The Temple Legend

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Temple Legend

 

In his lecture cycle "The Temple Legend - Freemasonry & Related Occult Movements" given in Berlin between 23rd May 1904 and the 2nd January 1906 (GA 93), Rudolf Steiner gives a synopsis of the myth in Lecture 5, entitled "The Mystery Known to Rosicrucians."

 

Below is a synopsis of the legend as given by Steiner in the lecture, followed by a more detailed version provided by the publishers (Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1985).

 

Synopsis:

There was a time when one of the Elohim created a human being whom he called Eve. That Elohim united himself with Eve and she gave birth to Cain. After this, another Elohim, named Yahveh, created Adam. Adam also united himself with Eve and from this union came Abel.

 

Thus we see that Cain is a direct descendant of The Gods, but Abel is a descendant of Adam and Eve who are Human. Now the myth proceeds :

 

The sacrifices which Abel made to Yahveh were pleasing to him, but the sacrifices brought by Cain did not please him because the birth of Cain was not ordained by Him. The result was that Cain committed fratricide. He killed Abel and for this he was excluded from communion with Yahveh. He went away into distant lands and founded his own race there.

 

Adam again united himself with Eve and from this union came Seth, also mentioned in the Bible, who took over the role of Abel. Thus we have two generations of mankind; the race of Cain, who was a descentant of Eve and one of the Elohim, and the other race which had human parentage and was brought into existence at the command of Yahveh.

 

Among the descendants of Cain are all those who have been creators of art and science, as, for instance, Methuselah, the inventor of the Tau script, and Tubal-Cain, who taught the use and working of metal ores and iron. In this line of descent, stemming from the Elohim, were all those who trained themselves in the arts and sciences.

 

Hiram also descended from The Race of Cain, and he was the inheritor of all that had been learned by the others of his line in technology and art. He was the most significant architect we can imagine.

 

Out of Seth's line came Solomon, who excelled in everything which came from Yahveh. He was endowed with the wisdom of the world and all the attributes of calm, clear, objective wisdom. This wisdom can be expressed in words which go straight to the human heart and can uplift a person, but is unable to produce anything tangible of a technical nature, in art or science. It is a wisdom which is a directly inspired gift of God and not attained from below through human passions welling up from the human will - that would be the wisdom pertaining to the sons of Cain, a legacy of the other Elohim, not Yahveh. They are the hardworking industriuous ones who seek to accomplish everything through their own efforts.

 

Solomon now decides to build a temple and calls upon Hiram, the descendant of Cain, to be his master builder. It was at the time when Balkis, the Queen of Sheba, was visiting Jerusalem because she had heard of the wisdom of Solomon. And she was certainly impressed and charmed by the exalted and clear wisdom and beauty of the King when she first arrived, and when he made love to her she consented to be his bride. Now she heard about the temple which was being built and she desired to make the acquaintance of the master builder, Hiram. When she first met him she was captivated merely by his glance. As a result, a certain mood of jealousy arose between Hiram and Solomon and the latter wished to do something or other against Hiram, but he was dependent upon him for the completion of the temple.

 

Now came the following : The Temple was almost complete. Only one thing was still lacking, which was to have been Hiram's masterpiece; that was The Molten Sea, which was to represent the ocean cast in bronze and was to have adorned the temple. All the necessary mixtures of ores had been prepared by Hiram in a most wonderful manner, ready to be cast. Now, however, three apprentices got to work, whom Hiram had found so lacking in skill that he had been unable to promote them to become Masters. They had therefore sworn to be revenged on him and desired to prevent the casting of the Molten Sea. A friend of Hiram, who got to know about these plans, confided them to Solomon, so that he should prevent their realization. But Solomon, through jealousy, did nothing to stop them, because he wished to destroy Hiram. The result was that Hiram had to look on while the whole casting disintegrated due to the addition of a wrong ingredient in the mixture by the three apprentices. He tried to quench the bursting flames by pouring water over them, but this only made matters worse. Just as he was on the point of despairing about the work ever being completed, Tubal-Cain, his ancestor, appeared to him and told him that he should not hesitate to cast himself into the fire, as he was invulnerable to the flames. Hiram did as he was advised and came to the center of the earth. He was led by Tubal-Cain to Cain, who there resided in a condition of pristine divinity. Hiram was thus initiated into the Mystery of Fire and into the secret of bronze casting, receiving from Tubal-Cain a hammer and a Golden Triangle which he was able to carry with him as a pendant round his neck. Then he returned and was able to complete the casting of the Molten Sea and to put everything in order again.

 

Hereupon the Queen of Sheba consented to become Hiram's bride. He, however, was set upon by the three apprentices and murdered. But before he died, Hiram managed to throw the Golden Triangle into a well. As no one knew where he had disappeared, a search was made. 

Even Solomon was afraid and was anxious to find out what had happened. It was thought that the ancient Master Word could be betrayed by the apprentices, and therefore another one was devised. The first word to be spoken when Hiram was discovered should be the new Master Word. 

At last Hiram was found and was able to utter a few last words. He said: "Tubal-Cain had promised me that I shall have a son who will be the father of many descendants who will people the earth and bring my work - the building of the Temple - to completion.” 

Then he pointed to the place where the Golden Triangle was to be found. This was then collected and brought to the Molten Sea and both were preserved together in the Holy of Holies. 

They are only to be discovered by those who can understand the meaning of the legend of the Temple of Solomon and its Master Builder Hiram.

 

What follows is a somewhat

expanded version of

The Temple Legend,

with more detail:

 

THE LEGEND OF THE TEMPLE

 

Ancestry of Hiram Abiff

Solomon, having determined on the erection of the Temple, collected artificers, divided them into companies, and put them under the command of Adoniram or Hiram Abiff, the architect sent to him by his friend and ally Hiram, King of Tyre. According to mythical tradition, the ancestry of the builders of the mystical temple was as follows: One of the Elohim, or primitive genii, married Eve and had a son called Cain; whilst Jehovah or Adonai, another of the Elohim, created Adam and united him with Eve to bring forth the family of Abel, to whom were subjected the sons of Cain, as a punishment for the transgression of Eve. Cain, though industriously cultivating the soil, yet derived little produce from it, whilst Abel leisurely tended his flocks. Adonai rejected the gifts and sacrifices of Cain, and stirred up strife between the sons of the Elohim, generated out of fire, and the sons formed out of the earth only. Cain killed Abel, and Adonai pursuing his sons, subjected to the sons of Abel the noble family that invented the arts and diffused science. Enoch, a son of Cain, taught men to hew stones, construct edifices and form civil societies. Irad and Mehujael, his son and grandson, set boundaries to the waters and fashioned cedars into beams. Methusael, another of his descendants, invented the sacred characters, the books of Tau and the symbolic T, by which the workers descended from the genii of fire recognized each other. Lamech, whose prophesies are inexplicable to the profane, was the father of Jabal, who first taught men how to dress camels' skins; of Jubal, who discovered the harp; of Naanah, who discovered the arts of spinning and weaving; of Tubal-Cain, who first constructed a furnace, worked in metals, and dug subterranean caves in the mountains to save his race during the deluge; but it perished nevertheless, and only Tubal-Cain and his son, the sole survivors of the glorious and gigantic family, came out alive. The wife of Ham, second son of Noah, thought the son of Tubal-Cain handsomer than the sons of men, and he became progenitor of Nimrod, who taught his brethren the art of hunting, and founded Babylon. Adoniram, the descendant of Tubal-Cain, seemed called by God to lead the militia of the free men, connecting the sons of fire with the sons of thought, progress, and truth.

 

Hiram, Solomon, and the Queen of Sheba

By Hiram was erected a marvellous building, the Temple of Solomon. He raised the golden throne of Solomon, most beautifully wrought, and built many other glorious edifices. But, melancholy amidst all his greatness, he lived alone, understood and loved by few, hated by many, and among others by Solomon, envious of his genius and glory. Now the fame of the wisdom of Solomon spread to the remotest ends of the earth; and Balkis, the Queen of Sheba, came to Jerusalem, to greet the great king and behold the marvels of his reign. She found Solomon seated on a throne of gilt cedar wood, arrayed in cloth of gold, so that at first she seemed to behold a statue of gold with hands of ivory. Solomon received her with every kind of festive preparation, and led her to behold his palace and then the grand works of the temple; and the queen was lost in admiration. The king was captivated by her beauty, and in a short time offered her his hand, which the queen, pleased at having conquered his proud heart, accepted. But on again visiting the temple, she repeatedly desired to see the architect who had wrought such wondrous things. Solomon delayed as long as possible presenting Hiram Abiff to the queen, but at last he ws obliged to do so. The mysterious artificer was brought before her, and cast on the queen a look that penetrated her very heart. Having recovered her composure, she questioned and defended him against the illwill and rising jealousy of the king. When she wished to see the countless host of workmen that wrought at the temple, Solomon protestd the impossibility of assembling them all at once; but Hiram, leaping on a stone to be better seen, with his right hand described in the air the symbolical Tau, and immediately the men hastened from all parts of the works into the presence of their master; at this the queen wonderd greatly, and secretly repnted of the promise she had given the king, for she felt herself in love with the mighty architect. Solomon set himself to destroy this affection, and to prepare his rival's humiliation and ruin. for this purpose, he employed three fellow-craftsmen, envious of Hiram, because he had refused to raise them to the degree of masters, on account of their want of knowledge and their idleness. They were Fanor, a Syrian and a mason; Amru, a Phoenician and a carpenter, and Metusael, a Hebrew and a miner. The black envy of these three projected that the casting of the brazen sea, which was to raise the glory of Hiram to its utmost height, should turn out a failure. A young workman, Benoni, discovered the plot and revealed it to Solomon, thinking that sufficient. The day for the casting arrived, and Balkis was present. The doors that restrained the molten metal were opened, and torrents of liquid poured into the vast mould wherein the brazen sea was to assume its form. But the burning mass ran over the edges of the mould, and flowed like lava over the adjacent places. The terrified crowd fled from the advancing stram of fire. Hiram, calm, like a god, endavored to arrest its advance with ponderous columns of water, but without success. The water and the fire mixed, and the struggle was terrible; the water rose in dense steam and fell down in the shape of fiery rain, spreading terror and death. The dishonored artificer needed the sympathy of a faithful heart; he sought Benoni, but in vain; the proud youth perished in endeavoring to prevent the horrible catastrophe hen he found that Solomon had done nothing to hinder it.

Hiram could not withdraw himself from the scene of his discomfiture. Oppressed with grief, he heeded not the danger, he remembered not that this ocean of fire might speedily engulf him; he thought of the Queen of Sheba, who came to admire and congratulate him on a great triumph, and who saw nothing but a terrible disaster. Suddenly he heard a strange voice coming from above, and crying, "Hiram, Hiram, Hiram!" He raised his eyes and beheld a gigantic human figure. The apparition continued: "Come, my son, be without fear, I have rendered thee incombustible; cast thyself into the flames." Hirm threw himself into the furnac, and where others would have found death, he tasted ineffable delights; nor could he, drawn by an irresistible force, leave it, and asked him that drew him into the abyss: "Whither do you take me?" "Into the center of the earth, into the soul of the world, into the kingdom of the great Cain, where liberty reigns with him. There the tyrannous envy of Adonai ceases; there can we, despising his anger, taste the fruit of the tree of knowledge; there is the home of my fathers." "Who then am I, and who art thou?" "I am the father of thy fathers, I am the son of Lamech, I am Tubal-Cain."

Tubal-Cain introduced Hiram into the sanctuary of fire, where he expounded to him the weakness of Adonai and the base position of that god, the enemy of his own creature whom he condemned to the inexorable law of death, to avenge the benefits the genii of fire had bestowed on him. Hiram was led into the presence of the author of his race, Cain. The angel of light that begat Cain was reflected in the beauty of this son of love, whose noble and generous mind roused the envy of Adonai. Cain related to Hiram his experiences, sufferings, and misfortunes, brought upon him by the implacable Adonai. Presently he heard the voice of him who was the offspring of Tubal-Cain and his sister Naamah: "A son shall born unto thee whom thou shalt indeed not see, but whose numerous descendants shall perpetuate thy race, which, superior to that of Adam, shall acquire the empire of the world; for many centuries they shall consecrate their courage and genius to the service of the ever ungrateful race of Adam, but at last the best shall become the strongest, and restore on the earth the worship of fire. Thy sons, invincible in thy name, shall destroy the power of kings, the ministers of the Adonai's tyranny. Go, my son, the genii of fire are with thee!" Hiram was restored to the earth. Tubal-Cain before quitting him gave him the hammer with which he himself had wrought great things, and said to him: "Thanks to this hammer and the help of the genii of fire, thou shalt speedily accomplish the work left unfinished through man's stupidity and malignity." Hiram did not hesitate to test the wonderful efficacy of the precious instrument, and the dawn saw the great mass of bronze cast. The artist felt the most lively joy, the queen exulted. The people came running up, astounded at his secret power which in one night had repaired everything.

One day the queen, accompanied by her maids, went beyond Jerusalem, and there encountered Hiram, alone and thoughtful. The encounter was decisive, they mutually confessed their love. Had-Had, the bird who filled with the queen the office of messenger of the genii of fire, seeing Hiram in the air make the sign of the mystic T, flew around his head and settled on his wrist. At this Sarahil, the nurse of the queen, exclaimed: "The orcle is fulfilled. Had-Had recognizes the husband which the genii of fire destined for Balkis, whose love alone she dare accept!" They hesitated no longer, but mutually pledged their vows, and deliberated how Balkis could retract the promise given to the king. Hiram was to be the first to quit Jerusalem; the queen, impatient to rejoin him in Arabia, was to elude the vigilance of the king, which she accomplished by withdrawing from his finger, while he was overcome with wine, the ring wherewith she had plighted her troth to him. Solomon hinted to the fellow-craftsmen that the removal of his rival, who refused to give them the master's word, would be acceptable unto himself; so when the architect came into the temple he was assailed and slain by them. Before his death, however, he had time to throw the golden triangle which he wore round his neck, and on which was engraven the master's word, into a deep well. They wrapped up his body, carried it to a solitary hill and buried it, planting over the grave a sprig of acacia.

Hiram not having made his appearance for seven days, Solomon, against his inclination, but to satisfy the clamor of the people, was forced to have him searched for. The body as found by three masters, and they, suspecting that he had been slin by the three fellow-craftsmen for refusing them the master's word, determined nevertheless for greater security to change the word, and that the first word accidentally uttered on raising the body should henceforth be the word. In the act of raising it, the skin came off the body, so that one of the masters exclaimed "Macbenach!" (the flesh is off the bones!) and this word became the sacred word of the master's degree. The three fellow-craftsmen were traced, but rather than fall into the hands of their pursuers, they committed suicide ad their heads were brought to Solomon. The triangle not having been found on the body of Hiram it was sought for and at last discovered in the well into which the architect had cast it. The king caused it to be placed on a triangular altar erected in a secret vault, built under the most retired part of the temple. The triangle was further concealed by a cubical stone, on which had been inscribed the sacred law. The vault, the existence of which was only known to the twenty-seven elect, was then walled up.

Ultimate Doom

“ Initially offered the choice of rebooting the Marvel line with Ultimate X-Men or Ultimate Spider-Man as a lure away from DC, Morrison turned both titles down, recommending Mark Millar for the Ultimate X-Men gig, and jumping ship from DC to pen the X-franchise flagship title, retitled New X-Men during his tenure.

During his 4-year stint at Marvel, Morrison consulted on the launch of further titles in the Ultimate line, specifically Ultimate Fantastic Four and Ultimate Avengers, eventually known simply as The Ultimates.

Ultimate Fantastic Four was envisioned as a superhero sitcom-soap opera, seen by Morrison to be in line with prevailing pop-culture trends (think Buffy, Friends etc.).  

This tactic had been used before in comics, notably in Giffen & DeMatties' Justice League International, a comic that had, at the time of Morrison's proposal, dramatically fallen out of fashion since its heyday in the late 80's-early 90's.

Supposedly Mark Waid, then writer of the main Fantastic Four book, asked for any Ultimate Fantastic Four book to be delayed so as not to detract from the then critical and commercial success of his title. 

 

Ultimate Fantastic Four eventually surfaced in 2004, after Morrison had left Marvel for another stint at DC, written by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar and, according to Morrison in various interviews, incorporating uncredited much of his original pitch.

"Ultimate Fantastic Four will probably still appear", said Morrison in an interview with Newsarama, "but I won't have anything to do with it. I was involved in some of the discussions that went on prior to the release of The Ultimates so I feel as though I've contributed my ten cents worth already."

 

Ultimate Doom is a scientific genius, though unlike Richards he approaches science as an art rather than as a system. 

While the Fantastic Four’s powers are compared to the four classical GREEK elements, Doom has attained the power of one of the ADDITIONAL CHINESE ELEMENTS, Metal – his body is almost completely solid metal, possessing no discrete internal organs, somewhat similar to Colossus (though Doom cannot switch back to a flesh-and-blood form). 

In his first post-transformation encounter with the Fantastic Four, he expelled the remains of his internal organs as a poisonous gas. He can grow and fling porcupine-like volleys of metal spikes from his forearms, and also possesses a regenerative power, but he cannot heal any wound caused by his own body. 

Thus, the scar Reed made on Doom’s face remains, because it was done with one of his own spikes. 

Doom exhibits super strength as well, as he is able to break the arms off the zombie version of Ben Grimm.

Hal explains he’s having a personal crisis, stating he used to be part of the Green Lantern Corps with a purpose and a plan. But with Oa drained and the Guardians having fled, all he is now is a man with a ring.

After some reassurances from Clark, they accompany each other to a museum convention Clark is supposed to cover for the Daily Planet, and briefly run into Selina Kyle. They then find the green lantern discovered by Janos in an exhibition. Hal recognizes it as a power battery, and tries loading his power ring with it despite Clark’s wariness. The effect is disastrous and a wave of magic energy kills both heroes. They wind up in the Region of the Just Dead and encounter Deadman, who explains that their deaths are not irrevocable until they have gone “into the light”. Hal then tries using his ring to take them back to their bodies, the worst thing he could have done.

Meanwhile, the Phantom Stranger sits in the apartment given to him by the Lords of Order, his current masters. Sensing that something else needs his attention, he finally leaves the apartment forever and dismisses the Lords, who insist that he cannot leave his confinement. The Phantom admits to no membership or affiliation with any group and also denies belonging to this place or even having a home, because if he belonged then he would cease to be a stranger. He bids the voices farewell, even as their threats of wrath echo in a now empty room.

Superman and Hal have wound up in Hell, where Superman’s super-senses cannot experience anything but suffering, fear and pain. Horrified by realizing that he can’t save these innumerable souls, he is slowly going mad. The catatonic Man of Steel can’t do anything but float around and cry, while a terrified Green Lantern desperately tries waking him up. When the two of them are attacked by blood-thirsty demons, Hal once again uses his ring, and they disappear.

Superman and Green Lantern encounter the power that killed them – the sentient Green Flame, the remains of the magic energies of Maltus. 

The Green Flame explains that their deaths were a result of Jordan trying to load his scientific ring with supernatural energies. 

Then it tempts Hal to give in for the supernatural power of The Green Flame instead.

At that point, The Stranger appears, and teaches Hal how to tame the corrupt Flame. 

Hal reads The Oath of Alan Scott, loads his ring, and the threat of The Green Flame is neutralized. The Stranger then returns Hal’s and Superman’s souls to their bodies, disposing of The Lantern.

Red

Siamese Fighting Fish, 

fascinating creatures. 

Brave, but on the whole, stupid. 

Yes, they're stupid. 

Except for the occasional ones such as we have here, 

who lets the other two fight 

while he waits. 

Waits until The Survivor 

is so exhausted 

that he cannot defend himself. 

And then, 

like SPECTRE, 

he strikes. 

I find the parallel amusing. 

Our organisation did not arrange for you to come over from the Russians just for amusement. 

Number Three. 

“A curious experience comes to Parsifal just at this moment. He is wandering about on his knight’s journey when a falcon attacks three geese in the air. Three drops of blood from one of them falls onto the snow near Parsifal and he drifts into a lover’s trance at the sight. He is transfixed by the three drops of blood and can think of nothing but Blanche Fleur. 

King Arthur’s men find him in this immobile state and two of them try to lead him to Arthur’s court. He fights them off, breaking the arm of one; he is the knight who had jeered when the maiden laughed in Arthur’s court. Parsifal had vowed to avenge her for this scorn. This vow is now completed.

Gawain, a third knight, asks Parsifal gently and humbly if he will come to Arthur’s court and Parsifal agrees.

In another version of the story, the sun melts the snow and obliterates two of the drops of blood relieving Parsifal of the spell so that he can function again. It is possible that Parsifal would still be there in his lover’s trance if the sun had not reduced the three drops of blood to one or if Gawain had not rescued him.

Curious symbolism is at work in this part of the story.”

Barbelith is the name of the “placenta” for humanity; a satellite-like object located on the dark side of the moon. It recurs throughout the story as a supernatural moon seeming both intelligent and benign. 

Barbelith’s role is like that of a placenta in that it connects the hologram of our subjective reality to the realm outside of our space-time, the domain of the magic mirror, and helps humans to realize their true nature beyond the subjective concept of “self”.

Prior to contact with Barbelith, most characters undergo some sort of trauma or intensity- an alien abduction or shamanic initiation, for example. A sort of cosmic “stoplight” is also present in some instances, though also seems to precede any sort of contact with the “healthy” dimension of The Invisibles binary-based paradigm; the realm of the Invisible College.

The word first appeared on a sign post in House of Heart’s Desire, a short story published in 1989 within the pages of A1, with art by Dom Regan. 

It has also cropped up in other comics Morrison has written. Doom Patrol #54 in particular goes into more detail.

Grant Morrison describes its origins as follows: “The word ‘BARBELiTH’ is derived from a dream I had when I was about 20 or 21 and coincided with my first structured ‘magical’ experiences and a minor nervous breakdown (in the dream, BARBELiTH was the name of some higher dimension or alternate reality).”

Barbelith is inspired by the Philip K. Dick novel VALIS in which the titular satellite, VALIS, appears as a sort of Gnostic information-satellite for humanity.

Perhaps of note, in Sethian gnosticism, the name of the first and highest emanation of the true God (as opposed to their description of the God of the Old Testament as Ialdabaoth or the demiurge) is called Barbelo.

Come in, Kronsteen. 

Sit down, Number Three, while we listen to what Number Five has devised for us. 

I hope Kronsteen's efforts as Director of Planning will continue to be as successful as his chess. 

They will be. 

According to your instructions, I've planned for SPECTRE to steal from the Russians their new Lektor decoding machine. 

For this we need the services of a female member of the Russian Cryptograph section in Turkey 

and the help of the British Secret Service. 

Naturally, neither the Russians nor the British will be aware that they are now working for us. 

Number Three, is your section ready to carry out Kronsteen's directives? 

Yes, Number One. 

The operation will be organised according to Kronsteen's plan. 

I've selected a suitable girl from the Russian Consulate in Istanbul. 

She's capable, cooperative, and her loyalty to The State is beyond question. 

And you're absolutely sure she believes you're still Head of Operations for Soviet Intelligence? 

It is unlikely she would know I'm now working for SPECTRE. 

Moscow has kept my defection secret from everyone but a few members of the Praesidium. 

For your sake, I hope so. 

Kronsteen, you are sure this plan is foolproof? 

Number 5 :

Yes, it is, because I have anticipated every possible variation of countermove. 

Number 1 :

What makes you think that M, The Head of British Intelligence, will oblige you by falling in with your plan? 

Number 5 :

For the simple reason that this is so obviously A Trap. 

My reading of The British Mentality is that they always treat a trap as a challenge. 

In any case, they couldn't possibly pass up even the slightest chance of getting their hands on the Lektor decoder. They've wanted one for years. 

Number 1 :

All that could be True. 

What else? 

Number 5 :

As an added refinement, I think that SPECTRE would probably have the chance of personal revenge for the killing of our operative Dr No, 

because the man the British will almost certainly use on a mission of this sort would be their agent James Bond. 

Number 1 :

Let his death be a particularly unpleasant and humiliating one. Good. 

Number 5 :

I shall put my plan into operation straight away. 

And there will be no failure. Hurry. 

Welcome to SPECTRE Island. Great honour. I hope you had a pleasant flight. My time is limited. Is the man I requested ready? His dossier. Good. "Donald Grant, convicted murderer, "escaped Dartmoor Prison in 1960, "recruited in Tangier, 1962." Excellent. Where is he now? At the lake. Bring him to my office, will you? Take me to the lake. Through the training area. This Grant's one of the best men we've ever had. Homicidal paranoiac. Superb material. Though his methods were a little crude, his response to our training and indoctrination have been remarkable. I hope our work here meets with your approval. Training is useful, but there is no substitute for experience. I agree. We use live targets as well. Call him. Grant. He seems fit enough. Have him report to me in Istanbul in 24 hours. 

Corporal of State Security Tatiana Romanova. 

Come in. 

You know who I am? 

Colonel Klebb, Head of Operations for SMERSH. 

I saw you once in Moscow when I worked for the English Decoding Room. 

Did you tell anyone at the Consulate you were coming? 

No. The message said... 

Yes, yes, I know. I sent it. 

Your work record is excellent. 

The State is proud of you. 

Thank you, Comrade Colonel. Take off your jacket. 

Turn around. 

You're a fine-looking girl. 

Sit down. 

I see you trained for the ballet. 

But I grew an inch over the regulation height and so... 

Then you have had three lovers. 

What is the purpose of such an intimate question? 

You're not here to ask questions. 

You forget to whom you're speaking? 

I was in love. 

And if you were not in love? 

I suppose that would depend on the man. 

Sensible answer. 

This man, for instance? 

I cannot tell. Perhaps if he was kind and good toward me. 

Corporal, I have selected you for a most important assignment. 

Its purpose is to give false information to The Enemy. 

If you complete it successfully, you will be promoted. 

From now on you will do anything he says. 

And if I refuse? 

Then you will not leave this room alive. 

I will obey your orders. 

Good. Now these are your instructions. 

You report to me here. 

Yes. 

But the Consulate security man must not know that I'm in Istanbul. 

This is classified far above his level. 

I will say nothing to anyone. 

If you do you will be shot. 

Come. Come, my dear. 

You're very fortunate to have been chosen for such a simple, delightful duty. 

A real labour of love, as we say. 

Great sport, this. 

What did you say? 

I said, great sport, this punting. 

I couldn't agree with him more. 

I may even give up golf for it. 

Really? 

Not quite. 

Souvenir from another jealous woman? 

Yes, but I haven't turned my back on one since. 

•The Carphone in his 1932 Bentley is ringing•

Excuse me. 

What? 

Give me my shirt, will you? 

What's going on? 

I have to make a phone call. 

But we haven't eaten yet. 

I'm starving. 

Come in, UNIVEX. 

James Bond here. Over. 

He's been asking for you all morning. 

Where in the world are you, James? 

I've just been reviewing an old case.

So I'm an old case now, am I? 

Shh. It's The Office. 

Tell him I'm on my way, will you. 

He is not on his way. 

Sylvia, behave. 

We'll do this again some other time soon.

Do what? 

Last time you said that, you went off to Jamaica. 

I haven't seen you for six months. 

I'll be there in an hour. 

I'll tell him. 

Your old case sounds interesting, James. 

Make that an hour and a half. 

Now, about that lunch. 

For my next miracle, I... 

It'll be a miracle if he can explain where he's been all day. 

But I've never even heard of a Tatiana Romanova. 

Ridiculous, isn't it? 

It's absolutely crazy. 

Of course, girls do fall in love with pictures of film stars. 

But not a Russian cipher clerk with a file photo of a British agent. Unless she's mental. 

No, it's some sort of trap. 

Well, obviously it's a trap and the bait is a cipher machine, a brand new Lektor. 

A Lektor, no less. 

The CIA's been after one of those for years. 

Yes, so have we. 

When she contacted Kerim Bey, Head of Station T, Turkey, and told him she wanted to defect, she said she'd turn it over to us on one condition :— 

That you went out to Istanbul 

and brought her and the machine back to England. 

Here's a snapshot Kerim managed to get of her. 

I don't know too much about cryptography, but a Lektor could decode their top-secret signals. 

The whole thing's so fantastic, it just could be True. 

That had occurred to me. 

Besides, the Russians haven't been up to any tricks recently. 

Really, I'm not too busy at the moment, sir. 

You're booked on the 8:30 plane in the morning. 

If there's any chance of us getting a Lektor, we simply must look into it. 

Suppose when she meets me in the flesh, I don't come up to her expectations? 

M :

Just see that you do.

Walk Away.

Let me tell you one story here, of a Samurai Warrior, a Japanese warrior, who had The Duty to avenge the murder of his overlord. 

And he actually, after some time, found and cornered the man who had murdered his overlord. 

And he was about to deal with him with his samurai sword, when this man in the corner, 

in The Passion of Terror, spat in his face. 

And The Samurai sheathed The Sword 

and walked away. 

WHY Did He Do That?

BILL MOYERS: 

Why?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Because, he was made ANGRY, and if he had killed that man then, it would have been 

A PERSONAL Act, 

of another kind of act, 

and 

That’s NOT What He Had Come to DO.

Mister Terrific! How can These Things Still Exist?

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.