Apocalypse Soon - 1999

APOCALYPSE SOON

Armageddon, the end of all things. In this case, the end of all things tasteful. Hundreds of pale, spotty, neurotic, obsessive-compulsive science fiction and comic fans scurry around the lower levels of the Aotea Centre, Auckland, New Zealand, clutching signed copies of this and that book or poster. A great sweaty, pressure of boys and girls whose focus in life has been slightly misplaced. But in this inane scene where Claudia Christian, star of Babylon 5, signs mildly erotic pictures of herself next to some girl someone said was on Star Trek sometimes whose doing the same thing, I found a pair of men looking more than slightly harassed and desperate.

So I invited them out for a drink. The comic book writers, Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison were only too happy to oblige. A half an hour or so away from the nutcases to relax at the local, the London Bar.

Warren Ellis, complete bastard and hater of most things, including, vehemently, his former employer, Marvel Comics, currently writes for DC Comics’ adult line, Vertigo and Wildstorm Comics. Transmetropolitan and Hellblazer are his best current works, The Authority and Planetary coming in a distant second. He’s a big man, hairy and belligerent. He exudes confidence and a dark humour, sharpened by a cutting wit turned on anything he hates, which, as it turns out, is alot.

Grant Morrison, enigmatic Man of Mystery, is most famous for his work on DC’s Justice League America, and most lauded for his own series, The Invisibles. He’s a thin man, wearing black and big boots. He’s slightly nervous in front of the crowds, but witty and full of information when taken away from the obsessives.

By the time we’re sitting with our drinks, Warren is already regaling us with the real story behind the Six Million Dollar Man: Apparently the TV series was a cover-up by the Americans to hide the fact they had made a real bionic man then tried to kill him by sabotaging Apollo 5.

"And they proceed to make it so stupid that people would discredit the idea of a bionic man if the real one ever appeared."

Warren Ellis is a grumpy old sod. He seems to have quite the axe to grind over the comic book industry.

At this Warren laughs. He’s got the kind of laugh that makes you know you’ve asked a good question, but makes you wonder if you want the answer.

"Well, yes, against most everything. Did you have anything specific in mind?"

Well, major complaints?

"Well, it’s like everything, innit, eighty percent of it’s shit. It’s just that it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s the short answer."

Right. The comic scene is shit, what about the readers? Both the men’s writing is notoriously unconventional, and usually surprisingly intelligent compared to other comics. But readers aren’t used to that. Isn’t it frustrating?

Grant answers: "Yeah, at the start of Arcadia [a story arc in The Invisibles] we had about 60,000 readers and by the end it was 20,000. But the good thing was, those twenty thousand never went away, and they’re die-hards. Every time I meet them they’re cool, lunatic people."

Grant is more optimistic of the comic scene. For him, the readers seem to be intelligent, they are loyal to the Vertigo line of comics and to their writers.

"You tend to get a more pure type of fanboy."

Both writers laugh at this.

"Too pure, I think," puts in Warren. "It’s just the idea of these people seeing our faces when they masturbate."

"Oh, c’mon, Warren," Grants says. "I see your face when I masturbate. . .Usually you’re asleep at the time."

Much mirth, but back to it.

Where’s Warren going?

"Slowly worming my way out of corporate ownership...into self ownership. I’ll have a readership of five, be living in a shed in Cumbria. I’ll be addicted to creosote and married to me sister."

Speaking of corporate ownership. The character Spider Jerusalem, in Transmetropolitan, has an interesting time with his editor. Experience?

There’s that laugh again. "Oh, yeah. Anyone who’s worked in writing can identify. The weird thing is I get fan mail from editors saying that Royce is the truest representation of an editor, and sit there rooting for Royce."

In this corporate owned comic environment, both men have written basic super hero comics, and then changed to less conventional styles. What’s the difference?

Warren: "The money."

Grant tells how he started out on psychedelic comics, but also wrote basic science fiction comics for money on the side.

"I could never get them to go together. . .The good thing is, you keep them separate. I’ve always had the mainstream going, and why I like it is you can get away from your head, just shut down and go, brrrm, Superman."

"I was doing Stormwatch," says Warren. "Which was basically a small, bitter, twisted political book. . . No bastard bought it. Then I brought out Stormwatch volume two, which was a big, bitter, twisted political book, and no one bought that either. So volume three is the Authority, which is a big stupid thing with explosions. . ."

"And guess what?" Grant says.

"Yeah, the world is queuing up to chew on my organ."

Grant: "It’s good, cause I’m writing for kids, writing for teenagers. I think it’s a good audience, cause they’re awake, they’re open to shit. They can be told stuff. You can get in there and cause trouble."

Warren: "Well, we like to think they’re awake and want to be told stuff."

Grant disagrees. "Yeah, they are. They’ve gone through the trouble of reading this shit."

"Yeah, and half of them are looking for a surrogate family on paper."

"Look at the families were giving them, then!"

"Well, this is the one bright spark, innit?"

"We’re helping them, we’re giving them surrogate families that are so twisted."

Warren really is a grumpy sod. He seems to have his axe to grind over everything. Is that his inspiration?

"Yeah, it is. It’s waking up angry, is what it is. It’s wanting to shout in people’s faces, not to tell them things, not to try instruct or to educate, or be didactic, just WAKE THE FUCK UP!" Warren’s hairy, pasty face is suddenly pushed into mine. "Think for yourself. That’s all I ever tried to say. Think for yourself, cause it’s a dying art."

Even so, Spider’s a prick who wants the same thing, but he has a soft side.

"People aren’t two paint sketches and a paragraph. The way it’s been best articulated in the last year or so is by the Verve, you know, Bittersweet Symphony, where half way through he starts shouting, ‘I’m a million different people from one day to the next.’ And everyone is. You can’t pigeonhole people. People do unbelievable things that should be against their character every day."

Grant: "I actually believe we’re all multiple personality disorders, just some of us can run with it. There’s thing in here [his head] that are just nothing like the guy you’re talking to right now. There’s some clever ones, and there’s some stupid fuckers that come out a lot."

"I agree, one day Spider can kill a bag of puppies, feel no remorse -and I agree with him entirely, they’re scum of the earth, vermin, should be wiped out, they have no place on this planet - then, he’ll go into a pawn shop and redeem himself by buying back a little girl’s doll."

Earlier, Grant had explained the metaphysics of the Invisibles, largely to deaf ears at Armageddon. Now he explains to a more receptive audience. A large part of The Invisibles is based on metaphysics, including an idea that the universe is holographic.

"That’s not my idea," admits Grant. "It’s Philip K. Dick’s. The idea I had, which I connected with that, was I was looking at the Christian fish symbol - now I’ve been obsessed with this since I was a kid. When I was eighteen I went to Glastonbury to visit the sacred sites there - and they used to build this thing, all their basic building plans were based on this symbol of Pisces thing, eh, which is two interlocking circles, and that’s the Christian fish symbol, it’s the fish extended. Well, that’s the symbol of the Age of Pisces, right?"

This turned into an obsession. Then one day, for some reason, he realised it was a diagram of a hologram; an interference pattern. And this sparked with the Gnostic teachings he was reading at the time. Jesus, apparently, was saying just this, that we are living a holographic universe, and he created the magical gospels, but they were thrown out because his disciples wanted a priest caste. Jesus said they didn’t need priests, because as a hologram, everything is essentially everything else and everyone was Christ, they didn’t need priests to reach him or God. But that doesn’t build a Church, nor does it make money, so they discarded Jesus’ idea.

It was reading Philip K. Dick that brought all this to light for Morrison. What triggered Philip K. Dick’s experience, was a hippie girl coming to his door, wearing a fish symbol. This flashed in his eyes and he found himself in a dream where he was trapped in the first century AD. He was part of the secret society of Christianity, who identified themselves by the fish symbol. And apparently, this made him realise that the first century AD is "Still happening."

"Our reality is a fake," Grant explains. "It’s a virtual reality created by these guys back in AD one. And one day we’ll all wake up as first century Christian monks."

"Waiting for Constantine to. . .create what we now understand as Roman Christianity," finishes Warren.

"So this is what I was reading," Grant continues. "Trying to find the thread, what links it all together, you know, what Dick Olsen said, like what Robert Anton Wilson went through. And that was the connection. I saw this fish there and thought I’ll use his holographic idea, you know, make the connection."

So that’s the metaphysics behind it, but where did ‘it’ come from?

"Well, The Invisibles started out as Jack Kirby’s Boy Commandos. It was originally going to be about these boys, the scouts, like a secret department of the scout movement. . .but DC see just wouldn’t let us do it. So I found the name Invisibles, which has been used through the centuries for secret societies, and that’s what it turned into."

Grant also had a timely experience when the Invisibles first started. He explains how he had an alien abduction experience. Like the X-Files, though before their time, his bedroom was invaded by small grey aliens, with the white light and everything. Except these aliens didn’t take Grant away to poke and probe him. Instead they revealed the secret of the universe to him. They took him outside time and space, so that he was in the void with them, looking back at time and space. The universe was a huge hologram sitting in front of him. The aliens then proceeded to show him how to create his own universe, from liquid information which was the key to everything. Of course, as happens, he woke up. All that was left was a voice saying, "Remember."

Twisting this around even further, Grant has ideas on his fiction affecting reality.

He’s created girls for his lead character, King Mob, then later met them himself, and they’ve become his girlfriends. He’s discarded girls in the comic, then lost them in life. He still misses Ragged Robin. But it’s not just him. This interviewer has had his own share of bizarre experiences with the Invisibles.

"Since I’ve been writing the Invisibles, people will come up to me and said, ‘You’re writing my life.’ People send me novels they’ve written, and it’s the same thing. It’s like we’ve all tapped into this, this thing."

Like tapping a primal unconscious gestalt?

"Yes, that’s what’s it’s designed to do. Part of what I’ve been going through is just opening myself up to all possible influences at the end of the twentieth century. And that’s why I think you can predict things, it’s the pulp thing, you’re working so fast, the unconscious mind is doing most of the work, and you do start predicting things. People have been doing this for a long, long time."

Warren: "Contemporary culture just rains out into the work through the subconscious, cause you don’t have time to rationalise it."

All these ideas, so much information. How much does the medium, and its corporate rulers, restrict the work?

Grant: "It’s not quite free reign, but ideas-wise there’s not much they’re gonna do to us, cause they don’t have any at all."

Warren: "Biggest enemy we’ve all got is time."

Both writer’s comics are their voices. It’s the way they express themselves to world, to try and change it.

Warren: "That’s like any writer."

Even Marvel comics writers?

Grant: "Well, that’s the scary thing, what they say, that is those guys’ voices, that’s what they really want to do."

Warren: "That’s what they understand, that’s the culture they subscribe to. It’s how they learn to write, it’s the only art they’re interested in. That is their voice!"

This is scary. Does it create an "Us and Them" mentality?

Warren: "You can sense it in them. A lot of those guys are really hostile towards us."

Grant: "I’ve been told that people in DC mainstream hate me, because I’ve got too many ideas."

Warren: "I’ve had the mainstream companies say, you’ve got too much in this issue, make it four. That’s what the other guys want you to do."

Grant: "Like I’ve been told, ‘You’ve got a hundred ideas in this issue, spread it out of two hundred issues. Like us.’ They don’t understand, it’s just the way we work."

"But they don’t understand, because that’s the culture they come from. You’ve got an idea, you milk it for a hundred issues."

"Those are the most successful ones. The guys who only have one idea in their life, cause they just keep hammering away at the one idea. They’re just clinging to that one idea, that one spar of wood in the Atlantic."

And so far so good. Ideas expressed, new things to come, but neither will let on as to what exactly. There are no regrets...except Grant says he killed some people and told us where they were buried, and Warren slept with Grant’s girlfriend...

Article conducted and written by Noel Meek