Growing up, I’d immersed myself in the life stories of Byron and Shelley, Rimbaud and Verlaine, and the Beats, and knew by heart the biographies of the sixties psychonauts like Kesey, Timothy Leary, and John Lilly. They were my perhaps dubious role models in my project of reinvention. I set about debugging my glitchy personality with Robert Anton Wilson’s Quantum Psychology, NLP, acting classes, tae kwon do lessons, and yoga sessions. The Arkham Asylum royalties gave me an opportunity to play the part of “writer” to the hilt. I pictured myself lolling with floppy, frilled cuffs like Thomas Chatterton, suicidal and glamorous on a chaise, quaffing absinthe and laudanum as I dipped a peacock quill into luminous green ink and scrawled feverish fantasies by black candlelight. Insensate on the South Seas, scandalous in the Forum. I longed to experience the full freedom and scale of the archetypal writer’s world and made up my mind to leave a biography as good as the ones I was consuming so avidly.
I’d already contrived to meet Animal Man in his own environment, creating with the help of artist Chaz Truog what I came to call a “fiction suit.” This was a way of “descending,” as I saw it, into the 2-D world, where I could interact directly with the inhabitants of the DC universe on their own terms, in the form of a drawing.
I wanted to take that direct contact idea further, to explore the interface between fact and fiction in a more personally involving way. I wondered if I could arrange an exchange that would affect my life and real world as profoundly as it would the paper world.
As I brought Doom Patrol to a close after four years of monthly surrealist folderol, Lonely Planet guides were being spread on the carpet to help map out a year away from comics and routine.
I plotted an immense path around the world via India, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Java, Bali, Australia, Fiji, Los Angeles, and New Mexico before coming home, I hoped, transformed.
On my first night in the dull hotel near the airport, I celebrated this personal rebirth by taking an electric razor to hair that was undeniably thinning. It felt ritualistic; my fear of going bald and becoming immediately unattractive was faced with a drift of brown hair on the floor. In the mirror was a blank character design, a smiley face. I could now revamp myself as I had Animal Man, the Doom Patrol, and Batman. I was becoming a superhero.
It didn’t begin as well as I’d hoped. Culture shocked, dripping in the heat, and unable to move in the ramshackle dream city streets of New Delhi without attracting a thousand touts offering water, shoe shines, or ear cleaning services, I’d never seen beggars with noses munched down to knotholes by leprosy. The days were spent staggering through the overload, the nights were homesick and lonely in a windowless room, at the soul’s lowest sump, and far from home, bald, thirty-two, out of my depth.
It all started to get better on a taxi ride to Agra. I’ll never forget the turtle crawling laboriously across a road between thundering eighteen-wheel juggernauts. I began to enjoy myself. Nobody knew me, nobody expected anything from me, and I was forced to rely on resources I never knew I had.
Three days on the state bus from Leh to Manali down through vertiginous Himalayan passes with no guardrails and the burned-out shells of state buses evenly spaced, far, far below.
A train ride from Bangkok, through the mountains of Malaysia. The Snake Temples on Penang. On a bus ride to Singapore via Kuala Lumpur, its multicolored Futurist pinnacles as fabulous as Oz in the nighttime half-awake.
There were magic mushroom omelets in Jogjakarta, motorbike rides to the scrolling, humid ruins of Prambanan and Borobodur, that colossal grounded flying saucer mandala where the story of life is cast in terraced stone.
In a tropical garden in Bali, glad to be alive, drunk on oxygen and the explosive fragrance of tropical flowers, I imagined myself going around and around the world like a satellite, resting up in hotel gardens between fleapits, sending scripts from Pacific atolls and rain forest villages. My friend Emilio, from the homemade-comics afternoons in the seventies, had relocated to the USA to meet his estranged father before winding up just outside Santa Fe, where he found work and accommodation with a young and prominent Zuni ceramic artist. I spent a life-changing few days on the Pueblo, ending with an acid trip on the sacred mesa overlooking the Rio Grande, as it flowed like a river of chocolate through a dawn Eden. My mind felt ten thousand times bigger. I’d found my SHAZAM!
Back home, I felt reborn, more confident, creative, and alive than ever before. To my surprise and delight, the girls loved my bald head and constantly wanted to touch it. So much for all those years worrying about hair loss.
I had to get deeper into the magical experiments, too. I’d read about the cross-dressing berdache tradition of shamanism, and decided I could do a glossy, chaos magic, nineties version of that as a way of shaking out my identity and becoming my own complete opposite. A few fetish-wear catalogues later, and I’d assembled a shiny disguise kit that put Jimmy Olsen’s to shame. The clothes and makeup allowed me to transform into a female alter ego I now created to stand in for me during the darker magical operations I was undertaking. I was entering some very bizarre areas of consciousness and found that the “girl” was smarter and more courageous and could more easily negotiate with and fend off predatory “demonic” entities. At least that was my personal justification for some epically odd behavior. If it helps, consider demons to be “bad” states of mind, crippling neuroses or fears. Dressed in black vinyl with six-inch heels, showgirl makeup, and a blond wig, I began to traffic freely with angelic forces, Voudon loa, Enochian Kings and Seniors, the scum of the Goetia and the Tunnels of Set, Lovecraftian entities, and other fictional characters and aliens. I performed rituals of all kinds to see if they worked, and they delivered every time. As mad as it sounds, and it sounds a bit mental even to me these days, all of this was done with the rigor and precision of scientific experiment.
If I found some dangerous or interesting ritual in a book, I’d give it a go to see what effect it would have on my consciousness. The results were never less than revelatory. Psychedelics gave these experiences the fidelity of a Star Trek 3-D holodeck experience. Demons and angels had faces now of white-hot, razor-edged purity or grotesque puzzle box monstrosity. Gods and fictional creatures had forms that seemed tangible. These beings could be painted and rendered from memory, and they fit the descriptions left by intrepid psychonauts who’d been this way before me.
I have no real explanations for a lot of this but numerous speculations that may find their way into another book one day. I simply allowed all this to happen under some vague direction from a diamond-interior Protestant straight-edge self that seemed to never lose control. I carefully filmed and recorded these rituals, during which I could be heard to speak in tongues, and with multiple voices—some male, some female, some utterly inhuman. Every day was a party. I would drink champagne or take mushrooms and write comics. My friends came around to drink, take mushrooms, and make music. Every fortnight my teenage girlfriend would visit from London to join in the fun or otherwise.
When I got bored, I’d buy a plane ticket and fly somewhere I’d never been before. The world felt intensely awake and alive, as if I’d somehow learned to dance with it a little. My comics began to reflect this new freedom, becoming looser, more personal, and more psychedelic in that word’s literal sense of “mind manifesting.” It was hard to believe that people were paying me for what I soon came to realize was something close to self-therapy. I could assume only that my problems and doubts, my hopes and dreams, were shared by many others who could relate to the way I was framing them as fiction.
In 1993 I toured America in the company of my Zenith collaborator Steve Yeowell and artist Jill Thompson. Jill was a striking alternative girl in her early twenties who drew herself into everything she did. Her work had a quirky cobwebby line with an instinctive grasp of composition and character acting. Together the three of us lurched across the States, winding up in San Francisco to live out my undemanding dreams of visiting City Lights bookshop dressed in a hoop
ed black-and-white T-shirt, leather jacket, peaked cap, and Beatle boots. I’d decided to let the hair on my shaved head grow back, and it had reached a particularly wispy stage of its return, like cat grass sprouting from a window box, hence the leather hat, which I’d convinced myself made me look like a Beat writer. Drunk in the Vesuvio Café, where heroes like Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs had gathered before I was born, I felt I’d finally become who I was meant to be and no longer cared what anyone thought.
“You should be in a cage,” the writer Tom Peyer observed as we all danced like strippers on MDMA during the “50 Years of LSD” celebration commemorating Albert Hofmann’s synthesis of the wonder chemical.
Next day, still sparkling merrily and wafting through Golden Gate Park, pinning flowers to Peyer’s curly locks, we all vowed to work on something new and amazing together, something that could change the world. Reading Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, tripping at thirty-three thousand feet, aged thirty-three, like Jesus in a post–Cold War international thaw, at large in a charmed era of dancing and hugging and doing what thou wilt in exotic latitudes, I was happy, I was cured all right, and my straight-edge years had left me looking ten years fresher than I actually was.
Another minifortune arrived in the mail courtesy of those three issues of Spawn for Todd McFarlane, and it looked as though I could fund this boho lifestyle indefinitely. I imagined writing one hundred pages of comics a year and making enough wedge to live large for another five, but the bubble was already popping, and I had to admit that this period of grace was unlikely to last for much longer.
The media interest in comics had subsided. The speculators who had entered the comics market now began to leave, pulling the business down around them as they beat a hasty retreat. The boom, like the Dutch “tulip mania” economic bubble of 1636–37, had been artificially generated. There was big money, it was true, in collectibles, number one issues, and special printings, but the inflated prices relied on scarcity and the endless multiple-foil-enhanced, 3-D holographic variants put out by Image and Marvel in particular were in anything but short supply.
The good times were coming to an end, but more important for me, I missed the discipline of regular writing and needed a forum to express my newly forming worldview. I was happy to get back to work on a new kind of comic book.
I decided to do a book where I could contain and address all my interests. I already had the vague concept of a vast occult conspiracy thriller set in the real world, in the present day. I flipped through the ever-reliable Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable in search of odd character names and interesting ideas, and that’s where I found the title The Invisibles and the names of several of the lead characters, like Ragged Robin—who Jill drew to resemble herself—King Mob, and the transvestite witch Lord Fanny.
The characters were all parts of me mixed with people I knew: Dane McGowan, the Liverpool street punk destined to be a bodhisattva, was the working-class cynic who still kept me in check. King Mob was the art school fashion-conscious chaos magician. Ragged Robin was my sensible anima; Lord Fanny, my indomitable tranny witch disguise; and Boy, the practical, pragmatic voice of reason that made sure I always paid my bills and taxes and fed the cats. Even the villains, blind Gnostic forces of repression, tyranny, and cruelty, were my own self-hate and fear given form, named and tamed like demons.
King Mob was the action lead. He was shaven headed, my age, and he’d made his money as a writer. As an anarchist activist, he borrowed some of his praxis from my dad. He was a Tantric sex adept, a kung fu master, and wore slick leather coats, PVC pants, and mirror shades. King Mob was the punk James Bond, the archetypal Matrix dude five years before the release of that movie, and like Neo, like Morpheus, he had come to understand that his entire universe was embedded in something bigger and stranger. I intended to blend my life, my appearance, my world with his until I could no longer tell us apart. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.
The world of The Invisibles was our own. I took care to keep it current, with the names of bands and movies and references to events of the day. It was a world so close to our own, it even had the comic The Invisibles in it, in a scene where King Mob reads and comments on the comic as a glamorization of his own real life. The model had to be perfect. The voodoo doll universe I was making needed to map our own closely to allow me to slip between them across the permeable page surface.
Having set this up, I wanted people to keep reading. I had to promise revelations, and so I promised the Secret of the Universe—not quite sure what I was going to deliver but certain I’d figure it out.
In February 1994, depressed and becalmed in Scotland’s winter monochrome, I bought a plane ticket to New Zealand with the intention of bungee jumping my way back to happiness.
As I stood, questioning my impulsiveness, on the edge of a short plank of wood extending from the Kawarau River Bridge, heavy elastic rope tied around my ankles, I held in my tightly clenched fist a magical sigil drawn on paper. The idea was to launch the Invisibles project with a bang, “lighting the blue touch paper,” as it were, of a dynamic “hypersigil”—a magical spell in comic-book form that would have the power to change lives, and maybe the world.
“What do you do for a living?” the operator asked, in an effort to distract me from the single shrieking note of fear in my head.
I had to think about it.
“I’m a writer,” I remembered through the squall of neuronal white noise. “I write Batman comics.”
“Well, this’ll give you something to write about, mate.” He grinned, counting down from five.
By the time he reached “three,” I could feel the last scrappy “Don’t do it!” thoughts raining like numbers off a screen. Then there was nothing going on in there at all.
“One!” he said. The whole horizon took on the static, eternal quality of a print on a hotel bedroom wall.
And off I went.
I hurled the sigil down into that moment of whipping chaos, before being bounced to a stop like a yo-yo under the arched eyebrow structures of the bridge above me. The surge of endorphins afterward brought an ecstatic rush that powered me all the way to Auckland, where I stumbled across a rare copy of Michael Bertiaux’s fabled grimoire The Voudon Gnostic Workbook, containing descriptions and names for the scorpion gods I’d encountered the year previously. The spell was off to a good start, I reckoned.
Then, in spring that year, came Kathmandu. The idea for this expedition had been triggered by a Dan Cruickshank documentary that my friend and Mixers bandmate Ulric and I caught on TV one night, in which the veteran TV host tramped his way through India, Nepal, and Tibet in the footsteps of the Buddha. We were particularly intrigued by Cruickshank’s description of the Shwayambunath temple in Kathmandu valley. There are 365 steps leading up the hill to the temple on top, and it’s said that any pilgrim who is able to ascend the steps on one lungful of air will attain enlightenment in this life.
The climb was so easy as to be barely remarkable for two fit young men. Beyond a beaming smile from a wizened Buddhist monk that felt like a brief audience with Yoda, nothing much happened that day. We sat drinking lemon soda, or wandered the refuse-mountain embankments of the Bagmati River, where huge black boars immersed their bodies in the sour fumes, cooling off in the yellow fever heat of another yelping, clattering, reeking day.
After a few drunken days in Thamel, the town’s tourist sink, we crawled back to our room at the Vajra Hotel, the House of the Lightning Bolt, where on our last day before leaving, Ulric felt ill and retired to bed. The bell-ringing, dog-barking cacophony of Kathmandu life went on, as it did all day and all night. I went up to the roof garden with my notebook. The Kathmandu football team was playing Bhaktapur in a nearby field, like a cargo cult version of the World Cup—the impromptu pitch marked out by the spectators, the teams in T-shirts and shorts.
I watched for a while, then retired to my deckchair, where I st
arted writing an introductory text piece for the second issue of The Invisibles at the same time as composing an essay I’d been commissioned to write for the late Simon Dwyer’s much-missed alternative culture journal Rapid Eye.
And then it all kicked off as the cheers from the crowd warped into a high-powered whine that might have been starship engine turbines. I looked up from my notebook to see the Shwayambunath temple rearrange itself like a Transformer into some kind of chrome lionlike configuration with exhaust pipes and tubular spirit conduits, seeming to blast its raw holiness into the sky as raging searchlight storms. Overwhelmed, I stumbled back downstairs in the grip of an immense seismic shift in awareness that I could not, hand on heart, attribute to the sole action of the tiny piece of hashish I’d ingested. I negotiated wildly distorting spiral stone steps and candles on the way down from the roof, to flop on my bunk and hang on tight. Ulric was asleep on the other side of the room. I could feel something enormous, unseen, squeezing down the narrow corridor of oncoming moments, looking for me.
I began to lose contact with the physical reality of the room, seeing in its place cranky ancient streets, and leaning ceramic houses haunted by gnomish presences, the current dragging me deeper through hallucinatory ancestral wynds and crabby cobbled alleyways that felt like the archaic half-remembered dreams of childhood.
The effect intensified.
Now there were what I can describe only as “presences” emerging from the walls and furniture. Perhaps someone else would call these rippling, dribbling blobs of pure holographic meta-material angels or extraterrestrials. They were made of what might have been mercury or flowing liquid chrome and informed me that I had caused this to happen and now had to deal with the consequences of my actions. Where did I want to go?
I had no idea. Alpha Centauri was the first thing that came to mind, and the thought was followed by a toppling, spiraling “stargate” effect that completely erased the room from my consciousness and replaced it with another reality.