QAA Podcast - Grant Morrison & Chaos Magick (E296)

Episode Date: September 29, 2024

Guest writers Ben Clarkson and Matt Bors, the creators behind the graphic novel series “Justice Warriors”, take Julian and Jake on a twisted journey into the ideology of Grant Morrison. Morrison is responsible for the Invisibles and a seven-year Batman run considered by fans to be some of the best Batman comics written to date. He also claims that he’s been abducted by aliens in Kathmandu, and that we’re all giant centipedes weaving through time and space. Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/QAA Matt Bors: https://x.com/MattBors / mattbors.com/books Ben Clarkson: https://x.com/benclarkson / https://thebenclarkson.com Justice Warriors: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Justice-Warriors-Vol-2/Matt-Bors/JUSTICE-WARRIORS/9781952090325 Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com) https://qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Keep mehame If you're hearing this, well done, you've found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, Premium Episode 296, Grant Morrison, and Chaos Magic. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakatansky, Julian Fields, Ben Clarkson, and Matt Bors. Election time is upon us, and so is another installment of Justice Warriors, which is the comic book drawn and written by our guests, Ben Clarkson, and Matt Bors. This time, the gross mutant cops from Bubble City return, but with a new subtitle. Vote harder. So can you explain to us, please, what does it mean to vote harder?

How can one make their vote a little harder this season? Well, you only get one, so you can't vote more, you can't vote higher or lower. You've got to vote harder. Well, that's unless you live in the high rise, in the high rise of Bubble City, you get a couple thousand votes. but if you're on the very lowest level, you only get one. If you've got good square footage, you can leverage your square footage to more votes. That's how you vote harder, is that you own property in Bubble City, and then your vote is disproportionately weighed more than the mutants in the uninhabited zone.

Yes. So for the uninitiated listener, Matt Boers and I, my beautiful compatriot, who's guesting with me today, I'm Ben Clarkson. We have a comic book, which is a satire of elections. in an insane city called Bubble City and it's a riproarious insane, disgusting,

ultra-violent smorgas board for whoever would like to read it. Yeah, the first one was so good, you know, I was like, what are they going to do? What are they going to do? Can they make a good sequel to it?

And it's amazing. I honestly, I love both of them so much. I was saying before we hit the record button that the boys had really outdone themselves. in this book. Oh, fuck me. My goddamn alarm. The boys had really,

really outdone themselves in this book. The world building, the art, the just packing like every page with little, like this is a horrible description and please don't take offense,

but like where's Waldo? Where like wherever you look, there's actually more of the story being told in like the tiniest corner of the panels if you're looking and stuff happening between the panels, something that I had really never seen in a graphic novel where you're actually sort of advancing the story in the space between the panels where like the white should

be. I mean, and it's really funny and it's ultraviolet and it's got good politics and yeah, it's just, I'm like halfway through it. I'm just, I can't wait to finish it. I was actually saying that I want to get that, you know, they send us a PDF, but I want to get the hard copy because I want to see it like on the page. Like that's how into it I am. I am. There's, like, a whole secret plot in the book in, like, background details that only gets unlocked in one of the last, you get a clue on what to look for in one of the last panels of the book. And then you can read it again, and there's, like, this whole conspiracy happening underneath the plot of the book. So I really wanted to make it, like, you're a conspiracy theorist while reading the book. That is so dope.

It really, it made me feel like I was a kid again reading, like, something like the 11th hour. I don't know if you guys were familiar with that. children's book where there is so much going on and these stories that are unfolding and there's clues and stuff to bake. I mean, there's really like this kind of like childlike sort of like imagination to it, but with, you know, totally cynical politics as one would have like, you know, nowadays. There's lots of a dating app stuff, which is fun. Yeah. Everyone is super online in the world of justice warriors. Everyone is hysterical from the police chief to the celebrity pop star mayor on down to the police and the mutants

and the people even trying to change the world for better. Everyone's a little bit crazy and way too online. I like that you're kind of populist pseudo-left guy is just a woman who's been fused to

like a kind of tank, but it looks like a big jelly bean type thing. I mean, she's a literal childless cat lady. Yeah. She's a mutant cat who I guess like Kamala is a cop in a sense she is a tax tank operator yes she's a tax tank operator it goes door to door if you don't put your tax money in through the point of

sales service on the tank's nose it'll burn down your house yeah and and and she's introduced she's introduced like essentially like having a fire fight with like an HOA gang like like in like something out of like dread where you know they're in like the you know the firing out of the windows and she's firing laser cannons back at them. And then, yeah, once she gets fused to the body of the tank, she decides she's going to take a run at politics, which is, which is, uh, hilarious. It makes sense. We keep you guessing through the whole book, what's going to happen. Once you're melted to a fuselage, like, it's time for politics. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, she kind of has, like, a superhero origin in a way. Like, uh, she gets struck, the tank gets struck by lightning,

which is what fuses her to it. And then it also kind of, uh, gets her woe. in a way. Like she realizes that she's been part of this evil system. The mainframe sort of overloads her brain with all of the stuff that she's taken part in over the years. And then she sees an election poster and basically says, fuck this. I'm, you know, I'm in a tank now. Like, I should be in charge. She's right. I wish we had more actual tank candidates. I want more mex. Yeah, more mix than the election. I totally agree. Tell me you wouldn't vote for them. Yeah. Well, we're approaching, We're approaching like my favorite, one of my favorite sort of like B-80s movies, which is robot jocks, where like political conflict was settled by two guys from like, you know, war in countries

just like plopped in like giant mechs to like battle it out in front of an arena. That sounds very similar to maybe our plan for number three. Well, you should probably watch robot jocks in that case. If nothing else to get ideas, a lot of people don't know about robot jocks. But it's out there. YouTube for free. Wow, thank you. Trump maybe endorse the comic and tell people that they can follow the link.

Oh, please. Justice Warriors is a great comic. It may or may not have predicted my assassination attempt. I'd want to ask the authors about that. The Secret Service wants to ask them a couple of questions, too. You can buy the book wherever graphic novels are sold. And Ben Clark's and Matt Boar's really great guys. They've got a horrible deal.

Coming on the QAA podcast. to talk to two idiots, one more of an idiot than the other, but which one it is remains to be seen. Poor guys got to talk for a while. We made them write the episode, and we didn't do very much work at all, so horrible deal, but great authors, great artists, good guys all around, big Trump fans, and the CIA is going to be asking them some questions about things that are in the book. Thank you so much, Donald. A beautiful, beautiful Trump impersonation. do have so we do have multiple assassination attempts in the book i'll three of them in fact i won't say how many are successful but we have at least three so we're outpacing reality so far but there's

still an october surprise to go yeah if there's a laser carving uh someone's face into the sun then we're gonna we're gonna take up some plagiarism charges with reality well if if trump did read the book and i should say it you know we're not trying to do like trump and Kamala, it's not like that, right? No, it really isn't. But if Trump saw that idea, he would 100% want to do it. My faith? Yeah, don't give him any ideas.

But that's actually one of the things that I really liked about that. It's so often when you have fiction that is making, you know, satire or commentary on a political, you know, on the sort of current political hellscape, you can often see one-to-one. You know, okay, it's one-to-one, okay, this is supposed to be Trump, this is supposed to be Kamala this is supposed to be Jill Stein you know and you guys don't do that I really

like how there are bits and pieces of different politicians that you know that sort of they don't necessarily rhyme but like you know it's you can find bits and pieces but there's no it really is an original story and these are original characters and

yes we're trying I used to do political cartoons and I mean I got tired of it honestly because people, it is about a one to one. I mean, you're doing, Trump is doing this. And then the message is unambiguous and people either agree with it or don't and like it on that, on those grounds. Right. You know, with Justice Warriors, we get to do world building and storytelling. And I think you can enjoy it on like, it's, it's dumb in a way. It's like a dumb action movie with a cop that's literally made of feces and it's fun. And you can just read it and enjoy it on that level. And then

it's also like a little brain poisoned like us and highly political and saying things about our terrible world. It's way too online, but as a book, so it's different. Yeah, that's true. So by reading it, you get offline. You touch grass and you read this book. It's great. Log off, open the book, log in. I like the sort of like gun smoke character, like the television character who like all of a sudden kind of inexplicably just begins like communicating to like, one of the cops like through the show and like sends him on a mission like before you know it the lines of like his own sort of like media diet reality have been blurred and it's like no explanation it just like starts happening and he just instantly accepts it's very uh you know

it's a little bit Manchurian candidate a little bit a parallax view we're pulling from like the paranoid thrillers of the 70s I I've been as we've been doing like the press tour I've been like boiling down the pitch and it's basically it's a political thriller for the deranged online era and when you have these like assassination attempts and you like the first guy was kind of like an in-cell loser who you know couldn't get it together to shoot up his high school before he graduated and he heard Trump was coming through town so he's like okay here we go I don't want to live to be 22 it sounds boring and then the second guy is kind of is like a kind of has uh he's a ukraine brain he's got ukraine brain yeah and and COVID brain like he's like I believe that

China created the bio weapon of COVID to, you know, sideline the fight in Ukraine or whatever. You know, it's, it's, he's a lunatic, basically. Yeah, yeah. He has a line of like, oh, my TV's talking to me. But isn't that our experience? All of our experiences every day. We all think, oh, that's for me. They're saying that stuff for me.

Yeah. So, fellas, you've brought us an interesting little topic here. So I will let you take it away. But, yeah, obviously, if we haven't made it clear, go pick up a nice copy of this nice physical object. Enjoy it. Please, yes. We'll have a link in the description. So, hi, guys.

Pleasure to be here again. We've got a bit of a rabbit hole to go into today. Matt and I are, as you know, as we mentioned before, comic book writers and artists. And we wanted to present you with a deep dive on a singular figure in comics, if there ever was one. We want to talk today about Grant Morrison, who is not only one of the most successful comic book writers in the history of the medium. He's also a practicing magician, but not a cool Chad stage magician. Like, he's a wizard. He's like a sorcerer. And maybe the world's most accomplished baker. Okay. But maybe he's baking for the good of the world. Imagine, if you can, a bald Scottish guy who dresses

like Neo from the Matrix, and we'll bake anything that pops into his head, but he's not pilled, a baker who's not pilled. Interesting. What the heck? Maybe he's a little pilled. Yeah. We'll see.

Be a little pilled as a treat. So today, we're going to talk about magic with a K, the creation of powerful sigils, the hidden reality of the cosmos, alien abductions, and how all of this relates to Batman. But to start, I want to introduce you briefly to Grant Morrison. Here we are, right.

Fuck man, I'll tell you, when I was a kid I read Robert Anton Wilson and all this shit. Here we are, I was standing here, we're talking about this shit and it's real. Okay, I'm pissed, and in half an hour I'm going to come up on drugs to watch for it. I guess, I don't know, is there any practicing magicians in the audience? Put your hand out if we got any. Yeah, come on, bold. A few. Okay, but the time we finish

is you're all going to be practicing magicians. This shit's easy, right? So, Grant Morrison is a Scottish... Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on, on that. You can't just play that and expect me not to, like, rant for, like, two minutes about how confused I am

about what this guy's vibe is. He's like a character out of train spotting or like a punk, like a punk, Like a punk lead singer, you know, from like 86. You've actually completely nailed it. As we proceed, your prophecy will come true. Well, as usual. Okay, please continue.

As you can tell, Grant Morrison is Scottish, and he was born in the 1960s. He comes from very humble origins, grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Glasgow. His father, this is very important, was an anti-nuclear activist, which I think is very cool because nuke's still around. Nobody's complaining about them today.

People who complain about nukes? Chad, based, in my opinion. Yeah, we need them to come back. We do need them to come back. Yeah. It'll get big again after the next one drops. Yes. It's just in a fallow period.

So his dad used to bring him actually to like ICBM facilities in Scotland because they put a bunch of missiles everywhere. And his dad would get him to like, pretend to throw his ball onto the base so they could sneak onto the base and he could take photos, which is a baller move. Yes. Morrison has attributed these experiences to scenes from his batshit insane comic,

The Invisibles, of breaking into massive underground bunkers, secret government conspiracies, and alien time travel devices. His work can be incredibly paranoid, and the Invisibles especially features cosmic spies having the true nature of reality exposed to them so they can shatter an extraterrestrial. real mind control matrix and there are secret conflicts between soldiers of light and obedient corporate forces the enemy is formless immortal demons inhabiting the bodies of human beings basically the invisibles is huanon meets the matrix and it's just all cool leather-clad hotties breaking free from social control to see the hidden truth of the world it's paranoid it's insane

lots of symbols and like things have relationships to each other that aren't quite clear but they're linked. There's a lot of Egyptian and Christian imagery. John Lennon is summoned as a psychedelic god and he's brought to earth by tarot cards. It's very 1997. Is there anything more Gen X than this? Yeah, no, it's true. No, no, not at all. A long leather trench coat. Yeah, this is the most Gen X thing imaginable. Like when Grant Morrison saw the Matrix and he was like, they fucking ripped me off. Yeah. Well, that's a lot of people have said that. I mean, I don't, you know, it was in the, uh, it was in the, uh, it was in the, the air at the time. Yeah. And he'll even acknowledge that. That gets into some of his vibe as we go on.

So then, like, his parents split up. He's a, he's a weird kid. He goes to live in an all-boys school. And then he becomes a rock musician dandy living in Glasgow. One prophecy fulfilled from Jake. He is, he was like a rock singer in a band. Yeah. And it says this stage in his life that he is exposed to magic, magic with a K. So now we have Morrison Talk talking about his first magical ritual that he ever took part in. But I did this and I thought, okay, I'm telling you, to show me something. So I did the ritual. And I lay back and I'm on nothing.

And I got the whole, I'm in the white hot room, you know, and it's like all these mages of times past and things like, you know, holy fuck. And it was for real. Yeah. But then, you know, I did the thing. And this was all like, I could. talk myself out of it because I had imagined it.

Yeah. And it was here and it was a spiral. It was the entire universe flushing down the plug hole, which has been a repeated motif. Yeah. But then at night, I woke up in the middle of the night and there's this pressurized space above me. Like a collapsing all the perspectives

and the, you know, the visual field was descending into this hole. And there was just this thing like siphoning into my brain. But then the lion appears. I am neither north nor south. I am, you know, I forget. So, for me, it was like, okay, this is actually, I just did something that changed my consciousness considerably. It didn't involve drugs.

It didn't involve anything other than he said this would happen if I did this. And he, oh, he was right. So that changed everything. And I just began to explore. Can I just say, if I wasn't reading the transcript as we went along here, I wouldn't understand 20% of the words. But everything that he said, said sounded like something I said when I was 21 after, like in the three days after I had

eaten an eight quarter bag of mushrooms by myself, except for the part at the end, it didn't involve drugs. Yeah, that's a confusing one. Yeah, that's very confusing. I also am skeptical about whether or not a lot of these are not drug trips, which I'll get into with magic too. But when Grant Morrison tells a story about magic, he almost always says like, believe me, I wasn't on drugs when this happened. Believe me. Like clockwork, believe me, believe me.

It's crazy. He's one of those people that speaks in like sound effects. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like he's one of those guys and you'll just sort of be talking to him and they're, you know, they kind of just like trail off. And you're just like, oh man, like, damn. Like, I wish I like had the freedom.

to speak in that way. You're talking about shit that words can't describe. You've got to kind of bring in the sound effects. Jake, after this, after this, you will be that guy. Magic will change you.

I will. I'll be at the Starbucks. I'll be at the Starbucks being like, yes, I would like, could I do a Grande ice cream? And they'll know. They'll get it. They'll know.

They'll know. To step back, magic with a K is a series of beliefs and religions tied to the occult. Clumped together in a category called esotericism. And specifically, Magic with a K comes from a certain weird type of Victorian orientalism and a revival of paganism. One of the big originating points for Magic with a K,

the originator of Magic with a K, is Alistair Crowley, circa late 19th century, early 20th century. And Crowley was a bit of a sex maniac, adulterer, heroin addict. But he was also very into dressing up like an Egyptian pharaoh and performing rituals from lost rabbinical texts. You know, that was back in the days when you couldn't get canceled for that stuff. Yeah. And Crowley, like, he'll always come up when Q people get like a little esoteric and start to be like, if you want to understand like where these demonic rituals come, you know, come from, like that these politicians are performing. You got to look into Clister Crowley.

And it's the idea, the idea is that he's kind of the originator. of like the satanic ritual basically and like he is he is the originator of the satanic ritual but it's much more pathetic and sad in reality yeah then like oh he's summoning the devil he's trying to do get pussy yeah that's it like 100% of it i'm summoning a little bit of pussy if we can if i can interject here for a minute before we get really get cooking alan more and grant morrison the biggest comic writers of their generation and people that i deeply respect and love their comics. They both have this like magic gimmick that I just find so silly. They're like magicians and wizards. And I'm like, oh man, you could like get away with that in the 90s. Like when you weren't

online all the time and you had to like perform your identity, it was like there was mystery to them. And I'm like, what percentage of this is just getting pussy? I will elucidate that. And a lot of it is. I'll say this. I'll say this. When I was in junior high and I wasn't super athletic or, you know, tall and the interest had, you know, was starting to focus on, you know, women and, and, you know, pre, you know, going through puberty, I made a decision that I would get good at magic and that would be what I had, that, you know, the athletes and like, there we go, the sort of like, the traditionally attractive guys wouldn't have. I would get good at magic. And to this day, I'm, I've got a couple tricks on my stuff.

I bet. You gotta have, everybody's got to have a gimmick, right? I think, I don't have a deck of playing cards here, but I could show you. I'm not going to, but I could show you. I assume there's some level of like discordianism at work here with Morrison, right? Because I mean, that's, I know that that defines Alan Moore quite a bit. Discordianism and chaos magic are closely related and emerged at nearly the same time. Discordianism is rejected by practitioners of chaos magic because it is too, I'm going to use the term prescriptive. It's too much like things mean things, even though it's too dogmatic for a chaos magician. Interesting. Which is something I can get into a little bit later. But discordianism also is chaos. There's also like, there's another movement

out of France, pataphysics, which is very similar to discordantism and chaos magic, which also has an occult twist to it, but is even sillier than all of this. Yeah. Everyone's taking designer drugs and making their little magic castle to live in, and it makes sense. Yeah, you had to go to a place to learn this kind of magic. You had to travel to a place. You had to study with one of the greats, you know what I mean?

This is like prestige-style magic as opposed to like, you know, David Blaine going to like Harrison Ford's house, you know? You know, it's like a different kind of, it's the kind of magic that, you know, you you know, Batman would have to trek up into like the Andes Mountains to like train with some guru and he would learn like the ancient dark arts. Like it's that kind of stuff. Well, just wait until we get to the Batman later because that's exactly what's going on. Mm-hmm. So Crowley basically set the tone for this new spiritual movement known as ritual magic with a K. I have a clip here of Duncan Trussell explaining ritual magic with a K to Joe Rogan.

And it's important to keep in your mind's eye for the listener because we're going to see. but it's important to keep in your mind's eye that in this clip, Trussell is dressed in a full gilly camouflage suit wearing an N95 mask while Joe Rogan is dressed like an astronaut. It was during COVID, obviously.

So witchcraft, as we understand it now, because of Hollywood is like, you know, ladies riding around on brooms and shit, but it just used to be mid- wifery. It used to be like healing women who would like deliver babies and stuff. But these were all connected to

They're all at pagan roots. And so essentially you can follow back this branch of data that some people say started in Sumeria or Egypt, ways of meditating, ways of connecting with the universe that are ritualistic in nature, but seem mysterious to us because even though, like, if you want to see what it looks like, just look at a Catholic mass. You're looking at a ceremony. It's theology, I guess you'd call it. That is a magical ceremony where bread gets converted into the flesh of a God that you eat. So that's a, you're watching robes. They're burning incense.

So that is magic. That's what ceremonial magic looks like. It's non-different from ceremonial magic. Someone in the Catholic Church might tell you, this isn't magic. This is me praying to the infinite and asking for forgiveness. That's magic. You're connecting with a divine intelligence. You're hoping from your connection with the divine intelligence to produce some change in your own psychology, in your own life, and maybe create good fortune or whatever it is.

You're praying for healing, whatever it may be. That's magic. So magic is that. He is in a full gilly suit. You can barely see his eyes. Like he just love it. You would have to grind for hours and hours and hours to unlock this skin. This is high level.

So magic, as he said, is an attempt to commune with the divine to affect change through ritual in ritual magic. Trussell here claims that the beliefs go back to ancient Egypt or ancient Samaria. But magic with a K, basically as we know it, as the historical record sets out, basically starts with a bunch of well-to-do dandies in the back room of a London social club. The Golden Dawn, which has a terrible name, terrible, terrible ISO now, was this secret. society in London High Society that basically took a bunch of Egyptian texts and rabbinical writings out of context and we're like, hey, we're going to do this stuff now. So magic is, and always will be firmly British. Like what we understand as magic in the West is a invention of British people from the Victorian era. Harry Potter is just part of a long tradition of Brits

talking nonsense about wizards. This is probably, in my opinion, some sort of of reaction to Victorian social repression. Magic is a product of Victorian society, which was very prudish about sex, and ritual magic is weirdly super focused on sex and ritualized sex between the participants. Crowley himself was raised as like an extreme Christian and an extreme Christian sect, and he later rebelled, describing himself as the beast. His motto was, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Basically, if it feels good, do it, even if you shouldn't. Can't imagine this ends without a few crimes along the way? Horny man and an ideology to justify it.

He ends up having a lot of weird, he ends up having a lot of interactions with people. And, you know, there's a really great book by Charles Portis called The Masters of Atlantis, which is sort of a satire of the history of magic. And I didn't realize that until I did some of this research. Love that book. It's a great book. I highly recommend it. But just like in Crowley's life, the moral of the story of that book and also Grant Morrison's

life is it's all about friends at the end of the day. It's all about the people you love who are around you. It's about the people you fake sawed in half during the magic show. Yes. It's about the half of the assistant you got along the way. So the rituals in magic were a way of, you know, sort of unconsciously and mechanically acting out some sort of mystical action that would get you access to wisdom and power of demons and angels to affect your desires. They are attempts to make change in the world around you. The rituals, as we understand them, were unlikely to have any of the intended results like a three-way hot date.

How is that going to make your relationship with your mother work? I don't know. I don't like that joke. I'll give anything a shot at this point. The rituals often involve robes, secret knowledge, and taking, get this, loads of drugs. Lots of drugs in magic. Lots of altered states and drug taking at every level of magic with a K. What were the preferred drugs?

Like, Kualudes at that time, or LSD? I mean, just smoking a little bit of dope? Aleister Crowley was really into heroin, but they would take, I'm sure they would take mescaline, they would do marijuana, hashish. Hasheesh seems to be like very common, especially early magic. And just as an aside, Stanley Kubrick actually probably took the aesthetics from some of the Golden Dawn rituals to design eyes wide shut. So all that stuff you see in eyes wide shut, that's not like Illuminati shit. That's like sex crazed, repressed upper society British crap that he's put in there. That's interesting context. I'll have to watch it again through that lens. Before they had apps where you could find someone to fuck your wife. You had to have a much more elaborate system. No, that's like 100% of what this is.

It's just like a weird. It's just like a weird orgy group, but they had to like find some excuse that they were allowed to do it. So chaos magic comes out of this. Chaos magic comes out of this idea of like practicing some sort of ritual action to get access to the divine, which is just an excuse to peg your neighbor. And it's a reaction to the repressive qualities of ritual magic, which had by the 1970s really congealed into a religion. It was very dogmatic ritual magic. So if ritual magic is

Catholic, like Duncan Trussell sort of alluded to, with all the robes and the masks and the candles, chaos magic was sort of a Protestant reformation of magic, with a major focus on personal experiences, discipline, and a rejection. of dogmatism. It's super countercultural. Imagine a hippie summoning ball with only a bick lighter and some hotel stationary. Once again, high on drugs. That's right. So here we have a clip of our beautiful bald boy Morrison describing the basic practice of chaos magic, which is the creation of a sigil. This is very important. Quite simple, say, it is my desire that my cat wins the Olympics. Take it all the vowels.

Write this down for fuck's sake and do it don't just listen do it right take out the vowels and you'll be left with a string of consonance take out the repeated consonants and you'll be left with a string of consonants that have no repeats in it you know whatever x y a d whatever turn that thing into a little image take the d draw a big d and then you've got a t draw a t under it and keep reducing it down until it looks magical and there are no rules for this thing do it until it looks magical At that point, you know, you have a sigil. The sigil will work. You can project desire into reality and change reality. It works. Your cat can win the Olympics. If you draw a sigil, it works.

It works. So just to like reiterate in case the Scottishness was too much for the listener, you write down what you want, you take out the vowels, you take out the double letters, you get a string of consonants, and you turn that into a drawing. and then your wishes come true. Who found this out? Who found out, oh, I did it the other way.

I took out the consonants first, but actually you got to take out the vowels. Where was this process? Look, if you were in junior high or elementary school at some point, and you took yours or your crush's initials and turned it into like a fun little symbol, a logo for yourself, if you will, on the side of your math quiz, you have drawn a sigil. It's a powerful, magical image, yes. And were you not making out with her in the back of the bus?

one week later. Yeah, if you have drawn the Stoosie logo on the cover of your trapper keeper, you are actually doing magic. And did you not beg your mom to buy you a $60 T-shirt one week later? Yes, you did. Did she get it for you, begrudgingly? So did it get you the dates that you wanted? Probably not.

Magic still was done. This elaborate story. So obviously it's very easy to dismiss this, this magic, the sigil as as ramblings and nonsense. But since it was so simple, I wanted to try. So I made for the purposes of our fun little episode, I made three sigils. Yes. Obviously, if one is doing magic with a K, it should be in an altered state of consciousness. So I imbibed an ancient herbal remedy when I made these.

which granted me new perspectives. It opened the doors of my mind. And then I proceeded on this higher plane to make a sigil for each one of you. So I started to arrange the letters on the page until it looked magical. And then I started seeing like the outlines of a drawing, of an image and being an artist

that's easy for me to organize it, pull something out of that noise. And what came out of my little wishes were three drawings. And so Julian, I'm going to ask you to, Here is your sigil in the Google Doc. It's the first one. I want you to describe the sigil for the listener. Okay.

Well, it appears to be some sort of underwater exploration vehicle or could be space. Hard to tell, but there's a little person in the kind of cockpit. And then that's connected to what looks like a kind of hockey stick-shaped object that comes down from the fuselage. okay yeah and the and the submarine is is shark shaped it's it's fish it's fish shaped there's a dorsal fin there's a big bubble around it it's inside of a bubble yeah it's inside of a bubble okay so that's for you julian thank you you keep that in your mind okay we can come back to it Jake here's your sigil would you like to describe it for the listener I love it I love it and I'm so jealous of you I wish I could draw like you like you can man it's awesome okay

This is a guerrilla, Dracula, or possibly wearing a Matrix trench coat. He's got the high collar and a nice pompadour, sort of sharp bottom teeth, very guerrilla-like. And he's wearing glasses in the shape of the Weezer W. And he's got something to say. And what he's saying is, what's with these homies dissing, my girl? Wow. Yeah, this is definitely very Jake. And then Matt, can you describe this last one?

Yeah, boy, what am I looking at? I'm looking at a person, a man in like a kind of a full body suit, standing on top of a machine of some sort. The machine is a few feet high. It looks like an engine. It looks like it might be blowing wind out of one side of it. And it has sort of some funky shapes coming off. Like the top that he's standing on is a little bit zigzaggy.

and there's like some sort of pipe on one end. It's, uh, couldn't tell you what it is. Okay. So that's what came out of this. Uh, and the experience of making these was very weird. And I'm into it. I'm very into it. Because usually when I make a drawing, I have an idea of what I'm doing before I do it.

I sort of picture in my mind's eye like, oh, I want to draw a gorilla singing weezer. Mm-hmm. But this time, I'm sort of like, I'm almost like a Bing AI where I have like a couple of shapes and then like my unconscious just sort of organizes it and says oh that's a that's a submarine that's a that's a this that's a weird lawnmower that a man is riding in through the sky and then I complete it so it it's very unconscious and there's a mechanical aspect to it too like where did the picture come from I do not know it wasn't necessary for me to come up with a drawing to generate it, but I did get a drawing out of it. Something came out of it. And then I have to sort of

figure out, okay, what is this, what does this mean? Like obviously all, all three of you are trying to sort out that drawing. Like what, what is that drawing? And whether or not it has some specific meaning for you, you have some sort of relationship or understanding of that image. And so from my experience producing a sigil is a bit like using your unconscious as a magic eight ball. You're placing things randomly around and then you try to make sense of it and you try to process this image and understand it. It's like a Rorschach test. You're just giving yourself a random constraint. It's like a journaling practice. It's like a drawing game. I used to be in this art collective in Winnipeg and we would like pass books back and forth and finish each other's drawings and you

didn't have control over it. And you would get like some hilarious, unexpected results that you were in awe of because you didn't come up with it. It was sort of a group thinking effort. And this is like a solitary solo version of that where you're like inventing a drawing or coming up with something or generating an idea off of a prompt. Well, I think where I'm coming down on this is that it's important to pump Ben full of drugs and get him drawing sigils because Because these are characters and vehicles that belong in Justice Warriors. Yes, yes. I'm going to use that gorilla with the Weezer glasses.

Yeah, I like this sort of like hand soap hoverboard that Matt's flying on. Yeah. It's like a magic carpet slash like motorcycle, like Indian motorcycle engine with like a hand soap spout on the end of it. So I didn't stop at these. I actually thought that this was a really cool experience and so I started making these all of the time. I've been making sigils nonstop. Some have worked.

This is where we find out that Ben has lost as mine. Yeah. I'm down the rabbit hole. I'm lost in the twist in terms of rabbit town. Because you can make sense of these images and you can relate them to your life whether or not that makes any sense at all.

So my wife recently had a bit of a back injury and so she has like this pinched nerve in her back and she's been going to see a lot of doctors and physiotherapists and stuff. and she was very worried about it. So I was doing these sigils with my daughter, and I showed her how to make one. And so we wished that my wife's nerve would feel better.

And so my daughter generated this drawing of like there's grids and bars. It's a giant robot walking through the forest she made. And then two days later, my wife goes to see a new specialist physiotherapist who really helped her, and her pinched nerve stopped hurting for the first time since her accident. Huge improvement. Has anyone in your life drawn a sigil lately because your back is looking great? And so my wife is leaving the physiotherapist's office and she looks at the exercise equipment

and it has all of these like robot shaped things with like bars and grids. And she thinks, oh, that's what the sigil meant. It's not it's not that my daughter and I wield this into existence. But there's like this weird process of cognitive. bias that takes place when you make one of these things, where you see retroactively, it makes sense. When I go to the Weezer concert in October, and I look to my right, you know, as they're playing Surf Wax America, and I see a gorilla in a trench coat wearing these glasses. I'm going to be pretty creeped out. I'm not going to lie. Especially when you're, when you're dissing his girl.

You're going to think of the sigil while you're there, right? Now this image is going to be with you. And that's a process that I find really interesting. And I'm going to elucidate on this a little bit more. So one of the main texts of chaos magic is called The Book of Results. And it's a way of acknowledging that you will see results from doing this process. Are you actually summoning things into your life? Probably not. Probably you're just giving yourself a little bit of cognitive dissonance by making these drawings and you're going a little nuts. But you start to see the connections and you start to believe that you have a little bit of control over things that are happening to you.

So now, we're going to jump to Grant Morrison talking about his experience being abducted by aliens. All right. Another just totally Gen X thing. It's a comic book, which is kind of my attempt to explain what happened to me after I'd been abducted by aliens in Kathmandu in 1994. And the only reason I was abducted by aliens and Kathmandu in 1994

is because I went to Kathmandu in 1994 to be abducted by aliens. And it works, right? And these fuckers, they will turn up. And what they told me was this. And they tell everyone the same bullshit, but it's in different perspective. It's from different nervous systems.

It seems to be filtered through everyone's own view of the world, but they keep telling us the same shit. So I met these guys. I'm sitting in the roof garden. of the Vajara Hotel in Kathmandu and they arrive on mass and they look exactly like Terence McKenna described. Why is that?

Because I just read Terence McKenna a year before. What they told me was they took me out my body, I wasn't in my body anymore. This doesn't normally happen with hash. This happens on DMT or it happens on ketamine or something, right? I'm on hash, a tiny little bit, size of a lentil and I start tripping and I'm out my body. and these fuckers are there

and they said where do you want to go the first thing I said was Alpha Centauri which is the first thing you would say and they took me to Alpha Centauri and it's fucking realness there there's three sons the whole thing was moving exactly as we're told it's supposed to move astronomically and I'm there and I said to them

what the hell's going on as you might and they said we've come to tell you this stuff so that you can put it in your work and explain it to the world why do they always say that to everyone Why do they always tell everyone to go out and tell the world what's going on And everyone tells us the same shit So these things I met them

And what they were was like silver Like those things you get in rave videos Basically silver morphing mercurial blobs of chrome That think And they took me to the fifth dimension And the fifth dimension is outside space and time And they explained to me what time is all about the universe we live in

is designed to grow larvae right believe it don't you I don't have to believe I'm just setting the story here they explained to me that beyond space and time we have our actual selves these things that we're experiencing

right now are sections through time everyone in here is a section through time but in actual fact you're not experiencing your real body what is your real body your real body is a process that starts when you're born and it moves forward until you die

that is you seen from outside that's what you look like you look like a gigantic centipede spread around all the little things that you always do up and down through your house up the stairs down to the store back and it's a centipede it's us right it starts as a little baby and it comes out your mother's womb and it gets bigger

and that is the process in time the audience just like mm-hmm wow interesting sir I want to say as somebody I've done mushroom trips that have totally blasted me out of my mind. Yeah. Where I have felt that I have had actual out-of-body experiences. I don't think that I literally did, but there's no other way to describe it.

And in the like two or three days afterwards, I probably sounded like Grant Morrison. I just came down from it eventually. Yeah. It's crazy to see somebody like this out there that's so successful and like one of the sort of pioneers of, you know, that time in, you know, comic book writing. Usually these guys are, you know, they've cornered you at a party and like you can't wait to sort of like figure out how to escape from them. But I will say like the last part that he's talking about, I'm totally on board with that. Like I've read books about string theory where it tries to explain what humanity looks like or what a human being looks like if you're looking at it through the fourth dimension, which is seeing all of time at once or maybe the fifth dimension. I can't remember which one it is. And they do describe this process of of you would look like a worm going through, you know, he says centipede, but you would look like a worm sort

of like, you know, from the moment you're born and, you know, doing all the little things you do, me getting up, you know, recording this episode going, you know, and downloading, you know, a free to play MMO afterwards, you know, and so they tried to actually do it in Donnie Darko. Yes. If you've watched Donnie Darko, that's kind of the visual that they, that they use. So I'm like kind of totally with him on that last point. Well, you know, Grant Morrison isn't anyone that you have to be cornered at a party and listen to. Luckily, he can write.

And these crazy ideas get sort of filtered into comic books and you get the invisibles and all sorts of other stuff. It's making me want to become more unhinged and drug addled. It won't be good for my family, but possibly for the generation of superhero ideas, I think so. Yeah. I'm definitely more unhinged after doing all of this research. I really like it. So the centipede thing is something I want to unpack a little bit too, because that's going to tie into sigils. So this idea of you over time, thinking of yourself as this constant, as this nonstop human centipede, is very important for another concept in magic called Nosis. And Nosis is Greek for knowledge.

and it's a central belief of the Gnostics, which is basically like, oh, there is a hidden knowledge. There is a hidden reality to the universe. And this hidden reality to the universe, as Grant has sort of framed it, is this idea that you're connected to everything, the cosmic perspective on your life. And that feeling you get

when you try to live in this cosmic perspective. This is really important to magic. This is what many magicians think think of as the altered state you're supposed to live in, is you're supposed to be in this state of gnosis, in this state of cosmic awareness. And so Grant is talking about his form of cosmic awareness, which is thinking about his life as this long centipede. But you can think about it, you can get this feeling, this vibe personally, if you just think about, let's all just think about how we're all made of stuff that was processed in a star. All the carbon in your body was

in a star one day. The iron in your blood was in a supernova. and then it exploded and it turned into gas and then it formed into a ball and then that was like in a boiling liquid that turned into a virus that turned into a bacteria and we're cousins with that bacteria and we're all cousins and we're all connected

and we're all these human centipede worms which join up at certain points and we go back in time into our mothers who go back in time if you look at it from this perspective that perspective that place and that feeling is nosis Let me tell you something.

I think this episode is going to have to be delivered with a lentil of hash. One of the great Morrison's great innovations in the X-Men was the creation of the antagonist with the terrible name of Sublime, which didn't practice Santeria, but was a sentient bacteria from like the primordial ooze at the beginning of the universe. viewed mutants as like its evolutionary antagonists. Yes, 100% Morrison. Oddly enough, I just recently, a friend sent me a scientific research paper that is about these scientists, no slouches either, who believe that they have discovered essentially

sentient clouds of plasma that live above our ozone layer that are feeding and attracted to the energy and electromagnetism. given off by satellites and stuff. Hell yeah. Love it. So I don't know. Maybe, I don't know. Maybe it's all for. Morrison's right in the news now. Maybe it's all fucked. Maybe we know everything. Maybe we know so little. Okay. So coming back to Nosis, because I'm going to tie all this together. This is a Morrison thing to tie it all together. That feeling of Nosis, that cosmic connection, that's what the sigil is supposed to do. You're supposed to leave breadcrumbs through time for

yourself so that you can remember yourself, you can remember your being, you can remember how you thought about things, meanings in your life by remembering these images. And so the images can pull you out of time, can pull you out of the flow of your life and show you, you already had the things that you wanted, or you didn't actually want that thing in the first place. The real treasure were the sigils we got along the way. Yeah, babe, I'm sorry. I've just been ripped out of time. I'm thinking about the sigil of a guy riding on a little lawnmower engine that I got on a

podcast in 2024. I remember. I remember. It was when Weezer was my favorite band before I decided one day that I didn't like them anymore somehow. Jake, that would be so horrible. My Lord. You without Weezer?

There's other bands around. I mean, you know, you never know what happens, but like, you know, I'm using reverse psychology to like... I haven't put all my eggs in one basket, you know. I don't know how you do it, Jake, like, I don't know. After maladroit, how can you, how can you stand them? No, don't get him started. Do not get him started. I mean, you just got to listen.

You got a, you got a search. You got to search. Yeah, you might not like anything. You might not like any of like the studio tracks on make believe, but if you find some like kitchen tape demo of hold me where, like, you can hear that. You can hear the pain in Rivers' voice, and you're like, oh, my God, this is actually, like, a beautiful song that was, like, ruined for this. You know, it's, it's all about identifying with the guy. If you, if you love the guy, if you love the guy, then you understand, you understand, like, where the magic is, you know? We have to move on. You said that with such, with such panic. in your voice, like I haven't heard in quite some time.

Yeah, I know where this is going. Yes. So chaos magic, as I have learned, is about giving yourself sort of a personal form of schizophrenia, where you are creating specific images of meaning for yourself through time to feel connected. Once again, let's come back to what magic is. Magic is participating with the divine to affect change in your life. So you generate these little divine images, and they tell you.

who you are over time by being able to come back to them and giving you a perspective on yourself. Because at the end of the day, that's what we're doing anyways. Like we live in a world which is incredibly schizophrenic. I draw all day and then someone gives me a voucher for groceries. How are these things connected in any way, shape, or form? You make up a story about how one thing causes the other. Sigilization is just the creation of your own. And it's also, magic is also the celebration that everyone has this part of their brain for baking. Everyone can bake their own meaning in their lives. Magic has a tradition of being practiced by those who don't have control over their lives. It's a search for control and a search for meaning in the face of the prescriptions

and repression of modern life. Here's a great synopsis by Arthur Jones and Giorgio Agilini, who made the film Feels Good Man, the Pepe the Frog documentary. Yeah, buddies of Yes, big fans. Magic is about sort of people, you'd say it better than I always. Well, I mean, he's sort of quoting this this occultist named Dion Fortune. Right.

And he's sort of an acolyte of hers. But yeah, they sort of talk about, obviously it's sort of all the trappings of magic that seems a little bit like hocus pocus, but this other thing they're talking about is much more serious. And that's the idea that magic has always been the politics of the unheard.

That if you are, magic proliferates, and sort of happens within communities where they don't feel like they have any agency in the world that they live in. So it happened in like feudal situations. It happened among slave cultures where people didn't feel like they had agency in their own reality.

And so they would kind of create ceremonial ways of like art and willpower trying to affect their reality in a positive way and to also give them hope. And so now we'll follow that up with a last clip from Morrison. I'm just up to my environment. Yeah, but as a reaction to your environment, you've done all right.

No, but my environment was great, yeah. My mother, my mom and dad were activists, and they were, they didn't, my mother didn't have me until I was 30, and my dad was 35, so they were already smart, but they were just poor working class people. They were activists against, you know, nuclear proliferation, so I was taken on marches. My dad actually broke into bases and did all this stuff. So you can see a lot of that in my work and the Invisibles,

and this obsession were underground places and conspiracies and the fact that, you know, the ruling elites have it all over us. Because my dad could, you know, he could see all these things. He could photograph the interior. We saw coffins stacked up with everyone's names on him for the nuclear war. I'm not haunted in my dreams, and I know it haunted the dreams at an entire generation of people. Yeah.

But it was very much there, but my parents were against it and fighting it, and they were not winning. You know, my dad was a hero. he's been a soldier in the war he was like but he was a radical working class activist my mother was an intelligent woman

who didn't get to college who just became the wife of a radical working class activist so they had all this thing going on that I grew up with but I could see that they were failing to fight this monster and for me it was like I found a Superman comic

Superman's taking the bomb in his chest the atom bomb was like yeah it tickles and imaginatively that was the salvation. It was like, okay, beyond the bomb, the thing that my mother and father are so scared of, the A-bomb, at the fucking end of the world, Superman just laughs at that. And the Hulk only begins his story when that occurs, you know, and suddenly the mutants come from that. And the comics honestly imagine that they give me a space to escape that existential post-war horror.

And so now we tie it all together. The sigil, this personal image that you create can be an image of salvation from all of your worries. It can give you control over your life. It can give you a reprieve from the apocalypse. Breaking into an underground massive bunker full of children can become a symbol for taking back your own life. The symbols you have lying around are the ones you use to understand the world. Magic is the process of us making and manipulating symbols in an attempt to control the world around us. Schizophrenia might be the only way we can find a new idea to break out of our ruts in our lives. You've got gun violence, climate change, apartheid, war, disease, the breakdown of our quality of life, rapid technological transformation.

Of course, people are going to turn to schizophrenic magical baking. Turn to magic itself, magic with a K, to try to affect change in their lives in the face of repression. That's right. Q is magic. Q is magic. After doing this, I firmly believe Q is magic. I think instead of sending checks to people, like Trump bucks during the pandemic, I think they should just send everyone a sigil, pay Ben to do it. Yeah. And everyone just impose meaning on their lives and benefit that way. Yeah, that's right. That would be a form of government that I think you guys would put in a comic. Yeah. Well, we kind of did in a way where the first volume of Justice. Warriors is about a

cyberpunk zodiac gang that tries to take over society. So they're not exactly into magic, but they're into astrology, which is very similar. And they're kind of like if Maoists got astrology pilled. Yeah, I like the idea of like a symbol

standing in, a symbol gives you power. Do you think that's what Prince was doing with his symbol thing? 100%. I'm like fully magic pilled on all of this stuff now. They're all doing sigils. The McDonald's symbol is a sigil. After I got into this stuff, I was listening to songs with my kids.

They wanted to listen to Taylor Swift, and I was like, Taylor Swift is a powerful magician. She is a sorceress. She is summoning sigils, which affect people's minds. Well, you and the Q-On people agree then, yeah. Yeah. No, I'm like fully cue-pilled at this point. That's why I say that Morrison is like a baker for good.

He's baking things just for himself all the time. And I think that there's something in our society, which like not to not to editorialize on this a little bit too much we don't have nosis in our lives like we're never encouraged to have this like cosmic there's no place for us to be keanu reeves woe anymore and i think that that's something that is necessary to all cults is to give them like a cosmic connection place them within their world connect them to their own bodies connect them to feeling connect them to a system of meaning. And I think that magic can be a powerful tool for people to create meaning in their own lives

and create agency in their own lives. Heck, I've been using it, and I find it very helpful for my anxieties. See, the funny thing is, is like, I am somebody that is prone to believe in magic, and I have to go the other way. I have to, like, convince myself that it's not, that it has nothing to do with magic. There's nothing supernatural at play because then I will ascribe anything that happens in the future to either good, you know, good magic or bad magic or am I trapped in the good timeline or the bad timeline? And it's really interesting. Like my brain has to like turn away from that stuff, even though that's kind of what my default setting is.

Yeah, I think there's something to be said about how conspiracy theories are essentially folk tales that attempt to re-enchant the world. And at the same time, my criticism of discordianism that I had in the episode we did on it is that this ends up in like a form of extreme individualism, where there is like a total rejection of common reality. And that can be, that can be pretty bad. That can be, that can spin off into dangerous things. I also suspect all of this. A lot of this has to do with guys wanting to get laid. And if you took that out of the equation, it would make a lot less sense to their lives. But we're all happy that Benjamin's getting laid.

So, you know, his wife's backs better. Yeah. This point about the rampant individualism actually leads well into our next segment because something that Grant Morrison is really into is the collective unconscious, how these shared images and shared cultural ideas that actually can create nosis. Because you have to feel connected to something. to do magic. You have to accept

that other people are going to understand it or even your own personal system of meaning. It's not a private system of meaning. Deleuze calls this group fantasy. You get it from somewhere.

You get it from the culture. You get it from your parents. You get these images from images that are lying around. And one thing that really are lying around are comic books. So, Matt, how are Grant Morrison's comics? Well, I love them.

I've been a longtime Grant Morrison fan and I reread the entire Batman run for this pod, which is like, you know, seven years worth of comics, thousands of pages. Damn. And I was just going to take you through the Batman run focusing on occult aspects and sort of the kooky threads that Morrison connects Batman to these bigger ideas in our culture. Because Morrison believes that in a nutshell that superheroes are modern mythology, that was a big part of their book Super Gods, and who's to say that's not true. So in 2007, Grant Morrison

began a Batman run that would span seven years and come to be regarded as one of the best all-time takes on the character. It's classic Morrison in that it's high concept, heavy on lore, disjointed ideas that become a little hard to parse, if you could even imagine from the audio clips of Morrison earlier. And it's great fun and genuinely good comics. I think that this Batman run is really as good as Cape Comics get, and it's helped along by God-tier artists like Andy Kubert, Frank Quietly, Fraser Irving, and Chris Burnham, among many others. It famously introduces Damian Wayne, Bruce's shit-kicking son conceived with the international terrorist Talia Al-Goole, who was then grown in a vat by the League of Shadows, unbeknownst to Bruce because women's

reproductive health is her own business. And Damien's purpose in life naturally is to inherit the earth is the demon's head. But instead of doing this, Damien seeing Batman's model positive masculinity becomes the next Robin and a hero to which he remains to this day in the comics. And they even have a Batman and Robin movie coming out, I think, with Damien as the Robin. So the Batman run begins with Batman emerging from something called the Thogel ritual, a form of extended meditation where one simulates death and the afterlife. life. This is apparently based off something called the Togol meditation and Buddhism. So

Grant threw an extra A-chin to make it hit different when they were up in the mountains getting abducted by aliens. So deep into Thogel, Batman purges the dark elements of his psyche to purify himself and become a better Batman. And this is over the run. Batman kind of iterates on himself and becomes a better Batman. But the idea with this, I think, starting out, is that Grant Morrison is taking over after like 25 years of kind of dark and gritty Batman, you know, the second Robin is beaten to death with a crowbar, Batman's backs broken, the city's destroyed by an earthquake. Batman's earned a reputation as this brooding figure,

and Morrison wants to bring him back into the light to create an Uberbat that will emerge from convoluted comic book canon itself. So the run is notable in that it largely, ignores Batman's famous rogues gallery and instead pits him against an adversary named Dr. Hurt and his three replacement Batman and his mysterious criminal organization called the Black Glove. Now, Dr. Hurt, you may not believe this based on his name alone, but he's a very bad man with dark ties to Bruce Wayne's past. And this is when you get into Morrison's. Morrison loves to go into like Silver Age comics, find something. Oh, he likes to grab an image

from the past. Yes, yes, and pull it, centipede-like forward. So in this case, a 1963 Batman comic with a story called Robin Dies at Dawn, where Batman volunteers to participate in a special military experiment to test the long-term effects of isolation on the human psyche. Why not?

Yeah. And I think that's just this actual setup for like a silly adventure where he's away and then he has to come back and save Batman. But what Morrison does is retroactively say that this moment is when Dr. Hurt launched a sinister plot to M.K. Ultra Batman and break down his psychology to study history's best trauma-based warrior for the federal government. He would then implant a secret phrase, a trigger phrase in his mind in order to disable him when the time came,

which Morrison does a little bit later in the run. And at various points, it is suggested that Dr. Hurt is an immortal relative of Bruce Wain's, possibly his father, and or, in fact, Satan. Okay, yeah. You're following along? Yeah, yeah, no limits. Dr. Hurt describes himself as, quote, the hole in things, the enemy, the piece that can never fit, there since the beginning. And that's kind of a motif throughout the entire series. The holes, puzzles, Batman is always trying to solve, the hole in himself, the trauma at his center that he filled with Batman.

And over the years, this idea of, like, Batman always winning has become more and more of a character-defining trait. Batman, because he's a human in a world of superheroes, so the way he can kind of hang on their level is that he's so smart, so prepared, so determined that he can basically never lose. And so Morrison and Mark Wade kind of really drilled down on that in the 90s in the JLA, and then in this run, Morrison solidifies that idea by giving Batman his first indomitable foe, the devil. Tell me something, my friend.

You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight? Well, to quote Batman, if you want to get nuts, let's get nuts. The one thing Dr. Hurt didn't plan for, despite being Satan himself or Batman's father or both, is Batman having already thought of this and creating his own Manchurian backup personality that could take over and drive his body in case he is psychologically compromised, as Dr. Hurt Dunn's with the trigger phrase that he implanted in him long ago. You know, and then in classic villain form, Satan form, he doesn't just kill him. He pumps him full of drugs.

He's an amnesiac and leaves him on the street in a pile of garbage. You know, mistake number one, right? Thus, we find ourselves witnessing the absurd spectacle of the Batman of Zeranar, which is this alternate personality, a more aggressive Batman that wears a colorful red, red, yellow, and purple bat, you know, cowl and cape, carries a baseball bat, has a radio that doesn't work that he talks into, and is followed around by a hallucinatory batmite cartoon that narrates his thoughts, all in his head. Okay, wow, yeah. I definitely have not read this run of Batman.

This sounds way more interesting than me. This is baseball Batman. This is Psycho Batman. If they did a, like an into the spider verse version of Batman, like this would be one of the personalities that would show up. voiced by like, I don't know, Kevin Hart or somebody. So this is how Batman thinks, right? What if I'm psychologically compromised and can't mentally function?

I need a backup dissociative identity disorder that can kick into high gear and come out and play superhero. Of course. So that's what happened to Ben Affleck. Yeah. It's triggered by a divorce file. It gets a backer. tattoo and a pack of cigarettes and turns into the bat fleck of Zerunar. Yeah, he starts ordering Jack in the box.

Dropping his Dunkin' Donuts everywhere. Starts really bacon. So Morrison takes all these concepts involving Batman to like the outermost extremes in this series. Having him escape from absurd death traps, Dr. Hurt buries him alive. You know, again, it's just kind of a silver age Batman death trap type thing. So he buries him alive. But of course, Batman can't beat him.

He's already planned for that. He's already buried himself alive before on purpose to learn how to escape from it. He's done the Thogel ritual. He's M.K. Ultra Pilled. And he has his mind back it up with another personality that has a cartoon Batman in it that talks to him. So if you can't beat him because he has already come up with 10 responses to your attack before you've even developed your plan. He has a plan to his backup plans. Who, I got a backup plan to the backup plan to back up my backup plan.

That's Batman. Well, one of the Batman's. So continuing with the Satan theme, Morrison's run happened to take place during Batman number 66. It's been running for decades. And how do you not do something fun for Batman 666? So what happens is the story cuts to the. future, a dark future where Damien Wayne, who's like 10 years old in the comics, is now a brutal Batman in charge of Gotham. He sits at his bat computer and the news reports record highs,

poor air quality, and a pandemic from China killing 18 million people that's now easing up and quarantine restrictions are being loosened. So it effectively takes place in 2020. But Damien is not posting Black Squares on Instagram. He is taking real action to secure the safety of Gotham, selling his soul to Satan in exchange for the safety of the city. Be it up, be el-em-up, be Elizabeth.

Osvolios, Sathanas, Lucifer. We are doing some special things to the audience today. Yeah, you're all cursed now, by the way. Sorry, guys. Yeah.

Damien, you know, The naming conventions in this series are not too subtle with Damien and Dr. Hurt. So Damien deduces what many of us thought was happening in 2020 that the Armageddon is upon us and the Antichrist Batman has returned and is killing the local crime bosses. Now, a lot of this is just not explained as, you know, Morrison writes books that just kind of move at like 100 miles an hour and things are kind of filled in later or not. So you don't really know what's happening because this is just a huge jump forward

but the bat computer creates a map of where all the crime bosses are being killed and wouldn't you know, it creates an inverted pentagram at its center, Hotel Bethlehem. Now, it doesn't take the world's smartest detective to deduce that that is probably where the Antichrist Batman is and wants a showdown. So he goes there and like his father,

he's prepared for everything, so much so that he's rigged the entire city of Gotham with explosives in his spare time so that he can detonate bombs under any enemy that's standing anywhere. The entire city is rigged for a 9-11-style pancake collapse, if need be, but not today, because Damien shakes off bullets by the police who arrive, presumably from some power that he's been granted in his satanic bargain, and utters the badass line, The Apocalypse is canceled until I say so. I love how this is completely nonsensical and unable to be understood. It's completely inscrutable.

But once you know something about Grant Morrison, it's like, oh, of course. Yes. Of course he's going to cancel the apocalypse with a superhero through a secret conspiracy to set bombs in every skyscraper. Yes. Yeah. Well, this is why Morrison is perfect to write superhero comics, because every kind of off-the-wall idea you have can sort of pass. Yeah. You know, you don't have to apply this.

the same levels of logic and rigor that you would in a movie, say, but you can't just have a character say, oh, well, I've actually rigged the entire city with explosives. I've taken, you know, 14 years to do it. And I can just blow you up right where you're standing. You can just have a person say that in the comic and just say, oh, yeah, whatever. I mean, I've heard Morrison interviews. I get it. That's like how my three-year-old plays. Yeah. So what Morrison is starting to do with this issue is hammer on the idea that there's always a Batman. and that not only that he always wins and can't be beaten and has thought of everything, but that he's bigger than a man, he's an idea, and he's even bigger than an idea.

He's like a godlike concept that by existing, by creating Batman, Bruce Wayne sort of transcends superherodom and humanity and becomes something of a god. He's solidified this idea even further by giving Batman his second big foe in the series, Time Itself. Oh, here we go. yes there's a lot of time travel a delightfully absurd amount this has to do with an event called final crisis and explaining it all would sound even more insane than all the stuff i'm already saying so just briefly the villain dark side shoots batman with these like omega rays the omega sanction and that kills batman but you know it was initially on the last page it seems like he's dead but of course it's comic books so what happened is uh he basically shot batman with a time bullet, and it propelled him back into time to the caveman era, where he's faced with some unfriendlies from a local clan. So he, of course, kills a gigantic,

prehistoric bat, skins it, and wears its skin and head as a cape and cow to become cave batman. Sick. It impresses that Neanderthals so much that they create a bat worshipping religion. I mean, what would you do if you'd never seen anything like this before? I'm orthodox Batman. So the premise of this part is sort of that he's in an odyssey through time. And he goes through the caveman era, the colonial era where he battles a sort of lovecraftian being and helps a distant relative who is thought to be a witch. He ends up fighting Blackbeard the pirate who is looking for some buried treasure, which happens to be buried by the ancient bat people that he, from the religion he started before he goes on to be a bat cowboy in the West and eventually

reaches the present to fight Dr. Hurt. Wait, so he's not aging during all of this? No, no. He's just hanging out in time. He doesn't have his memories for the longest time, but he is sort of drawn to bat imagery. So what's happening is that he is traveling through time and he's remembering Batman. He's planting clues for himself. He's realizing he's self-actualizing.

he's self-actualizing and creating the bat myth through time that then grows and you know he's he's seeding batman early in history and creating a bat religion which is all around him he's slowly building the batman IP over time but yes he's increasing the market share of warner brothers and dc comics yeah but so he so essentially if hurt had never you know sent him back through time he maybe never would have become Batman because it took this time travel to cultivate all of the sigils, I guess, that would lead him to become Batman in the present, you know, it's kind of like that I am my own grandfather type thing. Yes, well, more one, uh, one thing Morrison talks about is sort of like the Earl Burroughs

and how everything's cyclical. So like Dr. Hurt is part of a, it's sort of, you know, who he is is half revealed, basically they say he's not Satan literally and he's not Batman's father, but he is a guy named Thomas Wayne who is an ancient relative like a couple hundred years old who survived through cult magic obviously to lengthen his life. Cult magic. Yes. Well, he wants to summon the bat demon Barbados. So we're now full circle. Is Bruce Wayne the bat demon Barbados? Unclear. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I don't think that Barbados exists. He believes that it does. Dr. Hurt believes that it does.

My thesis of like schizophrenia, it was really holding on strong with all of this. Yeah, this is. I would say that it reads, it reads better because it takes place over the course of seven years and I'm giving you like the high points. I'm giving you the craziest high concept stuff. It is fun reading like Batman's Adventures Through Time and stuff. Does it make sense? I mean, that's, uh, it sort of depends on the reader. Like Morrison intentionally fills a lot of. clues puts a lot of clues and threads in here like all of them aren't don't necessarily make sense but it's like a proactive reading experience for fans where you sort of become pilled and and start to bake and you're trying to figure out oh did he did he start batman by going back in time and creating the bat uh the caveman batman religion and so dr hertz wrapped up but basically uh the joker kills him because you know he needs to take his uh his spot

back as Batman's primary antagonist. That's interesting. I always love the, when they have, you know, well-established superheroes, like, mashing up with other fictional characters that you wouldn't normally have. I know that there was a Superman versus the xenomorphs from aliens run, but did bat, I feel like Batman has also fought the xenomorphs as well. And now Blackbeard, as I'm learning. Batman's fought the predator on multiple occasions.

Yeah, okay. And, you know, if you were a predator, you would probably want to take on Batman. I mean, if you were... Yeah, that's the ultimate. That's the ultimate prey. Yeah, I mean, it may be a bad decision, actually. Maybe not smart on your part because you're not coming back with a trophy. Yeah.

Explaining this to me in depth like this to the detail really makes me want to bully you for being some sort of nerd. At least you're honest. I'm like, oh, okay, he's also saying, okay, get in the locker. I didn't write it. Makes a whole lot of sense when you read it. Yeah, I have a theory that Grant Morrison is actually legitimately a paranoid schizophrenic, that he processes his delusions. If he's not a drug addict, I think he's a paranoid schizophrenic,

and he actually has mass delusions in actual hysterical events. And he just makes that the plots of the comic books. Yeah. Wildly popular. Yeah, I think there's an out, like, I'm glad that they have an outlet for this stuff. When you hear Morrison talk about, like, being abducted by aliens and shit, I'm like, I don't, I don't know what to make of that. You're either delusional or lying.

I have a question for you guys. Like, how does a guy like Grant Morrison get picked to do these Batman runs? Because it's, you know, it's an IP that's owned by DC, I guess. Does a writer come in with a pitch to DC and they go, hey, we really like this? Or do they seek him out? They go, hey, we really like the Invisibles. Would you be interested in doing a run-on back? Batman like what's your take what's your angle like how would that come about because this he strikes me as

the type of guy that like does not interview well uh he he got sniped from britain so there was this british invasion of comics led by allan more in the 80s and so he came over from glasgow and was brought over by dc and they brought him under that wing and they gave him a really small batman book at some point that was not a priority but then it became probably one of the best selling batman books of all time because it came out at the exact same time as the Tim Burton movie. And this is actually when Grant Morrison sort of turns into a crazy person as well because he basically made in our money today overnight, $250,000 in royalties. And so he instantly just starts doing drugs. He tells stories about him like literally experimenting with alcohol where he would pour himself like a pint

of champagne and be like, what will this do to me? Hmm. Doesn't sound like a disciplined magician to me. Sounds like a guy who got a lot of money all of a sudden. Yeah. And so that's basically the point when that's right before his alien abduction occurred. He was traveling rich, like no 32 year old ever is, unless you're into crypto and just like experimenting with all sorts of substances. And I think that something like busted up in him in that point. But to answer your question a little bit more, like this starts in 2007. It's sort of late career Morrison. I mean, by then they're like one of the biggest writers in comics for like a decade or two plus. So, you know, you start out smaller, doing Animal Man in I think the late 80s or 90s. That was a good run. And like Alan Moore,

like they both brought something new at the time. They have this like, well, they have their magic gimmick. Yeah. But they're also very, they're also very, you know, literary and they're bringing all these literary influences in addition to their crazy ideas. You know, Alan Moore is sort of bringing anarchy politics in and Grant Moore's bringing like, you know, fifth dimensional aliens pulling you through time as a human centipede. So yeah, and then, and then they're selling like crazy back in a day when comics used to sell a lot more. They, uh, their careers came up in an era I'm certainly jealous of.

So then when it comes to like, you got to sell Batman books, you know, you get one of the, I don't know if Morrison pitched it or someone came, uh, came to him, but it's like the best idea they ever had was putting this nut on Batman and letting him run wild. Yeah. Yeah, he feels a bit like when they need to shake things up, like get, get Morrison on it. We need a we need a kernel of hash and Morrison. Yeah, it's right. It's like they went out and like hired the Joker to write Batman in a twist of fate. But no, it's cool. It's like it's a you can tell that these guys are sort of like counterculture like within the comic world and they they are exploding out of the sort of good versus evil, you know, sort of just like law enforcement and detective

sort of vibes that Batman, I guess, is kind of built on and they're making him more psychedelic, which is cool because Batman is such a, he's a guy who's trying to hold it so fucking tightly together all the time. I mean, this is a guy who has just been like completely traumatized, you know, watching his parents get murdered in front of him. He's so buttoned up. He's so he doesn't show emotion he's not very funny he doesn't have a sense of humor so to like to see him yeah like kind of spinning out of control through time and space is a really interesting approach to a you know a character that everybody has sort of come to know as as being one way right yeah well but bruce way's a party boy but yes i do want to i want to hear this unified theory of the batman yes yes so this is what i think

Morrison was doing and even Jake it could be as if the Joker wrote it really because the Joker truly understands Bruce Wayne more than anyone maybe even himself one might say but I think if you know if you watched a lot of the movies like Michael Keaton hanging upside down sleeping like a bat the stuff they've done in the comics breaking his back and whatnot you know they just they kept going with this stuff that he's like a dark weirdo and traumatized and I think Morrison wanted to sort of change that and actually has a very earnest, positive take on Batman that I kind of like. But I don't want to get, I might get put in a locker for saying this. Yeah, no, that's it.

I'm ready. He's violent, folks. I'm ready. This is like, this is, all right, this is as earnest as I'm going to get about superheroes ever, hopefully. So, Batman is the idea that rose out of this kid's grief and trauma. And he filled the hole that Morrison writes about all the time with, Batman. So he would train, he would seek out every fighting technique on planet Earth, every meditation

practice, he would sign up for government isolation experiments to see what happens when you spend 10 days by yourself with your thoughts. And he got pretty carried away in the process. I think we can all admit. It's an idea that evil can be conquered through sheer will and dedication without any superpowers attached to them, and that you can avoid the bad day scenario, which I think is a big dynamic in Batman is the bad day, like one bad day, the Joker, Two-Face, a lot of the villains, Mr. Freeze, they have also had these past traumas and they were transformed by it. They can't let go. And Batman said, you know, he's going to handle it differently. If not be a normal person, then he's going to at least deal with it and process it in a way that feels cool and looks productive.

So you're a caveman skinning a giant bat for an outfit, but you're kind of doing it for mindset reasons and you're modeling strength and you inspire others. So you've thought it through and you're creating a bat religion, that you're creating a sigil essentially that lasts beyond you, beyond your death. It exists before your birth. It exists prehistory now. You're a central pillar of society and you're like a moral teacher like Jesus. I mean, I honestly think that's what Morrison believes Batman is. And I think that's what the purposes of the superhero stories basically are, right? It's these moral tales of how to behave and how to act and how to improve the world. Yeah, and all the villains are like shadow versions of the superhero. But what you need

is you need your magic sigils. You need to be disciplined with your magical practice to ensure that you don't become a villain. So, like, Morrison took it to the utmost extreme, which is pitting Batman against the forces of time itself, against history and Satan, and showing that Batman is always there, a character and an idea stronger than even time itself that it was planted in the past by Bruce Wayne, that he is an undefeatable trauma-powered hero whose real superpower, I would posit, is psychological resiliency. He has faced his demons. He's seen his parents die. He's seen Robbins be killed in front of him. And he's come out of the other side stronger. He's not wallowing in self-pity. He's skinning giant bats and showing cavemen how to

live their lives properly. He stowgled his soul, Zerunard his brain, and beat the devil. Yeah, he is a proper psychopath. I mean, really, which is why the Joker understands him the best, is because they're both psychos on two sides of the aisle. We see this, we see this in political influencers all the time. Yeah, he's a, he's an influencer for sure. He's a psycho, clearly. Yeah. Not normal, but he's decided to channel it, much like Morrison. And, positive societal way like he's contained it he's figured out how to can it's not normal obviously

to dress as a giant bat but he's not making any excuses for that he's just saying this is this is what I do to deal with my shit what is your plan it's not hurting anyone just let me do my sigils he doesn't do my thing yeah that's another interesting thing he never he doesn't kill that's

that's what separates him from you know the other sort of Gotham psychopaths yes I mean that's the whole thing with like That's why I said this is the earnest take on superheroes, which is, you know, they've been subverted and everything because it's hard to posit over and over and over that Superman and Batman can always do the right thing, never kill people, always do the right thing and save the day. But that's what these are. I mean, they started out as morality stories for children and venture stories where the good guy is supposed to always win. And then I think that like what people like Morrison try to do is say like, okay, these are now like mythological figures who are modern, they're IP, but they're also.

we don't have religion anymore. We don't have, uh, we barely have politics. So you have to like read Batman and be like, I should be a good person. Yeah. If I had millions and millions of dollars. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much, you guys, for bringing, uh, some unusual and magical fare to the podcast. I feel like this is a real, uh, brain, what it was, what's that thing you say, Jake? A brain. A brain boiler, a brain breaker. Brain bubbler. Brain bubble. Brain boiler. Brain bubble. I have my brain bubbled by this process, personally. The listener was just a frog and a pot of water heating up through the whole pod. By the end, I'm talking about why Batman is good, and they don't even know how they got here. Yeah, they find themselves in their study, you know, on the bus, in their car with the decapitated head of a prehistoric bat. They're wearing it as a hat. They don't know why. RFK Jr., kind of a Batman.

I mean, he is kind of. Whales head off. I think if the, if the sigil stuff teaches us anything, it's that you kind of got a role with that. Like, people could become inspired by your example. The bat could become, what's the next Batman? It's up to, it's, it could be the Weezer drawing that you have, Jake, that I don't know. You're sigil. You guys, you guys are the, are the comic book artists and writers.

I think it's kind of up to you. I'd love to help if, if you want, hey, I just, yeah, I could sit in with you. I could pitch a couple ideas. I know if you wanted, I mean, that would be real old on. I can see Jake being rocketed back through time and drawing the Weezer Wings W on the wall of a cave. Definitely, teaching cavemen about Rivers Cuomo and what he's gone through. What's with these cavemen dissing my rock? Well, where can people follow you?

Obviously, we'll have a link to the graphic novel, and I guess we'll also link to your social media outlets. Is there anything else you guys wanted to plug? Matt has a wonderful new comic coming out from Ahoi Comics. Tell them all about the reboot of the Toxic Avenger, Matt. Oh, hell yeah. Thanks. I'm writing a new Toxic Avenger comic, which drops in stores October 9th. And it's all about how the Toxic Avenger travels through time to be canalized. It's actually, I can give you the pitch real quick. I'm rebooting the Toxic Avenger, and it's actually, there's a toxic train spill in a town, and it's put under quarantine. Kind of based off of what happened in East Palestine, Ohio, except it's a lot more gory, violent, there's mutated teens.

There's a lot of satire. I mean, you know, it's similar vein to Justice Warriors. Fuck yeah. I love Toxic Adventure. I had the toys when I was growing up. They did a weird like children's cartoon run of that show for some, or that of that comic for some odd reason. Well, basically, I haven't made a secret about it.

What I'm doing is sort of rebooting the Toxic Crusaders. So like by the end of this first series we're doing, it'll be pretty clear that the next one is the toxic crusaders. I'm sort of taking the toxic crusaders, merging them with some elements from the movies, and then updating the whole thing. I might do a trading card. Very cool.

Yeah. Go check that out, folks. Pick up Justice Warriors vote harder. And, yeah, thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast. You know where to find us, patreon.com slash QAA, where you can subscribe for five bucks a month. And get a second episode for every main. and, yeah, also access to our entire archive of premium episodes for everything else.

We've got a website, QaAApodcast.com. Listener, until next week. May the Deep Dish bless you and keep you. We have auto-keyed content based on your preferences. And how was Austria, Master Bruce? I noticed you failed to bring me back a present. I wish I knew a little more about sacred geometry. My reading on the subject has been woefully inadequate.

Remind me to order some books, Alfred. I was rather hoping for a smart pair of Lederhausen. I read somewhere that the term Gothic might possibly be derived from the word Goetik. Goes in the Greek, meaning magical. I'm beginning to believe that. These are the architectural plans I discovered in the drowned monastery. of Lake Das, now watch while I superimpose the plans of Gotham Cathedral. See, an almost perfect match.

A man with no shadow who's lived for over 300 years, dreams, ghosts murdered children, and occult architecture. How does it all connect? One shudders to think. Apparently, Gothic architecture was based on a kind of arch, called the Ogiv. The idea was that all the stresses and forces of the building were directed up. the cathedral became a transmitter aimed towards God. Cathedrals were also designed to have certain acoustic upgrades.

One more thing. Like musical instruments on a grand scale, the whole effect was to produce a vast crucible in which a kind of spiritual alchemy could take place. Does any of this help explain your dreams, Master Bruce? If architecture could be used to focus in direct spiritual power, Then, could it also be used for evil? And if so, what kind of evil are we talking about?

What's going to happen in Gotham Cathedral on May Day? My father knew something. That's why I've been dreaming about him.