien head symbol, some of you may recall, a nineties freak version of the smiley face, in the era of TV’s X-Files. In my imperial delirium, I was ready to believe that something from the future was trying to break through the walls of the world, using images of superheroes and aliens as a carrier signal.
