OPI8 - The Scottish Connection Part 2: Grant Morrison

Originally published at www.OPI8.com, 19th October 2000

The Scottish Connection, part 2: Grant Morrison

A foray into Magick and Comics by David Sweeney

Listen.

I don't want to get too personal here, but Grant Morrison is a bit of a hero of mine. His work has had, I think it's fair to say, a profound influence on my young life: I stopped eating meat after reading Animal Man, Doom Patrol taught me everything I know about being a superhero and The Invisibles made me the sensitive criminal I am today.

You can imagine, then, how thrilled I was when he agreed to DJ at a club I ran in Glasgow. As with everything, Grant brought a glamorous, anarchic edge to his nights, turned them, in fact, into genuine "happenings". Along with his friend Emil, he span a wide range of records (I remember 'Borstal Breakout' by Sham 69 and 'Tomorrow Belongs To Me' from the Cabaret soundtrack with particular fondness) and instigated truly ecstatic episodes of audience participation, including a Tug o' Class War and a competition to re-design the human body.

You had to be there.

But if you weren't, this is for you.

-You know, Grant, I don't think I've got over The Invisibles yet.

Well, you should probably try. It's only a comic, after all, and that's kind of what it's all about. And I've told you before - don't follow leaders.

-Yes Sir. But remember you're talking to someone whose idea of a good time is to light a few candles, smoke some sage and read the whole three volumes while sitting in a circle of salt.

Well, in that case it's probably alright. Yeah, The Invisibles got a lot of people. I'm really proud of it but in a way I don't even think of it as mine. I mean, a lot of the time it just came through me. The characters took on lives of their own and people took on the lives of the characters. The barrier between fiction and "reality" was removed, which was what I wanted.

-It's a pretty dangerous game though, isn't it? As any good comic book fan knows, King Mob (Grant's fictional self in The Invisibles) got you hospitalised when you had the Archons torture him.

Yeah, but you get nothing for nothing with magick. Yes - I got really, really ill just as King Mob was nearly killed. But I had created him to be my avatar within that fiction so really the illness was proof that the spell was working. Then, when I started to give him an easier time, my health and life improved dramatically. I wrote the relationship between him and Ragged Robin and then, bang, a few months later there she is in the "real" world.

You know, like you've done recently using Buffy…

-I'm afraid I can't really talk about that.

Oh, come on. What's happening there, then?

-Let's change the subject. There is a danger to invocation - I'm thinking of Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard's Babalon working (a magickal ritual designed to create a female elemental, the Scarlet Woman). That fucked Jack up in the end.

You have to be careful about what you invoke and why you're doing it, particularly if you're using someone else as a vessel. You can end up just projecting things on to people which can blow up in your face, even if those people were originally complicit.

That's what happened with Jack Parsons.

The mistake that a lot of people have made with magick, the thing that has really fucked them up, is to stop at invocation. What you have to do is bring other things through and then nip past them before the door shuts. That's how you truly become transcendant. If the Lovecraftian Old Gods want to tear open a hole into our universe they'll do it - that's what makes them the Old Gods. The trick is to make that work to your advantage - you nip through the hole they've opened and go into their higher dimension.

-That sounds like Midas in Marvel Boy.

He represents a lot of what I'm into right now.

-But he's an utter bastard!

You've got to take the rough with the smooth, David. Obviously, Novarr, Marvel Boy himself, also represents things that I'm interested in, as all my characters do. But through a "baddie" like Midas I can get in touch with the real powers in the world, understand their mentality and adapt it. Like I say, I'm really interested in corporate culture at the moment and how it adapts magickal techniques.

-Like the "structural" or "practical" magick that is Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).

Exactly. It works and you can see that it does. There are easily identifiable material results - money and power. The people who developed NLP knew what they were doing. They'd researched shamanic methods and decided to apply them to multinational capitalism. And why not, it's the governing global system just like religion was previously. Magick doesn't have to be a bunch of skinny guys wanking in seedy bedsits. Maybe it did in the '80s but not now.

What I'm doing is trying to recognise the innovations that the corporate guys have made, the ways in which they've modified older techniques. I want to take them back from them and modify them again, to suit my own ends. As always, I use the ehn-ehm-ee.

-Just like King Mob. It struck me recently, though, that John a'Dreams is the real centre of The Invisibles.

Yeah, John goes through the door. And that allows him to recognise the struggle for freedom for what it is - a game. Just like King Mob finally does. That's why Volume three ends with Issue 1- it feels like something's about to begin. Something new.

-For me, the team had never looked quite as heroic as they did assembled in that issue.

Yeah, they looked great. No disrespect to any of the other artists on the book, but that's Frank Quitely for you.

-Okay, let's talk about comics for a bit. Do you share Mark Millar's optimism for the medium?

Of course. Mark and I are absolutely convinced that there'll be a big, and I mean big, boom in the comics market. With the success of the X-Men movie, The Matrix, Buffy, Angel all of which are totally derivative of comics, the right cultural environment is in place. The important thing is to stop looking at comics as a marginal, sub-cultural thing. They're a medium, like TV or film, that's all.

-But a medium that is dominated by a single genre, the superhero comic.

So what? You just take that genre as being a medium itself, like when Westerns dominated cinema. Look at Chris Claremont's run on The X-Men. That expanded the possibilities of the superhero comic at least as much as Watchmen and without being as referential to the genre's past. He used the characters to write about the real world - about real emotions, real relationships.

-It's funny - it struck me the other day just how much Dawson's Creek is like the Claremont/Byrne period X-Men. It's teen angst written by older, more eloquent people who are really just writing about themselves but with a pop gloss. Buffy's the same…

I was wondering when she'd come up again.

-Ho, ho, ho. Seriously, Buffy herself really gets put through the wringer in that show. It's tragic, literally so in the case of her and Angel. But it's also got action and glamour and witty dialogue.

It's a pop thing. And of course Josh Whedon's now writing comics and acknowledging their influence on him.

-I think he'll be a key figure in re-popularising comics. He's not a nerd, he's cool and he's very successful.

It's money and power again, and using them in a passionate, creative way. You get your big pop hits and you get a platform to tell people about other things, whether that be Acme Novelty Library or Terence McKenna. But that shouldn't diminish the importance of your pop stuff.

You try to give people a bit of everything. They can handle it all, it's only snobs who think they can't.

-Seedy wankers in bedsits?

Exactly. Those people have to realise - their time is UP.