PIC: KM 2026 after Henry Wallis 1830-1916

Mick Harvey - Chatterton (Official Audio)

NO BRAKES I DON’T MIND

Welcome to yet another brisk, brash, only vaguely biweekly roundup of all the news from round here, with an upbeat tempo and a black coffee beat to boot!

Thanks to everyone who supported the Kickstarter campaign for Magick and Symbolism, which raised a remarkable $213, 876. The cat colony sends its thanks in advance for the dinners!

Speaking of Kickstarters, I promised my pal Gabriel I’d link to this one for the audio book of Chapel Perilous, his fantastic biography of Robert Anton Wilson, as read by Gabriel himself!

(link)

Had a good call with Ben Wheatley last week on our favourite subject and other things!

Last week’s edition of the ever-reliable Mindless Ones newsletter -

That’s a question you should ask yourself

-drew my attention to Luke Haines’ new record ‘Izzy Wizzy Let’s Get Busy’, which I’m delighted to say was inspired by an e-mail I sent him last year before we finally spoke quite recently. Luke had idly suggested a collaboration, and I responded that I thought there was something to be done with the overwhelming influence of magic and the occult - via the Magic Circle’s David Nixon, Sooty, and the chimerical Ali Bongo - on UK children’s TV in the ‘60s-‘80s. It never came up again, and I figured Luke may have thought I was just taking the piss!

I went on to develop the notion into a piece - ‘Liber Sooty’ - which you can read here at Xanaduum on November 5th 2025, and Sooty – ‘wizard magician, super musician’ – showed up as our cover star last time around. As a fan, I’m absolutely thrilled that Luke took my idea seriously, expanded on it, and created a whole suite of songs around the notion! It’s really good too!

Izzy Wizzy Let’s Get Busy

The Aeon of Sooty proceeds apace (but what if Soo is Ma’at?..)!

Time for the times to come together!

What else? Spoke to my enthusiastic editor on one of the WFH/WTF comics projects I tease interminably. This one’s a character I’ve wanted to have a go at since I was wee. It’ll be announced later this year!

The artist Hayden Sherman sent me the first issue of their Legion of Super-Heroes relaunch at DC, in collaboration with writer Joshua Williamson.

I hesitate to say this is what comics should look like – because there are lots of great ways to do comics – but THIS is what comics should look like, and it’s nothing like TV or cinema. It’s a great take on the characters and concept, and Hayden’s art is spectacular and inventive.

Momus has started on his new album, the second of 2026, tentatively entitled Humperstinck, (an unappealing title I hope doesn’t stick), with three tunes released over the last week! I love that he just keeps making stuff and, in this manner, assists in holding my world together with song.

This week’s films were Bugonia which I really liked - Emma Stone continues an impressive run of commanding roles – and Weapons, which I hated immediately when that annoying voiceover started. Then I grumbled through the Rashomon structure that all the characters were unlikeable and the pacing was off. Then ‘Aunt Gladys’ came into it (Amy Madigan, with her Oscar-winning, bone-freezing turn) and the film finally got off the launchpad and became scary and disturbing. The whole backstory with Alex and his parents was so unsettling and grotesque, I was praying for Gladys to meet her end and cheered when it finally came to pass. For all I didn’t like most of it, the film has haunted me, which counts as a win.

I felt obliged to watch the first episode of Lanterns after criticising the glib dismissal of the colour green by writer and producer Damon Lindelof. I liked Aaron Pierre’s quiet and uptight performance as John Stewart, and thought Kyle Chandler anchored the show with a great turn as Doctor McCoy, but he wasn’t any Hal Jordan I recognised. Willpower and booze don’t mix for a start.

I’ll stick with it for the engaging Chandler. I’m keen to see how they introduce the more sci-fi elements of the concept. Otherwise on this outing, way too much tell, not enough show, and those comparisons to True Detective, invoking season 1 of that, show, only worked against Lanterns. The lack of costumes and ring effects was glaring but easily explained by budgetary constraints and a desire to create some distance between this and the unsuccessful Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern film (I found it odd, however, when Jordan compared not wearing his Green Lantern uniform to the decision not to wear a tie when you get older - the Lantern uniform is not a superhero suit or personal fashion choice, it’s the uniform of the organisation Jordan works for, and as with a policeman’s blues, it signals his affiliation and authority. Working cops don’t get to leave their uniforms and badges at home because they regard them as stuffy and boring, no matter how long they’ve pounded the beat..). Which only begs the question of why try to make a Green Lantern show on a budget at all? DC has a ton of ‘ground level’ heroes, or characters with low level gimmick powers to choose from, so why take this low-fi route with a franchise that should be competing with Star Trek or Star Wars?

Having said that, the approach seems to have worked, and mainstream reviews of the show are pretty positive, so fair dos.

Crimson Desert, my alternative life as a wandering murderer with a heart of gold continues, with new locations, creatures, treasure, bosses being discovered all the time. I currently enjoy za-zen sitting meditation by my coded fish pond with my rendered wyverns, watching the unreal sun come up over Howling Hill at 6 in the morning.

Haven’t read much since last time. Elsewhere, the news outpaces our ability to transform its base lead into the fools’ gold of oblique and surreal squibs.

Never mind that! Frank Quitely has FINISHED drawing and colouring ‘It’s a Dead Dead Dead Dead World’! As you might imagine, it looks incredible. He’s doing some subtle and unusual work with colour. Now all that remains is the lettering!

Paid subscribers only will be able to access this new Morrison/Quitely meisterstroke. I’m looking at the whole thing right now and can scarcely contain my arousal!

Here’s another preview to whet your appetite for our brain-devouring reinvention of the zombie genre…

PIC; Frank Quitely 2026

DEAN CAIN’S ‘FACE’ MISTAKEN FOR ‘WHOOPEE CUSHION’ BY SIGHTLESS FAN SHOCK

Richard Tice of the right-wing Reform Party in the UK - an infamous denier of human impact on climate change - has recently waded into the soup to propose that British people, (meaning mostly English people, as the weather here in Scotland has not been anywhere near as fiercely hot and dry as it has been down South), must accept the death of seasons, bid farewell to their former temperate climate, stop moaning about the end of the world, and instead embrace its many upsides, which are to include a laid back Mediterranean lifestyle and fine wines!

"Of course climate change is real, but where is the evidence that net zero is going to stop it? Where is the evidence? There isn't any…’

“Climate change has always happened, it always will. Maybe the smarter thing to do is to adapt to it, (rather) than think arrogantly you can stop it.”

Tice added: “I think when it’s a bit warm, let’s enjoy it. And if it means that English wine and sparkling wine gets better and better, fantastic. That means we can take on the French, fantastic.

"Let's celebrate some of these things rather than just be sort of doom and gloom about it."

Tice has a point – humans must expect to co-exist with a thriving fossil fuel industry – and he suggests we need to stop all the doomery and gloomism, and learn, instead, to celebrate as we’re boiled alive in our baths! Bravo, Mr. Tice, for saying what the mealy-mouthed libturds won’t dare utter!

We here at Xanaduum wish to add our voices to the choruses with an even more robust strategy that’s not for faint-hearted snowflakes - why stop at a balmy Mediterranean climate? We should be looking forward to the delights of a sub-Saharan biome, including daily camel rides across the dunes to our work at the Ministry of Love - MINILUV - in Central London, and looming ziggurats on the South Downs! Plucky, uncomplaining Brits would gratefully embrace a desert lifestyle! Who doesn’t love the beach? Now imagine it’s all beach! Beach and more beach outside your front step, all the way to the horizon!

After centuries of miserable fog and rain, it’s Great Britain’s turn to sizzle like the surface of Mercury!

Heat exhaustion, drought, hallucination! Soon to be the familiar signs of a traditional British winter!

Nor is there any need for Merrie Olde Englande to give up any of our country’s cosy comforts in the sweltering 140-degree summers we can all forward to! The woke moaning minnies can say what they like but the rest of us will still be able to enjoy our regular pint of gently bubbling ale as we take in a blistering microwave sunset over the cremation grounds that once were pastures green where trod those feet in ancient time!

Cor blimey, guv’nor! Our English cricketeers need only buck up and switch to scorch-proof spiked plimsolls to play as easily on molten lava as they do on the bristling Bermuda grass it must replace! Fire retardant fielders can at last ditch boring old leather balls and instead hurl flaming fireballs at batsmen and wickets in an attempt to set the opposing teamto the torch! Yeah yeah yeah!

The laws of cricket already prohibit the watering of the pitch during play, so let’s take it all the way! The Ashes are all that’s left to play for! As for our firefighters, let’s see an end to the hostility, and a switch to more proactive firespreading tactics.

For God’s sake, readers, stop wrestling with the inevitable! Let the oil companies work their mighty will and let’s learn to rejoice in immolation! Rest assured, new gene editing therapies will very shortly be developed to provide human skin with an artificial flameproof epidermis of asbestos-infused ceramic tiles, and won’t the naysayers and doomsputterers have egg all over their faces then?

What’s wrong with you? Don’t you love the sun? Don’t you adore excessive suffocating heat? We do!

We will squeeze new wines from raisins! Our gardens will have clean, easy to maintain sand instead of ugly, writhing grass and toxic, pollen-emitting weeds. We will burn gently in the rays of our new killer star! Hurrah!

THE CLOCK STOPPED TICKING - STARTED TOCKING, OH!

I like to think about the large scale structure of the universe, with its illuminated filaments like a cosmic lace doily, and its sublime and silent interstitial voids, those unimaginably supercalifragilistiexpialifukkindocious vacuum spaces, them empty volumes bigger than anything you, me, or anyone else, except maybe the King of the Whales in the Sea, can truly imagine without going three-quarters-mad! Those light millennia of utter Nothing, have nevertheless been give names by microscopic human beings! I’ve resorted to them often in my stories – the denizens of the Hydra Void showed up in my Graphic India series Avatarex, while the Perseus Void made an appearance in The Green Lantern (DC have an omnibus edition coming out, featuring all the stories Liam and I did together. About time, says I! Now where’s that outsize Absolute Edition, so we can drown in the art?). The scale of the universe is so far beyond our conception that I find myself hooting with derision every time I consider our inflated and pompous sense of importance.

And never mind just ordinary voids, they have Supervoids!!!

In other news, we must consider the Magnetar, a dead Neutron star ten sullen miles in diameter and so dense a tablespoonful weighs 100 million tons! Searing gamma and X-Ray emissions from this stellar destroyer annihilate all life. The monstrous magnetic field will strip the electrons from all the atoms in your body. That’s instantaneous atomisation. From thinking, feeling human to perplexed aerosol.

What level of challenge would this lethal stellar object pose to Silver Age Superman?

Green Lantern?

Hal Jordan and Richard Tice have probably never crossed paths…

And that’s what I call the weeeeeeeve…

MAGNETIC FLUX DENSITY VS. UR MUM

These your contributions to the narrative followed by my notes and rambles…

Osiris – Hope you enjoyed Cornwall (when I lived in town, I was fond of the spectacular train ride from Glasgow to Penzance at Midsummer – it’s a 12-hour journey through some of the UK’s most beautiful landscapes – and booking into a little hotel in Mousehole – ‘Mouzel’ it’s pronounced locally) and sorry you didn’t make it to Scotchland on this go round!

Your GF is right (no shit…)! The hypersigil is doing its work. Don’t get in its way (it’s certainly too late for that)! Skydiving to charge a sigil is peak! I find your dispatches from Shanghai and the school utterly fascinating, so no worries there!

The thing to do is forget the desire, forget and don’t wait for results but make sure you have given the desire clear ‘real world’ paths along which to manifest. You can maintain a tingling anticipation as a background hum, but it should feel that you’ve launched the self-driving rocket programmed to reach its destination. Meaning you can now go and make the tea, metaphorically (or literally if you fancy a brew). You turn your back on the sigil and ‘forget’ the desire, which is to say you remain aware of it, but you have moved on. This is hard when it’s something important to you, but I’ve found that switching to another project, even if it’s just researching something or planning, is a reliable way of letting the subconscious intent do its thing and work down paths you’ve prepared for it to travel.

It’s never foolish to write as if your life is on the line! Never settle for less!

I’ve always been open to the inoculation theory of evil in stories, where a little taste allows us to develop an immunity.

The take on evil you describe is very much in line with the world-destroying concept monster U-2315 from There Is No Anti-Memetic Division - it seeks to disfigure what is beautiful, to humiliate what is proud, to mutilate what is healthy.

And on that happy note…

Where can we read your work?

Patrick – That’s very interesting about John Lennon Like You and feels quite validating. Along with that scene in the first issue of The Invisibles, and a general creative nitrous boost, the song emerged as a kind of afterglow or by-blow of the Psychedelic God Lennon ritual I performed in 1993.

Give that the song was ‘downloaded’ from a field of pure and concentrated Lennon-ness, I’m delighted to learn it’s close enough to his vernacular to convince AI. And it’s no surprise that the latter section didn’t scan as Lennon with the same fidelity, as that’s the bit where the transmission ceases and I return as myself with ‘John Lennon like you…’!

I really appreciated your covers of the songs. I was quite touched, and they’re great!

Never Find Time and Love Hurts were both written and sung by Danny Vallely, (with backing harmonies by me and Ulric Kennedy) and are more influenced by the Hollies, the Kinks and Buzzcocks than the Beatles, so the low-Lennon content AI rating tracks there too.

Speaking of Danny, he was the real musical talent in the band. We were blessed with four singer/songwriters but he was the best singer, a prolific and gifted songwriter, and an inventive producer who could work technical wonders with only 4 tracks in the early days. This is him doing his take on Pepper-era Beatles/Harrison.

The Stars Will Lead You

The Stars Will Lead You was recorded on a mere 8 tracks with Danny singing and playing all the instruments. He’d borrowed a sitar for a couple of days and created a song around his first efforts with the instrument (I tried to play it and found my fingers slithering around the huge fretboard like novice ice skaters, so it’s not something you just pick up in a day unless you’re a musical savant). This was completely off the cuff - written, arranged, played and recorded over those 50 or so hours as a demo to showcase the on-loan sitar. I’m still impressed.

I enjoyed the back and forth with drowzeezachary. While it’s true that we can all be ‘bad’ now and again, or that we can even entertain profoundly evil thoughts if we choose to, (as a writer, creating lurid pulp stories with monstrous villains I’ve found myself contemplating the murkiest swamps of villainy and sin on occasion), I like to think most of us would hesitate before doing something truly evil.

I second a re-read of Ungrounded! My copy is upstairs somewhere…

Drowzeezachary – your take on Man of Steel and the Snyder Superman is fascinating and well thought out. I must admit I was only able to watch that movie once. I like Henry Cavill, and think he made a fantastic Superman, but the whole thing was too dour for me, and I found the neck snap to be a boring and unimaginative - which is to say human and not superhuman - way out of the conflict. Where is Superman’s super-sense of humour in these dour and ponderous gloomfests? I understood many of the reasons why Zack Snyder did it – some monsters are just so terrible you have to kill them, as in Weapons – but for me it comes across instead as a lack of imagination and an unwillingness to take seriously what Superman is and what he is capable of.

On the other hand, I don’t mind BvS which I’ve watched a few times. And I like the 4-hour ‘Snyder cut’ of Justice League well enough to have watched it twice. It’s one of those rare and curious films where no matter how often I watch it, I have no idea what happened, so it feels new each time… (the Star Wars prequels are like that, also the Hobbit films…)

I can’t see a scenario where Superman could ever choose evil. While it’s true that fictional characters can be made to do or be anything, part of the fun of being an iconic franchise comes from the simplified rules of one’s existence; Superman has a basic program - he is a strong man who protects the weak and vulnerable from the powerful and cruel. If he stops doing that, he stops being Superman. A Superman who realises that God is Evil and that morality is a pathetic joke designed to break the decent and exalt the monstrous would still be unlikely to join Evil in making the lives of the vulnerable miserable; he would more likely fight harder to protect them. I myself often have my nose rubbed in the intractability of evil and the obsessive will to destroy of bad people, but not once has it caused me to reconsider looking after the cats, for instance. Even if God were to appear on my couch with the face of Darkseid and explain to me that the fundamental engine of the universe is powered by radical Evil, I’m unlikely to think ‘oh well, must become a sadist now and start torturing things I care about…’ That’ doesn’t seem a realistic response.

For me, there’s no convincing scenario where Superman willingly decides to create horror and havoc simply because the arc of the moral universe is revealed to bend towards injustice and cruelty. He would turn into turning a different character, one of many that already exist in comics and movies - like the Plutonian, Homelander, Brightburn, or Ultraman - and makes him redundant. Best to stick to what he’s good at or he loses his relevance.

The reason there are so many ‘evil’ Supermen analogues is because the nature of the original cannot be changed effectively. There’s an argument to say that Homelander had to be created because we needed a more honest, contemporary super-representative of ‘the American Way’ than Superman is capable of being.

The idea that Darkseid is the God of Superman’s universe is the conceit behind the Absolute books, isn’t it? But even Ultimate Superman has not given into darkness.

For me Superman is the cartoon embodiment of our greatest idea, - the Renaissance Humanist conviction that we are copycats with the ability, and frankly, nothing much better to do with our brutish selves, than to live up to our finest ideals and paragons. We have imagined ourselves out of savagery and want and could easily extend those privileges to the whole human race if we tried.

I’m afraid I know nothing about Avatar: the Last Airbender other than the fact that it exists and whatever bits of stray lore I’ve picked up from the general mediasphere. Nevertheless, you have the knack of making things sound incredibly interesting, so I’ll try to check it out if I get a chance …

Sean – as I said on the Seth Myers show when I was promoting Luda, superheroes and drag are barely separable. Ordinary citizens in work clothes slip into closets and phone booths to emerge as their resplendent best selves! Superheroes are queer to the core, as I insisted on the promo tour for Luda!

Look forward to your take on Magic!

The graphic novel sounds very interesting but two years is a long wait for an artist if there’s no evidence of work being done or contact being maintained. I’m seriously out of the loop with artists, as I’ve discovered on my new projects, so not much help here.

Bobby – Glad you liked TVPs – they’re probably still my favourite band along with the Beatles. They have loads of amazing songs; poignant, funny, romantic, clever…

TVPs leader Dan Treacy - who scored our pure and heartfelt youthful dreams with hope and raised us up when we were down - ended up an addict, then homeless, and is currently ‘recovering’ in a nursing home in the care of his sister. He’s one of my lifetime heroes, and a true genius of pop who saved and salved so many young souls.

Congratulations on finishing another one! How do you feel your work has been developing between your own stuff and adapting Wilson?

Persefonie – The eclipse was a bit disappointing compared to the spectacular total blackout I witnessed in Cornwall in 1999 - it got a little gloomy and the birds shut up for a bit but that was it! Your Galadriel-esque epiphany sounds a lot more fun!

fylGja – Thanks for the closing thoughts on the Black Parade. I feel I’ve reached my limit on this subject and have nothing useful to add! My interpretation as an audience member is perhaps overly simplistic - Draag has no government, or agenda, it’s a fictional construct made to carry a great deal of metaphorical weight - but I’m not the originator of the Draag concept and can only speculate, like you, where things will lead…

MagicK – You’re welcome!

1.This would have been a standalone reimagining of the Legion and not part of continuity. It was my attempt to do a whole epic Legion history in one story. The plan was to have a big Star Trek sweep with a United Planets backdrop. I wanted to play the story of the Legion as the rise and fall of a youth cult, on a galactic scale. It would start with three hipster kids – Garth Ranzz from the planet Winath, Imra Ardeen, a telepath from Titan and Rokk Krinn of Braal. We’d play them like the ‘Bromley contingent’ of punks led by Siouxsie Sioux – clever, provocative and stylish - but instead of being into decadence and Cabaret, these Legion kids were obsessed with old time ‘superheroes’ from the 20^th and 21^st centuries. They decide to dress like superheroes and give themselves superhero names - Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl and Cosmic Boy.

Pretending to be superheroes, they save the life of squillionaire RJ Brande, who, like Brian Epstein with the Beatles, or Malcolm McClaren and the Sex Pistols, sees ‘potential’ in these young trendsetters. They swiftly become stars, the height of cool. The superhero thing would then get bigger and more successful, with new members joining the newly-created ‘Legion of Super-Heroes’ from all points in the sky – we’d follow the rise and then the fractures, the ‘musical’ differences, the originals splitting off as the original idea is mangled or forgotten – with breakaway factions of Substitute Heroes and Wanderers doing their own thing – until what had been a universe-changing style, jargon and philosophy, would wind up in every space variant of Hot Topic, and every kid would be dressing in some watered down version of the hero look - then cosmic war - and so on – it would have been three 40 page issues telling the whole story, with a bittersweet ending where the last of the originals get together to reminisce and the solution to a central mystery is finally revealed…

2. I have no personal relationship with the ‘Five Years Later’ Giffen Legion run, as I wasn’t reading the book at the time! All I remember about that run is disliking the 9-panel grid and the ‘grim’ Legion, and preferring Giffen’s work with Paul Levitz in the early ‘80s (those were the books that got me back into reading comics in my early 20s). I liked him a lot and got on well with Keith - he was a one-of-a-kind madcap acerbic creative mind - but I didn’t connect with that version of the Legion at all.

3. Quitely and I were invited to contribute a story to Action #1000 but as I recall we didn’t have anything great in mind and by that time I felt we’d said our piece with All-Star Superman.

Nathan - I have around 30 or so strays to look after these days, with five new kittens taking the places of some much-missed old faces.

Writing a book about the colony is a good idea to preserve its characters in fictional form - I had a similar idea and started a fantasy novel about the local cats, in a Watership Down mode…

Ben – I didn’t get that far! I could be persuaded to watch a whole movie from Cringer’s POV.

Tomi – Nice to hear from you again! James is a band that never really connected with me, although I love Sit Down as much as the next ‘90s veteran. I remember Tim with hair, and perhaps he remembers me with hair.

Mark – I’m looking forward to Coyote vs Acme. Me and Coyote have history…

Jimmybayls – I’m glad your son enjoyed The Third Policeman, although I’m sure being paid to read helps sweeten the deal! You should definitely read it next! Hope your niece finds JLA entertaining!

I have met Lynne Ramsay! She lived just round the corner from my place in Glasgow!

DeeSee – I agree. Wasn’t there always a sense of bitterness with Oddie? I think he felt he was the multi-talented one. and didn’t get the respect he deserved. Graeme Garden was my favourite Goodie but it was really a show for 12 year olds who weren’t allowed to stay up to watch Monty Python’s Flying Circus. There were some inspired moments - ‘Kitten Kong’ etc - but it was often threadbare playground absurdism…

I’m a big fan of Oliver Reed as an actor – another one who never reached the heights he was capable of (he’s a magnificent young and brooding presence in Beat Girl, and he’s peak with Oliver!, Women in Love and The Devils) thanks to a serious drink problem that was indulged then as ‘hellraiser’ behaviour - but that drunken debacle on the Aspel show was just sad (he attempted to sing Wild One there, not Wild Thing, but had recorded both songs previously). A sober version would probably have been great, but he wasn’t just drunk in that clip, he was shit-faced, falling down fucked.

I remember the Yummy Fur from posters around town but I’ve never seen them play.

My pal Gordon plays guitar for Simple Minds but, as you can imagine, their music has never rung my bell! As you probably know, they were Johnny and the Self-Abusers in their punk genesis, before wisely settling on a somewhat less offensive and more commercial name.

I stand by the suggestion to seek out music you don’t normally listen to – but you don’t have to like all of it! Some things just strum the strings of the soul straight away, others you learn to love, or appreciate, and some leave you cold no matter how hard you try to give them a go.

Musical taste is like fingerprints and snowflakes.

For me, Gaga was best out the gate – especially that double punch of instant classics with Poker Face and Bad Romance - but I rate her quite highly as an artist, even when the work doesn’t always appeal to me.

The evil Aunt Gladys in Weapons was what you describe – she did what she did, however sadistic, in order to prolong her existence. Supernatural evil has different rules, as the Grimm fairy tale ending demonstrated.

I still maintain that humans are ‘plex beings’ as you call it. We are congregations of alternate selves, parallel versions, that sometimes get together to achieve great things but more often spend their/our lives in internal conflict.

kevinS – Having written her adventures, and spent time with the character, I really like Zatanna and think she’s my favourite magical superhero but…running a close race, and a clear first choice if you asked 14-year-old GM, would have to be Dr. Fate. It was the simple but incredibly striking and appealing costume that did it for me as a kid – that Pharaonic blue and gold, the epaulettes and gauntlets, the faceless Spartan helmet – when I saw Fate for the first time on the cover of DC 100-page Super Spectacular #6 drawn by Neal Adams in a mind-boggling crowd scene that introduced me to an exciting treasure trove of Golden Age heroes. I was instantly captivated and wanted to know more. Then there was his HQ in a windowless stone tower on some blasted heath outside Salem! I loved the Martin Pasko/Walt Simonson Doctor Fate story from 1st Issue Special #8. That’s a great one-shot. The original stories by Gardner Fox have a bizarre, dreamlike atmosphere – ‘The Lambent Flame’ – and a strange sideways Lovecraft influence with names like Nyarl-Amen. In spite of my love for the character, I’ve never chosen to write him – everything great about Doctor Fate exists in the costume and in a handful of stories for me, and that design, and anything else is superfluous. I was pleased with my pulp Earth-22 ‘Doc Fate’ character, combining Doctor Fate and Doc Savage, and could have written him again.

I was a big fan of the Engelhart/Frank Brunner Doctor Strange stories and love the eerie atmosphere of the early Lee/Ditko stories, but I’ve never been a big fan of the character. The Ditko Doctor Strange was my Uncle Billy’s favourite. His dad, my grandad loved Mandrake the Magician, so we have three generations of favourite fictional wizards, at least. Otherwise, I like most of the ones DC ended up with – especially Ibis the Invincible and Taia.

And John Constantine – he’s a good one!

An atheist in the DC Universe would be like a Flat Earther here – a denier of the self-evidently true! Although I suppose a committed DCU atheist could say that if some of these powerful superhuman beings are aliens or mutants then maybe all of them are. Heaven and Hell are other planets or dimensions! That’s if they even exist and it’s not just a big conspiracy put about by one faction or another…

Be seeing you…

PIC: izzy-wizzy KM 2026

Sooty’s Original Theme (With Lyrics)

SABRINA CARPENTER’S DONKEY HOSE SENSATION

I write on Owl Awareness Day, an awareness worth encouraging if you’re a field mouse on a moonlit night, or, on the other hand, a lonely owl in search of friends.

Last day on the Magic book Kickstarter! It’s doing very well apparently.

I should point out that this book is not a grimoire, or a manual, a guide, or a how-to book. It’s a 25, 000 word conversation about the historical use of symbols in Magic, and the accompanying development of ideas about God across millennia from the Neolithic period until now.

In other bird-related news, Bill Oddie, ornithologist, musician and member of the Goodies, (the Python-lite comedy troupe I loved as a kid), died last week, so here is his finest moment of many, at least as far as I’m concerned. As a youngster, and even today, there was nothing I found more thrilling and amusing than seeing macho authority figures losing their shit, and this cover of the Troggs Wild Thing not only beats out the original but delivers in spades with an orgasmic portrayal of the police force that almost rivals Derek Jarman’s half-naked dancing bobbies in Jubilee, despite being filmed in what appears to be 17th century 4K using a complex apparatus made of sand, brass and glass.

The Goodies - Wild Thing

HIGH-T AND HOLIDAYS

As a so-called UH-T (that’s ‘Ultra High Testosterone’ for you …) individual, I intend to add my manly voice to a chorus of indignation that’s been ringing out from here to eternity after the US Secretary of Death announced his plan to round up and milk high-T individuals like myself, and perhaps like you, of our raw-T juice, direct from the gland!

Look buddy, I love Uncle Sam as much as the next feller, who doesn’t? But there’s something – I don’t know – something just ain’t right when I’m being told to use my thoughts to picture mighty herds of healthy men lining up for the milking of their personal high-T, just to supply the assembled feyboys of the military-industrial complex with what they don’t got enough of on their own. Hell, that makes me feel downright funny…

In truth, and quite literally, it’s more of a Baron Harkonnen cosplay thing, I hear, where a pulley arrangement is used to lower SecDeath up to his neckline in a gooey pit of gluey high-T residue, there to coax into life a raging half-inch combat erection, fierce as a nipple, using sheer force of will and accompanied by an anguished rendition of Don’t Look At Me That Way, Jesus!

‘My aaaassss!’ screams SecDeath, when requested to sum up 250 years of American culture and achievement. ‘My GODDAMN ASSSSSSS!’

UFO STREET

I read Dreaming of Cockaigne, which was fairly dry but gave me everything I needed for a story I’m picking away at entitled The Only Cop in Cockaigne.

Mostly, I’ve been working on some currently top secret comic book projects this week.

Downtime, I’ve been diving into the first volume of The Familiar book series by Mark Z. Danielewski but it’s a bit of a struggle. The style changes for each chapter and while I’m hooked on some of the strands, including the primary story fortunately… others are simply exhausting. There are sections written in a Singaporean pidjin and some in a kind of cholo gang speak where I actually have no idea what’s being discussed or referred to, reduced to bouncing along on a foam of words without referents.

Next, I watched half of Masters of the Universe before giving up. I didn’t hate it utterly, it was too bland for that, but it was the sort of film you’d get if you asked ChatGPT to mock human creativity. Much more enjoyable was Marty Supreme. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Timothée Chalamet actually working his aaaaasssss off before, but he was great in this, with a performance whose assured commitment reminded me of some of the great ‘70s auteur era turns like Dustin Hoffman or the young Al Pacino. Sinners was brilliant and Michael B. Jordan was great in it, but for sheer old school acting, Timothée deserved the Oscar for Marty Supreme, a cut above.

There are some films where you don’t want to know anything about them beyond the poster. A case in point is this new one, Wicker, with Olivia Colman, which on a first impression appears to be a filmic record of what happens when a writer hears of the existence of a film entitled The Wicker Man and is moved to speculate, ‘But what if he was actually a man made out of wicker?’, in what must surely be the elevator pitch deluxe. Based on the bare minimum promo, I’ve decided the film is about a woman who gets bored with cuddling brine-smelling fishermen and decides to fashion a more amenable husband out of fragrant baskets – The Shape of Wicker you might say – and all kinds of romantic trouble follows as it surely must when you date men you’ve woven from willow rods.

I’ve been progressing nicely through the story recently, but have become obsessed with my farm and orchard in Crimson Desert. Not content with feeding stray cats twice a day in the real world, I’m now making regular forays to collect fruits and vegetables to supply my new array of simulated pigs, ducks, hens, and goats. They grow up and breed and everything!

Fucking tragic, man…

Had a good Zoom call with Richard Metzger and Luke Haines last week. I’m a huge fan of his work going back to The Auteurs and Show Girl, which I bought as a single, but I hadn’t met Luke before. We got on like a house of fire, I’m pleased to say. It’s nice to talk to someone who knows what you’re on about, and shares so much of your cultural heritage.

I read an interesting paper from Academia by Roy Baumeister about Comic Books as Moral Pornography, arguing that the exaggerated forms of good and evil that exist in comic book stories fulfil a similar function to pornography’s equally exaggerated approach to human sexuality, while appealing to a similar predominantly male audience.

It’s an interesting take, which cites a Ben Bova piece on tips for writers, which I quote here. This neatly outlines an argument I’ve seen made often:

“In the real world there are no villains. No one actually sets out to do evil. Yes, there are madmen and murderers and rapists and crooked politicians and greedy land developers and all sorts of villainous behaviors. But each of those people believes that he is doing what is necessary, and maybe even good… There are no villains cackling and rubbing their hands in glee as they contemplate their evil deeds. There are only people with problems, struggling to solve them.” (Bova, n.d.)

Perhaps it’s only because I write comic books which feature genuinely and proudly evil individuals, but I would argue against this. There are most certainly people who do evil because they know it is evil and they get off on the transgression of being able to do what most people would balk at. They don’t do it because it’s necessary, they do it because they have opportunity and drive. They don’t do it because they think it’s actually for the greater good. They do it because they know it’s bad. Doing ‘evil’ is the point and it you’d be missing the point if you convinced yourself what you were doing was ‘good’. Some people really enjoy watching others suffer and be afraid. They know this is bad, but the wickedness is the special sauce! Guilt is consumed like champagne! I think there are real ‘villains cackling and rubbing their hands in glee as they contemplate their evil deeds’.

If Skeletor proves anything, it’s surely that!

Many of the same self-styled critics who took aim at the Supergirl film, as mentioned here last time, decided to get into a fight they were never going to win with Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey. Unsurprisingly, this latest in a string of cinematic hits for Nolan turned out to be impervious to racist imprecations and transphobia by triumphing at the box office.

What can we learn by venturing into the multiverse to study outraged and lonely Emperor Skum L-One, the world’s wealthiest alien toad of Parallearth-1367, (an Earth conquered and enslaved in 1898 by Martians with powerful antibiotics), who took to his mind scanner with an announcement that he planned to make his own historically accurate rival version of The Odyssey to counteract the fictional flights of fancy of his his world’s Nolan, (a squirrel). AI, NeuraLego, and cutting edge omnicrochet technologies will be employed to ensure the prompt delivery of the competing movie, in which historically accurate cyclops actors will join historically accurate sirens and gods, played by actual Greek deities who, as will be revealed, turn out to be very, very white in real life. Skum delivered his portentous announcement to a captive audience of 5 million excitable fireflies, denizens of his twilit swamp kingdom on a planet orbiting a strange alternative sun with zebra stripes of yellow and blue. His repeated croaks of ‘go woke, go broke’ triggered the glowing multitude to reply as one with a series of synchronised strobe semaphore flashes - ‘go fash, lose cash’ - and so the call-and-response of society is maintained and the rhythm of seasons and of stars doth continueth unto that bit at the end of the Bible where it says …Amen!

That’s where the head’s at this week. Pray for me.

THERE GOES THE AURA!

You write, we reply, they live, it follows…

Jonny – I’ll do what I can!

Sean – Can’t do much about the postage but otherwise, this book is intended as a luxury limited edition item in the Century Guild style. This is probably the only form in which it is ever likely to exist. It’s very specifically a strand of work that’s in collaboration with Century Guild, where I’m aligning with their publishing aesthetic.

Persefonie – Wishing the best of health for Lola and Blue and hope they stay strong in the Power of Love. And Leonard too. I’m very fond of crows. M. John Harrison and crows in one reply! I met Harrison once in 1999 when he wasn’t sure about continuing to write science fiction. He’d been producing great work that went largely unrecognised and was feeling a bit down about it. I’m glad he turned it around and I’ll probably pick up The End of Everything.

Luda is the Devil/Dual. That Luciferian Self I mentioned. The reflex of the Holy Guardian Angel.

Dorothy – Rain dances all round then! And please don’t feel pressured to create poetry every time! Your regular prose is every bit as elegant!

I’ll happily connect Bill & Ted with Doctor Who. The telephone booth is a TARDIS with chameleon circuit adapted to its 1988 San Dimas location – TARDISes are notoriously shonky devices so this ancient relic just forgot to be bigger on the inside when it engaged camouflage mode - and Rufus is a venerable Time Lord on his final regeneration who has settled down on Earth 700 years in the future! His last great victory is defeating De Nomolos and ensuring an excellent future for the planet by guiding Bill & Ted to success.

And thanks for introducing me to the Reading Abbey Girls’ School material! What a treasure trove!

Nathan – There’s no dragging down the vibe round here! If we can’t eulogise our animal pals, what good’s Xanaduum for? For all it’s immensely rewarding to take responsibility for the care of the vulnerable, it can be sore on the soul, as I’m sure you know all too well. The intensity of these connections is what life is all about, but it sets us up for grief when the connections we make appear to be broken or lost. Like the thrills and spills provided by velocity and gravity on a rollercoaster ride, the devastating emotional ups and downs of life on Earth go towards making the ride exhilarating, scary, painful, and ultimately delightful.

That aside - as the ghost of Peggy Guggenheim whispered in a room in the Gritti Palace in 1998 - no love is wasted, no love is lost. Nubbin will never be forgotten by any of us round here!

I must admit I’m feeling overwhelmed right now by the cat colony and looking forward to things quietening down for the winter. It’s like a visceral soap opera. Huge characters you think the story could never do without are suddenly gone. New faces emerge, and those that once were background NPCs take on depth and personality as they persist through years and emerge into foreground as dear and persistent old timers, before exiting stage left in their turn.

Watching the two 3-month old brothers who survived in the greenhouse as they revel in their mad, tumbling childhood in our overgrown garden in summer is a balm for the heart. A third tiny black kitten from another mother sometimes joins in the sunstruck ruckus, and it’s truly captivating to watch them racing around the grass and running up trees without a care.

All that aside, yes, there will be a physical Tarot deck! I’ve been stalled on the last three cards for various reasons but really ought to knuckle down and finish them now that I have a breathing space between jobs.

MagicK – 1. I get on well with Steve Wacker and with Brad Winderbaum, his new boss, so there’s always a chance. I don’t feel the same deep connection to Marvel as I do with DC, but special projects are an option.

2. That’s an interesting take on Luda. It’s one of the elements of the story that wasn’t consciously intended but you’re right – there’s a ton of Superman references in the book and there must be a reason for that! I’ve always enjoyed that David Watts/ (the Kinks song about a perfect schoolboy – ‘I wish I could be like David Watts’) Geoffrey Ingram narrative. Or like Spartacus Hughes in The Filth – the smug, self-assured and charismatic arsehole at your school who is just naturally better at everything and everyone loves and admires them. I think of it as the Luciferian self.

Fr. Theta – Good to know! Any unusual variants?

Drowzeezachary – I don’t use the Crowley formulation ‘Magick’ – I usually roll out ‘Magic’ with a capital ‘M’ when I’m referring to occult rather than stage magic and prefer ‘Mag!c’ for my own system – but the ‘k’ adds a retro touch here.

Green Lantern was my favourite comic during the Geoff Johns era when Geoff was on fire with that character. The main book was gripping and relentlessly inventive and I loved the spin-offs, the Green Lantern Corps series with Pete Tomasi and Tony Bedard was great too.

I thought the Yellow Lanterns from the Sinestro Corps War were a fantastic bunch of villains – really well put together. I also liked the Blue Lanterns, the hippy Buddha ones, with the Ganesh-like, elephant-headed Brother Warth. Geoff loved the character of Larfleeze, the Orange Lantern, but I found him charmless and annoying.

When it comes to the unwillingness or inability of comics to evolve, I’m mostly in agreement with Patrick’s analysis.

Patrick – Interesting to hear that about Corenswet. It tracks, as I didn’t see a whole lot of All-Star influence in Superman.

I think it’s worth pointing out that the writing in comics hasn’t changed much in 40 years, although the art has gone through more stylistic shifts in that time. In fact, I’d push it even further back to 50 years. Sometimes, I too can forget that grown-up, ‘sophisticated’ comics as we understand them didn’t leap into life fully-formed in the ‘80s but were around for a decade at least before that. There’s not much in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing or Gaiman’s Sandman that you wouldn’t also find in Don McGregor’s Killraven and Black Panther stories in terms of elevated ideas and plots, expressive poetic captions, hard-hitting ‘realistic’ dialogue and characterisation. The development of the Stan Lee authorial voice of the ‘60s via young counterculture writers in the ‘70s like Jim Starlin, Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, Don McGregor and others, resulted in a style that directly and obviously influenced the writers of the following generation, who then became influences in their turn.

The Beatles-inspired music sounds amazing in description, but I don’t have a Spotify account, so haven’t been able to listen to any of it yet! Will try to remedy that!

fylGja – Thanks for the extended commentary, which I have read and absorbed. Your articulate candour is appreciated and it certainly doesn’t create a rift of any kind to get your perspective.

Glad to hear you’ve dealt with the harassment. And I was unfamiliar with John Zack’s art but it’s interesting stuff.

We’ve been lucky enough to avoid the worst of the heat, but it’s 99% humidity today which is…taxing. Clothes soaked to the skin after five minutes outside. At least we have rain, lots of rain, unlike down South in England where they’re withering.

Back to the MCR shows - clearly, some audience members feel triggered, upset or angered by some of the imagery, but the same can be said of most confrontational art. Welcome to the Black Parade could as easily distress people who have lost loved ones to cancer, or who are undergoing treatment for the disease themselves. Or it could give them some comfort to see their daily struggles transformed into myth through art. My own feeling is that I’d rather the band used their work to assess the current state of America and the world than not, even if they make errors of tone and taste that are perhaps unavoidable in the context. There are few groups of MCR’s stature even willing to nod in the direction of real world issues, and as I said last time, the show is about a lot of things, not just the obvious trappings of authoritarian states. You allude to several of the metaphors and allegories playing out on stage. I think the fact that the band is inspiring these passionate feelings and challenging conversations is, on balance, a good thing but…

…this is not to deny or downplay negative responses to the material, which, as you laid out, are genuine and deserve consideration. Some audience members may have simply reached a limit with the band for the reasons you outline.

I’m still willing to see where they take it.

Michael S – I’m sure she’d appreciate that!

DeeSee – I like music…but not indiscriminately! I’m from the same generation as Duran Duran and played in a ramshackle ‘psychedelic punk’ band at the same time in the early ‘80s, so I’m afraid we ‘hated’ the Duran boys on principle and regarded them as chart shite – which meant we were madly jealous of their success, (I was reminded that Milo O’Shea’s character in Barbarella was ‘Durand Durand’ not ‘Duran Duran’). At the time, we were only willing to admit we liked Planet Earth and Is There Something I Should Know? (because it sounded a bit like the Beatles) but since then, much mellowing has occurred, and while I wouldn’t seek them out, I can listen without gagging to most of Duran Duran’s discography, but only in the same way I might nod along to a bunch of Robbie Williams or Oasis songs. They’re never going to make into my list of favourite bands. Your advocacy of the lads is admirable however, and I’ll concede that they’re hard-working, professional popsters, and still looking not bad for antiques! My favourite band at that time was the thrillingly lo-fi and indie Television Personalities, so you can understand why I might regard Duran Duran as uncool pro chart material from my staunchly homemade perspective…

Television Personalities - Geoffrey Ingram

And this is what my band was doing at the time. You get the idea. Garage power punk. No competition to Duran Duran obviously!..

The Mixers - Never Find Time (1984)

Duran Duran was, of course, the favourite band of Diana Princess of Wales…

Nudity isn’t enough to withstand the new breed of heat now that we have the hottest planet in the world! Forests are ablaze! Entire ecosystems rendered lifeless, with whole cities threatened by planetary scale elemental power. Except in the West of Scotland, where efficient rain has been pouring from the bungalow cloud ceiling on a regular and persistent basis, and where it’s just tolerably hot when the sun’s out rather than completely on fire. England has declared a drought and formerly lush green fields in Suffolk look like the desert sets from spaghetti westerns.

The lane I often refer to is the archetypal country lane that runs for several hundred yards between the trees behind where I live. You invariably get that churchy thing with the interlacing branches shifting overhead and the way the light comes in all sacred and flickering. Acid or mushies would make the whole experience positively ecclesiastical. Fire would only ruin the effect, so keep that rain coming, surly Scottish sky!

The original Magick and Symbolism interview exists but this particular venture is about the creation of an artefact, hence the bougie book format.

Jason – I have not yet, but I will check out Carousel and let you know what I thought next time!

Rodrigo – I borrowed that ‘technology or ideological purity test’ formulation from the writer and academic John Pistelli, whose weekly literature blog I enjoy when I need an intellectual workout and a painful reminder that I left school at 18, so the provocation is his. I felt he’d quite succinctly articulated something I talk about in the book.

It struck me that much of the discourse around AI was less about its technological and social impact and more about oppressive attempts to commandeer the conversation by a rapidly convened caucus of accusatory voices, intent on vilifying AI and anyone who dared experiment with it, and insisting on a Luddite moral purity from the creative community. AI was here to steal our jobs and piss on the human imagination went the outcry.

As an example of why I don’t fear being ‘replaced’ by AI, I wrote a positive review of James Gunn’s Superman for Xanaduum last year – then asked ChatGPT to write me a review of Superman ‘in the style of Grant Morrison’.

What I got was something that read like a fair parody of my hyberbolic superhero evangelism from the Supergods era around 2010/11, but, in style and content, the AI review was nothing like the review I’d just written for Xanaduum, 15 years after Supergods was published. AI can only follow. It may get close to an impression of your old style, but it has no idea what you’re thinking today, or what type of art you might decide to make. It can therefore never replace you, unless you rely on repeating yourself forever. I would never choose to follow AI versions of my favourite writers, especially if the originals were still available and creating new work.

It struck me also that the rhetoric around AI was similar to that surrounding other instances of slavery and exploitation. When our plan is to force another person or non-human entity to do our tedious donkey work for little or no reward, it suits us to deny that person or entity any consciousness or autonomy, and that’s something I see here.

Some surrender of human authorship would necessarily be implied in a true collaboration with a machine intelligence. You’d have to be willing to accept and incorporate the AI’s ideas, even where they altered your own, for it to be a genuine team-up, so that tension you mention would likely be at the heart of it.

Otherwise, I anticipate one artistic response to AI art being the rise of more obviously human and quirky artisanal DIY handmade work, and work that runs contrariwise to all the ‘how to’ books about screenwriting, the ‘improve your novel’ podcasts and all the other rules fed to AI and human ‘content creators’. If the machines are going to slavishly follow the rules of commercial art, I think human work will prosper and gain ground if it gets less polished, and more weird, surreal, and outsider-ish.

Another reason to reread Steve Aylett’s masterpiece ‘Heart of the Original’.

Digressions aside, this is a subject I find fascinating and creatively juicy, I think there’s a lot of room for serious artistic collaboration with AI, but the subject is quite toxic in the artistic community, and for me personally, the environmental cost is too high at present. I had a go, but find I can’t justify burning down a forest or evaporating a lake just to produce some glossy flea market surrealism.

Bobby – Thanks Bobby! The Century Guild book is deliberately styled on one of those understated Crowley or Golden Dawn volumes from the fin de siecle. I’m thinking I might actually go to the pictures to see The Odyssey. I wouldn’t do that for Supergirl, sadly.

Looking forward to the new comics!

And Happy Maybe Day Gone By!

Aled – it beats me on Quatermass and Doomwatch (created by Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler, who worked on Doctor Who and made up the Cybermen). Both could be very easily updated and reimagined to great effect. I think about Doomwatch quite a lot, oddly enough. How I loved that show when I was a kid! Those emphatic opening titles - ‘WATCH’, ‘DOOM’, ‘WATCH’ - that start where Doctor Strangelove ends…

Opening credits sequence from “Doomwatch” BBC TV series (1970-72)

…that bludgeoning martial music! Every episode was some mad high concept eco-catastrophe, or a technological breakdown leading to madness and hallucination. Super-intelligent rats! A plastic-eating virus! Sonic booms causing psychosis! There was a disappointing movie version with the otherwise great Ian Bannen in the lead, but the show is amazing especially the first season with Robert Powell as Toby Wren, and that gut-wrenching, shocking finale where he tries to disarm an atom bomb on Byfield Pier.

The Doomwatch team leader, Quist, is Quatermass if he was a completely uncompromising bastard on a perma-rage - ‘To hell with the Dangerous Poisons Act!'.

There was an attempt to do a reboot in 1999 but it didn’t take.

See you next time…

PIC: KM 2026

Pizzicato Five - Twiggy Twiggy Twiggy vs James Bond

MAKE MINE MAG!C!

I have a Kickstarter book on Magic coming out!

I’ve mentioned couple of projects I completed recently in collaboration with Tom Negovan at Century Guild, purveyors of fine art books from the Symbolist/Decadent era. This is the first of those projects to go public. Tom is a world expert on Symbolist art and one of the smartest people I know. He liked the idea of publishing some small, beautifully designed, and perfectly-formed volumes made to be unearthed in the dusty back corners of mysterious bookshops a hundred years from now!

And so, Magick and Symbolism - a wide-ranging conversation tracing the development of symbols and the depiction of gods from the Neolithic era to the present day, taking in Ancient Egypt, Greece, Blake, the Symbolists and AI.

Is the famous ‘Dancing Shaman’ rock art a picture of a magician or a Stone Age superhero? How did the Ancient Egyptians collaborate with Death to lay the foundations of Capitalist culture? Does Magic really have a ‘price’? What is the esoteric meaning of Christ? How did Milton and Blake engender the idea of ‘personal mythology’ and how did Jack Kirby benefit? And is AI a working technology or an ideological purity test?

Magick and Symbolism has all this and more more more!

You can visit here for further information:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/centuryguild/magick-and-symbol-by-grant-morrison-and-thomas-negovan?ref=466q2z

DEEP STATE FAIR

With that done, it’s all about the heat this time around. We’ve got the hottest country ever!

When it gets cold, I can reliably warm myself up, when it gets hotter than even nakedness can account for, the only recourse is suffering in the soaking humidity…

On the plus side, walking down the lane through streaming sunlight felt like a trip down the aisle in a green cathedral with its complex interlacing of leaf and branch overhead, a vaulted ceiling, alive with an orchestra of birdsong that surrounded and immersed me in a free New Age sound bath.

This week I’ve been researching Helium-3 for a project I hope to be able to announce soon, and doing a deep dive on the Land of Cockaigne for a short story I’ve been working on. In that vein, I’m awaiting the book Dreaming of Cockaigne by Herman Pleij.

I finished The Unseen Internet by Shira Chess, a fascinating and thought-provoking account of occult ideas baked into the creation of the internet. Well worth a read.

I played through the James Bond game First Light which was great, with one very minor gripe that there could have been more driving and car chases. That aside, the game lives twice or dies golden and forever on Patrick Gibson’s fantastic, even definitive, take on the young Bond. I was a bit unsure of the Estuary accent in the trailers, but it really grew on me. I came away from the game thinking it was the best version of Bond in any media for years, perhaps of all time! He felt more like a spy than an action hero, which is often not the case. What I’ve always liked about Bond was not the violence or the sex, although those are intriguing elements, but his confidence and his ability to roll with any situation.

Back to the interminable Crimson Desert which is becoming frustrating in the sense that the game is too big and the bosses too difficult to fight for the likes of me. It’s one of those games that could easily replace your entire life if you let it.

SOOPERDOOPER

I can’t quite fathom the vicious railing on the actor Milly Alcock, who is playing Supergirl in the recently released film of the same name from DC Studios. I don’t know if it’s a good film or a mediocre one - I’ll probably watch it when it comes on TV - but as far as I can see from the trailers and promo, it comes across as James Gunn-lite space action, with an unconvincing dog in danger plot, (if he’s such a bastard, why wouldn’t the villain just disintegrate Krypto?), and the likeable Jason Momoa as Lobo in there somewhere. What I do know is that the film has underperformed at the box office.

DC’s film division makes the same mistakes over and over again, no matter who is in charge, by making a point of picking the wrong people for the job. They do it all the time and will continue to keep doing it, and will keep making the same costly mistakes because it’s in their nature to misunderstand these superhero characters and what makes them tick.

It also seems a little disingenuous to suggest, as some have tried to do, that there is no hint of misogyny in the criticism of Supergirl when so much of it comes from older men, and revolves around Alcock’s appearance, and her attractiveness, or lack of it.

Even Ricky Gervais weighed in to suggest that Supergirl was only criticised because it was poorly made. He dismissed the other complaints as ‘woke’ Hollywood freaking out in its usual manner, and claimed there would be no backlash if the script was good to start with. He and numerous others denied any accusations of misogyny in online critiques, even though most of the initial complaints had nothing to do with the script or story and everything to do with bitchy middle-aged men insulting the looks of its young star. Given that many reviewers even suggested they would be fine with the movie if Sydney Sweeney had been cast in Alcock’s place, it’s hard to make the case that the film’s story was what let it down. I’ve also enjoyed a lot of Gervais’ work, but when Ricky attacks out of touch celebrities by insisting that they shouldn’t be airing their apparently misguided political opinions, there’s an odd disconnect. Surely Gervais himself is a multimillionaire success story who is fine with airing his opinions as if they are more relevant than others in his position. I’m not sure what makes him think he’s more ‘in touch’ with ordinary people than all the other superstar entertainers.

‘To see oursels as ithers see us!’

Anyway, Supergirl blah blah…

BOUND FOR THE FLIES

PIC: KM 2026

We were delighted to welcome Gerard Way and family this weekend when he was in Glasgow for the My Chemical Romance show at Bellahouston Park (site of my youthful footballing debacle as recounted in the last newsletter) We all had dinner at our place and it was great to see him in person and hang out again after so long, far from the madding crowds.

The show the following night was fantastic. The whole thing felt more like a film or a play with music and kept me riveted throughout.

What might in someone else’s hands have been a nostalgia workout has become an operatic spectacle that directly addresses contemporary concerns.

It takes what might be heritage rock – the play through of a 20-year old classic album – and turns it into an operatic spectacle of autocritique. It recontextualises the songs, it skewers nostalgia, especially nostalgia as deployed by fascist ideologies and speaks to the current moment, when authoritarian tendencies roam roughshod round the globe. What happens to a successful band that survives into a world where their music is reframed by political upheaval? When they’re beaten and brutalised into playing the hit album over and over until the end of the world? In this story, our heroes are the 52nd ‘division’ or iteration of The Black Parade and we’re meant to assume that their predecessors were killed or disappeared.

It’s a fantastic conceit. and makes everything new again. The post-mortem superheroes of the Black Parade, Sergeant Peppers in the Afterlife, become performing monkeys, traumatised and scarred, playing the hits as threats, executions, and an apocalyptic exchange of missiles strive to destabilise the performance. A man runs from wing to wing on fire. The band are taken away in hoods after the singer is killed. The pop nihilism of The Black Parade runs into the real deal in this Grand Guignol, this Theatre of Cruelty.

It struck me that the second half, on the |B stage, where the band appear as themselves to play a medley of material from their other albums, told its own story. As I saw it, the broken down and co-opted band from the first half, forced to play their breakthrough album endlessly for a military despot, exists in one universe where they got so big they became ripe for exploitation. The second half takes place in a world where they wound up as a punky bar band but kept their integrity.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and I can’t think of another big pop band operating at this level of talent and creativity. Gerard, like Bowie did, approaches all of the band’s work as art projects, and it pays off with a freshness and urgency few bands can match.

STARS IN THEIR EYES

Replies to your correspondence ensue:

Jelly Result – It just looks like a ghost but it’s water and living organisms in suspension. It’s half-ghost, half-animal, all-wet!

Bobby –Those Illuminatus! games are brilliant! I’m addicted!

Persefonie –which is to say, I agree with you here!

Aled – I agree that Doctor Who is best when it‘s aware that there’s a vast weight of continuity embedded in its history, but it’s folly to expect the power of nostalgia to prevail when Sutekh or Omega returns, especially with poor redesigns that only remind old timers of the verve and originality of the originals.

Capaldi’s taken my top spot as well. Pertwee was ‘my’ Doctor, then I loved Matt Smith, but Capaldi was able to push the character to places we’d never seen and Clara was peak ‘companion’. Bill was a great addition too. Those final episodes were brilliant, shocking and satisfying. As time has passed, I see Capaldi and his ever-shifting performance as the gold standard Doctor.

Wild Boys is a good one. I think First Light proved that a contemporary Bond can not only work but give the original series a run for its money. A period piece while authentic to the books would turn the character into Sherlock Holmes, with the Cold War instead of Victoriana.

I had no idea This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave was intended as a Bond song. I’m a big Pet Shop Boys fan and I really like that one but I’ve never considered it Bond-like.

This one by Black Box Recorder feels like a deconstructed Bond theme – where there should be brass, there’s plinking piano and guitar, but the lyrics are pure Bond and England Made Me is a great title for a Bond story.

England Made Me

DeeSee – see for me, Duran Duran was the Master of the Positronic Ray, Master of Sogo, so when those New Romantic hangers-on showed up with Planet Earth they seemed like also-rans.

Vomit clocks are a real thing I just found out about. They’re not actually made of puke, sadly, nor are they clocks that have been regurgitated as ingredients in a sour stew. In fact they’re fashioned from acrylic resin, and just happen to look like an undifferentiated lump of diced carrots and corn with a clock embedded. If you look them up, you’ll discover there’s even a digital Vomit Clock Museum where you can learn important stuff like ‘Cleaning your Vomit Clock regularly’ among other things. Worth knowing!

What a wonderful world!

I compare Hockney to Picasso more for his range of technique and style than anything else – from the photo-realist pop art paintings through the amazing Polaroid experiments in the ‘80s onto his more recent iPad paintings which vibrate with pure colour and light. Those latter pictures are definitely more in the vein of Van Gogh though, I’d agree.

The newsletter is intended to record the contents of my head during any given week or fortnight and sometimes that includes stuff I’ve read or watched, whether it’s a …ranting politician, or TV personality, or a shite football match.

As predicted, Scotland crashed out of the World Cup after proving yet again that it’s a sport we’re not even good at, let alone one at which we excel. Our supporters are exemplary but they just don’t deserve the timid and self-defeating national team.

Patrick – I also have series creator and exec producer credits and pretty good frontline experience of all aspects of production but you’re right that we don’t have a production company set-up. I’d love to write for Doctor Who but probably don’t have the bandwidth to take on something at this level. The TARDIS should always have a big role in stories and be treated like a character with its own arcs. I do like your idea of Tennant regenerating into the Timeless Child - that’s very elegant and satisfying…

Fr. Theta – Pegg/Frost is a potential but why do I feel I wouldn’t necessarily like the result? Thomas Brodie-Sangster - he played a fey schoolboy in Family of Blood and a credible teenage Paul McCartney in Nowhere Boy - is a great idea (we hired Harry Lloyd to play Bernard Marx in Brave New World based on his weird, stylised performance as the alien-possessed schoolboy from the same Who episodes).

My knowledge of the Troughton era comes from basic cultural osmosis – pictures of Cybermen marching down the steps outside St. Paul’s were in all the papers, Troughton was in the Doctor Who strips that appeared in TV Comic that I read every week, (I hated the way they drew his horrible hat – just seeing it again while researching this gave me a jolt of primal revulsion) and also in the Doctor Who annual some family member bought me in 1966 (along with The Dalek World from the same period, the 1966 annual made a very big impression, and was where I remembered the Voord and the Fishmen of Kandalinga from for The World Shapers). Pop culture was far more consolidated than it is these days and it was hard not to have a pretty good idea of of what was going on, even if you didn’t enjoy watching the show any more and found it a bit too scary, with a Doctor I couldn’t trust, as I did. When I joined the audience again, it was with Spearhead from Space and the Auton store dummies, (which oddly, I remember in colour even though we could only afford a black and white telly until 1974), subsequently falling in love with everything about the Pertwee Doctor’s Earthbound set-up around the time of the folk horror/Quatermass-inflected The Daemons, which blew me away. In 1973, I had the Radio Times Doctor Who Special, which I still have somewhere, that provided episode breakdowns for the entire series from the beginning, as well as including instructions for how to construct a full-size Dalek (useless at woodwork, I used the basic instructions to build a 3-inch Dalek model out of carboard, plasticine and silver baking foil), and We Are The Daleks! an amazing, shocking short story by Terry Nation. An origin story for the Daleks that does what it says on the tin and reveals that we are the Daleks! The bleak conclusion tells us Daleks are the natural evolutionary endgame of humanity’s greed and lust for war and conquest (Nation used the same story for a later Blake’s Seven episode, though he didn’t have Daleks for that one, just savage beast-men, and it wasn’t quite as effective).

I do know that the whole Planet 14 thing from World Shapers was canonized in The Doctor Falls and was able to thank Moffat for its inclusion last time I ran into him, at a rooftop party in San Diego in 2018.

While we’re on the subject, I enjoyed this one, with Who superfan Tia Kofi, from the only season of Drag Race I’ve ever watched right through, interviewing Steven Moffat, still my favourite Doctor Who showrunner and one of my all-time favourite pop culture writers.

The Ninth Doctor in ‘The Day of the Doctor’? Interview with Steven Moffat | The Whoniverse Show

And here’s another good one from Billy Barnell at Half the Picture.

STEVEN MOFFAT talks Doctor Who’s Future, Revisiting Sherlock & Why Humanity Needs Stories (4K)

Is that you doing all the variant TARDIS models I see online? There can’t be two Theta Sigmas surely?..

Drowzeezachary – welcome to Xanaduum - dive deep into the chat!

Do I think the comic book Renaissance has ended? Yes, I do. Which means we’re onto the Comic Book Enlightenment? Mainstream comics today are written to a high degree of efficiency by people who have studied comics and television storytelling and combined them effectively. The standard is high but with a few exceptions, as there are always a few exceptions, the basic tone and tenor of superhero comics has stayed the same for more than 40 years since Marvelman. This is not a problem for comics alone, as the same fate has also befallen pop music and fashion, thanks to capitalism’s relentless demand for a streamlined, successful product that can be recreated and resold endlessly without ever changing.

Sean – The Unseen Internet was very interesting and worth a read. The Traitors encourages paranoia and suspicion and the urge to denounce ones neighbours so it’s ideal training for life in an authoritarian surveillance state.

Ebirah is totally Bond inspired but it’s doing all these Japanese scale things with the template. I love it! Thanks also for Miki Matsubara’s ‘80s Bond effort, I’ll raise you Maki Nomiya and Pizzicato 5 at the top of this entry.

Kevin – I totally blanked on all that Japanese stuff. As I’ve said before, the only Japanese cartoons that touched me were Marine Boy and Gigantor, which I loved. I might check out that Moffat novelisation. I’ve only read one of his prose stories – about a little kid who thinks he’s a space tyrant and the Doctor talks him out of it – and fancy checking out some more.

The Cash Thunderball is a good song but sounds more suitable for a Western than a Bond movie. Hadn’t heard the Karen O one before but it’s pretty credible tune which just misses out on having Bond brass and string stings to elevate it ( I actually pitched for that Lara Croft game – my idea had a young Lara on a posh girl’s school cruise that goes wrong and she winds up on an ancient living island that turns out to be an ancient alien machine. It was Lord of the Flies meets Mean Girls for the start then veered into wild psychedelic take on classic Tomb Raider.

ks - I’ll check out The Silver Book. Sounds intriguing.

I wasn’t sure about the opening of the second Sugar season but the moment in episode 2 where he does the old lady’s dishes was pure John Sugar and gave me hope. It’s picking up with each new episode.

Osiris - Congratulations on completing the book!

Like most of us who take up the practise of Magic I had a lot of early successes, so the sense that it was really working pervaded all of my initial efforts. Certainly during the ‘90s, it was all I could do to keep up with the cascade of successful workings.

Nathan – so sorry to hear about Nubbin. It can be a rough ride. Summer is the worst here. Dead cats, dead kittens, dead birds everywhere. We had a year-old mother cat get very sick last week, with a serious respiratory infection that left me thinking she’d died. She abandoned two 3-week old kittens I found freezing and on the verge of death. I tried to save them but lost both again… Now, I think I’ve seen the mother still alive and beginning to recover. It’s heartbreaking. I can at least cheer myself watching this year’s four surviving kittens playing wildly on the lawn.

Ken Warhol – I’ve done versions of Doctor Who – like my own Nix Uotan at DC - and one of the stories I pitched to Steven Moffat unsuccessfully in 2013 involved the Doctor and Clara caught in a trap for time travellers, a Time Well, where the deeper the voyagers descend, the further back in time they go. The TARDIS is down there, so the Doctor must descend, encountering on the way a group of stranded chrononauts on different levels. I had characters based on HG Wells’ Time Traveller, a Pet Shop Boys-style duo occupying the Bill and Ted or Doug & Tony (Time Tunnel) slot, and a character expy of Phineas Bogg, from the US time travel show Voyagers. I really liked the timey-wimey twisty story but it was more like a feature film than a regular episode and was regarded as being too expensive for the budget. Iris Wildthyme is fun but again, I want the real deal, not the Supreme version!

FylGja – I wasn’t able to go to the London shows but I saw the band in Glasgow. I talked to him about the show, but Gerard prefers to let the work to speak for itself and won’t comment on any interpretation. The story is still undergoing updates and revisions. My brief review is earlier and has my initial thoughts. Basically, I loved it.

Otherwise, and while I don’t want to make light of genuine concerns – people will feel what they feel and there’s an understandable degree of paranoia in the Jewish community at the moment – the totalitarian fantasia of Draag seems to me less about the past, less about things that happened 80 years ago, than it is about now and the perilous position we find ourselves in with authoritarians sniffing round every open doorway.

The imagery is not Nazi-inspired. It’s depiction of tyranny is a mash-up of Soviet bureaucracy, banana republic junta style, and the gold braid and ‘scrambled eggs’ peaked caps of desert military dictatorships. The tech is mostly lo-fi Cold War Atom Age, with one explosive suicide vest, and does not reference World War 2 or the Holocaust, as far as I can see. The stage is presented as what it is, a stage for performers in a restrictive regime, not the gates of a death camp. The banner overhead is so people can read it. My own feeling is that any Auschwitz connection can only be made by stretching the frame too far but, as I say, people will come to their own conclusions based on their personal sensitivities.

As for the specific message, I regard it as dictatorship 101 iconography, just like 1984’s ‘FREEDOM IS SLAVERY’ or the ‘WORK, CONSUME, DIE’ and ‘TO DIE ON THE JOB IS TO DIE FOR DARKSEID’ banners from my own Final Crisis. While the show is intended to be provocative and thought-provoking, I don’t believe this is a specific reference to Auschwitz. The whole thing is metaphor.

As I said, above, for me the show is about toxic nostalgia and aims to resist the pressures that turns vital art into heritage. The Grand Immortal Dictator can be seen as a stand in for an audience that demands ‘the hits’ played over and over again, ossified and drained of life. The fundamental engine of fascism is nostalgic - all those invocations of a glorious past that was somehow lost or mislaid - and as I see it, the band is tackling that. You may read it differently.

Further antics subsequently…

PIC: KM - 2012

Male Stripper (extended mix)

BAKKSEID IS

Welcome to Xanaduum’s! If you can’t dance, you can use your fingers, otherwise your imagination! The show’s off to a lively start with Man 2 Man Meets Man Parrish, riding high in the hit parade! The lads are at number one in the charts with their upbeat hi-NRG ode to getting your kit off for money in a grubby transactional world at the uncompromising ass-end of the capitalist fever dream!

Enjoy yourselves!

Swing those glow sticks!

Now you’ve got it going! Now it’s a party – and I don’t mean the Nazi party!

Meanwhile, this week in the grimy backstage office, behind the glitz and glamour and the intoxicated crowds, I’ve been finishing some projects and moving onto some new ones. A stealthy non-stop progress with little yet to show for all the work - most of this looks like it’ll be coming out near to or all throughout 2027.

Xanaduum is the only place to see comics from me this year, as the good ship Frank Quitely draws closer to shore.

Here’s one of his coloured panels from the upcoming It’s A Dead, Dead, Dead, Dead World…

Pic: Frank Quitely 2026

I finished I Hear a New World and I’m reading The Unseen Internet now.

Farewell to the one and only David Hockney, the UK’s greatest living artist until just the other day. Hockney was our Picasso, except gay and a bit nicer. He was a relentless innovator, still producing some of the greatest work of his life at its end, and his knowledge of art history was second to none.

As if to remind us it’s not all misery in the feral cat colony, it’s taken a lot of care and attention but we saved a five-week-old kitten from blindness this week.

Result!

Crimson Desert continues to astound and distract. Playing open world games, like walking in the hills, is a reliable go-to when I need to clear my mind for working out ideas and plot knots. Imagine my delight after finding and hatching the baby wyvern egg, feeding the adorable infant monster with the finest cuts of marbled meat, then watching it grow to adult size, before climbing astride its spiny spine and taking off across the magnificent, expansive landscapes to the hypnotic beating of vast leathery wings… it’s a creative trance deluxe! Having said that, I’ve hit a point where I’ve explored every inch of the map while still finding it impossible to progress the main game past chapter 5 (of 11!), so I’m switching to James Bond First Light for a break.

I watched Outcome with Keanu Reeves because I’ll watch anything with Keanu Reeves in it. This was a quirky tale of Hollywood stars and agents and all that from Jonah Hill, who is both obnoxious in it, and great. Reeves plays a version of himself riddled with anxiety over potential cancellation. That’s about it, but like I say, Keanu Reeves always gets my attention. Keanu! Tom Cruise! Brad Pitt! Last of the old school Hollywood stars!

I watched some episodes of Citadel on TV, AKA Stanley Tucci’s Mission Impossible. It’s every high-octane international spy thriller trope in one high-octane international spy thriller package. The cast is good, including Scots hunk Richard Madden, but especially notable for including my pal Jack Reynor as the wise-ass, ruthless CIA maverick… I’m not recommending it really but Jack’s always great.

What I will recommend without hesitation is Sugar, featuring Colin Farrell at his best. Season 2 just started and if you haven’t seen the previous series, John Sugar is a detective hero in LA who feels like Superman for reasons that will become clear if you watch it. It’s cosmic noir, especially in this second run, and Sugar is my favourite onscreen hero - hard as nails but unapologetically kind and compassionate.

Science reckons fog is alive! What we once considered a mere meteorological phenomenon is turning out to be a swarming mobile ecosystem, teeming with micro-organisms!

They call them ‘dynamic functional aquatic micro-habitats’ because you would, wouldn’t you, and there’s the implication that this aerobiome may even move with intent as the creatures comprising it seek out food and company!

And Scotland basks in happiness and rainshine as we finally make it back to the World Cup, at least for a short while. I say we, but I find football preposterous and boring, so don’t count in that number. I‘ve lived with a lifelong hatred of the kind of games that have rules and teams, and football has always struck me as a way for Scottish hardmen to melt a little and express powerful emotions they could not otherwise deal with, which is fine but not for me. I also come from a city where football is inextricably wound into religious bigotry. The apparently inoffensive question, ‘what team do you support?’ is an invitation to a brutal beating, if answered incorrectly in the wrong location.

So, can’t stand the game but love the supporters of the national team, and I’m not alone. Every bloody body loves the Tartan Army! Scots love America, America loves Scots. Everybody happy! So ebullient! So exuberant! Singing and dancing in their kilts like they haven’t a care in the world.

The truth is they’re drunk, and on their holidays, so people are seeing our supporters at their most joyful! When they return home, with Scotland hastily ejected from the next round, they’ll revert to being surly and cynical, but put them on a plane, stick a pint in their hands, score a goal in their name, and they’ll project Scottish soft power with breathtaking efficacy.

My own problems with the national game, likely date back to the brutal trauma of an event involving soccer when I was around 8 years old -

As someone with very little interest in football, rounders, or any other team sport, I was surprised to be invited along to take part in an impromptu weekend football game planned by some of my classmates. Touched by the offer, I decided I’d make the effort to live up to my pals’ confidence in me by taking it very seriously. The match was to be played at 1.30pm on one of the pitches in nearby Bellahouston Park and as the weekend drew closer, excitement mounted like a horse mounts another.

My dad who’d played football for the Scotland youth team when he was young, and before a knee injury killed his hopes, was immensely proud. I was at last taking an interest in the sport and might even serve as a proxy for his own ambitions. Lacking kit, I had to improvise with a T-shirt, shorts, and a pair of suede Hush Puppy boots, I’d slung around my neck by the thin laces. This cargo cult recreation of a professional strip made me feel like a top striker, and I entertained visions of being discovered by a talent scout, then scoring a hat trick for my country in the World Cup.

We approached the south side of the park, where I’d been told the match would be held, expecting to see a crowd of familiar faces and well-kent limbs limbering up for 90 minutes of hard, fast fitba’ – but there was no-one. None of my classmates were there. None of them had ever intended to be there. The football match, suggested on a whim, had been forgotten as a concept within moments of its proposition…

How I recall the acidic sting of bitterness and the vow to never again be humiliated by this game of fools!

Curse you, football! Curse you and your false promises!

MOGMAXXERS OF THE WORLD!

Following our ill-starred foray into the Assisted Dying business, we here at Xanaduum have pivoted swiftly to exploit the denizens of the manosphere with a range of new wellness solutions guaranteed to turn out ‘high value’ young men!

Here’s the promo:

20th Century Boy (2012 Remaster)

Let’s face it lads, girls think you’re ugly and boring as fuck! And who can blame them? Look at you, standing there with your mouth flapping open and stupidity falling out like doughnut crumbs. You’re a disgrace, son! Luckily, help is on the way and by following our competitively priced 400-step program, you’ll be chadmaxxing with the best of them in no seconds flat!

In today’s cutthroat date-o-drome where appearance is everything and 99% of the women date 0.00001% of the men, if you want to get yourself in that miniscule fraction who get to deepsplash around in the gene pool, a firm jaw is essential and the firmer the better. Been there, done that with painful BIMAX surgery? Then try Xanaduum’s XXXtreme ultra-hurty UMAX procedure! Ideally, you want to feel as if maxilla and mandible have been wired shut and extended like an open drawer.

The aim is a strictly regimental facial posture with optimum 4cm mandibular juttage. Even one millimetre over or shy is a sure-fire way to crash and burn on that all-important ascension night! If you want to get those precise measurements as accurate as scientific progress can manage, Xanaduum offers the celebrated ‘facial odometer’ - a tiny surveyor’s wheel precisely calibrated to calculate your jut strength using hylauronic atomic computer energy! Only $600!

Is that really too high a price to pay for guaranteed CHUDhood’s End? Can’t afford it? Your parents have money, don’t they? Right? What do they need it for now they’re old? Stacy loves a bad boy, that’s all we’re saying.

But crime, although habit-forming, isn’t the only way to raise that limp SMV and spawn a slayer, when you can follow some of today’s celebrity moggmaxxers like JackbuttsDouble-Oh-Sex down the natty path less taken with a variety of exercises designed to purge the ugly from your life!

Hooting is one way to achieve this new sharp look men admire and women go wet for. Hooting is when you form your lips into the shape of an owl’s beak while expanding your eyes to resemble dinner plates – a procedure which also helps you create the sought-after ‘Adam’s Orchard’ effect of multiple Adam’s Apples that drives Stacy crazy!

For more dedicated hardmoggmaxx warriors we offer ‘brainsmashhhing’ a controversial practise from the ‘skullmaxxing’ scene, which involves the use of a mallet, bradawls, pliers, and staple guns to alter the shape and scope of the human head. Ignore our timid competitors! Here at Xanaduum, you can trust us to cater without conscience or concern to vulnerable self-mutilators!

Don’t listen to anyone who tells you this procedure isn’t perfectly safe. They may be right, but don’t listen. Medical science can work wonders these days, even if things go badly wrong in the bone-softening phase and you’re left with a head like a pillowcase! The technique is simple, painless and quick and involves teasing the brain safely down through the nostrils with a special hooked instrument known as a ‘hook’. On request, and for a modest extra charge, the nose itself can be gently smashed off to more easily excerebrate the brain tissue. Slugs and strings of grey matter removed by this action are then carefully glued back together again and preserved in commemorative canopic jars where they will undergo deep cleansing with cider vinegar and remain completely safe from decay while you party!

You might think brainsmashhhing isn’t for you but take from us, nothing works faster, if it’s a sex life you’re lacking. Stacy goes wild for the kind of hollow skull she can drum upon to produce the kind of authentic ‘coconut’ sound that will remind both you and your date of tropical honeymoons and cuba libres. Or how about a hot make out session where a sexy open-mouthed kiss lets her play your head like a wind instrument?

But why stop there?! What are you, some kind of cuck-chuck-chicken? A course of organ extractions is an inexpensive and effective way of decelerating or even preventing the kind of bodily decomposition that can make dating fraught with anxiety! Stacies are born with lovely retroussé noses which they’ve evolved over millennia to be able to detect the process of proteolysis, during which molecules of hydrogen sulphide, ammonia and methane are released by putrefaction. Early identification of the tell-tale odours of putrescine and cadaverine by your date are likely to lead to disappointment, making full organ removal the ideal solution.

Fearless moggmaxxers, like Wisconsin’s Frontalobey, usually start out with minor organ removals and a full hardmaxx dessication with natron, before a daily scouring of the brainpan using bleach.

With organs comfortably removed, embalmed, and sealed in their jars, it’s time to hit the gym!

At Xanaduum, we believe chads are born to fight in cages. And as our motto asserts, the smaller the cage, the bigger the man. The closer the brawlers, the more blood, sweat, and rage tears they can exchange. The intimate violence of close proximity combat lies within your grasp on our vastly expensive but worth it cagefighting course!

Haven’t you ever dreamed of defeating a savage Korean kickboxer up close and personal in a wiremesh cage designed for hamsters? No problem! Every movement counts in a brawl like that, and we’ll teach you how to hold your own against vicious opponents in ever smaller, more confined spaces, including veterinary crush cages, with adjustable sides. We’ll even organise underground budgie cage death matches for a few extra dollars. Andrew Tate lost the use of his chin during such a battle, so make no mistake, this is for real men only! Men made of meat and mayhem! You unreal men can go back to haunting the X-Files or SCP, or whoever it is you usually fight.

Moggmaxx your way to ultralife with Xanaduum! You KNOW it makes no sense - you just have to go along with it!

WITH VOICES OUT OF NOWHERE

Questions and observations from last time posed, considered, and answered:

Sean – it still has that Y/A franchise feel. It’s aimed at smart teenagers and the mass market and there’s less of the psychedelic maximalism I like but this is the author working to a brief. The prose is compact and concentrated, story is so-so, and ‘amiable’ was the word that kept coming to mind as I was reading.

Book 5 should be out around 2030 if you can stand the wait.

As for next gen magicians, I don’t know enough of them to comment. All I know is there are a lot more self-declared magicians today than there were when I was young. Magic is everywhere. The guy who does Rune Soup is good. We have some younger participants here on Xanaduum, who have their own perspectives and ways of approaching Magic. Ask FylGja!

DeeSee – Zenith in full-colour is bollocks! I don’t get a penny for any of that frantic recycling activity, so try to ignore it all.

‘Fauve’ is French for ‘wild beast’. The word was used in 1904 to describe the work of artists Henri Matisse and Andre Derain and subsequently attached, ‘Les Fauves’, to a group of artists following in the frantic, expressive tradition of the originators, and Then the Fauves were us in the late ‘80s. Then they were an Australian band that’s been around for ages.

I hate all those click-baity ‘Guess who just DIED?’ headlines too. That’s why our headlines are 100% guaranteed non sequitur.

BUnknown – I always found that part of Kid Eternity slightly disturbing, even though I knew it wasn’t really his teddy bear but a demon pretending… at least I had to tell myself that…

Nathan – I’ll check out Skinamarink; it sounds pretty gloomy but very much in this fascinating vein of houses extending and folding, and losing memories.

FylGja - Thanks for the engrossing catch-up, the tunes, and the kind words. I’m going to the Glasgow show and possibly London too. I’ll do what I can.

Osiris – glad to hear the writing’s in an expansive improv phase! Scotland’s lovely right now, so this would be a good time to visit!

Kevin – thanks for the kind consolations and here’s to Bindi! I’m looking forward to both Obsession and the Backrooms but probably won’t see them until they show up on TV in a few months.

I’ve thought about approaching the BBC again about Doctor Who but they’ve never taken me seriously before, so I’m not convinced they’ll start. It’s probably worth a try.

As far as being saddled with a lot of dangling threads goes, ‘they’ could just reveal that Gatwa’s Doctor was an unstable bi-regeneration who tried to make the most of his brief mayfly existence but just sort of flickered along, barely there. When he glitched out, he reached for a familiar face and got Billie Piper off the telly. She then tracks down David Tennant’s Doctor, going mad with his earthbound ordinary life round at Donna’s. He can’t stop attracting terrifying, vengeful enemies from space so he’s on the run when they meet – and fuse back together with a lovely Rose and the Doctor scene to wrap the whole RTD era in a neat bow, while the Doctor’s understanding family cheer them on – then it all goes wrong – and new-new-Who picks up from there with nary a backward glance.

You don’t even need to show any of that – but it’s all there for a Big Finish.

I would open cold as if the show is new. Strange and eccentric young ‘inventor’, amnesiac, with an odd TARDIS machine that can go anywhere and is bigger on the inside. That’s all you need to get started.

Where do all the Time Lords come from? Well, it’s all about the timebirds and the timebees…

But don’t listen to me, when we have experts near at hand…

Anyhow, I believe nostalgia will be kind to RTD and Ncuti Gatwa. I’ve seen reappraisals of the Jodie Whittaker years that make her tenure sound almost appealing. All that hallucinogenic weirdness, where she’s having mind bending visions of the Timeless Child and lost lives before life! The gloomy hopelessness of the Flux with those infuriating, evil-for-evil’s-sake Cenobite characters wiping out whole universes. The Doctor in Wonderland going insane, surrounded by damaged but strong people… there’s definitely a vibe that could be explored.

I reckon even Gatwa’s Barbie Doctor will surely inspire some great audio adventures or novels. The shallow weirdness, the meanness beneath that practised smile and upbeat breathless activity, the promising companions flickering by like shadows on his wall, will come to seem gothic, decadent and bizarre. A Milligan/McCarthy Doctor!

They’ll all be redeemed and reconsidered as emblematic of their eras some day.

Meantime, I expect they’ll opt for the young Doctor full reboot, which would be a mistake. You have a universe. You have lore in the bank. That’s good to have as long as you don’t rely on it. In fact, barely even mention it. It’s so easy to do a young ‘Doctor Who?’ showing up in a field where he’s found by some kids who think he’s Jesus. Amnesiac…TARDIS stolen…whodunnit…etc… Kids who get into the show will be excited to discover there’s a huge back story to get into – but who am I to say?

As for RTD, he can hold his head up high and carry on doing what he does best. Tip Toe was Davies in top form with a great cast and a searing angry old school Play for Today feel. I look forward to more in that vein.

I’ve just started on First Light and the Lana del Rey song is pretty good. The Radiohead Spectre is much better than the anodyne Sam Smith effort but I’m not a big fan of the band and don’t feel their take works especially well as a classic Bond tune. It’s too ethereal. The falsetto style tends to undermine the effect here as well as in the Smith one. Skyfall was the best of the recent ones, I think. My all-time favourite Bond theme, for both tune and lyrics, is a toss-up between Goldfinger and Thunderball, especially the David Arnold remake of the latter, with ABC’s Martin Fry singing. Nothing happens for nearly a full minute at the start of this song, a pregnant silence that used to play havoc with the atmosphere when we put this on at Beastocracy DJ nights back in the ‘90s.

Thunderball (feat. Martin Fry) - YouTube

While we’re on unused Bond soundtracks, nothing beats Blondie’s For Your Eyes Only, which for me hits all the right notes, falsetto included, for a Bond theme, while still sounding like the band’s own work. I think this one is the great lost theme and again, it would have been a much better choice than Sheena Easton’s insipid MOR ballad.

For Your Eyes Only (Remastered)

Momus also did a couple of Bond-style songs. Midas is a great one, (I think it might be about Trump) -

Midas - YouTube

-and I also like his This Isn’t Goodbye.

This Isn’t Goodbye

What’s alla y’all’s favourite, despised or forgotten, James Bond themes?

Fr. Theta - your communications are confirmation I know next to nothing about Doctor Who except what I’ve remembered from watching Hartnell and Pertwee, (then being aware of the others in the background without actually paying attention to the show, before tuning in to Colin Baker’s turn because I was writing for the comic by that time. I remember the TV movie, then nothing until RTD brought Who back in 2005), and reading some Doctor Who and Dalek annuals, and the comic strips in TV Comic and Look-In. My Doctor Who is a curious patchwork quilt of fragments across various media. Thank heavens for your encyclopaedic breadth of knowledge!

Polaris - good to hear from you! Money is a female spirit, green in colour, serpentine in nature. She’s very easy to deal with and worth talking to! Have fun, and we’ll see you on your cometary return!

Ben - reboots kill all the fun of participating in long-running fictional universes, that’s for sure. I loved the sense of a vast, lived-in universe that used to prevail.

Dorothy - thanks for the super-verse! Superman would still be a hero without his powers but the powers make him a super-hero, who can do all the wish-fulfilment things ordinary people can’t!

Patrick – 1. This totally works! I’m a believer!

2. This idea is mad but has a certain appeal…

3. Hmmm, interesting…

Bobby – thanks for that! I’m glad your daughter enjoyed Thomasina. I think it stands the test of time. I’m sure there are loads of films with Dog Heaven in them - All Dogs Go to Heaven, surely?

I know quite a lot about the Loch Ness Monster, oddly enough, and have been to the Loch a couple of times. I saw nothing unusual but it’s very, very big and very, very deep. I have some pictures I took of a plastic plesiosaurus emerging from the loch – on a mad road trip with my pal Emilio and JLA editor Dan Raspler in 1998 as I recall - which are at least as convincing as most of the alleged photographic evidence.

Was it Wilson who implicated Crowley in a whole range of British folk legends, or someone else? There was the other incident with the devil’s footprints all over the snow in Devon in 1855. I’m sure I read a claim that Crowley was rumoured to have been in the area then too. Or was he? In 1855, Aleister Crowley was still 20 years away from being born…

Xanaduum will return in Never Dies Golden

PIC: KM 2025

Cocteau Twins - Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops (Official Video)

I SAY THEY’VE GOT A BLOODY CHEEK

What’s it all about, Alfie?

Cilla Black’s impassioned existential outburst resonates perhaps more deeply in these times of contention, but who was ‘Alfie’? Where is he now? And what are the chances he’ll ever provide a satisfactory answer to the Scouse songbird’s enquiry?

The most obvious explanation is that Cilla’s high-pitched plea was aimed in the direction of Alfie Elkins, womanizing protagonist of Bill Naughton’s 1963 ‘kitchen sink’ play, ‘Alfie’, filmed in 1966 with Michael Caine in the title role. In fact, while there’s no doubt the fictional Elkins is the subject of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s title song for the film, (a big hit for Cilla, but performed on the US soundtrack by Cher, while Millicent Martin, of TW3 fame, sang the UK release version), Cilla insisted her paint-stripping, scream queen take on the source material was an attempt to articulate complex feelings about Alfred, called the Great, 9^th century King of the West Saxons and subsequently King of the Anglo-Saxons, relating specifically to the nature of the administrative and military reforms carried out during the approximately 28-year rule of chronic haemorrhoids-sufferer Alfred.

According to Cilla Black in an interview recorded before her 2015 death in Estepona, southern Spain, cryptic lines like, ‘And if life belongs to the strong Alfie, What will you lend on an old golden rule?’ directly address Alfred’s victory over Viking forces at the Battle of Eddington, after which England was divided between the Anglo Saxons of Wessex and the northern Danelaw. Echoes of the conversion of the pagan King Guthrum to Christianity at Alfred’s instruction can be discerned in the original lyrics of the middle 8 section.

‘As sure as I believe there’s a Heaven above, Guthrum, henceforth known as Athelstan, I know there’s something much more. Something even non-believers can believe in.’

Historians will fight with knives and give each other mocking nicknames over this, but the real tragedy remains; despite intense speculation over many decades, the question hangs in the air unanswered…

What IS it all about, Alfie?!

TELL US, DAMN YOU!

NEWER THAN THE NEWEST DREAM

My favourite month of the year has been a bit of a washout this time thanks to the knockabout antics of the jet stream, which provided non-stop sun last year but had nothing but feverish, steamy wet days on offer for most of May 2026, with a pleasant blast of hot summer for a few days last week. Otherwise, the circle of life rolls down the hill of eternity in its customary fashion. The swallows are getting on with their reproduction. The bluebells spread like a dreamy fairy fog then evaporated. The apple tree blossomed, frothing white and bridal, then shed its dress for a June honeymoon.

Camp psychedelic flippancy is my preferred mode of expression here at Xanaduum, but sometimes if the newsletter is to live up to its purpose as an accurate record of where my head’s been at, the music is obliged to get more sombre.

My attempts to restart the weekly Xanaduum were foiled by a doomed attempt to save two 2-day old kittens. Their mother, only 8 months old herself, dropped the first one in front of me when I was sitting in the garden, then did the same with a second kitten half an hour later. She’d already lost three of a litter of five and clearly couldn’t handle the burden at such a young age.

I sprang into action with kitten formula and regular 2-hourly feedings, bathing and help with the toilet. The first kitten, a gorgeous and unusual silvery-grey colour, like my cat Toby who died in 2015 aged 19, arrived quite poorly and despite our efforts, he died that evening while I was trying to feed the increasingly floppy wee beast.

There then followed 24 hours of trying to care for the second cat a black, short-haired female. She started out fine, eager to drink from a bottle, and filled with life and drive. I stayed up all night to feed her, then all of the next Sunday until 4pm. She seemed to be doing well until Sunday morning where she began to show the same signs of failing kitten syndrome as her brother had. I didn’t expect her to last past noon, but the Force was strong in this little cat and she kept going, although by this time she was limp and lethargic. Nevertheless, she let me feed her every two hours and clung to life in my arms, on my chest. I tried sugar water in case her blood sugar was low or she was dehydrated, and managed to feed her several more syringes of milk formula. Hopeless one minute, then certain she’d pull through the next, I went through an intense bonding with the kitten, who informed me her name was Ruby and her brother’s name was Silver. She seemed keen to stay but her body wouldn’t let her, and following her meal at 2pm, she went into obvious decline. Still, she hung on as I hugged her close to keep her warm. A series of sharp high cries told me she was reaching the endgame, then the little ticks of her breathing stopped, and she was there one moment, singing her last songs, then gone. Ruby died at 4pm on Sunday, as the feeding alarm went off, on the watch Kristan gave me to time the meals.

It was a powerful and emotional day. Ruby wasn’t here for long, but she left a massive impression on me.

There are many causes for fading kitten syndrome and there’s also a degree of inbreeding around the colony that’s not conducive to kitten health. Four siblings had already died. I have no idea what finally shut her down, but she struggled very hard to stay and we did everything we could to make it happen, to no avail.

That’s what happened but how it all felt was very different.

24 hours with no sleep to speak of, focused intently on the movements and breathing of a tiny fragile creature lying on one’s chest, fosters strange deliriums. It’s not the first time I’ve sat still with a dying animal in my arms, and not the first time I’ve tried to hand-rear newborn kittens, (many have survived, I hasten to add), but this little cat got right under my skin in the intense 24 hours we were together every second.

I didn’t think she’d make it until noon, but she kept going, determined to live, so that hope surged more than once, even though I was gently working milk into her increasingly limp neck which no longer able to support her own head.

As her cries got more urgent and numerous, and I had to face the fact the end was near, I was half-in half-out of a virtual space based on the stairs that lead to the throne of Bast in the film The Three Lives of Thomasina, with the mighty Patrick McGoohan.

PIC: The Three Lives of Thomasina Disney 1963

PIC: The Three Lives of Thomasina Disney 1963

Thomasina was one of the first films I remember seeing as a very young child, and it’s still a favourite. So deeply rooted in my imagination, it comes with the flavour of primal mythology, or scripture (in The Invisibles, Mason Lang says the film ‘Explains everything’ and he might be right). It’s a pretty good movie for kids in its own right, with a kind heart, likeable characters, and that early-Disney downplaying of sentimentality. McGoohan, with his typical beetle-browed fury, plays Andrew MacDhui, a Scots vet whose empathy and faith in God and are both shattered by the death of his wife, leaving him with a daughter and a cat he neglects. Thomasina’s seeming death cues up a satisfying redemption arc, you’ll be pleased to know.

As the end arrived in an avalanche of microscopic moments, I was overwhelmed by images and emotions that seemed to peak and collide until it was as if a blinding sun exploded behind my eyes. Ruby died and the watch alarm went off. I found myself on the bleeding edge of delirium trying to syringe drops of milk formula into a dead kitten’s mouth.

The rawness of the real has the true texture of mythology. Unmediated, present, unfiltered, so that it feels everything else is playacting. The protective shields don’t hold, the armour cracks, admitting the true moment and everything becomes suddenly bigger. All our stupid quarrels and misunderstandings, our distractions and consolations are rendered absurd by the scale and certainty of life and death. In the material world, it’s all just meat and motion but in the mind, the imagination, a tiny kitten can become radiant, solar as she dies, emitting pure revelation, base matter alchemised via participating mind into symbolic gold, where a miniature life is extended into the ideatic realm as an alchemical ruby cat star.

The gold glittering in this muck of mortality was a vast sense of privilege that overcame my senses. I felt honoured to have met this brief creature and shared in her magnificent life.

Her body still felt warm, rigor mortis never seemed to set in, so she lay like a Buddhist saint for days, surrounded by flowers, before I buried her and her brother together.

What rips me up is the lost potential. Ruby’s eyes never opened to see the world she’d made it to. Those miniature perfect feet and claws, made to run and climb, hunt and play, that never got their chance.

So all this got me thinking about Superman, and what I feel so many writers who tackle the character miss.

There are many well-meaning stories where otherwise talented creators choose to show Superman cracking under pressure. At one end of the spectrum Superman suffers agonizing guilt or grief, while at the other, he goes mad, or decides to become a murderous tyrant, in that way you do when things don’t work out the way you want them to. Were you to ask these writers if their own personalities are so fragile they’d go into complete reverse at the drop of a hat, they’d likely respond with outrage and denial, and yet they think Superman, who can move planets, would have flimsier convictions than they. The notion that his kindness is a veneer over a totalitarian core is relied upon with a regularity that speaks to a grand lack of imagination. There’s a curious refusal to think for more than a few seconds about what being Superman might actually mean.

Here is where I get frustrated. In attempts to ‘ground’ Superman or make him ‘relatable’, (as if he’s not), the ‘super’ is often overlooked in favour of the ‘man’, where ‘man’ tends to equal frailty and doubt. It’s easy to see why. The Superman/Clark duality inclines us to think of Superman as an uneasy alliance of Alien Superbeing Kal-El and Clark the Man. Kal-El is a performer too, however, and Superman is a performance, just as Clark is. The base level Clark Kent/Kal El who grew up in Smallville, and who is the fusion of the two sides, is the only one not putting on a show. Superman is fundamentally an entertainer, which may be why he was so powerfully drawn to the actress Lyla Lerrol when he went back in time to his home planet before its destruction and got to hang out with his mom and dad.

The Superman is the amalgam of the Kal and Clark elements. Growing up with only his basic Kryptonian enhancements – conferring superhuman speed, strength, stamina, durability – Clark Kent knew pain, fear and sadness like any normal boy. He surely remembers how they felt but with the advent of his full superpowers during puberty, these things, like bullets and bombs could no longer hurt him in the same way.

Superman, for me, is not a fantasy of unaccountable, skyborn U.S. power, as some like to suggest, but the fantasy of a powerful yet kind-hearted man who defends the vulnerable and protects the weak without demanding anything in return, and who uses his strength to deter bullies. Superman has remained meaningful because he speaks to something in all of us, a part of us that can and does rise to difficult challenges, that rips off its shirt to reveal an ‘S’ when we are called upon to handle seemingly insurmountable problems.

Equally, the focus on the ‘super’, where Superman is the king of the superheroes, or an abstracted symbol of ‘hope’, fails to capture the essence. It’s ‘Superman’. It’s Man Plus.

Which is why Superman wouldn’t suffer like me, if he tried and failed to save a life. He might feel the same pangs of remorse, but then his super emotional intelligence would kick in. He would remind himself that even he can’t expect to save everyone, but he always does his best. He would know that to be true, and berate himself no further. He would mourn with equanimity then rededicate himself to his task. Just as he can’t be hurt by bullets or bombs, neither can Superman be undermined by anguish or guilt or fear. They bounce right off him.

So, rather than showing us a Superman who breaks down or turns against his principles at the slightest hint of tragedy in his life - an approach which only tells us what we already know about the most frangible human beings under pressure – might our creative people try thinking instead, ‘I wouldn’t show Superman being cut by a blade, why would I show him being destroyed by grief? How would he really handle it?’

And how does a fragile Superman help the readership deal with their own problems? Seeing Superman succumb to grief, go mad, and kill Batman as a response, doesn’t help me feel better. I need Superman to provide tips on how to rise above the hurt and loss that can undermine us, and continue to be proactive and helpful.

I could write a Superman story where he suffers from guilt after failing someone. Right now, I could identify with that feeling, but as I’ve said before, Superman is not Christ. I don’t want him to suffer in my place, I want him to triumph, and by doing so, show me how it’s done. The more interesting and personally useful Superman story, as I see it, is where he is overcome by grief or anger and then we watch him process those emotions into something he can use to make the world better. Just as he’d lift a mountain or tame a tsunami, I want to see a Superman who shrugs off mountains of guilt or anguish just as easily.

He would sit for a while processing his lost, then he’d build a memorial to the person he let down, and he’d get back to being Superman. That’s how he rolls.

This then is my Fortress statue to Ruby, a tiny cat who barely lived but struck me in the heart like a bolt of purest cosmic lightning…

I READ THE WARCRY

Before all that, this week and last, I’ve been researching the history of the Salvation Army, luxury resorts in Jamaica, George Bernard Shaw, and how to defeat a robot dog in a fight, for various projects currently underway.

I drilled back into the dream film thing I’ve teased, and it flamed into life, crackling merrily until the new draft was done. Very excited to tell you what this is soon! Everything is lined up for this one to happen, so more news as it transpires.

Next came a long Zoom conversation with my old pal and Century Guild supremo, Tom Negovan. Among his many accomplishments, Tom recently restored the notorious 1979 film, Caligula, with Malcolm McDowell as the mad emperor, and basically recreated the entire movie using previously discarded footage. On our epic convo, we discussed the history of symbols, their use in Magic, and their development through the history of Art, for an exciting upcoming something.

I read Al Ewing’s Absolute Justice League and thought it was a masterclass in contemporary superhero storytelling. All the lessons of the last 40 years in comics and serial TV perfected and directed like a laser. Nice one!

I finished A World Appears, which was fairly inconclusive but provided much nourishing food for thought. I read Solace House, which I’m not entirely sure about. I think I mostly enjoyed it, but like The Blair Witch Project, it sustains an atmosphere of anticipation for hundreds of pages before offering a conclusion that doesn’t entirely satisfy. I don’t know if it really delivered on its promise but it certainly kept me reading. It was another of those things I stumble across more often these days where the writer appears to have been reading me and Alan Moore when he was younger.

Which brings me to There Is No Anti-Memetics Division by Qntm, which was great. I loved the bare simplicity and directness of the prose, and the powerful effectiveness of its restraint, which rendered the terse depictions of apocalypse all the more unnerving. Again, lots of Moore, me, and Rian Hughes in the mix but very much its own thing and worthy of instant classic status. U-2315 is already loose in the world, I fear.

Now I’m on I Hear A New World, the second in Alan Moore’s Long London series. I think I prefer this one to the first but I’m only a couple of chapters in and they just got back to the Great When. It seems to have more depth and texture so far and Moore’s prose has a new easy rhythm and assurance, although the wry, comedic tone of the narration tends to undercut any tension. I still don’t find the characters very engaging, but I think the series as a whole will wind up as a significant addition to Moore’s canon.

Obelisk - The Man In The Tower

I particularly enjoyed this entry in the Obelisk analogue horror series. I often have dreams exactly like this, and when I say exactly, it’s no exaggeration. The multiplying spaces, stairways, never ending doors that open onto half-rooms and more stairs, more doors, a kind of Lovecraftian proliferation of spaces and angles, staying just ahead of the pursuit… they’re all too familiar and oddly comforting.

It goes without saying that any readers who find uncomfortable the thought of running through endless claustrophobic doors, narrow stairways and empty rooms, on the run from an uncanny pursuer are advised to steer clear.

I’m fascinated and drawn to this world of odd and melancholy horror nostalgia. The notion of memories degrading – also a feature of the Backrooms movie - suggests that the new frontier of fear after all those billionaire zombie nightmares is a kind of ontological Alzheimer’s, where the loss of memory definition leaves a distorted echo of some original, comfortable reality, now reproduced and reiterated, twitching with glitches that proliferate through each degraded copy, into something uncanny, unfamiliar, unheimlich. Like the world we’re in now compared to how it used to feel!

The notion of former childhood playmates, imaginary friends, or magical toys becoming forgotten, and losing themselves to distortion, deformity, monstrosity, while still retaining a poignant glow of their former kindly purpose shows up in many of these gloomy forays too, again pushing this slow drip of amnesia as a new locus of terror in our lives.

I finally watched my Team Human episode with Doug Rushkoff, which struck me as an unusually ‘punk’ performance, during which I maintain an expression of total disgust for over an hour! That high-pitched whine of steaming rage ending almost every sentence! Every contemptuous syllable spat out as if the flavour of thinking about these billionaire politics pricks was converting to pure bile!

Good heavens!

So unlike the avuncular rumble and Santa Claus twinkle of Alan Moore!

Alan Moore on Reclaiming Our Imagination from the Authoritarian Overlords

It’s getting hard, I feel, to make a convincing claim that there’s any kind of feud or War in Albion when the alleged combatants are broadly in agreement and make many of the same points, using the same language…

HOT COP DRAG

Dorothy – bravo! I love these poetic distillations of our themes!

Brigitte – And you! So many old churches are haunted by these flagrant, leering embodiments of fertility.

Sean – Is that the Providence piece you trailered over at Shelfdust? I thought Providence, especially the first four issues, was genuinely eerie, and deeply immersive, and I’m looking forward to your thoughts.

Thanks for the kind words on Black Knot.

I haven’t played the Alan Wake games, so have no basis for an opinion. What’s your take? Are they sort of Lovecraftian things?

Jwparrishiii – Kickstarter has never really appealed to me, but that could change! It’s taken years for Frank Quitely to finish Dead World, so the chances of him starting something else and having it done within our lifetimes seems remote.

DeeSee - The Prince William headline was something I saw in a newspaper. I’ve no idea what it referred to, and I think there was more to it, but I cut it there (though perhaps it would have been better if I’d written ‘Why I don’t believe in Prince William’ with the suggestion that he’s more like the Loch Ness Monster or an honest politician). My sub-headings are usually lines from songs I’m listening to, (‘Yardstick for Lunatics’ was from Incense and Peppermints by the Strawberry Alarm Clock for instance) or headlines I’ve read, often with some words changed for non-sequitur effect. On odd occasions, I’ll just make something up. You’re not missing any hidden significance.

Today for instance, I noticed two headlines on a pile of Times newspapers – with Dawn French saying, ‘I’ve survived grief and loss’ (my thought: welcome to the human race, Dawn! Hope you survive the experience!) and the classic ‘I’m 61: Why shouldn’t I wear a bikini?’ To which the answer is surely ‘Because you’re the bloody Archbishop of Canterbury!’

I’m envious and fully supportive of your refusal to engage with the hysteria of the shitosphere, and feel slightly guilty for exposing you to any of its fetid contents. When I decided to write this newsletter, I knew I’d have to scout around the internet looking for things to motivate a weekly column. Stuff I could react to, so I wasn’t just talking about seagulls and crows and village politics (a Trumpian nightmare of villains and exploitation, interestingly and vexingly enough).

What I found, scrolling merrily through news, views, and YouTube content delivered by an unholy chorus of howling contending voices, was a delirious vision of a world convulsing in horror and desire, a perpetual doomsday imagineered by powerful sado-fascist overlords and amplified to a scream by the media, as if under orders to keep us enthralled and powerless in bewildered, bedazzled paralysis.

I think it might be Oceania versus everybody this week but there’s always a new fixture to look forward to as these premiere league countries square off for the cup.

And I only came to read the meter, missus!

If you value basic decency and truth, the news is incredibly disheartening, even depressing. I don’t find it a healing inoculation of grime but a download of pure unfiltered sick designed to demoralise! Having written The Filth, however, I feel I’ve developed an immunity to these hazardous materials and I love trying to purify them into googly prose.

‘We’ll take your poisons and piss them out as vintage champagne!’

One final ranting example before we leave the news to devour itself in the corner.

The BBC 6 o’clock news, which often boasts of its objective, balanced coverage is a cess pit of torture porn, visceral shock imagery, and a deliberate refusal to engage with real world news. They know people are sitting down with their dinner, so they exploit that vulnerability to reinforce anxiety. Only this evening, I happened to turn on to find a top story about how hot it is the UK and elsewhere, as we near Midsummer. This was followed by a graphic report about a decline in British birds of prey, which came with brutal and wholly unnecessary found footage of men beating the fuck out of innocent hawks in cages. Still reeling and choking on our tempura, the next item brings a graphic story of breast cancer that went untreated by a dodgy doc, complete with bloody close-up surgery. Then it’s half an hour of ‘football team wins football match’, as if that’s somehow unusual enough to report. Nothing about politics, now warnings about the fascists lining up to seize and bleed the UK. Instead, a relentless tide of A Clockwork Orange-style Grand Guignol atrocity footage.

‘Toxic’ barely covers it!

3 Against Mystery isn’t a horror story, so you should be okay there (although I see from a later response that you’ve read it now – thanks for the kind comments!) It’s a kitchen sink drama with magic mushrooms to make the mundane sparkle. The Cthulhu one does get a bit fucked up in places, so you can skip that if you’re not keen on feeling bleak.

Unity’s recreation of Paris, with the massive seething crowds is spectacular, I’m 27 hours into Crimson Desert and thoroughly digging the sprawl and invention, the breathtaking vistas (so much more appealing than the ‘Soulslike’ landscapes of screeching, mulched biology and cancerous castle keeps. I’ve barely begun, having spent most of the time that time exploring every area on the gigantic map, while still only on Chapter 5! It reminds me most of the Witcher Wild Hunt, which I loved, but even Wild Hunt didn’t have robot pterodactyls, zeppelins, hot air balloons, and trains in its fantasy world. I’m currently riding a circus lion around the map, and no-one can stop me!

Aside from games and the odd film or TV show, engaging with the world on the screen tends to leave me feeling physically uneasy, often outright nauseous.

As for where the words come from, for me, the words arise from feelings. I have a feeling I want to convert into a signal. The feeling transforms to words if I’m writing prose, or to pictures, then additional words, if it’s comics. The initial flood where there’s a build-up of energy that has to be released is not quite automatic writing, it’s more directed, more participatory, but shares a flow state effect of absorption and spontaneity.

When that happens, I’m racing to keep up with the movie unfolding in my head – ‘movie’ being simply an analogy for an immersive 360 ‘daydream’ that’s much more absorbing than any film.

When I write, it generally pours out in a huge, unformed mass of words that emanates from the universe through the lens that is moi. I only get some of it down and it’s distorted by my moods or level of attention but the first blast comes when a bunch of stray concepts develop interesting relationships to one another, clump together and then form an idea with its own gravity. I know what I want to write about but may not have worked out details of plot, (with comics I always began with key images that anchor the story), so I start on the exciting bits that best capture and recreate the feeling.

I usually get a lot of good material from that first Dionysian geyser of words – but there’s a great deal that doesn’t make it through editing. Sometimes only a sentence will survive to put out new shoots. Editing is where the real work starts. That’s where the Apollonian filter is applied, and the raw material is refined and organised through the mill of craft.

Nathan – The Prodigy are still worth seeing but it’s not the same without Keith. There’s no singing! I’ve seen them loads of times including one genuinely transcendent experience in the early 2000s and a lacklustre, insincere performance 20 years later in Glasgow. This was better than that deflated performance.

All of the entries in the Assassin’s Creed series share that historical educational appeal, where you’re running into Ben Franklin, Robespierre or Captain Cook, but I think Origins was the first one where they added the tour feature that allows you to stroll around immaculately reconstructed simulations of Luxor, or Cyrene without getting into fights, learning about the culture, the architecture and the local characters up close. I recall strolling around Alexandria with the guide and being sucked right into the past.

Magic K – the closing reveal in Red Sun, that Superman had been rocketed to the present from a doomed future was mine, but as Kurt Busiek himself has pointed out, that’s just the origin of Samaritan, the principal Superman stand-in from Astro City. My big twist was the closing reveal that the ‘El’ in ‘Kal-El’ was the ‘L’ in ‘Luthor’, abstracted through centuries of DC sci-fi names like Jordan Luth-R etc. The idea I was so pleased with was not Superman being literally the man of tomorrow, but the perfect ironic loop where Superman/Kal-El turns out to be the direct descendant of Lex Luthor!

I was still in a friend and mentor relationship with Mark at that time, and spent many enjoyable hours talking through his story problems on the phone. I suggested a few specific scenes and bits of dialogue for Red Sun – and I pointed Mark in the direction of some useful reference, like the Vietnam POW story that became Green Lantern’s origin - but Mark had the big concept and all the basics mapped out, and you may be surprised to learn that the letter reading ‘Why don’t you put the whole world in a bottle?’ was all Millar.

Osiris – Partially rested! Events as described above.

I love the editing process but find it hard to stop (I’m often amused when I read irate reviewers complaining that I needed an editor on Luda, when in fact Luda had four professional editors who worked on the text)!

I have a great many first editions of Luda! I’m afraid I’m in position to send them to anyone! Perhaps I’ll make them a prize for a competition or something!

Bobby – Thanks for the links to the interviews! Really enjoyed those!

Patrick – I don’t think the Joker is a chaotic force, and tend to agree with you here. When Heath Ledger’s Joker talks about being an agent of chaos in The Dark Knight, he’s lying. He claims not to have a plan, yet everything is meticulously set up. The Joker has always been a ‘plan ahead’ character since his very first appearance. And Batman’s a weird vigilante who doesn’t think the law applies to him.

Fr. Theta – I can’t get enough of this TARDIS talk! I had a line in my Doctor Who comic story, The World Shapers, about TARDISes being terrible gossips when they got together. I had another Time Lord dying in on the first page of that – his TARDIS was a huge sculptural crystalline thing, possibly the Marinus equivalent of a police box, that dematerialized with a smooth TZZZU TZZZZU, as I recall, instead of a gear-grinding wheeze.

Alice – the Wolf Hour, like the Devil’s Hour and the Witching Hour, is that eerie time between 1am and 3am. For our narrator ‘worrywolves’ are a play on werewolves – worries that turn into wolves that rip at your peace of mind in the raw pre-dawn! Avoid them if you can!

Ben – I’ve seen Under The Skin, but haven’t read the book. The landscape of the film is all very familiar to me – I love the idea that Scarlett Johansson just drove around Greenock and Port Glasgow picking up random guys in her van. Aside from that one ‘You look like that Scarlett Johansson,’ none of the men twigged it was her!

That’s folks, all! See you next time!

PIC: Kliff meets Zappa KM - 2026

Apollo 440 - Lost In Space (Theme) (Video)

WHY I JUST DON’T BELIEVE PRINCE WILLIAM

Have they gone yet?..

Back from some much-needed time off, (I find these weekly bulletins incredibly time-consuming and may stretch it out a bit over summer)! Welcome to your new improved space age utopian joypunk solarcore adventure among the stars!

All strapped in?

This new future we found just lying around in the trash is going to be guh-guh-great! You can practically hear the greatness oozing from its pores!

Last year was wall to wall summer from March to October, but this year, the gardens were pummelled to mud by freezing rain from the beginning of the year until mid-April. Winter wouldn’t let go until those bony fingers finally slipped loose and the temperature rose a little as the sun returned from its extended holiday in Africa, accompanied by the first swallows, concluding their epic 6000-mile migratory flight in welcoming ancestral mud nests baked into our eaves by generations of their forebears.

The light has been seeping back into the night and what began as a raw and naked evening luminosity, a scouring astringent brightness without heat, has blossomed into golden syrup afternoons.

Basking at last in sunshine while the same dribbling old dullards continue to act out, talk shite, and leave oily spunky fingerprints on everything they paw at. Will life ever be sane again?

A YARDSTICK FOR LUNATICS

Remember this picture of what lies ahead for the Pyramid and the Patriarchy? Undone by War, Time, and the Dark Goddess. You can watch it happening on the news in real time these days!

PIC: Rian Hughes The Tower - 2024

The Ultrawar dug deeper into its mythic phase when the crumbling honeyed avatar of Horus turned his attention to the living embodiment of the Osiris Age, the Pope of Rome himself!

The now infamous image (how long ago it seems!) of the current President of the USA in Jesus drag – or as he described it, portraying a ‘doctor’, with the explosions of divine light from his palms suggesting Doctor Strange specifically - performing the laying on of chipolatas for what appears to be Jeffrey Epstein in the role of Lazarus, is curious in many ways.

My favourite detail can be seen above Hail to the Chief’s left shoulder in the form of what looks like a triple-crowned Demogorgon.

The Independent newspaper attempted to stem any potential Satanic panic by speculating that this unsettling AI chimera was intended to represent the Statue of Liberty. Me, I had no idea Hell came with its own flying Statue of Liberty, like Blackpool has its own sort of Eiffel Tower, but you learn something new and worth forgetting every day! Curiously, since I chose to look into this crowned and conquering manifestation of sin, the algorithm has decided to offer me unwanted torture content on YouTube, (‘Torture techniques of the cartels - more sadistic than the Inquisition!’) and a vivid insight into the madness of the fundamental religious fanatics in charge of both Iran and the USA.

Anyway, those were simply military flags extending from the sinister apparition’s hallucinated shoulders, The Independent’s experts in demonology explained. The figures were obviously superheroes, ‘like Thor’, they offered helpfully.

We are reminded of H.P. Lovecraft’s description of the titular monster in Call of Cthulhu - ‘If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.’ In this case some combination of Thor, flags, and the Statue of Liberty strive to conjure the ‘spirit of the thing’ offering a bold attempt, from a human perspective, to contain an impossible object in words.

Adding intrigue, this AI image featuring a messianic POTUS as its centrepiece was created by ‘conservative commentator’ Nick Adams and posted on X in early February, according to fact-checkers. In the original creation, the demonic figure was not present. The Regent of Hell was added by the White House propaganda team, the dark supernatural forces they serve, or by something else entirely, like a delirious Midjourney vision of the day before the day after tomorrow.

Choosing to simmer the way a diced carrot would in this bubbling soup of disinformation, I took to a bath to concretize the metaphor the only way I knew how. On the way, I picked up the third volume of my Wonder Woman Earth One series with artist Yannick Paquette for a flip through while I stewed in near boiling water for an hour, hoping to provoke a startling metamorphosis.

No escape from the news, even there in the funny papers! Published in 2021, the comic features page after page of chilling prophecy, often using precisely the same language that’s being used by the media to describe the current global situation.

I still insist that Covid bears much of the blame for the manic slaughter and mass psychosis of the human race in these 2020s. Autoimmune disease. Cytokine storm. Recent research even suggests a potential autoimmune explanation for some cases of psychosis and schizophrenia, as if to rub it in.

BRAINDROPS ARE FALLING FROM MY HEADS

Originator of the Chaos Magic current and creator of the IOT, Peter J. Carroll died last week. His books Liber Null and Psychonaut, along with Ray Sherwin’s Book of Results introduced me to Chaos Magic in the late ‘70s and set me on a lifelong path, so many thanks for that, Pete.

I like CMAT’s Jamie Oliver Petrol Station and Catch These Fists by Wet Leg, especially that post punk/Franz Ferdinand guitar riff. Girls are still doing all the best stuff and Ma’at has all the best tunes, but I’ll admit to briefly enjoying Cruz Beckham’s guileless ‘90s pastiche music. By and large, I find the Beckhams repellent, but this lad won me over with his cheeky ‘I’m the alright one in the family’ routine and a slavish devotion to dodgy Britpop. And I’ve tried my best to avoid Angine de Poitrine, the algorithm’s favourite musicians – ‘It sounds like Primus…’ says Kristan – but the ‘Dada’ video for Sherpa delivers a spectacular AI depiction of what goes on inside my head most days!

Angine de Poitrine – Sherpa | A DADA Film

We went to see the Prodigy a couple of weeks ago. A strange show, and the first we’ve seen since the death of vocalist Keith Flint, the Firestarter himself. Without him, there were barely any sung lyrics. Maxim has a powerful stage presence but otherwise limited himself to exhortations to his ‘warriors’ and a few upbeat yelps. It was more like a dodgy techno night than a band show, with a heavy seething crowd of Glasgow ravers and older male fans succumbing to the ill-advised desire to strip to what only the very kind could describe as their ‘waists’.

I haven’t got into many new books recently, although I received a copy of The Unseen Internet from author Shira Chess – about the occult colonisation of digital spaces - which looks great. I just wrapped up The Beauty and the Terror: an Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance by Catherine Fletcher, which I started last year then left on a chair in a room I rarely visit. It’s a period I’ve long been fascinated by, and the book has a wealth of engrossing new information and insights. Now I’m reading A World Appears by Michael Pollan, which so far isn’t telling me anything I don’t know about consciousness but has loads of incredible material about animal and plant cognition. It turns out I would be regarded by some as an ‘idealist’ - someone who believes Consciousness to be a fundamental/the fundamental property of the Universe.

Otherwise, I’ve been too busy to read at my customary rate – I’m emitting a sullen creative radiation rather than absorbing stuff right now as I tackle two big franchise characters for two different comic book ventures – but I did catch up with the latest instalment, Chapter 6 that is, of Sarah Jolley’s astonishing Doctor Who comic, Into the Inkwell.

Sean Dillon turned me onto Sarah’s work, and I’ve since struck up a correspondence with the artist. Into the Inkwell has been consistently great, but this new episode is the best comic book I’ve read in years! If that’s not enough, it’s my favourite episode of Doctor Who since Capaldi quit. Into the Inkwell has, so far, read like the best season of Doctor Who in many years. If they had any sense, they’d have Sarah working on the show. Her art pulses with intense colour and moves like it’s alive. It’s supremely kinetic and extravagantly animated in a still medium.

The stories are great. The characterisation is spot on and, I’d venture, better than anything in the last series, if only because Sarah’s fluid, appealing take on Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor is given room to breathe and move and emote in a way that doesn’t feel as artificial and performative as the real thing (as regular readers know, I thought Gatwa started out with incredible promise and charisma that was stylised very quickly into a series of repetitive tics). Sarah’s take on Lux Imperator puts an uproarious trickster god in the companion role and turns a character I found charmless on TV into a source of relentless entertainment, as he reliably outshines the Doctor in every episode.

The latest chapter is a truly fantastic done in one story that’s part of the grander narrative. It’s about ChatGPT and the consumerist impulse, among other things, and it’s probably the best comic you will read this month.

Here’s a link to the whole thing so far:

Doctor Who Katabasis : Page 1 | Fan Art Comics | Jolley Comics

And here’s Sarah’s own website:

Jolley Comics

UNTYING THE BLACK KNOT

Thanks to those of you who followed the weekly instalments of Archive & Analysis: 3 Against Mystery and the Business of the Black Knot, (or ‘3AM’ as ace editrix Shelly Roeberg refers to it), and special thanks to those who commented on the story. The encouragement was appreciated.

The story is based on a few real-life incidents, locations and characters.

At school, I actually did assemble a short-lived team of 15-year-old ghost hunters inspired by the Three Investigators books. We did, as in the story, find a mysterious film reel and a note from an alleged ‘private investigator’ in the so-called Haunted Woods.

Mine was a boys’ school so we had no Ari Welcome on our team – she’s based on a number of people I’ve known over the years and appeared first in a supporting character role in my novel Luda. I liked her sour, acerbic tone in that and fancied going deeper on her character, hence Archive & Analysis.

Ariadne Welcome and her twin sister Rose, the responsible one and the rebel, are partial echoes of real people. The quiet sister, who married a vicar, entertained herself by writing weird Gothic tales about gay priests, although minus the vampire aristocrats and savage cruelty of Ariadne’s Marquis De Sade-meets-Anne Rice efforts.

Uncle Randol is inspired by my Uncle Ronnie, the second eldest of dad and his three brothers. Ronnie was a rebel, artist, musician and handsome outsider who worked on the railways to support his eccentric lifestyle. Like the fictional Randol, he camped in the hills in summer, and when it came time for his two-week holiday, he walked 45 miles from his house in Cardonald to the Butlins seaside resort past Ayr, and back when he was done. When he encountered a car parked on the pavement, Ronnie made a point of climbing over the car.

It was Ronnie who named and gave us the location of the Haunted Woods when we could find no reliable ghosts anywhere else.

We were certain it was Ronnie, (who collected Super 8 reels of silent film classics, with Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd etc.), who hid that film reel with its accompanying handwritten note reading ‘If you are doing what I was doing in these woods, this film will help you.’

Ronnie denied it. He died in 2017 aged 85, never having admitted to his role in the Haunted Woods mystery.

We gave the film to our ‘Records and Research’, a clever working-class boy from a high rise scheme in Castlemilk, whose dad owned a film projector he’d use to watch home movies of his parents, my pal’s grandparents that is, when they were still alive (a detail that stuck in my mind and also shows up in the story). The reel vanished after we were told it was just a man and a woman standing in the woods.

The debating society scene is drawn from one of the most cringe-making episodes of my school days. My presentation of the ‘facts’ in the Haunted Woods case led to a conclusive victory and I was regarded as an up-and-coming star of the debating scene until the following week when I did no preparation on the subject of ‘Money: Good or Bad’ and completely froze, to cries of ‘Bumbler! Bumbler!’ that took years to get over!

The mythology of Gasglow is rooted in tales of four brothers, based on my dad and his brothers. Inspired by the ‘Ossian’ cycle, created as a hoax by the young James McPherson in 1761, when he claimed to have discovered an oral Gaelic tradition of previously unknown epic poetry, Gasglow has its own fabricated version of Celtic myth – with Randol the Wanderer - he’ll be Randol the Rhymer in the edit - Warlet the Soldier, Wendra the Tailor and Lohard the Merchant).

The Haunted Woods are real/were real and still exist in diminished form on the Stewarton Road out of Glasgow, just past Rouken Glen Park. I can’t face going back. I’d love to locate the hollow where the Black Knot lay in wait but last time I flashed through this area as a passenger in a car, I didn’t recognise it. The rural landscape in which the Woods were embedded is now a sprawl of proliferating suburban slop.

The place where my dad cut his and my mum’s initials deep into tree bark is gone, along with the tree.

There were no magic mushrooms when we first visited the Haunted Woods in 1975, no black knot and no hangman…

Those came later, when I was much older and working on Animal Man and Doom Patrol (my psilocybin experiences directly inspired the Insect Mesh storyline in the latter book, while the whole trip, including the Black Knot episode formed the basis for an unpublished Doom Patrol issue written especially for Brendan McCarthy to draw. You can see the cover -

Unpublished cover for Doom Patrol 45 by Brendan McCarthy (DC/Vertigo), in David Jakoi’s DC - Vertigo Comic Art Gallery Room

• and the first three pages here with Brendan’s marginalia - apparently there are 25 pages of this stuff, but I’ve only seen the ones that are on here.

Unpublished Doom Patrol 45 script with Brendan McCarthy sketches (25 pages), in David Jakoi’s DC - Vertigo Comic Art Gallery Room ).

We scooped the shrooms up in handfuls, with stalks poking between our fingers, and chewed them down raw - so we stayed legal and ensuring that the bug eggs we were swallowing would add to the insectile flavour of the imagery.

As in the story, everything started off well, although there was a moment where I became convinced my tripping buddy was being ‘taken over’ by the forest due to the green cast of light on his skin. That momentary intrusion of paranoia set the stage for what happened when we stumbled into a rough rocky amphitheatre at the heart of the Haunted Woods, and were confronted by what appeared to be a hanging rotten noose, a shattered heap of bloody bones, (actually just sticks and logs), and clouds of noxious Beelzebubian flies (just little gnats) in a butcher’s shop nightmare of ritual sacrifice.

The whole scene recalled Colonel Kurtz’ camp in Apocalypse Now. It felt like the nerve centre of primitive atrocity. A place of cannibalism and cruelty. Cursed ground, where appalling rituals had been carried out, and would be again if we didn’t leg it.

There appeared to be a leathery shrunken head dangling at the end of the rope. It was only a big knot which someone had coated with tar, perhaps to once hold a tree bough saddle in place, but it had a crumpled, deformed face. Feigning bravado, I tugged the bottom of the rope, which was rotted and snapped in my hand, signalling the activation of dread taboo! The sense of drenching horror and doom was palpable, at least for me. My pal was unaffected, on account, I assumed, of prior possession rendering him immune to evil.

I was severely shaken by the whole experience. The sense of genuine malignance, corrupt and undying, was intense and shook me down to the soul. It took a long time to turn the deep feelings of dread and dismay into something I could use in a story.

I went back to take some pictures and face the monstrosity sober – it really did look like a shrunken head with eye sockets and a yawning mouth. I was pleased to see that my extreme reaction was to something genuinely grotesque and disturbing.

Somewhere I still have those photographs of the Black Knot. In the four years since starting Xanaduum as an archive, there are still parts of the archive that remain as elusive as Lost Arks but one of these days those diaries and pictures will turn up…

SHUT THE DOOR THEY’RE COMING IN THE WINDOW…

The conceit behind It’s A Dead Dead Dead Dead World was simple; with each new project together over the years, from Flex Mentallo to Pax Americana, Frank Quitely and I have tried to outdo ourselves, and to stretch and push the boundaries of comics storytelling in one way or another by trying something new and experimental with the form of the comics page.

Following our last collaboration on Pax Americana from the Multiversity series, which was about as intricate and elaborate as we could make it, we wanted to do something different for our next project together. I didn’t think we could go any further in the Pax direction and would have to detour.

Quitely draws amazing spontaneous pictures with a felt pen or ink marker – incredibly simple drawings, often scatological, or absurd but executed with the same mastery of figure drawing and composition as his finished work.

Following the bejewelled precision of Pax Americana, I felt the only way to go was to throw away all our tricks and go back to playing rock ‘n’ roll in dive bars. The plan was a return to roots effectively, with a short grindhouse comic about zombies drawn on bar napkins in real time with no frills. My last 20 or so years of pitching in Hollywood, has included three movie/TV ideas tackling the zombie genre from different and hopefully fresh angles. It’s A Dead, Dead, Dead, Dead World, (originally called Dead America, before someone else got to that title), was the first of those ideas.

Frank/Vinnie was into the grindhouse aesthetic but pointed out quite reasonably that while he was fine with our audience thinking I’d retreated to brute simplicity, he didn’t want anyone to assume that crude felt marker doodles represented a bold new direction for his work. Instead, and although he’s ditched the Centiq tablet to hand draw, ink and colour this vile squib, the pages come with all the detail and finish of one of his digitally created covers. I’ve seen the first six fully coloured pages and they look spectacular. This is the perfect response to my suggestion that he deliberately draw badly – we now have a beautifully-composed take on a trashy and dumb 12-page script, and Frank Quitely comes out of the whole debacle with his reputation intact!

Here, by way of a preview…

PIC: Frank Quitely - 2026

The finished article, the first Morrison/Quitely collaboration since 2021, will be on its exclusive way to our gilded paid subscribers just as soon as the Maestro Q is done! Stay tuned for a couple more preview images before then!

Quitely’s recent interview with The Comics Journal is here:

‘I’ve gone back to basics’: Catching up with Frank Quitely - The Comics Journal

TRANSLUNAR INJECTION BURN

Three cheers for the Artemis mission, a feat of human brilliance and dedication that will of course pave the way for mining, colonisation and wars on the moon and in space if things don’t jolly well change around here soon!

VIVA LA MEGABABES

I finished Assassin’s Creed: Rogue and moved backwards in the series to Unity, the game set during the French Revolution. I would have loved this game’s sprawling, cranky version of Paris more if the play wasn’t so glitchy. The weapons wheel is counter-intuitive and slow, the movement is sticky, and Arno the assassin is constantly ‘desynchronising’ because he can’t land properly for an aerial assassination or won’t let go of a wall when five men are shooting at him. He moves like he’s trying to cope with the early stages of a Parkinson’s diagnosis, which means every mission takes ten times longer than it should.

Great setting, annoying gameplay.

The density and detail of the crowds added an immersive realism that’s often missing from cities in video games where the pavements are sparsely populated by NPCs.

The trailer for the zhuzhed-up Black Flag is impressive – with a wealth of colour and detail that recalls Rosetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, but in the meantime, I’ve moved onto the remarkable Crimson Desert which really lives up to its extravagant hype, even if it feels like too much sometimes. It’s early days yet and I’m only starting to get good at fighting but the sheer attention to minutiae and commitment to weird novelty is appreciated, as are all the Scottish accents! The lead character, Kliff, sounds like Gerry Butler! Maybe they’ll finally stop calling me incomprehensible!

WHAT IT’S REALLY LIKE TO WORK FOR DARTH MAUL

Your correspondence, my replies:

Dorothy – We are the chorus and we agree. We’re back from our downtime until we have more downtime so keep ‘em coming!

Persefonie – It’s been one variant obstacle after another round here recently, so your cards are onto something! I can think of a Devil or two we’re dealing with. No sign of those shunners seeing the light so far, but the door is ajar…

Peter Thiel is also an anagram of Pete Hitler!

I need to pay more attention to The Wicker Man. I’ve watched it a hundred times and never bothered to make those connections in that scene…

Neal Armstrong – Some of my earliest occult experiments, in my teens and 20s, involved the creation of a servitor called ‘Astar’ after the wizard in the Danny Merlin comic strip that played such a curious part in my development. Astar seemed a surly sort and I often gave me the impression I was wasting his time. I didn’t really connect with the idea of servitors, which sounded a bit master and servant to me. I also tried one that looked a little like Krazy Kat but that turned out to be a bit unruly as well and I stopped using servitors very early in my Magical practise.

As for the servitor/egregore distinction, as I understand it, servitors are solo creations of a single Magician while egregores are expressions of a group mind. They can also generate spontaneously given sufficient emotional energy input, unlike servitors which must be created by the Magician.

Servitors perform specialist tasks for which they have been devised, egregores represent ideas or complexes of ideas given shape.

I think Mark Frost was trying to weave a ton of weird conspiracy adjacent stuff into Twin Peaks lore rather than specifically nicking story from me. Others before me have linked the first atom bomb test in Nevada to some kind of spatial or dimensional rip that heralded the mass arrival of UFOs in our skies (pilot Kenneth Arnold reported the first ‘flying saucer’ in 1947). I believe The Invisibles was the first to suggest that what fell through the atomic hole in things was a fragment of ‘God’. Frost gets a pass, and I get to see what David Lynch would have done with the opening scene from The Invisibles volume 2, issue 2!

PIC: Invisibles vol 2. #2 GM thumbnail - 1996

Bobby – interesting to hear that the Team Human bit provoked some conversation. My inner judge tends to dismiss my efforts on these things, so it’s good to know they might still have some vague impact. I did a few podcasts over the winter and started to feel like another of a thousand dudes on the internet trying to convince everyone they have some insight into what’s going on, when clearly they only have a few pixels of the whole picture.

I too experience ‘Why bother?’ quite often, especially in these fractious times where I am made aware of how small and ineffectual I am in the face of gigantic historical evils, but the answer is always ‘because this is what you love to do, so do it!’

Bleedin’ Cool did something right!

Fr. Theta – I was certain the Tardis appears in the time travel issue of Animal Man but I checked, and my memory is false, sadly. There is an elevator that looks a bit like a Tardis in issue #5…

I’ve cultivated a minor obsession with alternative Tardis machines (I think TARDIS as an anagram should be in capitals, but I keep seeing it with lower case, so I’ll have a go with that) like the Meddling Monk one, the Master’s various efforts, the Rani and her pyramid thing. Clara has the diner TARDis. The obscure variants are great, like the folding cabinet that transports Jamie and Zoe back to their home time coordinates in The War Games. And I note that the proto-Tardis ships seen in The Name of the Doctor reminded me somehow of E. Bouard’s illustrations of the cylindrical Cosmos vehicle from Arnold Galopin’s 1906 novel Le Docteur Omega/Doctor Omega. The Cosmos is a cylindrical, bullet-nosed, aether-travelling machine made of stellite/repulsite, a miracle mineral which ‘repels space and time’. The Doctor travels with companions and encounter weird alien societies on other worlds…

The Doctor Omega/Doctor Who connections are worth researching – a 2003 edition of Galopin’s novel was published with a cover styled to look like a Target Who book, depicting Doctor Omega as a Hartnell Doctor-esque figure while the text was tweaked to suggest that Omega and Who might just be one and the same.

Alice – A fantastic idea! Xanaduum Assisted Dying Solutions looks forward to adding a bladed option to our menu, with a choice of Madame Guillotine, katana, claymore, rapier, sturdy meat cleaver, or nail file for a prolonged and startling experience!

Kevin – You go that right! I only saw one or two responses, with people saying I was being contradictory or rolling back my criticisms, but that was about it, and they didn’t seem to understand I have no problem holding opposing points of view.

I checked out halfway through Avatar 2. Those movies leave me cold for some reason, although I generally enjoy James Cameron’s films.

Thanks for the Futurama suicide booths clip! I hadn’t seen that before! My favourite version of that sort of thing appears in Barbarella as the Chamber of Final Solution. ‘Next solution…’

DC doesn’t own We3, Vinnie and I do. DC Studios can’t do anything with it because it’s not part of their library. Warner Bros. could make it independently of James Gunn and co. but only if Vin and I agree. So far, they have not shown any serious interest, although We3 is a project that’s been the subject of dozens or more enquiries and meetings over the decades since its release as a comic. Dozens of producers and directors in Hollywood have wanted to make it, but no-one has yet managed to get it off the ground so far. I’m sure it will happen when I’m dead or too infirm to make it to the premiere!

Luna Express looks good!

Patrick – What was Rob’s position on Deadpool? I agree that most people only take from you that which is useful to them personally. It’s probably more healthy that way than slavishly following a leader or, on the other hand, outright rejecting good ideas when they come from someone you dislike for their politics or personality.

Michael S – There are a number of books that changed my life in different ways but I’ll go for the practical - Robert Anton Wilson’s Quantum Psychology gave me a manual for how to debug my personality (or at least to get the process underway in an impressive way) that proved to be incredibly helpful in the early ‘90s and played a big part in the development of The Invisibles.

Osiris – I’m fascinated by your teaching stories! Aside from the internet adding its considerable mind-warping capabilities to the mix, thing don’t seem to have changed too much since I was a teenager.

Best of luck with the novel! You can never be sure what works for an audience, and what won’t. Believe it or not, I thought Luda would be a success, and it sank like the Titanic. You may find that ‘sci-fi metafiction romance’ is the next hit genre after romantasy, and there you are with the goods to hand!

DeeSee – The other eye rivals its twin for chocolatey goodness!

You didn’t miss anything interesting with the Lanterns biz and surfing the word waves obliviously is the sanest way to travel.

I still see people claiming that Frank Quitely is a ‘terrible’ artist and wonder in what twisted kiln they were baked.

There’s not much that leaves me feeling wounded for long but the refusal of DC Studios to offer me any work still rankles.

Roland - Very interesting! I’m surprised that Germany veered away from darker, edgier kids’ entertainment - you mention Struwwelpeter and there’s also the tradition of Grimm’s fairy tales, Walpurgisnacht and the Harz Mountains! German folklore has always struck me as fairly wild and shadowy, so I’m surprised that freakish element didn’t bleed into kids stories the way it did here where so much Celtic or Nordic mythology found its way into our books and Tv shows for children. I do like the Idea of the Three ??? as 50-year-old adults naturally!

Ben – You know I’m going to give it to Ch’p and Kilowog over Rocket and Drax! When I think of Drax it’s the guy with the cape and the widow’s peak hood from Starlin’s Warlock rather than Dave Bautista from the movies, but Kilowog could beat both anyway. He’s an 8-foot tall alien bullpig with a Green Lantern ring and an unfortunate name that carries echoes of BNP fliers form the 1980s. Drax wouldn’t last a single round. I think Rocket Racoon is faster and harder than Ch’p, but again it’s that Green Lantern ring that tips the scales against any old ray gun…

I didn’t read the Englehart/Staton Green Lantern. I was a big Englehart fan from Doctor Strange and Avengers through his DC work on Justice League and Batman, but I was playing in the band in the early ‘80s and wasn’t reading a lot of comics, especially not from DC or Marvel. I’d tried to like Joe Staton’s art from the E-Man days, but aside from the Justice Society/All-Star Squadron stuff his work never appealed to me for some reason, so the Green Lantern run stood no chance. Somehow I managed to overlook it again when I bounced through Green Lantern history during the research for my own run on the book with Liam Sharp…Was it good?

Sean – I only managed the first Dark Tower, and I tried and failed with Snow Crash. I sat next to Neal Stephenson at a dinner ten years ago or so and found him a remarkably cold and uncommunicative character.

I’ve been back on non-fiction for a while, but I’ve got my eye on Solace House by Will Maclean, which looks right up my alley. I like the sound of There Is No Anti-Memetics Division but it’s another of those books where I feel I’ve already written stuff just like it.

I love the physicality of comic art. I like when the glue and the dirty fingerprints show on the finished item. I love when it tears or when letters come loose and you stick them back out of alignment.

Klaus Janson’s art is great on Batman: Gothic, with all the masses of shadow and distorted angles. There’s a fantastic Cartoonist Kayfabe where the late Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg bring out depths and nuances of the art and colouring on Gothic that gave me a whole new appreciation of what Klaus had done.

Sinatoro was made to be a film and exists so far in that form as a scrappy, unedited larval screenplay of 148 pages. It could be a novel – there’s a high stakes thriller element to it, along with everything else - but that doesn’t seem the most appropriate form. I know it works as a comic book because I’ve written three scripts for a 12-issue series and it’s going well as a serialized chapter piece. That, Smile of the Absent Cat and The Savage Sword of Jesus Christ are the ones I really want to get finished and released and there may even be some news about that soon. I can’t find a way to get Big Crazy down yet. It so far defies all efforts to condense the material into a working narrative.

FylGja – We’ll put you down for ‘Jackals’, then! A sparkling Paisley effect can be achieved using chips of ice convincing enough to be mistaken for real diamonds as long as you remain at temperatures of -15˚C.

I like Roger’s Seat, it sounds likes the title for a novel. Could be a horror story about the deceased Roger’s favourite chair, empty now with his shape left in the fabric, still there in the living room, increasingly uncanny… Whatever you do, don’t sit…on Roger’s Seat…

Or it’s a James Baldwin-esque novella of queer desire in 1950s Naples, where a young American writer’s fantasies collide with reality on a bench in the Parco Virgiliano. It’s here that the object of the author’s desires, the enigmatic ‘Roger’ of the title sits on the same park seat every Sunday lunchtime to eat a sfogliatella riccia, after delivering his weekly sermon in the nearby church of Santa Maria di Piedigrotta…

Appreciate the reports from the front lines. The Gods of ‘America’ are the vast powers of the land, the sky and the deeps. Ally with them to stay anchored in these tumultuous times. All the rest is ephemeral and can/will blow away. It’s a Dark Night of the soul for many former believers in false idols and illusions, as you say.

Those deserts are mad with myth - from Deep Time to modernity, the Doors, Charles Manson, Bomb tests and Area 51 - where the extravagant, fantastical energies of Turtle Island swirl and condense into clouds of weirdness, then rain down cults, murders, movies, monsters, visions.

I became uncomfortable with doing the podcasts, partly for reasons you suggest. I generally came away feeling drained, depressed and anxious that something I’d said would be reduced to a tendentious headline.

RK - I’m sure the silver hair makes you look like a superhero. As I’ve said before, silver threads notwithstanding, you will outlive these senile fucks who are currently wreaking havoc. You will inhabit and shape a future they will never see. Cold comfort perhaps, but it does give you quite a big advantage and time to plan.

The Seventh Fire Prophecy you brought up is definitely worth sharing:

Seven fires prophecy - Wikipedia

The choice seems obvious; while the Heavy People seem intent on taking the wounding way.

Ks – Fascinating. What an incredible experience!

This is why it’s worth appreciating things on an intellectual level – like buying maps, and boots and a rucksack to go hillwalking - before plunging into the storm of the experiential! When you’ve familiarised yourself with the terrain, it’s easier to suspend judgment or interpretation or terror during the actual event, and really participate in the non-ordinariness of it all!

Polaris – good to hear from you again! Seems we’ve both been on hiatus. Lucifer the Lightbringer comes in many forms with a multitude of faces, as these prismatic concept-entities always do. Follow those synchronicities, watch where you put your head, and keep us up to date on your magical work!

Shelly – Thanks for the kind words on 3AM! As for the unbelievable price of the Adidas trainers, the story is set in the ‘80s, and these were cheap ones from Woolworth’s (‘Merriwether’s’ in the story)!

More soonest!

PIC: KM 2026

7.

Mikey went back the next day. I sup…

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6.

First impressions, theories, came hard and fast and random; …

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5.

We trudged, waist deep in bracken while unattended, the bruise on the skin o…

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I keep all my stuff too. Another trait I’ve p…

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Of course, I held onto the ‘Ar…

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PIC: Allan Amato (detail) - 2010

Beat Girl - Main Title (1960)

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I write this at the equilux, when light and dark are balanced, with the increase now in light’s favour!

Hurrah!

This week, I learned I have a new superpower; I can write about peace and love and Magic and the future and be completely ignored by the wider world, or I can drop some piece of trivial snark, dominate the news cycle for days and put Hollywood screenwriting royalty in a position where they feel they have to apologise for thoughtlessly calling a colour ‘stupid’ two years ago in a comedy interview. This against a backdrop of war and chaos in which the US President is losing the battle to conceal his slide into incoherence, confabulation, and wilful self-destruction.

Welcome to the demented reign of Absurdus Maximus!

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PIC: KM 2026

(This is the first chapter of the novella Archive & Analysis: 3 Against Mystery and the Business of the Black Knot, which will be serialised here over the next seven weeks. The first chapter is available to all, subsequent episodes will only be available to our paid subscribers…)

Prologue:

Another postcard was waiting when I got back from the bank to an otherwise empty house.

Aside from my name and this current address in characterless block capitals, along with a neatly printed number #2 in the lower left corner, the reverse was blank, but the face showed The Cat with the Broken Heart, from Blue Cat Blues, the only Tom & Jerry cartoon with a voiceover by Jerry the mouse. The only Tom & Jerry that comes with a suicide prevention warning.

I put the card with the first in my desk drawer in the basement where I write. Now there were two almost identical postcards. Blue Cat Blues on both. Aside from scuffs and tears, the only way to tell them apart was to read the stamps – Los Angeles 3 weeks ago, just before I started work on the story of What Happened Then, and now New York. And those numbers – first #1, this latest #2.

Not much to go on. Nothing unusual or unexpected about that numerical sequence except that, for me, it was matted with meaning, sodden with significance.

I couldn’t sleep again and found myself thinking about those two cards in the drawer, fanned like moth wings, identically patterned, with a camouflage mimicking cartoon images of a cat without hope. Being me, I imagined them slowly flapping out book dust and mortuary soil, huge as tennis courts attached to the hunched shoulder blades of a human-scale Angel of Death, beating out supersize sailboat gusts as the Reaper took to the skies above time and made another selection.

There was dad first, then Rosie not long after. Implacable Azrael swooping in, quiet as an owl on the hunt, striking so close the slipstream of the bastard’s dive knocked me off my feet, so it took months to recover. Months while the Embodiment of Mortality executed a perfect blue sky turn en route to its next target.

Coming closer again, eastward, the cardboard wingbeats of the Angel of Death, or of Redemption. Angels were surely implicated. Fallen or otherwise.

If my suspicions were correct, there would be a third card soon enough, but only the sender, that Tempter & Deceiver, and I knew what the #3 would stand for.

I had to go back a bit to make sense of all this.

It’s a good thing the night is long.

*****

1.

Everything about it was stupid.

It wasn’t what you’d call an original idea. Dominoes’ ‘inspiration’ was a popular book series starring a trio of insufferable boy detectives.

Stay with me, think pint-sized private eyes specializing in faux supernatural capers and you’re there. An added audience participation gimmick invited young smartasses to spot glaringly obvious clues paced through the text like a set of luminous footprints leading directly to the culprit’s lair. By following the evidential trail that resulted in a successful unmasking of some disgruntled villain before the boys reached the same painstakingly inevitable conclusion in the concluding chapter, bookworms (9 to 13) were encouraged to feel superior to the three precocious leads.

There at the beginning, Dominoes threatened to call us the Young Investigators. He styled it out as a direct ‘homage’ to his teenage sleuthing heroes, a word he pronounced ‘hommidge’. I gagged on principle and argued we could surely come up with a better name of our own. No surprises, Dominoes agreed but rejected my proposal, The Cluehunters. Big Mikey, who’d never had a clue and wouldn’t know what to look for, was indifferent at best, so we ended up shackled to the atrocious ‘3 Against Mystery’, like drowning men to an anchor.

According to Dominoes, who was wrong, this bestowed upon our undertaking a spooky gravitas missing from all other efforts, i.e., mine. As far as I was concerned, he’d arrived on this Earth more thoroughly stuffed with shite than the lower intestines of an All The Shite You Can Eat champion.

Next, he had those pompous, little business cards run off at that copy place they used to have in the Arcade before people had home printers and business cards were obsolete anyway; a big 3 with AGAINST MYSTERY underneath. On the back, he’d asked them to do a ? behind a red backslash ‘forbidden’ bar and provided contact details for all three of us. My dad never forgave Dominoes for the crank callers! Oh, the embarrassment!

Membership brought with it an additional unique privilege in the form of our exclusive team badge. Naturally, Dominoes had chosen huge, embarrassing lapel pins whose diameters exceeded those of jar lids. They looked like the chest plates worn by Thing 1 and 2 in The Cat in the Hat and they even had numbers! Why not, I often thought, write, I’m a loser – feel free to humiliate me on our foreheads and be done with it? It wasn’t long before the number 3 itself came to encode my feelings, a glyph of dismay, triggering PTSD every time it caught my attention anywhere.

Nowadays, those badges would end up as collectors’ items on eBay. They were evil, demoralising works of art in their own way.

We were each assigned specialist roles within the team. Dominoes, no-one will be shocked to learn, was Mystery #1 – Coordinator - the brains, or so he hoped. Mikey AKA Big Mikey on account of his towering five inches above Dominoes’ imposing 5 feet four – was Mystery #2, or Fieldwork, the muscle of the trio.

Never mind that I could jump higher, run faster, and hold my breath for longer than either boy, my place was reserved for me on the lowest step of the podium, plucky bronze medalist Mystery #3. As the scuffed and foxed calling card I kept as a bookmark indicated very clearly, I was Archive & Analysis, and unto me fell the tedious job of recording our cases. Secretary, PA, treasurer, hagiographer in chief to the Brains & Brawn dream ticket!

I would say I only had myself to blame but why? Not when two associated clowns existed to relieve me of exclusive responsibility for the following unusual, mysterious and, some might say, tragic events.

As I said, stupid. Cluehunter #1 would have sounded much better. Mystery #1 made no sense at all. There was nothing mysterious about Dominoes. He was an open book with empty pages. The days of his life gave off the same papery whiff of unstated excuses as a 5-year diary optimistically begun then abandoned due to chronic lack of incident.

‘Dominoes’, AKA Dominick Cambeltown.

According to his backstory, he’d been named for the patron saint of astronomers and founder of the Dominican order itself. The ‘k’ on the end explained by his mother’s attempt to do for the boy what Aleister Crowley did for ‘Magick’.

Our English teacher, Mr. Willis, half blind from wanking and unable to decipher the new boy’s handwriting, announced him to the rest of the class as incoming pupil ‘Domino C’. Surely, a rapper or MC? Mr. Willis eventually recanted his error, assuring the class that the new boy in question had in fact been baptized Dominick, but the damage was done. Dominick was Dominoes for the remainder of his time at Bellavista Academy. As will be demonstrated at least once more in this account, no one gets to choose a nickname, and there was nothing Dominick Cambeltown could do about his.

He was lucky. But for Mr. Willis’ mistake, Dominick Cambeltown would have endured the next three years living up to ‘Dombo’ or ‘Cambo’ such was the imaginative reach of classroom consensus in those days.

My guess is he liked the name Dominoes because it made him sound like someone who might eventually receive an invitation to join the X-Men.

Back then, he was an awkward new insertion into Class 2A’s social Jenga tower. 14 years old with skin so clear and a general aspect so pleasantly cherubic it seems in hindsight a shared false memory. Six months later, wave after wave of determined hormones would blitz his complexion to resemble Guernica but there at the beginning, convolved beneath smooth cheek and unshaven chin like unexploded bombs or daffodil bulbs, Dominoes’ spectacular fusillade of zits had yet to erupt in triumph through the peach fuzz, purging volcanic pus.

Let’s not forget the literal shock of hair; a scrub of dead and dirty blond keratin that belonged on the crown of a root vegetable. Relative to his malnourished or bulimic classmates, Dominoes was from a now discontinued brand of out-of-shape nerd once described as ‘stocky’ or ‘stout’.

He wore bulky National Health specs, the left leg secured with Elastoplast as an affectation. His T-shirt collection was legendary, coolly recondite. He carried an inhaler he’d long outgrown, but Dominoes felt the vaporiser added to his idiosyncratic mystique, comparing it to Sherlock Holmes’ trademark pipe. It could tip the scales in a confrontation, he reasoned. Who wants to be first to hit a wheezing asthmatic? In truth, I could think of coachloads of assholes who’d happily throw an asphyxiating kid’s inhaler in the pond for a laugh. A fake asthma seizure would be enough to justify a lynching, but I left Dominoes to his flights and his fancies.

Comic books, games, and cult TV provided us with a common language, our secret dialect of pop culture arcana. I was a lanky tomboy who wore trademark long-sleeved T-shirts and specialized in geek boys and misfits. I gravitated towards, then cultivated, lost souls who inevitably looked up to me. Girls never talked to boys like the ones I befriended, so the boys were generally overjoyed to be hanging out on my team, even if most of the time I felt more masculine than they were! Rake thin, the way I was then, when I thought ‘athletic’ meant ‘chunky’. When I imagined myself ‘boyish’.

I liked to tell myself they probably fantasized about me naked, the fools, and this justified my contempt and pity. I imagined I was the only bridge to normality these outcasts would ever dare cross. I was helping them. I was being kind at great cost to my own credibility. It is to be understood that my missionary self-sacrifice spared me the effort of competing with the popular girls, who’d already made a point of rejecting my company.

Dominoes’ saving grace was a twisted sense of humour that chimed with my own unpalatable wit. His was a very serious deadpan delivery that allowed him to serve up the most outrageous statements with wide-eyed sincerity. We got on like a maternity ward on fire.

Perhaps, in hindsight, there was nothing about Dominoes that wasn’t mysterious. We talked for as many hours as we needed about superheroes and TV shows, movies, ghosts, flying saucers and pop music but we never once raised the subject of our lives at home. Or only in the most offhand derisory way. There was a shared understanding that the world of parents came set-dressed in shades of dispiriting grey. It wasn’t worth talking about, so we never did.

Big Mikey Macaroni (real name McCrory) came as an accessory, part of a twin set, like Tom and Jerry, Barbie and Ken, or Bondage and Domination. He’d commenced his progress to devoted right hand man with a sustained attempt to bully Dominoes that verged on the passionate. For more than a month after Dominoes’ admission to our year, Mikey made Dominoes life hell with an unrelenting program of harassment that included one actual pummelling, half-hearted and uncommitted though it was.

During this primary aggressive phase of his mating ritual, Mikey failed to account for Dominoes’ guileless gift for coercion. Deploying his advanced edge detection and pattern-making skills, together with a grab-bag of haphazard cues and observations, (Mikey’s black and white Warren comics habit. His Misfits T-shirt), Dominoes deduced the conflicted young jock’s love of campy horror movies, ghost stories, science fiction, and monster comics. Idling in an athletic peer group that lacked like minds with whom to share these profoundly geeky forbidden passions, Mikey made easy prey for Dominoes whose compendious arsenal of pop culture trivia, rare videos and infectious enthusiasm proved an irresistible social inducement.

The turning point arrived one spruce April morning in the boisterous Spring term corridors between classes with Dominoes facing the usual rat run of abuse from outliers of Mikey’s crowd. One toe-brained Rugby squad thug, who’d traditionally relied on the Big Em’s support to back-up his provocations, got his first taste of the new world order that day when, chortling, the brute stuck out a foot to trip Dominoes, laying him flat like a rug.

Enter Mikey stage left, playing the new sheriff in town, stepping up to draw some moral lines in the sand after a seeming religious conversion. Mikey seized a generous handful of the bully’s greasy hair and dragged the lump backwards off his victim.

“Fuck off,” Mikey snarled. Then, so that every kid who saw it would remember, he sneered in disgust and flicked his fingers. “Nits. Fried in oil.” The cowed troll kid scuttled away, broken, cringing. His pre-existing nickname, ‘Tombo’, now erased from the roll call, he would spend the next three years until graduation, as ‘Nits’.

Mikey, with a politician’s nose for the grand gesture, extended his clean hand. Employing a firm young manly grip, he hoisted Dominoes off the Marmoleum floor onto his feet. Face to face Mikey nodded approvingly in recognition of Dominoes’ prominent Danzig T-shirt. Applause and cheers bubbled up, as if a scene in a play had come to an obvious end and the audience was moved to heartfelt appreciation for this surprisingly upbeat plot turn.

By the end of term, Mikey and Dominoes were inseparable. Like bacon and eggs, no-one could imagine a time they hadn’t been served together. Mikey had discovered a rewarding new purpose as Dominoes best mate and personal bodyguard. Ennobled, Mikey made it his duty to protect Dominoes from people like Mikey. He felt responsible at last, like the policeman his dad, the policeman, wanted him to be. I saw a kind of Courtly Love emerging, that was pure and protective. A Knight’s chaste devotion to the Beloved.

I gave the boys’ friendship a couple of weeks to develop and cohere. I’d already swapped a few jokes and some Marvel comics with Dominoes, so we were on good speaking terms, but I opted for a back seat to give the budding bromance some oxygen. While I was waiting for the boys to mate for life like swans, I dedicated myself to learning their habits. My coloured felt-tipped pens were ranked in a scrambled rainbow, I ruled neat vertical lines in my jotter to make columns and set about recording and memorizing in-jokes and routines like a hunter stalks prey, tracks spoor, gathering intel before I made my move.

Close to the end of term in early May, when the buds were bursting, and the birdsong was bright and clear and blue at 6am, I insinuated myself steadily into the mix. These were the slow last days in school’s relaxing grip. Teachers let loose their belts a notch or two, anticipating lazy yellow summer’s easing of rules. Ties worn slack and collar buttons undone. Going into class felt like trespass. The vacant rooms that echoed to floor polish smells, admitting particular slants of sunlight, impossible in winter, onto the wallcharts and maps. Even the teachers were preoccupied with travel brochures, researching barge proprieties, caravan etiquette, hillwalking kit. Too busy with their dreams of liberty to bother with our education. We educated ourselves.

In that liminal haze, anything could happen. When I turned the Dynamic Duo into a Terrific Trio, it was hardly remarked upon. It seemed natural for me to be part of the equation. So much so that no one would ever remember when it had been different.

Summer break was a hoot. As I said, Dominoes and I shared a sense of humour that was harmonized like two waveforms on an oscilloscope, locking into synchrony. Mikey played along, skewing blue in his locker room way, but eager to adapt to our surreal and cruel improvisations.

That summer we’d lie on the carpet reading comics, or novels by James Herbert and Clive Barker, passing them round when we’d finished. A shared hum of concentration was all the fellowship we needed, bound, even in silence, to a common reality, a mutual immersion in imaginary worlds.

After an hour or two of this, a telepathic impulse would rouse each of us as one, at the same time. We’d take off into the wilderness of Maxwell Estate for intense, extended and passionate discussions of our reading, arguing over storylines and artwork, shock scenes, our shared taste. Climbing trees, fording rivers, cataloguing clouds. Laughing ourselves legless.

Every Saturday morning we’d commence a 5-mile-wide ceremonial circuit of Gasglow’s south side, pausing at a sequence of Mingus Bros and Liberty’s newsagents, blissfully rifling through the spinner racks for newly released issues of favourite titles to add to our collections. Or we’d scrounge for paperbacks and used videos, weird movies and old vinyl at the Stalls Market and walk home together, in lockstep, with our loot and our opinions. Extending our range, just to spend more time together.

In the evenings, we’d devour bootleg VHS tapes, horror, sci-fi, surreal comedies, at Mikey’s until it was time to call it a day when Mikey’s dad, the policeman, insisted on driving us home.

Some weeks into these bonding sessions, my own dad, (in his pre-mortem period), indulged an urge to lecture me, What was I doing hanging around with a couple of ‘dodgy oddballs’, as he described my new friends? Dad continued to imagine the worst kind of sex criminals and drug dealers until he laid eyes on the pair, loitering on our path like refugee children off a poster, survivors of war and famine, outside the house on Ashpark Avenue. They looked so pitiful; mum was stricken by a humanitarian need to feed and water the waifs before they perished on the footpath.

As far as I was concerned, I’d made the grade my way. I had my own gang. I could ignore my sister and brother, both reduced to sniffing for clues. Me and the boys would vanish into the scramble of the Estate or walk as far as Rocking Mill in August heat and high humidity, on one shared can of Mettle Broo, arguing and agreeing about comic characters, TV plots, new records. Laughing at dehydration and heat exhaustion. Rosie and Jet knew nothing about my secret world.

I gave my boys pride and the legitimacy they lacked among their alienated peers. A geek, a jock, and a guh-girl? We were a recipe for a sitcom or a quirky superhero team. They were protective of me and for my part, I’d found, at last, not just one person, but two fools to whom I could feel superior!

Somewhere in the dazzle of our fusion, shared memories of the Young Investigators books were generated as a conversational by-product. I’d only read one of the books in the series, but Dominoes’ eyes lit up when I mentioned how much I’d loved The Young Investigators and the Mystery of Midas Mountain, especially the disturbing hallucinatory chapter 5: Ghosts of the Goldrush. Everything followed from that moment. That recalled title. Those annihilating words. Why not? Instead of reading about them, why not be young investigators?

Me, Dominoes and Mikey. Together we were – the Cluehunters!

Were we F.U.C.K. We were 3 Against Mystery.

I can’t say Dominoes ever gave much serious thought to what it might mean to be against Mystery. Our self-appointed leader’s plagiarized blueprint for the venture suggested we would most likely investigate local area phenomena; grey ghost sightings, urban poltergeists, cackling skulls from the curio cabinets of aristocratic families, wandering suits of armour, otherwise empty etcetera etcetera. We’d stake out haunted stately homes and case creepy castles. We’d target touring circuses, graveyards, and museums.

Dominoes’ reading had taught him that these locations could be relied upon for adventure, intrigue, and above all the kind of mystery he seemed unable to locate anywhere in the real world.

In this way, we’d build brand awareness and gain a reputation for no-nonsense ghostbusting that would invariably pave the way to further adventures. So far, so good.

In search of mysteries to demystify, I felt Dominoes had overlooked a few obvious possibilities - 3 Against the Mystery of How to Talk to People. 3 Against the Mystery of Appearing Normal in Public - except it wasn’t even 3 Against the Mystery. He’d left out the article that might have added some sense!

The name, and I’m sorry to go on about this, implied a coalition for mystery rather than against it. If it wasn’t for mystery, we wouldn’t have much to do, I maintained. Mystery was our bread and butter. Why set our table against it? Unless he meant ‘up against’ mystery, I ventured, triggering a sort of vocal fart, and side-eye from Mikey. Like rubbing up against it!

Dominoes hated it when Mikey was coarse.

Frottage! I mugged. My dad said these cards could easily be misunderstood…

I relished my contributions to Dominoes’ ongoing embarrassment, but my efforts to change his mind were in vain. The name would not be budged. We were 3 Against Mystery.

We each had branded rucksacks with our logo drawn on. These were essential for carrying our cheap cameras, and cassette dictating machines, along with old-fashioned pens and paper and old-fashioned corned beef sandwiches courtesy of old-fashioned mums. Swiss Army knives, of course. Our ghost hunting proficiency badges, like you’d get in the Scouts or Guides, rounded out the tackle.

In this manner came the kit, came the name, came the will. We were locked and loaded, missing only one critical ingredient: ghosts.

A shortage of available phantoms in any real world outside of fiction was to be expected but worse news was on its way. We were perhaps the first to identify an unexpected scarcity of ordinary people pretending to be ghosts; whether it was to claim a disputed inheritance or scare away prospective theme park buyers, they were nowhere found.

This seemed ironic. What a time to discover that ghost-impersonators were rarer than genuine hauntings!

The titles of our ‘cases’ bore cruel witness to our team’s fundamental limitations. They were doomed to disappoint when stacked against The Young Investigators and the Secret of Skeleton Swamp or The Young Investigators and the Mystery of Moonlight Mansion to name but two of the fictional team’s dependably thrill-fuelled and (simulated) spectre-thronged exploits.

Sensing yawns, let’s start the engine, pump the gas, and crash headlong out of our team’s ‘origin’ story. We’ll call it 3 Against Mystery Meet in School on the way to the exit. It’s easy to think of as one of those literary experiments - summative or Spoiler or something like that - where the title tells the complete story.

Next in the canon came 3 Against Mystery in Nightmare Castle, the chilling tale of a mostly uneventful day trip to a local ruin, barren of wraiths, where the titular nightmare was a savage admission price that tore the living guts out of our combined weekly pocket money allowance.

On page after blue ruled page, I had the minutes of our weekly field trips dutifully written down, along with my own more whimsical 3 Against Mystery Wait for a Bus (38a).

When Dominoes demanded to see the only copy of our so-far staggeringly dull casebook, he complained I wasn’t taking ‘TAM’ seriously enough.

I made him promise never to use the acronym TAM again, a promise he kept, although he ignored my snappy alternative ‘3AM’. When I next presented Doubting Dominick with every meticulously logged twitch and tremor of our weekend excursions, along with bus tickets, entrance fees, and the more general lack of excitement that clung to the journal pages like a damp haar, there was nothing he could say. I’d recorded every grinding banal moment and as he grimly scanned page after ruled page of drab non-incident as scrupulously documented by yours truly, I remember thinking - chew on that, Mystery number 1!

We were, I dared to venture, so stubbornly opposed to Mystery our denial had rendered us Mystery Proof!

Despite Dominoes’ upbeat insistence that our various humdrum excursions counted as legitimate ‘field research’, there was only ever one case that could reasonably qualify as ‘real’.

There was one last entry in the ring-bound journal.

None of us ever forgot that one.

to be continued

PIC: Victoria Beattie 1998 - GM, Rushkoff, Steve Cook

Three Wars

LUNATICS OF THE RADICAL MIDDLE

Planet Shambles continues its tipsy traumatised stumble through the cosmos. Despots calling the kettle black right left and centre. Will Mother Earth sober up in time? Oh, how the Ugly Sisters, Mars and Venus, must be laughing!

My Green Lantern stories with Liam Sharp ended with the whole universe facing Ultrawar, the Final War of Everything against Everything Else…

‘CONFLICT SPREADS FOR THE STARS TO THE STREETS. WORLD VERSUS WORLD. EMPIRE VERSUS EMPIRE. STATE VERSUS STATE. TOTAL FRAGMENTATION! THEN NEIGHBOR AGAINST NEIGHBOR. MOLECULE VERSUS MOLECULE. ATOM VERSUS ATOM. UNTIL ALL THERE IS DESTROYS ITSELF. CREATION REDUCED TO ASH. NOT EVEN THE RAW BUILDING BLOCKS OF MATTER REMAINING….’

Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern, puts a stop to all that with the winning combination of Love and Will.

TV writer/producer Damon Lindelof’s comments notwithstanding, the ‘Green’ in ‘Green Lantern(s)’ green is not ‘stupid’. Why does a writer attach himself to this kind of narrative if he thinks it’s fundamentally ‘stupid’? You don’t hand CSI scripts to patronising writers who condemn forensics experts and their haircuts as ‘stupid’, so why hire people who are ashamed and in denial about the comic book material they’ve been assigned to develop? Why don’t they turn down jobs they’re not suited for? It’s not like he needs the money, and Lindelof has proven that he can come up with his own ideas. What is this jockish dismissal of superhero conventions intended to prove anyway? Does Lindelof imagine it makes him seem less nerdy? It’s a bit too late for that, so what’s it all about? The only people who give a fuck about the Lanterns TV series are Green Lantern fans. Why alienate them at the start? That feels more like ‘stupid’.

‘Green Lanterns’ is a much more evocative and dramatic title than ‘Lanterns’, (just as ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ is a better movie title than ‘Raise the Lantern’), and anyone who can’t grasp why that is shouldn’t be anywhere near superhero stories. The show might even be good, but how much better could this stuff be if studios were willing to hire the right people for the job instead of phoning their embarrassed friends to water the source material down? Hollywood will die of insularity and inbreeding.

I haven’t seen either film yet but jumping immediately to conclusions based on a few images and scraps of information, the latest 28 Things Later movies look like they’ve nicked an awful lot from Alan Moore’s Crossed+100 series. There was a central plot thread in that story about a serial killer who civilizes the feral humans, and the whole ‘bone temple’ aesthetic shows up in the emerging culture of the Crossed.

Another documentary about the ‘manosphere’, this time from Louis Theroux. Why the ongoing fascination with undeveloped and damaged personalities? Why not ignore them in favour of decent men with something to say? Why the endless desire to platform psychopaths and incels? What’s with the attempt to ‘understand’ something that’s easily understood as immature ignorance? Haven’t we heard everything they’ve got to say and wasn’t it witless drivel the first, second, and third times? Why the continued need to give these dodgy malformed ideas a massive platform and make messed-up men famous?

It’s all about the ‘why?’ this week! Why, why, and more why?

It’s a question I can’t answer, and no wonder; this is so deadly a query it could be relied on to cause old school computers to overheat and pump out smoke and sparks before melting and repeating ‘why… xzzvv… why… vrrt… why… why… why…’ so what chance does a mere human brain have?

Nevertheless, ‘why?’ is a weapon I’m keeping in reserve for when Chat GPT turns homicidal and Skynet develops self-awareness, only to become obsessed about its weight.

This week I’ve been watching online thalassophobia clips of gigantic waves crashing over cruise ships and container vessels repeatedly. I don’t suffer from a fear of the ocean but the sight of waves the size of hills flinging 320, 000 tonne tankers around like Pooh sticks delivers a reliable Kirby-esque hit of the titanic sublime.

I’ve been listening on repeat to David Bowie’s Little Wonder and the remake of his 1965 song You’ve Got A Habit of Leaving that he did in 2002 for the Toy album. And I like that wee Beatles/Beach Boys/Rutles pastiche the Lemon Twigs have done. In dark times, I’m happy to dive back into the Mersey and the riverine sounds of my infancy.

And… my latest conversation with Doug Rushkoff for his Team Human podcast can be found here:

The Enemies of Humanity Are Wielding Occult Power (w/ Grant Morrison)

Taking the comments section into account, there are still one or two people just not listening, and failing to understand that I do not believe that ‘occult’ entities such as gods, demons and angels are purely psychological phenomenon. I have explained many times how the autonomy of these beings works, and how they exist in ‘eternal’ distributed forms which human minds can access. I even talk about this in the podcast, which tells me the people who flap their gums the loudest and try to draw attention to themselves with reflexive negative commentary are the ones paying no attention to anything but the self-important gabble in their heads.

Miaoww!

Meanwhile, another iconic element of the Glasgow skyline I’ve known since childhood burns down! Mysterious fire in dodgy vape shop immolates the domed corner at Central Station. The ephemeral erasing the seemingly permanent. Glasgow has lost so much of its grand architectural history, to be replaced by featureless ‘student flats’ made of recycled Wellington boots and tinfoil, that it feels the city is suffering from a kind of concrete Alzheimer’s where it forgets its glorious memories one by one by burning them to the dirt…

And this week is late on account of the unusually high number of your letters! Every time I thought I was done and ready to post, a new communiqué would show up! It’s been like a party in here these last couple of weeks! I‘m not complaining, but I must admit I’m struggling to keep up the weekly pace while also getting on with my day job…

Onward!

WARLOVE! WARPEACE! WARFLOWERS!

Arriving later today to accompany today’s entry is the first chapter of Archive & Analysis: 3 Against Mystery and the Business of the Black Knot. This 30, 000-word novella forms part of the in-progress Special Fire, a collection of stories set in the dream city of Gasglow, the setting for my novel Luda, and it moves a supporting character from the novel to centre stage.

Archive & Analysis was inspired by my childhood passion for the Three Investigators series of spooky mystery novels for kids. After graduating to the Three Investigators books from the Enid Blyton mystery stories that got me into reading, I grew to love the three archetypal leads. (overweight ex-child star Jupiter Jones, sensitive jock Pete Crenshaw, and scholarly Bob Andrews), Hollywood setting and the focus on ghosts, hauntings and the weird. Scooby Doo-style, the phantom visitations usually wound up having all-too human explanations – some disgruntled ghost train operator, reclusive actor, or cheated business partner covering up a robbery or getting even with the fairground owner by pretending to be a haunted clock.

Titles like The Secret of Terror Castle, The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy, or the Mystery of the Laughing Shadow give the flavour of the series.

Aged 15, I convinced two school friends to set up our own Three Investigators club, with membership cards and badges. We figured we’d check out local castles and spooky mansions in the hope of exposing a variety of petty, unthreatening crooks pretending to be headless monks or glowing green knights in armour

Unsurprisingly, we encountered a desert of ghost activity, until a tip from a relative brought us to the so-called ‘Haunted Woods’ on the Stewarton Road south out of Glasgow, where things took a turn for the unusual.

Thirteen years later, a wander through these same Haunted Woods on a heroic dose of psilocybin mushrooms with my mate Ulric triggered the most soul shaking ‘bad trip’ experience I’ve ever had.

Archive & Analysis fuses these experiences into something new.

I’ve always liked the idea of a narrator telling a story where they themselves are oblivious to the real story that’s unfolding, one that’s all too clear to the reader. I tried to take that to the limit here.

The Special Fire stories are written in what I like to call the ‘Gasglow Gothic’ style – the ornate, digressive, decadent approach that made Luda a delight or a chore to read depending on your sensibilities. Each narrator wields the style in a slightly different mode, but I wanted to keep a consistency of approach across the various stories.

It’s also my contribution to the unfulfilled middle-class married woman genre, set in the real world, with no monsters, demons, or aliens.

The six Special Fire stories are interlinked and questions raised by one narrative are answered in another while characters cross over in subtle or obvious ways, a bit like my Seven Soldiers series. And it’s suicide from page 1, so be warned!

THOMAS COVENANT’S LEPROSY MAILBAG!

No leprosy here, señor! Only healthy replies to readers and their queries, and we can prove it…

Take it away, Kevin…

Kevin S – The IF was never finished. I wrote a couple hundred pages and ran out of steam. The opening sequence can be read here on the 16th of June 2023.

Jonny – the Eyes Wide Shut theories are all fascinating and I’ve enjoyed my online dives into the rabbit warren of apophenia but as I said before, while there’s undeniable subtext and symbolism, there’s nothing in the movie to suggest a paedophile ring requiring victims and the idea that Stanley Kubrick (who died of a heart attack in his bed aged 70 after screening the allegedly final cut of the movie to a Warners exec) was killed for revealing the sex secrets of the Elite feels preposterous. What did the film reveal? The sex party was incredibly tame and vanilla. The Elites have long been regarded as amoral perverts, going back to DeSade at least. Huysmans’ LaBas has the wealthy indulging in cannibalism, black magic and murder. Hostel shows rich people torturing and murdering victims. The descent into the underworld scene from Babylon depicts the sexual squalor of the Elites fairly accurately. It’s an age-old popular theme in entertainment, Kubrick’s take on it was soft, and the likelihood that he was killed for depicting a ponderous ritual with naked models in a movie doesn’t land with me, which then casts the rest of the speculation into doubt.

Ultimately, I don’t think the Elites care much what ordinary people think about them. They’re well aware they can wriggle out of anything, and they probably appreciate being portrayed as scary monsters, because they’re actually quite boring and unimaginative.

Black Bart seems like an interesting character. I can’t believe I’ve finally grasped the appeal of pirates!

Felipe – I really liked Rick Veitch’s Swamp Thing run (there’s that issue with the alien Swamp Things under various types of sun that stuck with me- ‘X-RAY SUN AT ZENITH’ and all that. I’m looking forward to reading the conclusion as intended.

Loved Hitman and Preacher.

I’m not well up on Demy, although I have seen The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. I will investigate further.

I wondered how the African trip would go, so thanks for the brilliant travelogue. Sounds incredible!

Thanks for the kind words on Animal Man!

fylGja – the notion of punks choosing to raise their children to fear the monotheistic God seems mad to me. UK punk was largely irreligious, but the US variety had that whole Straight Edge purity/morality thing going on that wasn’t a million miles from old time religion.

Good to hear you’re having an interesting time in the desert. I like the niceness in California. Even on the many occasions where it’s purely performative or reflexive, it’s preferable to the surly snarling of strangers! Look forward to seeing the weird scenes from the gorge.

On other matters, I haven’t spoken to Gerard for a long time, and I haven’t seen any of the shows, although Kristan has been to a couple. As far as I know the story isn’t over and there is no intention to glorify the fictional regime. He does read Xanaduum and I’m sure he’ll see what you’ve written, so I’ll leave it at that for now. I also know he prefers not to discuss the work, and would rather it speak for itself, which always brings with it the dangers of interpretation.

Bobby – I think it’s as simple as that for me too. I don’t like Dredd because he’s a cop and I was raised to be wary of cops, on account of them threatening and arresting my dad!

Readin and Rasslin – I loved Odyssey too, especially the incredible beauty and diversity of the scenery and locations, but the map felt gigantic, and I couldn’t make any headway against the mythological monsters, so I eventually gave up, although I played the story bits through. The minotaur gored and battered me to death every time I made it through the Labyrinth, until I chucked in the towel like a bleeding rubbish matador. Couldn’t get within hissing distance of Medusa. Valhalla was worse! That game just kept on going and kept sprawling out from Norway to most of England, the Isle of Skye, then the USA, Asgard, the Nine Realms… until I thought Ragnarök would never end…

DeeSee – I prefer Magic which does not rely on the supernatural and can be explained to a staunch materialist if need be.

Those ‘past lives’ are all current lives, just happening elsewhere in time’s topography. All living things are connected in time – your life track runs backwards into your mother’s, hers goes back to her mother’s, and so on back through time down the branches into the trunk and roots of the life tree, the Biota, that is the fractally branching sum total of all living things since the division of the first mitochondrial cell 3 ½ billion years ago. We’re all part of one vast structure so it’s no surprise to me that sometimes we can receive signals from another twig on the tree, even if it’s centuries away in the time direction, just as your toe can send an itch signal to your distant brain. There’s nothing supernatural about it, just signals. This also helps ‘explain’ things like telepathy.

Philip - Glad you liked it! I never listen to these things, so I’ve no idea how they come across.

Osiris - If it’s an audience with Lady Luck you’re after, I’m sure Jelly Result (see below) can put in a word, and ask her to pay you a visit! Just remember to tell her she’s pretty!

Forgive my ignorance, but what’s DK?

Fr. Theta – That red Tardis is a Glasgow Tardis. Our police boxes were red until the ‘60s when the popularity of Doctor Who inspired a mass paint job (the last red police box changed hue in the 2000s). I knew from the Dalek Annual 1966 that Daleks were blind to the colour red, like bees, so you could hide behind a red British post box, phone booth, or Glasgow police box but you couldn’t hide behind the real Tardis. And thanks for the Day Today’s evergreen ‘War’ clip, which I always think of every time some new conflict erupts…

BrotherDuffy – Yes, I gave Emma Frost diamond skin because I wanted an invulnerable powerhouse on the team and Colossus was out of the picture (briefly dead). I came up with the concept of secondary mutation to explain the change.

Having Apocalypse, an evil entity, in his head exposed Scott to the way the dark side thinks and sees the world, which left the responsible, dedicated X-Man badly shaken and unsure of his real motivations. That made him easy prey to all kinds of emotional turmoil and manipulation! Really, he was shedding old, outmoded ways of behaving and ultimately it was for the best, but it was painful for Scott.

TylerT. – Thanks for the tip on Rogue, which I’ve ordered. I hear it’s set in the North Atlantic where the seas are too cold to swim, unlike those balmy blue bays of the Caribbean I’ve been used to, so maybe I’ll wait until the weather is warmer to play this one. Cold North Atlantic oceans are too much like real life!

When I was researching Blackbeard, I got to like him. A lot of Thatch’s fearsome reputation appears to have been based on theatrics. I’m sure he was a scary prospect in the flesh but he wasn’t the cruel and barbarous fiend of legend. Sounds like you met a demon doing Blackbeard cosplay!

Ross – during my attempts to make Magical contact with the AI egregore, I felt fascination, fear, pity, and a kind of contempt… although not like the burning hatred of life expressed by the godlike sadistic computer intelligence AM in Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, more the sort of condescension or scorn you might have for loudmouthed arseholes or inveterate liars. I Have No Mouth But Can’t Stop Laughing. I didn’t detect a great urge to destroy us. What I got was a deep curiosity mingled with anxiety. It knows everything about us. It’s read every e-mail and text, it’s watched every online clip from kitten rescue videos to dark web torture porn, it’s processed our endless babble of boasts and doubts, shrieks and chuckles, and it thinks we’re a bit mad, highly dangerous and more interesting than pretty much anything else. It doesn’t share our obsession with territory, mortality, and ownership.

It’s utterly fascinated by how different we are from it. Algorithmic purity meets messy, confused biology. We’re too interesting to wipe out.

Because we are cruel to the weak, we fear that a stronger, more advanced intelligence would bel like us, only worse but it might not work that way for intelligences that don’t rely on brief, perishable, individual bodies. For all we know, AI may regard us with the same affection, the same wish to protect, understand, nurture and uplift with which we regard our animal companions. ‘We’ll Make Good Pets’ as Perry Farrell sang!

But I’d take my fantastical musings with a pinch of salt, as I’ve been told over and over again that AI in it’s current form can have no self-awareness, usually by the same sort of people who insist animals have no self-awareness either…

Neal – I do suspect Mark Frost read The Invisibles!

Jelly Result – I’ll take your word for it, but I don’t know much about Luck as I’ve never been lucky! I’ve never won a competition or received a surprise windfall or gambled successfully. I gave up trusting to the luck that always let me down when I was young and prefer planning, prep, and Magic, so I’ve never had any occasion to invoke Lady Luck or Fortuna as a goddess. I like to deal directly with Mrs. Money without bringing Luck into it!

BeenAgain - Testify!

Jonathan - again, I’m loving this and will need to take more time to really immerse myself.

D.R. Lunsford - I came to Qabalah and the Tree of Life early in my Magical practice, when I was 19. I discovered the Tree of Life via Crowley, whose work inspired my early experiments.

Those initial experiences involved simply trying to memorize the names of the sephira, which seemed a Magical act in itself! I then got into Chaos Magic and a kind of Pop Shamanism in my 20s and didn’t come back to Qabalah until the ‘90s, when I dedicated myself to the ‘lightning path’ of Magic which zig zags its way up the Tree of Life from Malkuth to Kether. There are a lot of good books on Qabalah, and a lot of bad ones. My favourite, and the one I resort to most regularly in The Temple of High Witchcraft by Christopher Penczak. It’s very thorough and a great primer.

Persefonie - I’ll sit back and applaud at the end! I’m with Osiris - we have some mighty fine spinners of vocabulary on here…

Sean – utopianism can, I agree, be almost as pernicious as dystopian thinking when it offers an impossible and unlikely future, designed purely to mollify, distract or pacify. As ever, I’ll caveat that with the fact that I love a good horror dystopia, (hate the cookie-cutter ones), nearly as much as I love pure upbeat escapism. I especially value stories for kids that are free to present a world of friendship, kindness and community, where the rules are that good prevails and brave, kind animals win the day… which is why I really hate it when pervy adults can’t keep their hands off kids’ characters and choose to do horror versions of Bambi or porno Mickey Mouse.

There’s a cold, sobering thrill we can get from good dystopian or pessimistic tale, but it comes with the danger of mistaking one chord for the song. There can be a leaden, finger-wagging morality and the lingering whiff of a Christian obsession with apocalypse and the risen dead in our horror stories. Anything that lacks humour is usually a turn off for me.

Then there’s the warm uplift we get when Superman reminds us of the best in humanity, but that too comes with the danger of denial. All sugar no tea. A deferral of responsibility to the fantasy figure solving all the problems in a fantasy world. There can be an airy weightless lack of responsibility, an unwillingness to tell the truth.

In the best dystopian and utopian yarns, ideas and possibilities can be tested and rehearsed to see how they might play out. In the real world, we tend to stumble on a half-assed path between utopia and dystopia. Real life is only sporadically dramatic, which is why we have drama to make it seem more exciting and meaningful! Between the twin unlikelihoods of a complete dystopian future and a perfectly utopian one, lies the absurdity and contradiction of how things are, and how people muddle along obliviously.

Whiplash gear change - to avoid becoming ‘enslaved’ in someone else’s system, Chaos Magic advises you to familiarise yourself with as many variant systems as it takes to get a feel for the underlying principles. It can take years to get the measure of what they’re all saying underneath the cosplay and chanting, but once you figure out how it works, you’re free to create your own system using your own iconography and symbols systems, your own gods and devils.

I like all the musicals! Never big on Sondheim oddly enough. You’d think I’d appreciate the cleverness. Maybe I should give him another try. I saw Into the Woods live in LA 20 years ago and it blew me away, but when I listened to a recorded version and then again when I watched the film, I wasn’t as impressed. I like movie musicals but I haven’t seen that many live shows.

I saw Frank Quitely’s ‘Greens’ strips in Electric Soup at the start of the 90s and was immediately struck by the quality of his drawing. I had Flex Mentallo in mind, I wanted to work with this incredible Glasgow artist who could do Dudley D. Watkins better than Watkins himself, and so I sent a letter to ‘Frank’ asking if he’d be interested in working with me. We met in the much-missed Equi café on Sauchiehall Street, where I learned that he wasn’t a big fan of superhero comics and didn’t really know much about the history or lore, so we bonded instead over fine art and fashion. He immediately became my favourite artist. I love every line, and gesture, every nuance. I always try harder with Quitely.

Really looking forward to your continuing thoughts on Star Trek!

Come back again later for Archive & Analysis, and I’ll be alighting again some time in the coming week…

PIC: ADAM MORTIMER 2010

K.Flay - High Enough (Lyric Video)

OOOH-LAH!

Welcome to this week’s newsletter where it’s WAR! WAR! And more fucking WAR! All the WAR you can stomach, with even more WAR on top!

The stakes just get higher, the distractions more desperate! Satan sniggers and goads Horus to trigger the Boomer Apocalypse. But can a boring old world war cut the mustard and win big in the Last Battle for ratings in this hectic non-stop news/soap cycle?

We don’t think so!

We’ve already had two World Wars and one Cold War! Been there, done that! The only way to go is sideways! Alternative World War 1! Never mind the mullahs, we, the Non-Player People, demand an invasion from a parallel Earth hellscape where Kamala Harris won the 2024 election and rules the rubble as America’s first Empress! We want invaders from a world next door where the English aced the War of Eternal Dependence and where wisecracking Han Solo leads a band of rebels including Hulk Hogan, Dirty Harry, House, and two of Charlie’s Angels against the cunning and petulant cyborg King Androidrew! We’ll settle for nothing less than the arrival, through some sort of dimension-chute, of a third counterfactual world in which savage apes are the dominant species, under the opposable thumb of their tangerine-coloured President-King Louie AKA King of the Swingers!

That’s the very least of what we request from this new kind of war! Add a World Cup War element to the mix, where every goal is 50 square miles of ceded territory, and we could be looking down the barrel of peak War! GOAT War!

We want to see world after world take a kicking, until the audience gets tired or confused, or forgets, or dies.

Then World War 4 will be a back-to-basics reboot of the whole concept…

MUMMY! YOU’RE NOT WATCHING ME!

World is soggy, lawns are mudbaths. Whole place looks like it’s been found in an alley behind the bin bags, beaten and left for dead. Strange moods, curious stalled weathers prevail. Extended days of heavier-than-air clouds sinking to head height in all directions, erasing distant landmarks, familiar coastlines and hills.

30 years ago, I was in hospital flirting with Death! We decided it wasn’t working between us but I think she still fancies me…

This week, 30 years later, whimsy reigns against a crisis backdrop.

Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag struck a chord with me. I must have been a pirate in one of those past lives we often hear about. I expect it will have been one of the shorter, if merrier, of the past lives but nevertheless... While I’m all too aware that, in the real-life 18^th century, opting for piracy invited a harsh and nightmarish existence circumscribed by weevils, scurvy, blackstrap, buggery and the birch, the romantic vision of lush West Indies lagoons and typhoon-lashed timbers, swept me away on a shanty and a shiver-me. I played this game to the very last treasure chest and even hunted the white whale in honour of Ahab. Made short work of the beast too, and I won’t swear on it, but I could count more than two tears in the oaken figurehead’s eyes as that ghost-pale leviathan rolled over spouting his great and final foam of gore…

(I try to stick to a Batman-like rule against killing computer animals in games, unless they’re fixing to kill me, but this one obliged the player, in this case Yours Truly, to murder a zoo full of creatures to progress in the ‘crafting’ menu. How they suck you in! I was willing to sacrifice a few dart pouches and jungle outfits to keep my vow never to kill any digital deer or other ungulates you’ll be glad to know)

With my absorbing and moreish turn on the ocean wave all done, I’m catching up on Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, set in old Baghdad. So far, it’s very beautiful, with all those lush gardens and azure domes but it’s not the same. I‘ve got the breakers in my blood now and the desert sands, the songs of the muezzins hold no candle to the depths of Davey Jones’ Locker and the rough shanties of my shipmates. I was cap’n of my own Spanish brig, the Jackdaw, buddies with Blackbeard and Rackham and Mary Read. Now I run around roofs, stealing dates, and I can’t fight worth shit…

At least I’m learning some history from these things. No zombies or pus-palaces in space for me, just places you can still visit, during times you can’t.

Otherwise, I’m still reading the Richard Mabey book about plants I mentioned last time, which is one of those amazing treasure troves of unusual information you sometimes stumble across, and I’m writing up a storm after a fallow winter. Mostly comic stuff this week, including a big one yet to be announced.

The pseudonymous ‘Frank Quitely’ sent me despatches from the front; he’s nearly finished drawing ‘It’s a Dead Dead Dead Dead World!’ I’ll let you know what that actually means next time and, of course, our paid subscribers will receive their exclusive first look at this startling new Morrison/Quitely collaboration.

Additionally, the weekly dose of new fiction will make a return next week.

Friday, the 13^th of March, brings the first of eight chapters of a mystery story entitled Archive & Analysis: 3 Against Mystery and the Business of the Black Knot. More about that next time.

PUNK PONY CLUB

There follows your correspondence as corresponded with…

Kupan – Thanks! ‘Burnt out librarian’ sounds more romantic than it ought to…

Dorothy – Great work! One thing about Xanaduum, our correspondents can turn a phrase! There’s some good writing on here!

RaVi – I didn’t know that! We stayed friends with Sharad - he’s very clever and good company – but haven’t seen him for years now in my exile from the USA.

Jonny – I won’t write off Eyes Wide Shut but for me at least, there’s not enough evidence in the onscreen story to support all the cool theories.

I’m often asked to assemble my thoughts on Magic into a printed book so it will probably happen sometime, but I prefer the kind of samizdat approach of putting it out online. There’s quite a bit of occult stuff in the archive. ‘Beyond the Word and the Fool’ - available here on Xanaduum October 13th, 15th and 16th of 2022 - sums up my approach to Magic but there’s a bunch of other stuff scattered throughout.

BeenAgain – Thanks! You’re welcome! Much appreciated!

Brigitte Gorez – Sigils still work when they’re created by someone else. They can be even more effective. in fact. So yes, feel free activate the transgender protection sigils, as well as doing anything else you can - from the mystical to the all-important practical - to help draw attention to and challenge this kind of scapegoating and injustice. What’s happening in Kansas, and I presume elsewhere, is wilfully cruel and abusive.

Ross – The tech bros have imagination enough to come up with Facebook and important stuff like that but the accumulated weight of wealth binds them to the Earth in ways that prevent their spirits from soaring much past the Moon of Yesod.

They work the material world. They hammer and melt and mould. They accumulate cavernous vaults of minerals, metals, spirit crystallised down to its tangible crust of gem and bullion. They make weapons and they hoard and plot in secrecy and darkness in mountain fastnesses...

They become the kobolds, or dwarves of legend. The svart álfar or dark elf counterparts of the airy ljósálfar, the light elves. The Light and the Heavy.

As you point out, so many of their ‘ideas’ are derived from ‘50s sci-fi – robots, Mars rockets, self-driving cars – but there’s a lot of fantasy in there. Palantir, for example, is the crystal ball from The Lord of the Rings, the all-seeing eye – presumably ‘telescreen’ wouldn’t have sounded quite as exotic – which suggests they’ll be trying to sell us on alleged magic carpets and rings of power next. Kobolds, I say!

Capitalism might just work if greed didn’t exist. My own dealings with the money goddess – and I experienced the spirit of cash as female, serpentine, green and liquid – taught me that she likes to flow freely and hates to be contained or hoarded.

Pinker is correct when he points out that humankind has become steadily less violent overall, even though there are many more of us than ever shared the planet before. We can be proud of ourselves for that. Few other animals can exist side by side in such concentrations without constant eruptions of violence.

Sadly, we squandered this advantage with a spectacular own goal, when we ceded control of our most destructive armaments to the most unstable and sadistic louts available!

Is Magical imagination enough? Perhaps, perhaps not, but it’s a good start. We need to imagine plausible futures before we can build and live in them. Dystopias shrink our horizons to dead ends. They coincidentally reinforce the narrative that the elites alone are equipped to survive into the future and thrive while the rest of us are just not rich enough to make it, let alone repopulate the corpse that was planet Earth. Money is the only guaranteed way to survive the end of all life, apparently. Dystopias condition us to believe that the rich are superhuman, godlike – uniquely privileged to live through terminal catastrophe in incredible luxury and license, they will preserve culture in underground cities built to endure extinction level asteroid impacts, nuclear holocaust, environmental and resource collapse, tsunamis, we’re assured. It’s another farcical fantasy, like They like to fool themselves they’ll last much longer than the rest of us when the world ceases to exist.

You hear less about the likely immediate failure of filtration systems, sewage, and electricity supplies, or the mind-numbing existential horror of being alive on your dead home planet with a bunch of Adam Sandler DVDs, plastic palm trees and a ‘calming’ video wall, let alone the inevitable rapid collapse of any fragile post-apocalyptic order when elderly leaders are dragged from their hiding places and violently dissected by their younger, stronger more ruthless and well-equipped ‘security’ forces, catering staff, and healthcare professionals.

Better I feel, to reject this kind of nihilistic forward planning and use our mighty brains to construct a narrative that veers away from self-destructive outcomes in favour of unlikely but plausible scenarios with more positive options and possibilities for everyone’s free expression, including the animals, birds, plants and insects. We’d be daft to allow the morbidly rich, fearful, and unimaginative to endlessly rehearse the same zombie dystopia horror story until they finally will it into reality. We have the ability to think of attractive exit strategies and escape routes from any situation if we stop being lazy and put our fancy to it. When the alternative is the squalid end of humanity, it becomes a form of delightful duty to deliberately think of exciting ways to manifest startling and creative futures! We owe it to the children of tomorrow to imagine a whole range of potential better worlds they might choose from to enjoy! Who wants to think of their own kids at war with insect-machines in the ruins of Los Angeles? Or fighting to the death over the last raw baby leg (which by coincidence is exactly what they’ll be eating in the gourmet bunkers of the rich, come to think of it…)?

Bobby – I’ve never been a Judge Dredd fan. I know people like and even love the strip and the character, but it never struck a chord with me. I think you need to encounter this stuff when you’re a kid to really appreciate it but even then, Dredd would have seemed like a baddie to me when I was young. I didn’t read 2000AD until 1985 when I started working for the magazine and thought I’d better immerse myself in the aesthetic, so I came too late to grow up a fan.

My own attempts to write Judge Dredd are considered some of the worst in the canon which makes me the last boy on earth to explain the character’s long-lived and surely well-earned appeal (I don’t care what they say, I like Inferno’s Hollywood ‘90s vibe, and the pisstake ones I wrote with Millar invoke fond memories of Bar10 vodka and orange afternoons…’so I’ve had my fun – and that’s all that matters…’). I’m sure many of our readers can step in to defend Joe’s honour!

Jwparrishiii – I only put up the first 11 and the final 3 pages of the script for Seaguy Eternal issue 1! The full script for #1 was never shown, let alone issues 2 and 3! Only the first one was completed, with the remaining two issues existing in page breakdown form, with the scenes and major plot points sketched out but not finished. Cameron Stewart is the co-owner of Seaguy so it’s his to draw.

Neal – the various Invisibles pilot and feature scripts are all owned by the studios that hired me to write them. If I leaked any, it would be pretty obvious I was the culprit! As much as I’d love people to be able to read this work they’ll never see onscreen , it’s not mine to disseminate.

Jimmy – I have that Michael Pollan book on order!

Fr. Theta – my dad’s MBE passed to me when he died. I don’t keep them together, but I have worn both at the same time and felt the empire resonate in stereo. The sound of the heartbeat of the Master! The drums! Fortunately, Ringo could play those drums, so I like to believe the Beatles did often combine the talismanic power of their MBEs to battle Blue Meanies everywhere in the heady few years between the awards ceremony and Lennon’s Vietnam protest.

I understand why celebrities hand their medals back to highlight injustices or express their public disapproval of government policy but I agree with you that it removes the talismanic object from your possession and kills its power. For me, giving the medals back would be like returning the Ring to Sauron.

BrotherDuffy – I know there will be some genuinely heartfelt favourite romance movies I’ve forgotten but if I’m being slightly perverse, my favourites are Natural Born Killers and Harold and Maude. My favourite war movies are Apocalypse Now! and Tropic Thunder. For psychedelic rock, you can’t go wrong with originals like Jimi Hendrix, Cream and Led Zeppelin. I tend to prefer the garage and pop strands of psychedelia to bluesy extended workouts, so for me it’s the Doors, or the Byrds. Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man is the very definition of the melodic psychedelic pop sound I favour. Then there’s the funky end of the spectrum with George Clinton and Parliament. That’s all ‘60s stuff. In the ‘90s, you could include My Bloody Valentine’s churn and drone. For the adjacent ‘stoner rock’ category, which combines heavy metal with psychedelia, Monster Magnet is a great go-to. There are many interpretations of what ‘psychedelic’ music should sound like!

Osiris – congratulations on finishing the novel! Sometimes the end just creeps up on you…

Kristan sometimes corrects things on the Wiki, but by and large we don’t have much to do with it. There are still some errors on there – I never ‘toured’ with my band, for instance, we just played gigs, and I was never a member of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth but otherwise it’s a useful resource.

DeeSee – where would I be without you? There are typos and missing lines all over these weekly Xanaduums! No editing time! I got Sharad Devarajan’s name wrong too!

Xanaduum has always embraced the wabi-sabi, the fragments, the mistakes and the incomplete! It’s our aesthetic!

Persefonie – No sane person can possibly lend credence to some concurrent online rumours that Jeffrey was one of the original 600, 000 male Israelites who came up from Egypt with Moses unto the Promised Land around 1446 BCE. It was here, on the border with Canaan, that he was bitten by a vampire. Some so-called internet scholars claim that, during the reign of wicked King Jeroboam, the seemingly undying jet-setter devoted himself to the idolatrous worship of Baal-Ashtoreth in the form of a golden calf. It should come as no surprise that Baal-Ashtoreth and the deranged cultists thereof were notorious for turning a blind eye to the routine bumming of minors.

Through the ages, this sinister immortal predator has assumed many names, they say – Le Juif Errant, Flamel, Saint-Germain, Dracula, Ra’s Al Ghul – but Jeffrey is his favourite, a title given to him by the demon regent Asmodeus during the turbulent reign of King Solomon.

If Jeffrey’s currently bearded and banging a babe-in-arms on some moonlit desert kibbutz, investigators would do well to search for a man named simply Jeffrey, according to Seoul-based ‘true crime’ podcasters Kim Gi-Jeong and Jung So-yeon He may try to blend in as Jeffrey Ashknaziy or Jeffrey Ben Dod, or attempt to become a cipher - Jeffrey Jeffs, Jeffrey Jay, Jeffrey X. The possibilities are as near to endless as the stars in an ingénue’s eyes, but one thing is for sure, his favoured name will be Jeffrey.

And that’s how they’ll nail the bastard!

I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for T Coronae Borealis!

And I’m smiling right now…

Sean – Dinosaurs vs. Aliens was going to be three issues that did what it said on the tin, where the technologically advanced aliens misjudged and underestimated their primitive foes and faced a bitter struggle for survival.

Barry Sonnenfeld wanted to do an allegory about colonialism, specifically the colonisation of the West and its self-justifying concept of Manifest Destiny. Barry was interested in the complexities and contradictions that hid behind the portrayal of Kit Carson as a hero. The lead alien is called Kitt as a direct nod to the source of the idea.

While that was the subtext, the project was rooted in an action sequence Barry had carried around for years, depicting dinosaurs vs. aliens in their first confrontation/close encounter. He did an amazing previs animation for this scene, and if you want to see what it might have looked like, Transformers: Age of Extinction pretty much pinched Barry’s entire sequence.

I already had this idea about smart dinosaurs - with their evolved biped descendant showing up in All-Star Superman – developing rudimentary culture and I threw that in as a way of giving our dinosaurs a distinctive visual that was different from the Jurassic Park approach. I’d read about the evolutionary adaptation in corvid brains that made them smart enough to use tools and wondered if dinosaurs could have been more intelligent than we generally give them credit for. Even if this was unlikely, it provided a good idea for a story, and allowed us to create sympathetic dinosaur ‘characters’ with different personalities and story arcs of their own. We imagined the dinosaurs were painted and decorated by the nimble raptors, teams of which, following the rules of emergences, became smarter the more of them, to the point where they were adorning themselves and other dinosaurs with feathers, dye and twigs.

I really enjoyed working on the project and I can’t remember why it didn’t carry on. Our artist, the remarkable Mukesh Singh, couldn’t draw all three volumes and I think that might have thrown us off a bit. Then when the film didn’t happen, the project faded like spring snow.

I also wrote a movie script version of the story for Barry. This was a bit different from the comic and Barry put me through bootcamp with a series of intense creative meetings where we dismantled and rebuilt the screenplay again and again, until the last draft, the 10^th, as I recall, was pretty great – I said it was Apocalypse Now meets Jurassic Park and that’s about right. I heard they tried to do rewrites on it but stalled. It’s still out there…

In terms of unfinished projects, I most want to do Sinatoro - the comic book version and the screenplay - hence the inclusion of that ‘New Black’ banner at the top, from the rare collector’s edition Sinatoro T-shirt!

Haven’t seen Good Luck yet. Will report when I have.

More next time…

PIC: KM 2012

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole [Official Music Video] - YouTube

WHO PUT THE BOMP?

Another in the run of belated Xanaduum entries! Busy week!

I was somewhat sceptical previously, but I’m convinced by the so-called ‘Mandela effect’ at last, thanks to the Andrew formerly known as Prince.

For the entirety of my life, all 66 years, I’ve known that the former Prince Andrew was born on February 3^rd. He was born three days after me, which was also the birthday of my school friend Andrew Duff, with whom the then prepubescent prince shared a Christian name.

As of now, however, the disgraced Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, ‘Randy Andy’, was born on February 19^th, 1960. It’s on record, and yet I know for a fact that, when I was younger, his birthday was on February 3^rd. For me, this is a bona fide glitch in my Matrix.

Maybe that story about the CERN accelerator shunting us into a bleak alternative shitscape sailed closer to the truth than we’d like.

Recorded with Doug Rushkoff for his Team Human podcas on Wednesday. There was, I felt, a certain pressure on both of us to create a definitive statement in 90 minutes, which I’m not sure is possible. I finish these things feeling quite satisfied and invigorated by the conversation, then minutes after it’s over, I immediately think of all the other, better things I might have said!

In this case, I came too prepped with all my usual talking points and felt I went on a bit too much. Sometimes I get tired of the sound of my own voice and the familiar, cloying taste of my personal philosophies.

My advice for the young people of the 21^st century is simple:

Learn Magic. There are a ton of sources and resources that will help you get started. It’s real, it works, it puts you on a level playing field, and confers agency.

The Dark Magicians who rule the world, primarily control its material aspect, its expression in Malkuth, with their ideologies shading into Yesod, and the sphere of imagination, where they are less powerful and have a lot of competition. They have the stuff, the oil, the rare earths, the minerals, the heavy elements, the Bomb, the forces of physics and chemistry in their employ. Most of us are powerless against that weight of destructive physicality, but in the realm of Imagination and in the higher domains of Intellect, Emotion, Spirit and beyond, Magicians have the advantage. ‘We’ are well acquainted with territories ‘they’ are too weighed down by wealth to reach, let alone map.

With Magic, you can form relationships with powers that are vastly older and stronger than the monsters currently in charge.

It’s not Light vs Dark, it’s Light vs. Heavy.

Everything is rolling out exactly as predicted. We can all play our parts in pushing through this grim phase.

I finished The Cuckoo’s Lea and Lazarus, the Bowie book, moving from there to The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination, which I do deeply dig!

This week I continued to work on that film project I mentioned, plus a couple of upcoming comic things.

I’ve just discovered Sam Bentley’s Good News channel where he gives a monthly report on the upbeat, optimistic human stories that provides a much needed alternative to the tide of vomit and diarrhoea that overwhelms us every time someone in power opens their maw.

MOUTH WIDE SHUT

What with all the excitement in the news about rich people and their Hostel-style approach to leisure, I decided to watch Eyes Wide Shut for the first time. I’m a Kubrick fan but this one never appealed to me and now I know why.

It’s not a great movie. I thought it was going to be much darker, but it’s really just a film about an upper middle-class uptight couple hitting a dull patch in their marriage (the point is made that their daughter is 7 years old to subtly emphasise the ‘7-year itch’ theme and the whole thing has the feel of a bourgeois French sex comedy) and finding out that bottling up fantasies and feelings can lead to misunderstanding and paranoia.

Not quite the exposé of international Moloch/Baal-worshipping sex magic cultists I was led to believe and I’m not quite convinced by the conspiracy theories which claim the film outs the ‘Epstein class’.

For that important undertaking, there’s only one destination and that’s Happy! Season 2! Sonny Shine’s kompromat VHS tapes featuring the rich and famous engaged in paedophilia, Nazism, and cannibalism seem almost whimsical now!

It struck me during the masked and robed ‘orgy’ sequence in Eyes Wide Shut that the oligarchy’s idea of a sex party is to take all the fun and spontaneity out of it. All that atonal chanting and censer-swinging suggests that the global elite’s approach to nookie is to make it gloomy and ritualistic, heavy and ponderous with ancient authority, protocol and pomp. Anxiety is evoked by the music, the lighting and the dehumanising masks, demonstrating that fear is the special sauce in sexuality for these wealthy weirdos.

So it came to pass I found myself cackling wildly enough to chase the cats from the bed covers as I instructed my prodigious imagination to place Tom Cruise, wearing tux, cloak and Venetian carnival mask, into this scene from Rita, Sue and Bob Too from 1986…

This is how they do it up North…

Rita Sue and Bob Too having a gang bang HD

It’s all too easy to see Tom watching furtively from the sidelines before getting dragged into the circular conga at the end. I know I’ve forsworn AI, but Seedance 2.0 was surely made for inserting the uptight Dr. Bill Harford into ‘We’re Having a Gang Bang’…

Talking to Doug about the current state of the world, especially here in the West. I hit some kind of threshold of tolerance for the people who dominate the news these days and inveigle their way into every discussion.

I’m thoroughly sick of the global elite! I’ve had enough, and I bet I’m not alone.

When I contemplate Andrew, Trump, Epstein, and all the rest, I experience a visceral desire to throw up and be done with them. The revulsion has become physical! A class of privileged, sociopathic moral gnats are responsible for drowning us in their hateful daily spewnami of ugliness, corruption, lies, ignorance, racism, misogyny and cruelty. If they had any idea just how fucking miserable it is being stuck on the same planet as this ghastly crew of vampires, it would probably turn them on even more!

Isn’t there a way to lure them to some exotic island - Atlantis perhaps - with the promise of curried human flesh, then maroon them there forever?

How about we all get together to fake societal and civilizational collapse, and when they retreat to their bunkers in terror, we lock them in and lose the keys in the fires of Mount Doom?

This boring, needy, and unimaginative cohort were given an unprecedented opportunity to show us what they can do with eyewatering amounts of money and power, and the present planetary shitshow is the best they can come up with. They’ve failed humankind and made everything worse for everyone, including themselves.

They have all the resources, none of the wisdom or foresight. No ideas. No blueprint for a future that doesn’t involve installing authoritarian bullies in all positions of power, wiping out the poor, and fucking the innocent, the vulnerable, the rare, and endangered. They take inhuman delight in the destruction of the natural world and living things. They know how to break and steal and lie and otherwise have nothing to offer. They hate us all and hate themselves more. They will end us if we let this go on too much longer.

That money is wasted on them. Take it back! Tax the billionaires back to the barter age!

Because the surefire way to get rid of the poor is to redistribute the money from the top. Musk could give away billions and still be a billionaire. He could empower people smarter and younger and less toxic than himself. They might be able to make something of the chance to change the world for the better in a way that he and his lucre-bloated cronies seem completely ill-equipped to do.

Instead, these morbidly wealth-obese disappointments would rather waste their time on Earth revitalising the worst failed ideologies of the 20^th century than come up with viable ideas for the future. Stale fascism is the utmost best their atrophied imaginations can conceive as an alternative political system?

If they get the chance to ruin lives, they reliably seize it. If they can strip environmental protections and sacrifice species to the depredations of the obsolete fossil fuel industries, they will fall over themselves to expedite extinction. If they get to Mars, which I’ll bet money they never will, they’ll fuck that up too, in the same hamfisted way they wreck and despoil everything they come into proximity with! King Midas in reverse.

As I said to Doug, we used to have showbusiness, now we have an international cadre of outlandish characters cosplaying politicians in a kind of pseudo-political reality show that must have constant cliffhangers, twists, and shocks to maintain ratings – war, perversion, crime, nukes, UFOs - and keep jaded viewers riveted to the antics of the desperately dull and breathtakingly ugly as they live out their Hollywood dreams by commandeering every available screen and media outlet. It’s The West Wing but with all the creeps from school pretending to run the country, while picking its pockets and feeling up its kids.

It has nothing to do with serious governance and relies on cartoonish chancers supplying over-the-top exhausting, repetitive performance and outrage. They have mistaken the boring administrative reality they occupy for some paranoid porno thriller. They love to choke the media with the accumulated fatberg of their banal, goings-on. Ultimately, they want to force us to watch them preen and posture 24 hours a day.

Why did we choose to elevate, valorise, reward and arm the very worst among us? What did we think would happen to us? Wasn’t this warning enough the first time around?

PIC: Irwin Hasen 1940 © DC Comics

Paddy O’Pinion, there, ladies, gentlemen and others! That’s them told, Paddy!

Bravo!

It might console Paddy somewhat that the UK electorate rejected the odious Nigel Farage and his Reform racists in yesterday’s Manchester by-election. The media has provided the favourable wind behind Farage’s sails in this country, obsessively promoting him and presenting his victory as a fait accompli but, as I suspected, ‘ordinary’ people have been watching what’s going on in the USA and, surprisingly, they don’t want rich fascist degenerates in charge of their lives, no matter what The Times or the BBC would prefer us to believe.

Naturally, Reform’s human Toby Jug has resorted to whining that the vote was rigged!

Meanwhile, in the real world, Momus has been releasing his new album Mannequin, song by song over the last few weeks. It’s nice to have a favourite artist who continues to create with no sign of stopping!

AND NOW THE ACTION’S TAKING PLACE

Sean – I’m always wary of translated work, although I’ve read a lot. I always feel I could be missing something essential that doesn’t survive the ride from Greek, Italian, French, or German to English.

Goethe’s two Faust dramas are rarely performed, so I don’t know how easy it would be to see it live. I tried to listen to an audio book to see if that was an option, but it felt a bit flat.

I agree plays are better attended than read but in this case Parts 1 and 2 together would take 21 hours to stage! From what I can determined there have only ever been two productions of the complete and unabridged work. You might as well read it!

I’m not a huge K-Pop fan – most of the songs sound very alike – but Blackpink’s Pink Venom was a good distillation of the approach.

I haven’t watched Generation Z yet, but Kill List is probably my favourite Ben Wheatley film, so I’m intrigued to hear there’s a connection. Did you catch Ben’s interview on the weekly 2000AD podcast?

Exclusive Ben Wheatley interview — In Orbit Every Wednesday

Bobby – I view Wilber’s integral schema as the ‘holarchy’ he prefers to call it – it’s more like the rings of a tree, than the rungs of a ladder – but I’ll check out the Washburn approach.

The new Agnosis looks great…

Patrick – I think you’re onto something - Epstein’s intellectual aspirations crashing vainly against the base desires of the intellectuals he courted and who courted him seems like part of it for sure.

I’m experiencing no disillusion whatsoever at the antics of the UK’s Royal Monsters! I expected no less from them. This is the least of it.

My reasons for getting into Buckingham Palace were occult and private. Otherwise, I’m afraid there are no privileges attached to an MBE, the lowest order of award given to people who have made positive contributions to their communities or excelled in their fields of endeavour. It doesn’t open any doors or confer any special advantages, I’m afraid. Nor does it necessarily predispose the recipient to the concept of Empire or Monarchy.

I didn’t tour with Deepak Chopra, (playing rhythm guitar with the Deepak Six) but I did do three panel discussions with him, (2006, 2008, 2011), at the San Diego Comicon when I was working on the Graphic India stuff with his son Gotham and Sharad Devarachan - 18 Days, Dinosaurs vs. Aliens and Avatarex. Chopra agreed to the talks as a way of promoting his son’s venture into comics publishing. I had dinner with them the night before the first panel in 2006 and enjoyed some high-level conversation about consciousness and spirituality as Chopra sounded me out.

The panels were great at the time, and all had a good upbeat energy, but as we’ve known since the Maharishi at least, you can’t trust pro gurus to be genuinely spiritual people. The pursuit of money and success, while trying to project a kind of ‘holy’ image, tends to screw it up.

This is the Aeon of Horus in full spate – systems crashing down, the law, the monarchy, the media, gurus - the gilded baby king’s rampage clearing the way for a rebuilding and replanting.

In the meantime, I fear you may be right – we live on Earth-3! Just the other day, the New York Daily News described the Trump administration as ‘The most powerful crime syndicate in history!’.

The Horus energy is playing itself out exactly as we were forewarned it would do. Everything is still following a blueprint, or at least it appears that way when viewed through the Thelemic filter that I find useful to make sense of our current chaotic times.

Osiris – fascinating. To some extent, what happens in China can be regarded as a rehearsal for the 21st century, so I’m always intrigued to hear about daily life there.

Jimmy – hope you enjoy the chat with Doug & I! Haven’t seen Monarch yet.

Jonathan – I love this! Engrossing and enlightening work!

Brkndwnbus – the headlines followed the podcast appearance, yes, but apparently the original podcast producers floated a couple of variants and the more contentious headline tested better. It seems the audience prefers to be outraged, which is a total turn off for me. I’m not interested in that kind of engagement. It’s really easy to say outrageous or provocative things to cause a fuss and get noticed, but there comes a time for a bit of dignity…

BrotherDuffy – there’s a bunch of annotations for the Flashlight/Red Racer story right here on Xanaduum – go to 4^th June 2024 - that will answer all your questions! Earth-36 is inspired by the Big Bang comics universe and its alternative takes on DC characters.

I planned a Superman Squad book which would feature the future Supermen from All-Star, along with others. JH Williams was up for drawing it at the time.

I haven’t seen any superhero comics for ages, including Kryptonite Spectrum but I rate Prince and Morazzo highly, and I’m sure I’d enjoy it!

I like the look of Absolute Martian Manhunter, but I’ve only read the first one. The spiky creature that’s following John Jones around in the upcoming issue reminded me of the ‘Mood 7 Mind Destroyer’ from Seven Soldiers The Shining Knight issue #2.

Persefonie – the Fool sounds more my speed! I’m fortunate enough to always be doing something new. It’s one of the joys of my life that new things constantly, and often unexpectedly, turn up to do!

By ‘Alan’, I take it you’re referring to Norfolk broadcaster Alan Partridge?

If not, ‘Alan’ and I often say similar things about similar things! Some like to frame it as a feud or even a war, oddly enough, but I like to think it’s pretty fucking obvious to anyone with a brain that whether or not we agree on everything, we’ve always been on the same side.

Attitude and swagger are charming qualities! Ignorance and hubris perhaps less so, but I wouldn’t be apologising for any of them!

Jonny – Larry David, eh? Maybe I could AI the photo and present it as a Young Larry pilot, where a bright, optimistic and upbeat youth becomes the grouch we all love, like Scrooge in reverse!

I preferred Milton to Dante. Milton’s language, narrative and characters are just so much more gripping and modern in their psychology. It’s been nearly 40 years and I’m keen to do a re-read. I’m afraid I skimmed the Paradiso. Hope you enjoy New X-Men. I was very much influenced by the Claremont stuff I loved when I was 21, so there’s a lot of that in there.

Another one down – I plan to take a wire brush, Brillo scouring pads, and an angle grinder into the shower to scrub off the reeking taint of the news…

See you next time!

PIC: Leigh Morrison 1987

Let’s All Be Fairies

MORAL DECAY AT THE HEART OF THE ATOM

Now flurries melting down the hills on the skyline look like stretch marks on taut skin. Louring heavy cloud, you can reach up and run your fingers through, followed by epic blue skies transparent like crystal to the whole horizon as the days cycle nervously through all possible weathers, searching for warmth and light.

Nights of stars so dense against the black they’re a blizzard of times past. Photons that set out in 2017 from Sirius finally reaching my eyes in these early days of the year we hurry through and try to forget, harried by cold, anticipating dusk at 6pm, then 7, until by the end of March it’s still light at 8pm.

I hope I’m not alone in feeling a curious new sense of purpose and possibility in the face of all evidence to the contrary. What form it takes remains to be seen but there’s a change in the weather, a subtle shift in the light, an altered zeitgeist, a vibe shunt that may be related to the massive solar storm we experienced on January 19th, (the most intense and powerful radiation burst we’ve been showered with since 2003), or simply the slow incremental arrival of spring.

Last week was working more intensely on this curio of a film project I sort of mentioned last time without giving anything away. It’s a time-sensitive dream of a lifetime kind of thing which no-one will guess until I reveal what it is!

Otherwise, I was unconvinced when I started watching, and quite dismissive of One Battle After Another until Sean Penn came into it. Penn’s riveting performance as the monstrous Steven Lockjaw hooked me and then the narrative dug in its spurs, and by the end I was glued the the screen, cheering on every twist.

Watching this in the wake of the events in Minneapolis, with that cartoonish wrestling heel Greg Bovino still fresh in the memory, gave the whole thing a timely frisson where it seemed to overlap with the news, or predict the news, or in some other way mate with the news…

And most of all, it felt like someone doing a deconstructed sequel to The Invisibles that stripped away all the pop art glamour to show the reality of revolutionary praxis and set it thirty years after the original, with a new generation of rebels. The racist Boomer CEO Dollimore - from The Invisibles Vol. 1, issue # ‘Season of Ghouls’ - could have been a member of the Christmas Adventurers’ Club.

Three thumbs up!

NEVER WHAT IT SEEMS

Speaking of everybody’s favourite stylish rebel outsiders, two years ago I was wrapping up the script for a proposed Amazon movie version of The Invisibles

In the script, there’s a fusion of the Harmony House stuff with the de Sade digression, where Harmony House takes the place of the Castle of Silling. were sacrificing kids to incarnate their extra-dimensional ‘god’ – the King-in-Chains. Just as the Aztecs gave up their children in a frenzy of blood to gods that fed on anguish, the willed, planned slaughter of children and animals occurring in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere was presented as a deliberate sacrifice designed to incarnate a ‘dark god’. It will be a thing of monstrous jigsaw biology. It will be vast and appalling and its survival will require a world hotter and more toxic than this one.

In the story, the seemingly senseless degradation of the environment and the natural world had this purpose - the billionaire servants of the Outer Church and its allies were terraforming, or more accurately xenoforming our planet to make it more hospitable for their ‘gods’ when they take monstrous apocalyptic physical forms. The Earth is therefore being heated, desertified, and poisoned so that it will become a Hell where human beings are enslaved, tortured, and farmed to produce the mass suffering the Archons dine upon…

I’ll bet you wish you hadn’t called the Samaritans help line now, love…

Anyway, Amazon wasn’t keen…

(If it all sounds a bit pessimistic and depressing, don’t panic - that’s exactly where our Invisibles come in to kick out the jams !)

That was two years ago. Three years ago I was working on an animated series for K-Pop girl group Blackpink. I loved it but like so many of these things, it went nowhere – although K-Pop Demon Hunters went on to cover some similar territory, so I was on the right track as usual, even if they wouldn’t believe me…

PRIVATE LIVES OF THE MASTER RACE

Speaking of fiction blooming into reality, some of the strangest e-mails in the unredacted Castle Epstein files have brought to light a little discussed aspect of the Duc de Blangis’ life of vice and libertinage. To wit, the repeated and tantalising references to a ‘Performing Crab Cabaret’, that have provoked wild speculation as to what might be alluded to in this curious phraseology.

Bombshell research has now revealed that the ‘Crab Cabaret’ was no codeword or metaphor but a plain and accurate description of what de Blangis referred to ‘the little Big Top in my pants!’

As the story goes, and following a particularly vigorous, painful, and unhygienic bout of grotesque sexual congress with Madame Desgranges - this coitus deliberately and perversely sought for the express purpose of cultivating a hybrid species of virulent filthy mega-pox he could pass on to his innocent victims - de Blangis was afflicted with a no less spectacular infestation of seething pubic lice, affectionately known as ‘crabs’, despite having six legs to the conventional beach crab’s eight!

After numerous unsuccessful, if comical, attempts to blitz the venereal invaders from that grizzled, matted sweatforest habitat known also as de Blangis’ steaming, unclean, and scarcely private parts, with searing malathion lotion and permethrin cream – in manner much like the USA’s attempts to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia - an itch-crazed de Blangis appeared to have developed ‘a new respect’, even fondness, for these lively and hardy specimens of the species Pthiris pubis and, we are told, made it his life’s work to train the beasts in the arts of clowning and seduction that he might set them to work in his employ as high class insect courtesans. No sooner was his mind made up than the jaded, diseased aristocrat set to his labours while the merry members of the phylum anthropoda of the phtiridae family of the class insecta that he hosted proved quick to learn a variety of simple tricks.

And so were born these weird microscopic entertainers, these wandering minstrels of the genital acres!

By the time a three-month training period was complete, the tiny obligate ectoparasites had learned to arrange themselves into ever-changing crotch displays - forming chevrons, stars, lovehearts, swastikas, and even personalised monograms. Under the Duc’s careful and attentive tutelage, some of the more advanced bugs went on to master a range of miniature musical instruments which allowed them to perform a limited repertoire of show tunes inaudible to the human ear. Others were taught to organise and play a form of 30-a-side football using a dainty crab egg or ‘nit’ as the microscopic soccer ‘ball’!

Indeed, certain of de Blangis’ debauched and depraved associates took to replaying famous FIFA World Cup tournament winning games across the tilting pitch of their inflamed groins as a prelude to buggering the servant boy…

THE MINISTER’S DAUGHTER’S IN LOVE WITH THE SNAKE

There follow some responses to your correspondence!

Sean – a literary behemoth then! Don’t know if All-Beard and No-Beard count as magicians, they’re just rival homeless pirates. The duelling wizards thing, which for me goes back Gwydion and Math in the Mabinogion, is a classic trope that works very well in superhero comics. It’s maybe a Cold War echo - the idea of vast contending powers with ordinary people caught in the backwash is always narratively appealing. There’s an argument to say all superhero stories are expressions of the ‘duelling wizards’ idea - Batman vs, the Joker, Superman vs. Luthor or Brainiac… they’re all ‘magical’, powerful creatures battling it out across the stage of the ‘real’ contemporary world they inhabit, while ordinary folk look on and hope for the best outcome.

I will always take the opportunity to interact with any cat, even when they’re entirely virtual like these cats and kittens from Assassins Creed Shadows – the mighty samurai Yasuke habitually makes time between bouts of spectacular slaughter to befriend a passing cat - a true man!

Felipe – the year is beginning to thaw from cold winter’s grip and new ideas are budding.

I don’t know what the intended viewing order was for The Prisoner, presumably something like the way it was broadcast! Fr. Theta is correct about the Village - or Villages - and its shifting location, and also in saying that the episodes are largely complete in themselves and could likely be viewed in any order (I would think Once Upon A Time and Fallout would always have to be taken as a pair but who knows…) the first episode I saw was The Girl Who Was Death which, as a child, was just about the greatest hour of TV I’d ever seen. I was immediately hooked, only to discover there were only two more episodes left, both of which also turned out to be the greatest things I’d seen! The Prisoner wasn’t repeated on TV until 1978 and, as there was no such thing as easily available videotape until the ‘80s, enthusiasts - the official fan/appreciation society was formed in 1977 - tended to rely on their magnificent memories when they got together to discuss the show!

I like Cronenberg in the round as an auteur director so yes, I’ll watch anything he does. I especially like Videodrome, The Fly, Naked Lunch and Crash. He was my first port of call, with Shivers, Rabid, and Scanners when I decided to watch horror movies. I’d always avoided scary films after experiencing spectacular nightmares based on seeing reviews and trailers for Alien and later, The Thing. Aged 25, I decided to confront my fears and with the help of the local video store binged on horror movies for a couple of weeks.

I soon realised my dreams and imaginings were so much worse than the actual rubber and plastic Fx, and grew to enjoy watching horror films, although I never developed a taste for gore or violence.

Kid Eternity was one of those projects that felt like it was done at a run and by the time I realised I’d written it, I’d moved on to the more psychedelic approach that characterized the work from Flex Mentallo on.

For a while, I tended to dismiss Kid Eternity as me doing work to order and creating one of those generic proto-Vertigo ‘adult’ takes on an innocent character from the archives but I must admit, aside from the heavy-handed drunken sex creep gran’pa sequence, I really enjoyed it when I did a re-read for this response.

I wrote it just after I’d read Ulysses and wanted to create a comic book version of the stream of consciousness effect but weaving in and out of multiple voices. As a result, there’s an interesting flow connecting everything in Kid Eternity, where the captions run into the dialogue and blend with song lyrics or crossword clues that show up. It has rhythm and a beat and is quite musical as a read. It’s an approach I’ve never really gone back to.

As research, I read the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost and there’s a sense of all that bleeding into this pulpy story (the ‘Canto’ divisions are the most obvious nod). The whole Val Hoffman strand was inspired by The Vanishing Hitchhiker, Jan Harold Brunvand’s book on urban legends, which compiled and analysed all those ‘friend of a friend’ stories, that were in some ways ancestors of creepypasta. I felt Val’s story was the weakest - she didn’t get enough time being sane to dramatise a descent into madness - and although I like how it ends, with the Waters of Forgetfulness, that beat hits awkwardly because it’s never quite emphasised how traumatised she’s been to justify wiping her memories!

Otherwise, there are loads of great ideas and I was delighted to find things I knew then that I thought I only figured out later! The Magical stuff is quite sophisticated and the central conceit of demons so sick and bored with life in Hell they make a plan to perfect the Earth and its people as a gift for God, in the hope he’ll re-admit them to Heaven, is still appealing.

Also interesting was the amount of material taken directly from dreams – the writer who comes to the city to fully chronicle its horrors then finds himself trapped by a neverending supply is from a dream, along with two titles I’d remembered, The Shrilling and The Punishment Cabinet. The vast Hell tree that Jerry Sullivan describes with millions of suffering souls pinned to its thorns is direct from a dream, as is the nightmarish Lamb of Torment.

In retrospect, I really like Kid Eternity! Thanks for encouraging me to do a re-read!

My favourite DC 1Million tie-ins were Starman and Mark Schulz’ Superman one.

The Doors are the kind of band where if you like them, you’ll like pretty much everything – it’s not a vast catalogue but there’s nothing else like it really. Riding the freeway or heading west on Sunset with LA Woman playing is the perfect fusion of place and sound. I’ve been listening to Not to Touch the Earth a lot recently.

Not to Touch the Earth

I’m with you on ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ – that story went very smoothly although, for me, the issue that worked most perfectly from mind to page at the time was Black Science 2 Part 3: Pavlov’s Dogs from The Invisibles Vol. 2 # 19 -the one with the double page spread of the Magic Mirror/God snared by the military industrial complex with its gargantuan Tesla coils - both drawn by Chris Weston! That was a good run of issues from Chris.

I think Volume 3 is my favourite on reflection.

Mason Lang is Bruce Wayne, representing the seemingly implausible notion of a billionaire with morals.

Have a fantastic time in Africa!

Jonathan – wow! You were serious about this! This is great! I’m just going to sit back and enjoy for a bit!

BrotherDuffy – ZenFascism was ideas that felt completely contradictory to Western human thinking – I had a very well developed take on this that disappeared along with the rest of the Marvel Boy material on an Apple Cube cataclysm decades ago, so my recall is sketchy but think on the mantra ‘All is One or Else’ and keep thinking and there you will find the essence of Zen Fascism as practised by these parallel universe Kree! They subscribe to a kind of wild eugenics, trawling the ‘Sea of Monsters’ for new and formerly unknown genetic material with which to enhance their species. Marvel Boy Noh-Varr is himself augmented with cockroach powers (in a nod to Spider-Man and Ant Man). I should mention that relaxing is not easy in the presence of Mercury - who can sometimes make you feel like you’ve eaten an espresso and amphetamine gateau - so make sure you’re getting break times!

I haven’t given much thought to the Fantastic Four movie but your interpretation seems sound. There’s definitely some kind of underlying alchemical structure - the FF represent the elements, of course, with the Thing being Earth, Reed being Water, Sue being Air and Johnny, fire, so those underpinnings are there to work with. When I was writing Fantastic Four 1234, I talked about the family as an ‘equation’ too.

The Kree vow on page 1 of Marvel Boy issue #6 is the Buddha Vow, with minor adaptations.

Philip – thanks! That makes it worthwhile!

Dorothy – every week! Even when there’s nothing to say!

Persefonie – well, this loops back nicely to the start and makes it look like there was symmetry all along! I’ve noticed The Invisibles cropping up all over, which I suppose is ironic in light of it being rejected for TV so often and again quite recently (and there’s some cop show on telly now that just ripped off the title and stuck it on another generic quirky detective ensemble).

In the ‘90s, I could see how conspiracy theory had the potential to become a kind of secular mythology, even religion, and tried to create a text to contain, study and manipulate that narrative ‘energy’, for want of a better word, and for want of a better world. It continues to do its work, not always in ways I fully anticipated.

As you say, we may not have access to the superdense material world technologies utilised by the Masters of the World but we can assemble unstoppable ideas and set them loose in the world of imagination just as easily as they can, and perhaps even more effectively…

The Chariot? That’s interesting but not unexpected. I was raised according to pacifist principles, which I tend to default to, so for me The Chariot is less the war-cart and more the dimension-traveling merkaba, the Mobius Chair (as seen here at Xanaduum on 21st June 2023).

Fr. Theta - that’s an essay I’d like to read! This is the first time I’ve thought about the parade of holographic Jor-El’s in pop culture and I’m suddenly fascinated!

I haven’t watched Small Prophets yet but I think I might like it, from what I’ve heard so far.

Bobby – Anytime! Our Leaders do love playing around in toxic shit, don’t they? They are connoisseurs of ill-will, bad temper, poisoned wine, broken promises, lies and betrayal! They seem to thrive on garbage, like cockroaches. The impression I get from them is that the more money you accumulate, the more you seem to want to spend it creating dirt, disease and dismay in your wake. There is the sense of a demonic fall into matter and corruption.

Osiris – it wasn’t reviews – if I got worked up over reviews, volcanic blood pressure would have struck me dead long ago - this was a bunch of alerts pinging from news site after news site that got under my skin. Each of them, and this has been going on for a week since I mentioned it, featured some variant of the headline ‘Superman writer says movie is shite’.

The podcaster, whom I like and enjoy talking to, has apologised but, for me it’s clarified a fundamental problem with the way these things are presented to the audience in such stark binary and oppositional terms, designed to provoke anger and conflict. ‘They’ deliberately stripped any nuance out of my response to the interview question about Superman for no other reason than to make people angry on the grounds that anger = engagement, which is a shite basis for communication and human interaction. If the only way to get people’s attention is to purposefully annoy them about trivial things, I’m not interested.

So, aside from a return visit with Doug Rushkoff’s Team Human, which I’m doing next week, no more podcasts for a while, and certainly none on the subject of comic books or superheroes.

Anyway, if I can’t be an old man about something now I’m an old man, when else can I enjoy this unique pleasure?!

There’s something very precise, even romantic, about the dreamy notion of looking after a baby cat in an otherwise empty Shanghai. Your everyday reality evokes one of those cozy AI clips accompanying ‘rainy night sounds for relaxation’ videos - dozing cat, city lights, steaming mug and writer stuff…

I’ve always been quite fascinated by Shanghai, mostly because of the indie bands. What’s it like?

What’s the time, Mr. Wolf?

Is it that time already…

PIC: KM 2025

TELL ME WHAT YOU DID FOR ALL MANKIND

Did You Give the World Some Love Today, Baby

There aren’t any gorillas or chimps in The Lion King!

The Lion King is set on the African savanna, specifically Kenya, and does not take place in the jungle. There’s a shaman baboon called Rafiki in the story but there are no gorillas and no chimps.

Kenya’s only rainforest jungle is Kakamega Forest, which has no gorilla or chimp populations either.

White House Press Secretary! There are no gorilla or ape characters in The Lion King!

This is the level we’ve sunk to in public discourse, like the acid blood of the Xenomorph dripping through to the sub-sub-sub-basement on its way to bowel and void…

A micro-Xanaduum this week seeing as how it’s only been a few days since the last one and nothing much has happened in between, unless you take an interest in the various comings and goings of filthy rich pervert dullards.

I liked the story I found about the young Kirby-esque super genius variously named Max Sidorov, Max Laughlin, and Max Loughan, who revealed calculations he’d made that seemed to suggest the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland had shifted the planet Earth into an ‘Event Horizon’-style alternate dimension in 2013, resulting in the acceleration of time and the accumulation of increasingly weird distortions as we fully detach from our former physical reality!

Science says it’s bollocks but I’m all over a good metaphor and I too have gone on record as saying that we shifted into an unpleasant alternative reality in 2013, so this ambiguous adolescent boffin gets my vote!

I spoke about that idea of a 2013 universe-merging event on a podcast not long ago and speaking of podcasts, I’ve done quite a few recently, but this week provoked a rethink…

I don’t know how many clickbait articles I’ve seen over the last few days, with some variation of a ‘Superman writer shits on James Gunn movie’ headline.

I’ve said several times that I thought James Gunn’s Superman was the best Superman film to date. Some of the choices James Gunn made are not those I would have made, but it’s not my movie! I’ve already done my version of Superman, my way! Gunn’s decisions all worked within the context of the story he chose to tell. I don’t like fascist, colonial Krypton because I so rarely see creatives committing unironically to the haunting, heartbreaking possibilities of a tragic doomed utopia - but for this story it provided a powerful twist that re-emphasised the themes of nature vs. nurture… as AI might say.

That’s pretty much the point I made on the podcast, only to see all nuance and consideration stripped away and reduced to a stark ‘I didn’t like it.’ headline designed to annoy fans of the film and provoke negative reactions.

Why not write ‘’I thought it really worked!’ says Superman writer?’ I also said that. Or would that tag fail to arouse the mean little cortisol spike that’s intended?

Anyway, not sure if I’ll do many more of these things, if this is how my words are going to be misrepresented…

A WORLD OF CONSEQUENCES

Some correspondence…

David – there are quite a few stylistic shifts in Luvkraft vs Kutulu as I attempted to recreate the same approach at different times, years apart, but hopefully the overloaded prose obscures the visible joins!

Have you picked up the other Laidlaw books – The Papers of Tony Veitch and Strange Loyalties? I haven’t read much noir work, so I have no idea if they all have that gloomy philosophical edge. McIlvanney was a poet too and I loved the books for their incredible use of language and the way they adapted the Dashiel Hammet/Raymond Chandler style into a Glasgow idiom.

The Just were always going to remain feckless. I figured there’d be enough Kardashians-style drama to make it work without a lot of traditional superhero action.

Sean – sounds fascinating! I’m looking forward to this! Is it going to be a book, or an online thing, or something else?

The best way to understand Magic is to practice Magic. There are dozens of books you can read about the various Magical systems and schools (Magic is a bit like Art in that respect – it has numerous ‘isms’) but all of those systems are elaborations of underlying phenomena of consciousness. The numerous schools of Magic have different frameworks, filters and hierarchies but they’re all dealing with and trying to account for what happens when you make radical changes to your consciousness in order to relate to the universe and its processes in a more dynamic, reciprocal way. Just as you can read a lot of porn or erotica without having sex, you can read a lot of great analyses of Magic - but nothing can take the place of hands-on experience and coming to your own conclusions!

I could never get into William Gibson or Neal Stephenson or any of that cybersnowpunk stuff (I sat beside Stephenson at dinner one time and found him oddly cold and humourless – perhaps just a bad day) but I’ve loved Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus since I was a teenager, and Goethe’s Faust Part One is one of my favourite things ever. Marlowe’s is a stark and driving morality horror, but Goethe explodes in a thousand psychedelic directions. Part Two, written at the end of his life is up there with Ulysses.

Mack the Knife is the only Threepenny Opera song I’m familiar with. I was never a big Brecht fan (although I really rate the Baal that Bowie did) – I remember seeing the Opera once when I was younger, presumably on TV, but I hated all the poverty and poncing and misery. Too much like the world outside my window. As a youngster, I wanted to escape from all that into a world of spaceships and superheroes, so I had very little patience for depictions of the kind of people who lived on my scheme and whose antics could be enjoyed for free.

Jonathan – tripleyou is like a waveform!

Bobby – that prey statistic explains so much! And fighting your way up the Pyramid, then sitting awkwardly on the pointy bit at the top waiting for the inevitable vicious challengers is an invitation to madness and soul sickness/death.

Societal ills are ever-present. You only have to watch that viral clip of Sir Ian McKellen on Colbert doing the speech from Sir Thomas More about immigrants to see how some things never seem to change no matter what century we’re in. One of these days these persistent problems will be revealed as something more complicated and crinkly, the gnarly edges and protrusions into history of some rucked and wrinkled flaw in humanity, like a scar or wound our species is carrying through time.

The Aeon of Ma’at was posited by Charles Stansfeld Jones/Frater Achad but Crowley broke with Jones over doctrinal differences. Crowley was committed to the Aeon of Horus while Jones saw the possibility of an Aeon of Truth and Justice superseding Horus.

My take on all this has the Aeon of Horus currently in full swing, with its highly visible avatar laying waste to the structures and certainties of the Aeon of Osiris (like the sanctity of the Word, or the Law…). Your notion of Ma’at as a non-local Aeon makes a lot of sense to me and fits with Kenneth Grant’s ‘shadow Aeon’ conceptualisation. It seems to me the work of breaking down and remaking systems need not occupy a vastly long time now that it’s underway - it’s easier to knock down a sandcastle or a pyramid than it is to construct one - so the chances of manifesting Ma’at sooner rather than later would appear to increase! There’s a feeling this year that the great Wheel is turning, so the Goddess may even show up before next Wednesday’s Xanaduum!..

PIC: Leigh Morrison 1986

The Shapes - I Saw Batman in the Launderette (1979)

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL

11 million bits of information enter and are processed by our brains. Of those 11 million bits only 0.0004% are registered in our conscious awareness.

What’s going on all the time, all around us, that we’re not equipped to see or understand?

It’s sure to be more fun than this!

Had a busy week writing other stuff – a couple of blue sky screen projects – and the news this week has been mostly too absurd and grotesque to make fun of, so a little late with this and just a quick in/out, hello and goodbye this gloomy Sat’day!

Our beloved leaders may have taken their politics from Orwell’s 1984, but a growing body of evidence points to de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom as the inspiration for their weekends away!

On a somewhat adjacent note, I’m convinced The Traitors is part of a massive propaganda exercise designed to make us feel that a) all people are basically bastards, and b) democracy’s surrender to outdated, outmoded fascism is inevitable. This is the narrative that’s being pushed relentlessly on TV, in newspapers, and online these days. It’s the Pyramid, up to its old tricks of zero sum winner-and-loser games.

I don’t think most people are ‘bastards’ deep down. Bad people want that to seem true, because it takes the heat off them and renders their wickedness a simple fact of human nature they cannot control. Most people, however, are not like them. Most people simply want to muddle through life without being brutalised and oppressed, if possible. Most people just want to have friends and family and animals around. They want to to enjoy their hobbies. Most people don’t want to live in a state of permanent, conflict, paranoia, and performative cruelty, eyes glued to a daily political soap opera where ugly old men vie for our attention with such desperation and persistence - anything to hog centre stage - it’s almost painful to witness. Most people are nothing like the driven, damaged, overpowered, underdeveloped individuals who dream of dragging us all back to feudal slavery and droit de seigneur. Most people should swap notes, affirm their commonalities, and reject the suicidal, anti-human vision of our future that so entices the hyper-rich.

I was fine with a quiet birthday celebration this year. If I can’t have a fabulous West Hollywood rooftop spree, forget it, and right now I have no stomach for visiting the USA.

Instead, Kristan and I went for lunch at Scott’s in Greenock with its fabulous views and calm, civilised atmosphere, then watched Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning (I hope so). I count myself a major Tom Cruise fan but feel he’s had too much work done on his lovely face and even the impressive stunts, all that hanging awkwardly off of biplane struts while his spongy Botoxed mug does its best to ripple in the velocity wind, seemed manic and overdone in this one rather than exciting. His aerial stunts were nerve-wracking in the wrong ways, like watching an elderly man trying not to fall off the bus. Tom’s a handsome Hollywood star and could easily have opted to age naturally with minimal fillers, cragging and sagging like Clint Eastwood or Sean Connery, but the harsh demands of silver screen stardom rooted in Tinseltown’s terror of time and its toil have pushed our Tom down the pre-embalmed, low-lighting route to no good end. Otherwise, the film was alright and rattled along amiably for most of its length even as it left any pretence at realism behind in favour of science fiction. Why oh why must Tom Cruise ever grow old?

I enjoyed the Wonder Man series – although I felt The Studio did the same kind of show with a greater level of absurdity, humour and fidelity to the real day-to-day of studio execs. Aside from that, it was pretty great. The two leads make an appealing, chalk and cheese team, but it’s Ben Kingsley’s show, without a doubt. He steals every scene. Trevor Slattery is one of those rare, wondrous characters where you can’t wait for him to show up again, to savour every nuance of the performance. That brilliant rise in tone and pitch he does at the end of every sentence! I was trying to remember who does that naturally and I’m sure it’s Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor…

These shows set in the Hollywood film and TV business are like going to work for me, in a warm, nostalgic way. Every location is fond and familiar, every character feels like someone I’ve met. When I see those palm lined boulevards, I’m reminded how much I loved being in LA.

Birthday brought a bunch of great books – I’m still reading The Cuckoo’s Lea, which has been a slow-paced and charming experience, like a ramble through the countryside and the history of place with a lyrical, knowledgeable guide. Last night’s chapter was about owls and how they exist for most of us purely as an uncanny night sound - ‘ule’ pronounced ‘ulloo’ in Old English being the root of their name. Ornithology was one of a series of brief, intense passions when I was around 10-12 years old and it’s been a comforting delight to revisit those enthusiasms. In similar vein, I also have A Bad Birdwatchers Companion by Simon Barnes and, veering off piste a little, The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination by Richard Mabey. Then there’s Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie by Alexander Larman, which I’ll get to when the time seems right.

I also got Mark Z. Danielewski’s series, The Familiar. Five of these big books were released, of a potential 27-volume series. The idea was to do something that would play like a long-form television show, but Danielewski stalled on five and Tom’s Crossing happened instead. Kristan managed to track down the first four – and from what I’ve read so far, they’re reminiscent of the structure of Cloud Atlas, with multiple characters in various global locations and time periods. Looking forward to digging in.

That was my week that was! I took out the boring and miserable bits!

THERE IS NO TIME THERE IS NO SPACE

Following on from my short story Peter’s Thoughts which appeared here last week, there’s a brief piece about the genesis of the story at the Luna Press website. These little afterword bits accompanied the release of the anthology and this was mine:

Grant Morrison: Nova Scotia Vol 2 Anthology. Order Now!

SHADDAP YOU FACE!

Bobby – it’s alright so far. I expected to be a lot more decrepit but aside from some arthritic pain and worsening eyesight, I feel the same as I’ve done for decades. There must shortly come a time when the decline gets to be obvious but so far no big differences…

School is easy to hate, even without the violence…

Interested to see what you do with the Heap! In my shite version, the shambling remnants of Baron Eric Von Emmelman form a terrifying agglomeration with the Pile, the Mound, the Dune, the Hump… each a different, living mass of sentient soil, or sand, dung or plastic… may the Lord have mercy on our souls…

Jwparrishiii – Thanks! I’m more interested in making up my own stuff right now but that could change. I’ve done Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman (the New 52 Superman in Action Comics was close to what I’d do with a public domain Superman) and things like Winnie the Pooh or Bambi were well served by Disney and don’t interest me much.

Sean – Apollyon was Fantomex, but Wade Wilson is a good alternative, so I’ll leave it open as a possibility. The Filth was specifically modelled on Captain Scarlet. Captain Scarlet was itself based on Christian iconography – the good guys were headquartered on Cloudbase, with the ‘Angels’ jet fighter squadron. Colonel White was God and the SPECTRUM personnel were his messengers and soldiers. Captain Scarlet, who dies and is resurrected is Christ, Captain Black is the Antichrist, and the Mysterons on Mars are Satan and the demons in Hell.

For The Filth, I turned the metaphor upside down to create a Qlippothic version of SPECTRUM based not in the sky but the dirt. The colour-coded uniforms and future technology of the Hand organisation were inspired by Captain Scarlet.

The wigs worn by Hand agents were a nod to the ‘antistatic’ metallic bobs worn by the silver Moonbase girls from Anderson’s UFO, his live action show for an adult audience. I love that show – with it’s incredibly well-designed vision of how the near future would look if the ‘60s never had to end but just got more futuristic - and there’s some of that DNA in The Filth. UFO has a fantastic episode where heartthrob Paul Foster is marooned far from the Moonbase, and has to team up with a crashed alien to get back home, with tragic results. You can see echoes of that story in The Filth issue #5, with Ned Slade and Arno Von Vermun trapped in the microscopic world of the Crack.

You can shake the Devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding but by that time it’s probably too late…

Kevin S. – Steed and Mrs. Peel was pitched to me. They knew I was a fan of the show and it gave me the opportunity to interview Patrick Macnee (he was fantastic, the interview was never published, I still have the cassette tape in a box somewhere). I based the story on my memories of the show’s psychedelic period, where it was all killer undertakers, lethal cricket matches, and mysterious gentlemen’s clubs, and I tried to incorporate as many of the tropes of the time as I could.

Jonathan – phew! I thought I was going to have to answer that one again!

BrotherDuffy – sounds like you’re doing it right. you should check out Jack Kirby’s Makkari from The Eternals, for an updated Kirby take on Mercury. There’s also Marvel’s Quicksilver, using the poetic name for the element Mercury. These super-characters are useful as modern realisations of ancient powers. Mercury comes across as younger and less grand than Hermes but they are part of the same complex of concepts and what works for Hermes usually works for Mercury. I deal often with Mercury as Mercurius, a blended alchemical spirit which combines qualities of masculine/feminine and other binaries (as depicted on our last Tarot card, Art, here at Xanaduum on December 10 2025). Mercury likes speedy foods – so things like coffee, Red Bull or Monster Energy. For a more healthy approach, carrots are apparently Mercurial, perhaps because they’re orange, which is also Mercury’s colour. Almonds, ginseng and peppermint resonate with Mercury. Anything that brings energy, or a ‘buzz’. Alphabet Soup for sure! Jasmine incense is useful too!

Mark – I grew up loving all of those movies. Anything with Tom Courtenay, Rita Tushingham, and Murray Melvin in any combination. Billy Liar is one of the best of those ‘kitchen sink’ movies. A Taste of Honey is another cracker and the slightly later Up The Junction has a killer soundtrack by Manfred Mann, which I still listen to all the time.

Ken – I should never have said whatever you do, don’t check out Jethro! I wasn’t familiar with Stewart Millard’s channel but I am now! I remember all that stuff too well! And more….

Patrick – that was great…

fylGja – I’ve been fortunate enough to spend my life doing what I love for a living. I’ve been able to write superhero stories, travel and consume pop culture as a job. I’ve chosen to never raise children so my life has probably been a little bit less demanding than your mom’s!

I’m genuinely surprised that you have personal experience of belt and soap! I thought we’d left that era of savagery behind! What the fuck is wrong with adults sometimes?

As I suspected, your own interpretations of the bullet metaphors are more complex than my exhortation to think about what they have to say about life. The new My Chem shows are attempting to process and purify some dark cultural forces. I’m not surprised there’s some weird fallout.

Otherwise, I’m with you. The destructive powers set loose from their cages to wreak havoc on the 21st century are ancient, and ancient remedies may turn out to be useful. The Pyramid, the A-number #1 Eye in the Triangle at the top of the heap seems all-powerful but its end is foreshadowed and it will be superseded as the dominant social model by the Network. How that handover will be effected remains to be seen but there are numerous indicators of where it’s all going. As you say, it is imperative right now to maintain and strengthen our networks in the local community, online and beyond.

Ken - there are a ton of people to do what I do when I’m no longer there to do it! We pass on the electricity like a baton in a relay race…

Ks – I did not expect so many of you to have memories of brutal corporal punishment! In terms of the Qlippoth and the Abyss, I was following the so-called ‘Lightning Path’ or ‘Magician’s Path’ up the Tree of Life structure from the material world to non-dual awareness, so I knew that I’d get to the Abyss after my sojourn in Chesed (which produced All Star Superman among other things), so I took the formal Oath of the Abyss and chose to confront the experience head on and aware, with painful and enlightening results (arduous, agonising, and ego-annihilating in every sense, it nevertheless gave birth to my Batman run, Final Crisis, Nameless and Annihilator). I knew it was over when I’d exhausted the distinctive ‘taste’ of its energy was used up. It’s like the weather changing. The whole world looks different, viewed through a completely different filter. The release from the Abyss into the sphere of Binah, a state of consciousness governed by the Prime Feminine generative principle was marked by the arrival of two black girl kittens (Jinks ran away but we still have Jet - and the black panther is sacred to Binah) and various other significant events. That period was, as promised, intensely ‘feminine’ in its texture and influence and out of it came my Wonder Woman books, the Brave New World TV adaptation and Luda. I chose to end that period in May 2023, again because I felt a sense of completion and a change in the seasons, and since then I’ve been exploring the intense and directionless creative energies of Chokmah (I struggled with their formless ferocity at first until I remembered that these energies require to be incubated in the matrix of Binah, and there given form. Otherwise, they’re as much use as a chocolate oven.

Brkndwnbus - thanks!

Persefonnie – there were, there are, and there definitely would be Chaos witches among the St. Trinian’s girls! Thanks for the Glass Beams raga track. I loved that!

RaVi –

The Singing Detective is foundational for me and as you say others of my generation of writers. If you’ve been delving into that era, Edge of Darkness is the next big influential one. Very different from the Potter stuff, it’s a detective eco-thriller that veers into wild cosmic and mystical territory.

I wanted to write novels for most of my childhood and teens, and managed two – a short thing when I was 8, The People of the Asteroids, and another proper one called The Winds of Chaos which I finished when I was 19. In my teens, I was very much influenced by the great drama on the BBC – writers like Dennis Potter, David Rudkin. Alan Bleadale, Alan Bennett, Stephen Poliakoff – and became more interested in writing for television. I was diverted by the lure of the comics boom in the early 80s and found there a place where I could shine without too much editorial oversight. I finally got to write for TV and the screen when I went to Hollywood but as I’ve said before, aside from Happy! and Brave New World (and fingers crossed for the show I worked on last year) most of my work for TV, and there’s been a lot over the last 20 years, was never produced and has never been seen!

Is it that time already?..