29/10 A HOUSE THAT TRIES TO BE HAUNTED

PIC: Alien: Earth - deleted baguette scene - KM 2025

Doors are open!

In Like Flint | Soundtrack Suite (Jerry Goldsmith)

Welcome one and all and none at all, in the newly imagined and constructed XANADUUM MERCURY LOUNGE! The weekly Xanaduum newsletter starts here!

Please take a drink, a seat, a photograph, an aperitif, or perhaps a partner for the dance! How about gorgeous and deadly Yuliana here, arrived with the ballet from Hallucinograd on the TransPsykick Express? The mood here is mellow, comrade! Spy-fi cocktail scented breezes blow through blacklight and bubble gun and lava lamplight! Help yourself to a dry martini, why don’t you? Alles gut, jah?

But wait! The walls are pulsing pink op art spirals now! Bridget Riley checkerboard Alice in Wonderland pizzicato paranoia machines spin into life!

It’s all gone bubble bath and brainwash!

Whose SIDE are you on? I prefer the backside myself, Mr. Bomd…

Scene set, the call of the mundane awaits…

WHAT A FUNNY GIRL, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL WORLD

Life of the writer…

I did an AMA two weeks on Reddit – it was supposed to take up two hours of that Wednesday afternoon; I was doing it right up until I fell asleep at midnight. I found myself unable to stop once I got started. The questions kept on coming. I started early on Thursday and just kept going with it in the same fever pitch, on a mission, single-pointed, answering questions, encouraging people, consoling others, delivering clickbait unto the needy, still convincing myself I could respond to everyone, until the witching hour once more, and all day Friday till fresh midnight yawned, with a few more stabs over the weekend until the sheer scale of the Leviathan did o’erwhelm my resolve!

There were over a thousand questions, many containing multiple queries within, like matryoshka dolls. I was asked about everything from the DC Absolute comics, and my favourite breakfast, to the nature of God. I tried to answer everyone to the best of my limited knowledge but it proved impossible. My apologies to anyone who failed to get a reply.

I live in the country and speak to the same seven or eight people most days. Most of them have not read my stories and know me only as a neighbour, or friend. Although I never forget that people are out there reading and enjoying the work, there’s an abstract element to my relationship with the audience for my work. The Q/A element was there but there was conversation too, and mild disagreements, and so it was like trying to talk to everyone at a party with a thousand or more guests… one after another for days put me in an altered state. So many written messages. Some brought me to tears or haunted me. Others entertained me, or told me off, or made me think, or laugh. I was emotionally frazzled near midnight on Friday, when I had to call it a day.

Saturday, I slept. Thumbs up to all the peaceful No Kings protestors! Seeing the assembled crowds felt like a little taste of Ma’at energy facing down the collapsing pyramid and the mummy-men of the Age of the Osiris as their bandages unravel. An event depicted on Tarot card The Tower as depicted here on November 15^th 2022 by Rian Hughes as part of our modern deck (final four cards are on their way soon)!

General strike action next! Then try levitating the White House into low earth orbit with 10 million mind power and leaving it there!

I remain somewhat heartened that the masters of the material sphere are themselves unwitting, all-too mortal victims of that solid world’s tendency towards ironic caprice.

FLOWERS IN HER HAIR, FLOWERS EVERYWHERE

People have asked what I’ve been doing – I spent most of the last year and more developing a TV show. It has now entered Hollywood hell as it holds its breath for a greenlight, or no light at all. I can’t say a word about it, but if people knew what the project was, I think they’d be very excited. Loved the process, having the outcome delayed is less welcome. Otherwise, the summer heat and general downbeat vibe killed my creativity dead. 2025 was a write-off, with a demoralizing, heartbreaking litany of deaths and disappearances from the feral cat colony.

Come September and the lowering of the temperature, the electricity came back on in my brain.

Been writing some new comics for next year, which youz’ll hear more about here first. There’s a new Sebastian O adventure planned with Steve Yeowell. A couple of horror things I mentioned before – The Hangman’s Song and Vaster Than Empires. Worlds Collide, with director and Beats of War creator Etienne Kubwabo, has been delayed from this year to the end of 2026, but it’s finally back on schedule.

I enjoyed writing Batman/Deadpool more than I expected, and it reignited my dormant passion for writing comics. I thought I’d take a swing at one of those late career renaissances I hear about!

I spotted this in an interview from the iPaper, with Richard O’Brien, creator of the Rocky Horror Show (I hope I look as good as he does if I make it to 83):

“They say that being gay and being transgender is a psychological problem, which it is, of course, by default, isn’t it? It wasn’t a problem until people said: “You shouldn’t be that.” Then it becomes a problem. In a binary world, it becomes a problem, but in a more generous kind of world, where people are allowed to be what they are, who they are, without being ridiculed or belittled or perhaps burned at the stake, then it isn’t a problem. The problems are imposed by society.”

Seems plain enough.

I WANT TO HEAR THE WHOLE WORLD JANGLE

Coming up on Friday 31^st October, Halloween – the first two chapters of LUVKRAFT vs. KUTULU – this one’s deep dark psychedelia and seriously not for the fainthearted. Multiple trigger warnings apply. You can read the first couple of chapters for free on Halloween, this coming Friday, and if you find yourself offended, we urge you turn away and find Jesus wherever you can, and as quickly as you can! For only he can save you – and only then the way you’d save stamps, I’m afraid.

The following six increasingly nauseating instalments will be available weekly to paid subscribers only. The living will envy the dead.

What else?

I have Batman/Deadpool coming out on November 19. It’s only 27 pages, but they have more DC/Marvel team-ups by other great creators in there to beef up the page count.

My headliner is a buddy banter-based psychedelic romp with a story structure rooted in the kind of stuff Bob Haney and Jim Aparo used to do with the Batman team ups in Brave and the Bold. The tone is not especially serious. The prologue follows directly from a plot strand in JLA/Avengers by Kurt Busiek and George Perez, which was the last and greatest of the Dc/Marvel crossovers – from 2003/4 – before the recent Deadpool/Batman (well worth a look) and the upcoming Batman/Deadpool with me and Dan Mora re-ignited the grand tradition.

Great opening line for a noir novel, inspired by my cat-ridden habitation…

‘The smell of fresh shit and stale urine hit me as soon as I opened the door. It told me I was home…’

I’VE GOT ALL I NEED, LOTS OF BOOKS TO READ

I wrestled all the way through with Timothy Morton’s Hell: Towards A Christian Ecology, but loved the experience by the end. The analyses of Blake’s work are astonishing, peeling back layer upon layer of meaning like an expert restoring a painting. Another Blake-inspired cracker!

Morton’s interview with John Riordan, friend of Xanaduum, helped clarify some of the ideas and the approach. Morton’s a rare and original thinker with a good heart.

Sticking with Blake for a bit I’ve started on John Higgs’ William Blake vs. The World which, in classic Higgs tradition, is brilliant and compulsively readable.

LETS LISTEN TO THE SPIDERS SING

Xanaduum boasts some of the highest-level reader correspondence available to humanity! Paid subscribers may enjoy, or dread, an ongoing dialogue with GM +PLUS+ unlimited access to the remarkable and outrageous Xanaduum archive, and the many mysteries and wonders contained therein! Magical instruction, comics, songs, stories, scripts, art, a wealth of arcana to keep you reading until the nightmare’s over.

New readers! Here follow some cryptic replies to previous communications and enquiries. See if you can guess what the questions were!..

John – thanks for the Morton link! The interview helped clarify some of what confounded me!

Loved the Blake comic! More!

I’d be delighted for Philip Hoare to use my comments! Be my guest! Say ‘hi!’

Osiris – jumping out of a plane will do it! Hope you wore a parachute, or, if not, that the plane was still on the ground! FylGja knows the score – check out my essay Beyond the Word and the Fool for a breakdown of my pragmatic and practical approach to Magic, what it is, what it does, and what it’s for!

Brigitte – ‘Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted’ is the battle cry of a virtual world where we can fly or grow to gigantic size …

Bobby – the parallels between Ancient Egyptian culture and American culture in the last hundred years are fascinating.

Clint as the Pookah! Choronzon! I need to think about that now!

Maybe Night is coming!

The stories are all interconnected – they are the part of my diary record of day-to-day existence that I publish! As I see it, they all flow into one another. An idea or image will recur and be developed then redeveloped in another story. It’s one continuum – where the ideas flow into one another and form puddles, pools, or even oceans.

ILLUMINATUS! #2 was brilliant! Thanks for sending!

Felipe – I love Alan Moore and Alan Davis’ Captain Britain! The Moore work that really caught my imagination was all from that explosive early ‘80s period where he showed up like a comet. Captain Britain, Marvelman, V for Vendetta and Swamp Thing all made a big impression on me. Then I met Moore a few times and found him ??? In 2006, I ran into Brendan McCarthy at the Birmingham Comic Convention, sought out his Strange Days and became an instant convert. Moore’s work seemed stolid and unsexy by comparison and that was the end of the affair for me! Kirby’s Fantastic Four is packed with incredible ideas but I much prefer when Kirby writes his own stuff – that’s when he approaches William Blake levels of genius! Len Wein’s Justice League of America is what made me want to write comics – it’s probably my favourite run on that book!

‘The Devils’, oh yes! Derek Jarman’s set designs are astonishing, and I’m a big Clouzot fan.

1. I love the one where Batman’s rendered brain dead and the Atom shrinks down to race around the Dark Knight’s brain, zapping it to make him move and complete is case! The Mister Miracle one in Egypt is good. Batman and Sgt. Rock vs. Hitler/the Devil. The one where terrorists are holding Jim Aparo hostage and forcing him to draw Sgt. Rock killing Batman! They were all interesting and some were great! Haney had a real knack for coming up with a great new high concept thriller every issue! He’s the big inspiration on my Batman/Deadpool.

2. Mark and I plotted the stories pretty tightly together but we tended to write the scripts on our own. I don’t have an Aztek collection around to check but I definitely did the Joker issues and the Lizard King stuff. Mark wrote the final issue Otherwise, I can barely recall the stories!.On The Flash, I did the first four – the whole ‘Emergency Stop’ story, the Mirror Master story, and also the first part of The Human Race. Everything else was Mark, I think.

3. I like all Donovan from the ‘60s – favourites include Sunny Goodge Street, Hurdy Gurdy Man, Sunshine Superman, Jennifer Juniper, Season of the Witch, Epistle to Dippy, Barabajagal. Hollies – Games We Play, When Your Light’s Turned On, King Midas in Reverse, Signs That Will Never Change, Clown.

4. Tom Peyer’s stuff for DC in the ‘90s was exceptional. My very favourite thing he wrote was Dark Night of the Golden Kingdom. Everything about it is great. He’s good on anything. Check out his Ahoy Comics stuff!

5. I’d be happy to see you write anything at DC!

Jwparrish – DC has been through so many iterations of its continuity in the nearly 20 years since I floated the Fifth World notion. Those ideas are lost to the mists of passing time and I’m in no position to apply them, even if I wanted to. Younger creators have the floor and the spotlight now, as it should be. Even Doomsday Clock is 8 years ago! There have been many grand notions, but the comics biz moves on and new voices bring their own cockeyed takes on comic cosmology. As I see it, I created my own bottle world within DC, which is in continuity with itself, and all those ideas echo throughout my work! Geoff did the same. Scott Snyder too.

Ks – thanks again for the rec!

I’ve been trying to read Finnegan’s Wake for over 30 years, and don’t think I ever will now! I’m fascinated by it, and everything about it, but I’ve never managed to read it through. I read everything else by Joyce in the late ‘80s/’90s, but FW beats me to the mat every time!

Long answer on the Tree of Life and ‘higher’ consciousness - the circuit idea works as metaphor and suggests a game board too, a planetary hopscotch diagram, but feels a little ‘flat’ for my experience of the Spheres. Alan Moore, of course, also presented the Sephiroth in Promethea as a structure which Promethea and Barbara ‘climb’ and then jump ‘down’ from when they’ve completed their journey to Kether – in an exhilarating sequence of several pages depicting the plummet back to Earth/Malkuth, so he’s aware that there are a number of ways to think about these things. He’s also shown the Tree of Life as a subway map, like the London Underground, which I like.

I see consciousness – from materiality to abstract non-dual – more as nested bubbles, each containing, including, and dependent on the one before in all directions. Or like subtler gradations of the atmosphere from ground level to space. Buddhist thought regards absolute consciousness more as the ground or substrate from which other forms of consciousness emerge. It’s the underlying reality. In Qabalah, there’s the metaphor of light fractured through a prism.

The sense of ‘altitude’ we ascribe to ‘higher’ states of consciousness is really that feeling of expansion that allows us to perceive more of the terrain, and see new relationships between parts of the inner landscape that were once ground level and separate. Features that seemed distinct or obscure remain but they transform, as if in a bird’s eye overview, so as to convey more information about themselves and their surroundings.

Each extended state of consciousness derives from and includes the others– information gathered in the prior states is continuously incorporated – the map gets bigger, the connections between grid reference become clearer, and the Magician can use this to their advantage to do things that look supernatural.

Just as most of us can run, or draw, or can do Magic, we are not all Olympic sprinters, or Picasso, or Doctor Strange. Magicians are specialists in Magic. An ability to see reality from the perspective of Kether, on the Tree of Life, or LIL in the Enochian system, does not make the Magician ‘better’ than other people who cannot, EXCEPT in as much as a Black Belt in Karate is ‘better’ than you or I at defending themselves from physical attack (apologies if you are a supreme martial artist). The 4^th Dan master is much better than I am at fighting. The Magician is better at Magic than other people, but may not be better at running, raising a child, or painting.

There are monks and ascetics who abjure the complex and contradictory stresses of the material world by retreating in isolation to study the architecture of their spirits (although even they have to chop wood, stay dry, and eat, however frugally) but the monastic life is one of detachment, tuning out the noise to locate the signal. Most Magicians, on the other, choose to live and work in the mundane world because it soon becomes apparent that it’s all signal.

The act of say washing the dishes, or cleaning shit from the cat box (or in my case the carpet and everything else) is still the same physical process, but when viewed through the lens of expanded understanding it can become a delightful, intricate interplay of symbols and meaning – the dish is the Grail, occluded by the slurry of decayed material life. The water is spirit, lovingly revealing the ‘pure’ dish as an unsullied archetype, and so on… Washing the dishes can become an ecstatic ritual of cleansing and revelation!

Magic without a real world expression and something tangible to show for it, is just daydreaming, or dress-up. Nothing wrong with either, but they’re not the kind of full spectrum Magic I’m talking about, or practice.

Hope you enjoy the finished version of Luvkraft vs. Kutulu!

The comic looks great! Will comment more when I’ve read it all!

Jelly Result – last of the cybersplashgirls! Coral custard and molten candy ceramic!

Jonathan – the Philip Hoare book I spoke about – William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love was a fantastic rollercoaster of writing…but it was Timothy Morton’s Hell: In Search of A Christian Ecology that really got under my skin and messed with my thinking. The book and has stayed with me, itching and fretting.

You’re thinking of Ruben Diaz, who was my first editor on JLA. I really liked Ruben. He was a firecracker of energy and enthusiasm. Loved Raspler too, and we became quite good friends outside work. He came to visit and took a mad road trip with me and my best mate Emilio up the west coast of Scotland – castles, waterfalls, glens and mountains round every corner until we were practically choking on sublime natural beauty.

Sean – looking forward to the book! I couldn’t manage a single thought all summer but I’ve erupted back into life and I’m raring to go – perhaps it’s the season! I read a lot so I feel my general research is ongoing. Something is likely to trigger a story or a way of thinking. The research I do when I’m assigned a project is more specific: I go through the multitudinous books on shelves in many rooms – in search of the subject I need to study, whether that’s Batman, Mediaeval England, the temperature of the star Rigel, the life of Orson Welles, or the ups and downs of World War 2. If I don’t have them, I order the appropriate materials.

I look up stuff on the internet, cross refer, and take handwritten notes. I bounce between writing and research – when I’ve latched onto some interesting new, I’ll work it into the text as I’m going along. What I call ‘research’ is not an academic discipline in any way.

Ben - I really like Valerian for the utopian title sequence and the spectacle - the opening set-up was incredible – the brightness of the sun and the beach, then the horror from the sky… and that boggling bit later when they’re crashing through world after world. It’s one of those ones I’ll still watch any time it shows up.

It’s just a pity that the leads had zero chemistry. I like Dane DeHaan as an actor, he was great in a Kill Your Darlings, the Spider-Man one, and A Cure for Wellness, but was unable to squeeze an ounce of passion or rogueish charm into a single line of Valerian. He was completely miscast. For her part, Cara Delevingne couldn’t strike a single spark with her co-star, and together they had all the sex appeal of two empty tracksuits on a washing line. Their banter fell dead as lead. The opening scenes with the two are like a table read! Compare and contrast Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element!

I never got into The Incal – or Euro comics in general. There’s a few I like but, as I’ve said before, my general comic reading was very narrowly focused on DC superheroes.

Kevin – what Doctor Who needs seems so obvious to me, but hey… it looks as though RTD, like Trump, will never leave…

SEE YOU NEXT WEEK WITH A BRAND NEW SHOW!

When a washing machine achieves consciousness in Tokyo…