GRANT MORRISON GRANT TALKS ON THE INVISIBLES WITH "They're GRANT MORRISON like Peter Greenaway movies. You can sit and study them all week." This book offers one (or more) possible interpretations of THE INVISIBLES; you've been pretty clear that there shouldn't be a definitive explanation of the series. There actually are people who are doing definitive versions. The Barbelith board — there's a guy there who gets it, completely understands it. It's shocking to me; this guy's in my head. He understands every single aspect of what I was doing with it and kind of has it in context. There are people who actually understand what I was trying to do with it. It's there for people to interpret, even if they interpret it badly or accuse me of doing something wrong or they've just misinterpreted it, at least I've got their reaction. A lot of it isn't even interpretation. A lot of is just people assuming that something they've forgotten suddenly isn't there. It definitely is there, it's just a lot of people miss connections because there's so much in the book that it's kind of hard to keep everything [in your head]. How did you pitch the series to DC? I'd done a couple of miniseries for them and was working on KILL YOUR BOYFRIEND and THE MYSTERY PLAY, and I suggested to 229 them that I wanted to come back and do a regular monthly book, but rather than use one of their characters I'd come up with this new thing, which was THE INVISIBLES. Part of it was the fact that I'd spent all the money, as well. I'd made my mark on ARKHAM ASYLUM and got quite rich off it, but I bought a house and I traveled around the world a few times and the money was gone. I decided I'd better do some work again. I'd actually done no work at all from '92 to '93, and I was just kind of assembling notes and traveling and kind of taking drugs and going a bit mad. The first one was a pretty big seller and it got really good publicity; it was in all the papers. It was even questioned in the House of Commons because it was so anti-authoritarian supposedly. So it got out and did pretty good business, but by the time Arcadia came out people just couldn't handle it. I kind of perversely did it deliberately to see if they could handle it. I knew they couldn't, but I wanted to say, "Here's the philosophy behind this — if you can't take it, then tough." Most of them couldn't take it. Yet they stuck with SANDMAN, which Arcadia is quite similar to in some ways. In SANDMAN, however, the philosophy would have been merely a background for the story, whereas in THE INVISIBLES the story is a background for the philosophy. The primacy of ideas is what the series is about, really. Everything is dramatizing ideas. The spy story or the terrorist story in it is just a misdirection. It can engage your attention while the you're getting this other stuff pumped into you. How much thought did you give to the way you portrayed gay characters? Fanny and Jolly Roger aren't exactly exploding any stereotypes. I just based it on people I knew. I wanted to use those things. You could just as easily say, "King Mob's got bald hair and piercings, so he looks like every guy in an S&M club during the '90s." Yeah, that's the point. Those are the people I was meeting and they were like that. I did meet transvestites; they were like Fanny. The lesbians I met did have short hair and did talk like that and they drove vans with a bunch of them in there and they wore shorts and big old kicker boots. I was just drawing on people I knew. It always annoyed me when people said they were stereotyped. People are stereotypes. I'm a stereotype; I fit the exact stereotype of an Aquarian, every inch of it. Stop fighting it. So what? I'd still be a real character if you put me in a comic. You did. Yeah, exactly. I can see why people would [complain]. If you're an individual in what's perceived to be a minority group you're more concerned about your individuality. In actual fact you don't look too fucking individual to anyone else. Get used to it. I don't look individual to a group of media boys. I look exactly like every other media guy in Glasgow, despite my attempts to be an individual. We are what we eat. 230 Entropy in the UK sees the series start to wear its influences on its sleeve, but it also sees the overt onset of magic around the book. Well, I was getting more confident. I'd used magick. The first arc is about Jack :learning about magick, and it's my ideas ab out magick, which was something I was interested in at the time, taking Situationist ideas and applying them to magick. So it was basically the notion of shamanically empowering your own town, because that's what a shaman would do. It's not about going to South America and taking [drugs]. It's a nice holiday, but a shaman is supposed to be walking his area. That's the point; you're supposed to do stuff. Because of the experience [in Kathmandu] I had a different view of what magick was. It just became more i ntrinsic — the comic became an act of magick rather than a comic about magick. There'd been many comics about magick before that, but I've done it. I touched on it in KID ETERNITY, but that was kind of to give it color, to make it more exotic. But THE INVISIBLES actually became an act of magick. I got so inexplicably drawn into it. It was roundabout that time; I think you can see me getting more enmeshed in the text from the time of Sheman onwards. This was the time you had your illness... That came afterward. The time leading up to it was really strange. There was a lot of weird experiments going on. From '92 onwards I got really involved in magick and really involved in drugs and really involved in weird sex. The whole thing is in there. THE INVISIBLES b ecame about that. The transvestite stuff was me doing it, and going out like that to see what it was like, and then coming back and writing about it. It's not like I was fucking people or anything, but I wanted to be in that head. So I'd go and do that and be Lord Fanny for a night and come home and try to write that stuff. A lot of that was verbatim, so it's got a kind of creepy edge off it; you think, This is something for real. After the virus storyline ends, the series relaunches with a new volume. Had that been the plan all along? What I had in my head was Volume 1, and then Volume 2 was this vague area. I knew they were going to go to America, I knew some of the points. There were always going to be three [volumes]. It was based on a lot of things —one of them was the Buddha's experience, so there's different extremes in it. The first one was going to be British, have that kind of questioning, intellectual, caption-laden quality of British comics of the time. The second one was an American adventure, so the violence goes up and the guns go up and the glamour goes up. That was always intended. The third one was going to be a global thing, which is a confusion of everything that's been, and pushed toward what might be. So I'd had it planned, and the fir st one always had to be the way it was going to be, but as the second one progressed it came to life. The actual series came to life. My life and the series became indistinguishable. It was also my experiences. It's difficult to talk about THE INVISIBLES because it's fractal. We could go on forever and ever and ever. There's a story in there; there's also a critique of the story in there; there's also a biography in there; there's also 231 A critique of the biography; there's also an alien abduction being dissected by the person who thinks he's been abducted via the medium of the comic; there's a spell in there. There's so many things that could be talked about. There's also just me doing what was happening at the time. At that point I was spending a lot more time in America, so the series suddenly became about the American experience and about the glamour and the infection that America lives under, the infection of itself. I began to see that's what it was, and that's where THE INVISIBLES ends up. It begins with an action movie, and by the end the action movie's been cut into pieces and there's nothing left. It's the Tower. America's fallen at the end, Mason's house has fallen.