Grant Morrison

Grant Morrison once played with my Catbus. 

Not many other men can make this claim.  My brother, maybe.  Though, to be honest, it was his Catbus too, so I don’t know if that really counts.  The incident has been on my mind lately.  Not the touching, per say, but that initial, physical encounter with the great Grant Morrison all those years ago.  Why?  Because I think I caught something from him.  Or maybe he gave it to me intentionally.  I can’t be sure.  With Grant does it really take a face to face, skin to skin experience?  Or was I compromised/blessed by the opening panel of the first Grant Morrison comic book I ever read?  When did the initial infection/affliction/imbuement occur? 

I guess anything/everything is possible.  What I am certain of is that my brain has been altered in some way and that Grant is responsible.

If you don’t know who Grant Morrison is, you’ve missed out.  He is, and this might be a literal statement, a comic book god.  Read any of his issues on the following books if you need convincing: All-Star Superman, The Invisibles, WE3, Doom Patrol, Animal Man, Batman, 52, New X-Men, JLA, The Filth.  And that’s just for starters.

I don’t recall the first Grant Morrison comic book I ever read.  I’m guessing it was Animal Man.  That seems a likely place for contamination since Grant Morrison actually makes an appearance within the pages of that book.  The Catbus incident, however, I recall clearly enough.  It occurred in San Diego.  At Comicon in 2003.  I brought an Invisibles shirt I’d made, hoping to get it signed by Grant at a panel he was scheduled to host on Friday of the Con.  It was a black shirt stamped with a white circle (the blank badge), with the Invisibles logo printed on it in clear.  I wanted Grant to sign the black fabric with a black pen. 

On Thursday of the Con I was not expecting to see Grant Morrison since he wasn’t scheduled for an appearance until Friday, so my brother and I were surprised when we spotted him wandering around outside the convention center.  He was in disguise, facial hair and head stubble, but we recognized him.  Actually I recognized his then girlfriend, now wife, Kristan, from the pictures of her on Grant’s website.  I believe I said, “That looks like Grant Morrison’s girlfriend.  Hey, that’s Grant Morrison!”

We followed them into the upper floors of the building and imposed ourselves upon them.  The shirt was in my bag but I had loaned my black marker to a friend who was off meeting Ray Bradbury.  I explained the idea for the signature and Grant was very enthusiastic about it.  Then I mentioned problem about the pen.  Not an issue.  Grant said he was headed to an interview with Tripwire Magazine and invited us to accompany him.

Let me pause for a moment and dwell upon just how awesome that moment felt..

Being in the presence of Grant Morrison has a bipolar sort of effect.  You feel star-struck, in utter awe, like hanging out with a galaxy of the coolest sci-fi planets, and you feel completely relaxed, and comfortable, as though you’re with one of your closest friends. 

My mind was dealing/not dealing with the sensation as we rode down the escalator with Grant and Kristan.  In silence.  Words would not form, but, as with an old friend, it didn’t feel like that was odd.  Grant, gracious man that he is, began asking us questions.  This nudged me back into reality where I realized that I was wasting my precious Grant Morrison time.  He asked what we’d bought, pointing to our bags.  Inside were some studio Ghibli products including plush-toy versions of Totoro and the Catbus.  When Grant saw these he grabbed the Catbus and said, “Look honey.  The Catbus!” and he playfully shook it at Kristan.

We chatted briefly about Miyazaki and even managed to get in some comic geek stuff about the Ultra Marines and Solaris the Tyrant Sun.  And I must admit that walking onto the convention center floor in the company of Grant Morrison was a moment of pure joy.  I believe they call it nerdgasm these days.  When we got to the Tripwire booth he drew an anarchy symbol on the back of my Invisibles shirt and signed his name.  Black on black.  

I shook his hand (the third time my brother later informed me), thanked him, and we departed. 

So… consecration through physical contact (thrice even), mental infestation through graphic media, or some sort of totem thing with the Catbus.  Regardless, at some point, in some way he got inside my head and has been tinkering/mucking about with the hard wiring in enigmatic ways. 

Even those who do not appreciate Grant Morrison’s work must admit that there is much more going on in his comic books than one first suspects.  Somewhere between the panels, dialogue boxes, and word balloons are secret things, special things.  Things that infest/enhance.  Things that stay with you, become a part of you, never really leave whether you want them to or not. 

Why?  Is it just good writing on Grant’s part?  Couldn’t the same be true for any writer with interesting ideas, grammatical skills, and a publisher?  Perhaps.  But how many of these writers can match Grant Morrison’s efforts?  He created a comic book to act as a psychic vaccine to inoculate his readers.  He stated that it was his intention to make DC Comics fictional universe gain a sentience of its own.   He placed himself in his own comic books, on more than one occasion, using two dimensional fictions suits. And he created thousands of awkward/fond/memorable moments for fans one magical Thanksgiving.

As seen in Invisibles volume 1 issue #15.

The entirety of the letters page appears below.  For your convenience.

 

There’s an intention in the deep structure of Grant Morrison’s writing that has nothing to do with plot or characterization and pushes beyond symbolism and metaphor.  He’s doing something to us.  Giving us something more.  But are these presents from on high or nefarious mind traps from the dark?  Scoff not, it’s a valid concern.  A twitchy little worry that squirms around in my subconscious. 

I’m beginning to think that Grant Morrison is somehow using my mind, all our minds in fact, for his own purposes.  Scoff not, I said!  It might be true and then you’d feel dumb later.

Still, I don’t think this is a malicious act on Grant’s part.  No more so than a carpenter using a circular saw to cut a plank of wood is a cruelty to the saw or a painter dabbing a brush into colorful blobs on a palette to mix a new hue is slight against the paintbrush.  I think he’s simply working in a medium that we haven’t fully fathomed. 

Why do I think this?  That’s actually a more complex question than you’d think.  Answers could range from a specific panel out of a comic book to a sanctimonious claim that it is somehow Grant’s will that I be the messenger through which he informs you all of his intention.  A more precise question would be: What incidents have caused me to suspect?  Still broad, but a little more manageable.

Mostly it’s been a combination of two re-readings.  Grant Morrison’s work and my own.  As December 22^nd 2012 approached, I thought it would be a great time to go through The Invisibles again.  As I made the journey I noticed that much of the material seemed brand new to me and that small snatches of text or interesting word combinations, buried between/within great gouts of seemingly random ideas, were precise summaries of short stories or even entire book ideas that I was in the process of writing. 

During this time I was also rereading some of my own work; editing and compiling a short story collection or transcribing piles of scratch paper notes and hand written pages into a more usable word documents.  On some of the more unique ideas, items of which I had taken much pride for my creativeness, I recognized Grant Morrison’s finger prints.

I won’t embarrass/indict myself with a parade of examples.  The PK13 story that follows should illustrate the phenomenon well enough.

So my mind has been pondering if I’m merely influenced by Grant Morrison or whether his tendency to pepper his work with shotgun blasts of ideas that simply beg for further expansion is part of Grant’s overall plan/intention/masterpiece.

All of my semi conscious mulling spilled over into full fledged wonder/paranoia a few weeks ago.  I had this dream.  In it I was reading a Grant Morrison comic book and watching an animated version of this same comic book all within the same dream at the same time.  And I think I was working at grocery store when all of this was happening as well.  My dreams have been like that recently.  Multilayered.  Hyper detailed.  And not just visually.  I will not only see every single dent, chip, and paint run on a stairwell rail, but I will also know the entire history of that rail, who built it, the people who have touched it since its installation, and how adjacent walls, steps, and supports correlate to its function and placement within the building.  Sometimes multiple character arcs happen simultaneously, each a parallel to the other. 

And so too, was this dream complex.  A fitting context for an imaginary Grant Morrison comic book to make an appearance.  The story in the book/cartoon movie was about a transdimensional private eye named PK13.  His name was longer than that, but I came to know him as PK13 (after I woke up) because there is no way to actually write his name.  It started with the letter P and the letter K simultaneously.  The P part of the name was seven letters long and the K name was six.  Both were followed by the number 13, which may or may not have been the result of adding the number of letters in both names together. 

PK13 looked like a cross between Richard D. James 

and Kurt Russell (ala Captain Ron) 

as drawn by Frank Quitely. 

[-I WISH I HAD AN IMAGE FOR THAT] 

If you are unfamiliar with the artwork of Frank Quitely, I pity you.  He draws stuff like this:

That's him drawing Grant by the way.

The animated version of the PK13 comic was made to look like a Frank Quitely comic in motion.  Some of you Morrison/Quitely fans out there are hating me for what I was allowed to see, but that’s just the jealousy talking. 

A long time ago I had a dream that I was watching the Invisibles movie, animated to look like Phil Jimenez art.  That has nothing to do with the PK13 dream, but you can go ahead and envy-hate me for that one too.

Anyway, PK13 had some strange kind of gun that I haven’t retained much memory of at this point.  It was cool though, and looked superhero/sci-fi/goofy/silly/awesome and matched his weirdo-cool 80’s disco shades.  

As drawn by Frank Quitely.  And he had this martial arts style in which he would flash gang signs to spell his opponent’s secret name.  This would have two effects.  One.  It would leave an after image in the air (sort of like tracers or 4^th of July sparklers when you whip them around really fast) between PK13 and his foe.  The image being the gang-sign glyph he’d just finger-spelled.  Two.  There was typically a physical effect on the actual fight.  It might cause all of his opponent’s punches to stray wide or slow to the point where impact was a feather light touch.  At one point PK13 spelled his own name in the air (I can’t recall what effect this had on the fight) and it looked like a smiley face (made out of contorted fingers; as drawn by Frank Quitely) with a 13 after it.

During the dream there was some back story on PK13.  He was born of a dimension hopping cephalopod, not quite an octopus but definitely not a squid, perhaps a cuttlefish, in the deli/butcher department of the grocery store I was working in (in the dream) while I read/watched this Frank Quitely drawn/animated awesomeness.  The cephalopod thing had a body that was about the size of a football.  PK13 was born fully dressed wearing his weirdo-cool shades and a brown trench coat.  He wasn’t a baby, he was just small.  I don’t know if the gun was in there or not.  The sequence was less like childbirth and more like picking up a pot roast from the butcher block and buying a blister-packed action figure simultaneously. 

Anyway, this dream lingered in my head for days.  Sadly, whole sections faded from memory before I jotted down a quick note.  Even some of the information on that note has slipped from my mind.  For example, I wrote: PK13 – trans-dimensional private eye secret detective gang-sign martial artist alien-cephalopod/man hybrid fantastic dance fashionista.   I lament the loss of the fantastic dance fashionista.  I have no memory of even writing that down, but I bet that part of the dream was amazing. 

Still, I had the gang-sign martial arts style and thought that I could probably do something with it.  It felt like a very original idea.  Bizarre and cool.  Something Grant would come up with.  But this one was mine.  I had no Frank Quitely to illustrate it for me, but I thought I could work up a short story around the concept.

A few days later I found myself reading though All Star Superman.  I was going to lend it to my eight year old nephew, proud to think of him growing up with Grant Morrison ideas in his head from such a young age, and wanted to reacquaint myself with the story.  And then, during the Jimmy Olsen issue, I found it.  Leo Quintum about to embark on a journey to contact the living neon gasses, Electrokind.  And how do they communicate, these living neon gasses? With some glowing, finger-movement, sign language crap that seems a whole hell of a lot like firework-sparkler-gang-sign-tracers to me.

And so I wonder, why does this keeps happening?  I guess it could be that Grant tends to pack each panel of his comics with so many out-there concepts that we can’t keep constant track of them all and are forced to store them in our subconscious.  They lie in wait until our creative brain is operating under an inspirational surge, then they pop into our minds as these brilliant epiphanies.  We write them down and bask in the glow of our inventiveness, possibly share them with friends or our limited public audience, and then cringe when we re-encounter them in a Grant Morrison book.

I know I’m not the only one that this has happened to.  My friend, Chad Rinn, wrote a short story in which the character creates an extra letter on an old typewriter.  The Triple-U.  Later, during a rereading of the Invisibles, he found out just who had introduced that idea into his brain.

I think this effect that Grant Morrison has on his readers is intentional.  That he engineers his comics to spread his ideas in this subliminal manner, sowing the seeds of his mind into our brains like a farmer planting a fertile field and then allowing those ideas to ripen into a crop of odd stories.  This makes me wonder if there is a harvest coming.  Does Grant Morrison intend to reap what he has sown?  And how cool would a Grant Morrison mind-harvest be anyway?

But still, what is the intent?  With these story seeds is he simply altering the creative landscape so fiction trends veer in the direction of his tastes?  Or is he, perhaps, creating a new medium?  Comics, film scripts, prose, music, it’s all too limiting. Maybe Grant Morrison has found a way to script our dreams and create worlds in our subconscious.   

When I consider it that way, wouldn’t it be disrespectful not to accept these ideas as gifts and use them if I can?  Would I not eat the produce grown in my backyard if someone else planted it for me?  Grant has an abundance of ideas, and maybe he wishes only to spread the yield around.  He may only have time for a panel or two in a Superman book for strange neon sign language, but if I can get a short story or a small serial about a trans-dimensional detective gang-sign martial artist from his idea seed, I think Grant Morrison would approve.  If not, then I guess he shouldn’t have left that idea in my brain where I could find it.

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All the preceding was written months ago.  I let the piece sit.  It felt like something was missing, but I couldn’t figure out what.  I was hoping I might spot the hole when I sat down to edit it. 

In the meantime, I started reading Supergods.  Not only was I eager to read a prose book by Grant, but I thought it might help me focus on my subject; assist in solving that little problem I was having.  In the latter half of the book (pages 260 to 288 of my copy) there is a discussion about Grant’s abduction/enlightenment experience in Kathmandu.  It involves a trip to Alpha Centauri, a vision of our universe as nursery for 5th dimensional beings, and an explanation of time which illustrates that we are all one organism dating back to the original mitochondrial cell in the primordial ocean.  A quick summation/taste of this can be found in a video called Grant Morrison Explains Life, on youtube at: http://youtu.be/xr-3zUjZgl0

Something else was happening within the pages of the book.  I was encountering my own ideas.  On page 410 Grant talks about All Star Superman and how “America’s greatest hero had fallen into the hands of three Scotsmen as if, at last, we were being given a chance to pay back the debt of all those Yankee mags, harvesting the fruit of the wondrous seeds they’d left growing in our skulls...”  Didn’t I write something about idea seeds, and a harvest?  What was going on?  Was I now prescripting my Morrison influenced ideas? 

Being no closer to resolving the issue, I shared my incomplete essay/musing with a couple of Grant Morrison fans and I asked if they sensed a blind spot or some kind of void within my words.  And if they could, what was it?  The consensus was that, yeah, something was missing, but, no, they didn’t know what it was.

After talking with Triple-U-Chad about the problem, I came to a decision.  Some sort of Grant Morrison-esque chaos type magick was in order (for those of you unaware of Grant’s ties to magic, simply type in chaos magick on an internet search and his name should pop up).  My plan was to perform one of Grant’s rituals, seek a solution to my story problem, and see what happened.  The hope was that something strange would take place and a wonderfully weird ending for my piece would present itself.

That night I went digging through some storage boxes, looking for photos of my trip to San Diego, specifically the one of Grant with my Invisibles shirt.  I found a box that was full of old writings and envelopes of half formed ideas scribbled on scratch paper, half of which were probably Grant Morrison’s idea children.  Inside this box was a little metal Ganesh figurine.  I was happy to find the statue and thought I might set it on a shelf in my office.  I’ve been fond of Ganesh for a long time, but I closed the box without a further thought to his function and without making an sort of connection to Invisibles imagery at all since I had a picture of Grant to find. 

When the photo was in hand, I brought everything to my office and set it aside to deal with later on in the week.  The next night I finished reading Grant Morrison’s Supergods book.  I set it on my shelf next to the photo of Grant Morrison.  Then I looked down, saw the little Ganesh statue in the box at my feet, picked it up, and set it on the book.  And that’s when I realized what had happened.  Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, had come to me when I was seeking a solution to my Grant Morrison conundrum.  It had to be a sign, right?  It would surely see me to some sort of resolution.  It was just Morrisony enough, wasn’t it?  It was… late and I had to get up early.  Perhaps the answer would come in a dream that night.

It didn’t. 

Not for me anyway. 

When I came home from work the next day my little girl greeted and me at the door.  She had set up a tea party/puppet show in my office.  We sat down to our pretend repast.  I could see the Ganesh figure from where I was seated so during our discourse I asked, “Did you have any dreams last night?”  She said, “Yes.  I had a dream that you and me and an elephant found a treasure box full of treasures, and buttons, and coins, and dragon scales, and diamonds.”

“Really?” I asked. 

An elephant.  Maybe this was it! 

“Where did you find all this treasure?” I pressed.

“In the blood.”

“The blood?”

“Yeah.  We just put our hands in there and moved around and we find it.”

Oh.  Okay.

So… A treasure box of blood?  Hmmm.  If Ganesh was speaking through my three year old daughter, something was being lost in the translation.  I tried to piece everything together, but, unlike Grant, I don’t have 5^th dimensional vision (read his book) and could not grasp a complete picture from these disparate parts.  Was I missing something?  I had to be.  I reviewed the sequence, the finding of Ganesh and the picture of Grant Morrison, and that’s when I realized that there was a third object in my storage boxes that might help.  The actual Catbus that Grant had played with in San Diego.  I would have to find it.  I needed it.  I was positive of this.  If I was to complete some sort of Grant Morrison chaos magick, the Catbus must be the key. 

Once again I dug through the storage boxes.  When I found the Catbus I placed it on the shelf next to the book, the Grant picture, and Ganesh.  

All that was left was the performance of some kind of ritual.  But what would that be?  Not a Thanksgiving turkey-baster type offering.  The Catbus is a plushy kid’s toy that I’m saving for, hopefully, a second daughter.  I couldn’t involve it in magick like that.  And… rituals and spells and sigils just aren’t my sort of thing and the effort involved in researching and performing such an act was a bit daunting.  Also… I don’t have a lot of free time these days.

I could feel my chaos magick solution slipping away.

Perhaps I should just ask Grant Morrsion.  I follow him on Twitter, I could just type a question requesting that he tell me what was missing from my essay.  That would be simple enough.  And I could safely assume that whatever answer came back would be just the one I needed.  So I spent days composing possible tweets in my head.  I couldn’t make it work.  That stupid one hundred and forty word limit.  Also, something felt wrong.  It was too direct/easy.  And besides, if my prior assertions were correct, the answer should already be out there waiting for me. 

So, almost on a whim, I opened youtube and typed: what’s missing grant morrison.  If there was a part of me that hoped for a video called Grant Morrison Explains What’s Missing, it was very microscopic.  What came up was a selection of videos I had already watched.  Except for one.  It was called Grant Morrison at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.  I thought maybe there would be some information about his upcoming projects.  My mission/quest/effort to complete my essay now all but forgotten in the face of possible impending Morrison literature news, I clicked the link.

The video was of an hour long panel with some Q&A at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.  Forty-nine minutes in someone asked Grant about Kathmandu.   http://youtu.be/tVJYjS0G4SA?t=49m16s.  Grant went on to talk about his experience with the mercury looking blob things that took him to Alpha Centauri and showed him a higher dimensional plane of existence.  How they explained that our universe is a sort of fourth dimensional nursery where they use time to grow their young.  There’s a bit about the tungsten glass aliens, the ones filled with neon and speak by making shapes with their glowing hands.  PK13 and his gang-sing martial arts style (as drawn by Frank Quitely) popped into my head.  Grant mentioned how the silvery blob guys wanted him to go back and tell everyone about what they taught him.  About how we are all part of this same living organism.

At fifty five minutes (http://youtu.be/tVJYjS0G4SA?t=55m39s) he stated that our existence, this strange time grown organism, was about to become an adult, and that people who experience similar events have this feeling that they need to tell others, that it’s important, that it will somehow prepare us, the cells of this living thing, for what’s to come.  He also suggested that we can somehow share the memories of others because we are all one and that, somewhere in time, long dead people still exist, still live out their lives within the overall organism.

Over the next several hours this all stewed in the back of my mind.  The idea seeds, the harvesting, PK13, the Catbus, Supergods, our time-grown pupa lives, this essay/musing, all if it.  Finally something clicked.  In this essay/musing I’ve claimed that my mind was altered by Grant Morrison.  Since, in time, we are all one creature grown from the same mitochondrial root, then it would make sense that one cell could affect another.  Especially if that one cell was intentionally modified to do so, as Grant’s experience suggests.

This felt good, this felt right.  This almost felt epiphanous.  And this could account for everything if I wanted it to.  Maybe the Catbus, with its multiple legs, was a hint at the many legged creature that we all look like across time.  Perhaps the treasure box of blood symbolized the source of creative inspiration we share.  We can dig around in it for treasures because we’re all parts of the same organism.  PK13 is transdimensional and affects others with silent language.  Could he be a fourth (or is that fifth?) dimensional fiction suit of Grant Morrison, working across space-time in his newfound artistic medium?  Grant has been known to dabble with hyper-sigils, casting them across the time-space of entire comic book runs, which exist in a universe of two dimensional space.  Even the self referential form this essay/musing has taken hints of Grant Morrison.

Or perhaps I’m reading too much into it, and everything is much more simple/complex than all of that.

These mercurial blobby things made Grant into a supercell of sorts and now he goes along adjusting other cells in service of the overall organism.  The organism that is me, that is you, that is all of us and everything.  The why of this becomes a bit clearer when considering the approaching maturation/transformation of the I/You/Us/We life-form.  But since I can’t even fathom what that looming change might encompass, I’ll limit my focus to the part that is me.

I am a cell and I have a function. 

I have been adjusted/modified by another cell with an apparently higher function.  This does not mean that I have a higher function, but it does reinforce the notion that I do have a function and promote the development of the overall whole.  We are all part of the same entity, all time is happening simultaneously, everything I have and will have done (be it writing or otherwise) has and is happening.  More importantly, whatever effect I have on the I/You/Us/We organism is complete/set/accomplished.  Job well done, cell: Tom Landaluce. You have/are/will served/serving/serve your function.

So is that notion confining or freeing?  I guess that would depend on the person.  Most writers like to imagine that their words are absolutely unique, and envision their work impacting upon the minds of millions, bringing fame and fortune.  And yes, this does seem pleasant to me as well, but at a basic, almost cellular level, I just want others to read what I have written.  Knowing that, in simultaneous time, I am always being read, is freeing.  Knowing that my work somehow affects the overall I/You/Us/We creature is encouraging.  Knowing that the Grant Morrison cell is somehow a part of me/you/us, and is assisting me/you/us in my/your/our function… I find that inspirational.