13/5 DRACULA KNOWS BEST

PIC: Kliff meets Zappa KM - 2026

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

WHY I JUST DON’T BELIEVE PRINCE WILLIAM

Have they gone yet?..

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

All strapped in?

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

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

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

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

A YARDSTICK FOR LUNATICS

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

PIC: Rian Hughes The Tower - 2024

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

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

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

PIC: US Admin - 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BRAINDROPS ARE FALLING FROM MY HEADS

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

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

Angine de Poitrine – Sherpa | A DADA Film

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here’s Sarah’s own website:

Jolley Comics

UNTYING THE BLACK KNOT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHUT THE DOOR THEY’RE COMING IN THE WINDOW…

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

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

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

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

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

Here, by way of a preview…

PIC: Frank Quitely - 2026

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

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

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

TRANSLUNAR INJECTION BURN

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

VIVA LA MEGABABES

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

Great setting, annoying gameplay.

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

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

WHAT IT’S REALLY LIKE TO WORK FOR DARTH MAUL

Your correspondence, my replies:

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

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

Peter Thiel is also an anagram of Pete Hitler!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bleedin’ Cool did something right!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luna Express looks good!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven fires prophecy - Wikipedia

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

Ks – Fascinating. What an incredible experience!

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

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

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

More soonest!