9 - Supergods
I thought I'd seen the back of the old Sekhmet hypothesis in the early Noughties, then one day I was leafing through books in Waterstones when I can across Grant Morrison's book, Supergods - Our World in the Age of the Superhero. I didn't know I was such an influence on Grant's fiction until this book came out. I just figured there was something familiar with the later Invisibles comics. There's some reference to sun spot activity as a nod and a wink to the Sekhmet hypothesis and yes I found that one with a chuckle.
As for New X-Men I'm rather touched to have been a tiny influence on this but to be honest, if you imagine that Penny (out of Big Bang Theory) were to wake up one morning only to discover she was partly responsible for starting a riot in Xavier's College for Mutants, you can imagine the look of disbelief on her face. Well that's how I felt. When I stumbled on this bit in Supergods (while standing in Waterstones) I actually started swearing and muttering at Grant (who wasn't there). I'd only innocently gone into town to get my eyes done at Specsavers. I had no idea the book had come out. Perhaps my paranoid reaction can be traced back to the mid 1970s when as part of an hysterical mob we chased the Gaelic teacher out of our primary school for the last time. He was a racist bully.
Grant's X-Men book, Riot at Xavier's, deals with the 'darkside of the stormer' - it tackles the thorny question of what happens when hostile strength mixes with intolerance to other races. I'd already dealt with this tricky subject in the past in a tentative manner, so it was nice see someone take the bull by the horns (or the eagle by the talons so to speak) and turn it into fiction with humour and a moral message.
White supremism practically fed off the punk current in the early Eighties resurfacing within skinhead culture as a very real threat. It's no secret that any 'stormer' archetype would lead to the same process. I like to concentrate on the original youth archetypes themselves, devoid of any politics, but it's a process that seems to apply to any aggressive trends including black metal and gabber.
The history of comic heros in Supergods was an education for me (I laughed out loud at the naughty antics of Wonder Woman) and then things become especially interesting and shamanistic towards the end of the book. Like Austin Spare scribbling his art on bits of old crockery Grant finally tears open a crack in the universe by writing himself into The Invisibles - the result is spectacular and for Grant himself, profound. This goes beyond any jokes of putting in a cameo appearance in his comics - in Grant's own words he wanted to 'blend' his life with that of his character, King Mob. Later he admits, 'I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.' The merging of his private world and comic world brings about a visionary 'out of body experience' in which the biosphere comes to life as a cosmic nursery from the perspective of blue stellar angels.
While the Wachouski brothers took King Mob out of the Invisibles, gave him a novel twist and found an outlet via the cinema, Grant rebirthed himself via his own mythology and found himself in an altered state seemingly in touch with the biosphere. Forget the gossip as to which scenes in The Matrix were crudely sampled from The Invisibles - here is the deeper emotional link presented with barely any reference to the film itself (although the joke on the back cover takes care of this.) I like the organic process to this - the pregnant Invisibles as black alchemy to the cinematic Matrix.
I've only just watched the documentary biography of Grant, Talking with Gods, and fell about laughing as it graphically shows his own personal 'King Mob' imagery giving way to Morpheus in the late 1990s. That must have been a fragmenting experience. But for bystanders like ourselves it's completely hilarious. Let's face it we've all had creativity or 'spells' in the past that have bounced back in a spectacular way but that one surely takes 'Freaky Synchro (rip-off) of the Year' award.
This for me was the best part of the book. Much like R.A. Wilson's Cosmic Trigger, it reads as engaging biography not as boring magical text book and there's just enough biography to get you past the huge mass of comics in there.
I was a little annoyed to see the old ideas of solar cycles being brought up again by Grant Morrison. Then again perhaps he's given me another opportunity to finally lay this nonsense to rest. There is no link whatsoever to solar cycles and youth trend archetypes. Don't take my word for it - go to the Spaceweather web site and compare the dates yourself - you'll quickly discover that you're only staring at faces in the clouds. It's funny and delightful however to have seen this idea feed into Grant's mythology.
I think it's a bit sad to see the old Sekhmet hypothesis devalued with Grant's comment of, 'things don't have to be real to be true or vice versa'. I think that's hedging at its most naive. I'd much rather have seen Grant destroy the old hypothesis and salvage whatever driftwood might be left. Ironically the main message of The Matrix is to get back to the physical, not the simulation. Wake up and participate, don't just spectate. And yet it is to this very myth that Grant turns to, to help explain the manifestation of storm culture in 1999. He claims in Supergods that The Matrix (as in the film not the concept) is an archetypal manifestation of the 'stormer' vibe when in reality I predicted an overwhelming physical archetype similar to the punk explosion of 1977. To be fair he throws in a few references to nu-metal and several long coats in the anti-capitalist scene but this hardly qualifies as a major youth trend archetype. Rave culture rightly demanded (and found) some kind of cultural reaction after several years of optimism, but it didn't get a singular atavistic youth trend. Instead it became part of a writhing mass of the previous youth currents which merge and seethe together to this day.
I remember the day I first came across the Matrix film poster at the Phoenix cinema in Oban and stood staring up at it in surprise - I actually put my hand up to the characters to touch them and then suddenly aware of how strange I must have looked, I grew self-conscious and withdrew my hand. It struck me then as it strikes me today that they should have been on the street.
But I also enjoyed being proven wrong in '99 - it spurred me on to take the hypothesis apart and dump the solar dross. It was only then that the sequential description of the life scripts took on more meaning. And that later had a personal element I won't go into here, but if you've got an infant or a terminally ill patient to look after you'll connect to it quick enough. The sequence (or retroactive sequence for the terminally ill) is the key.
The idea that youth trend archetypes might actually describe themselves in the very same sequence as the four life scripts in personal infancy is I think just as interesting as the idea that they might be described by the solar cycles. It's just that the former seems much more down to earth and less like a plot out of the X-men. Having said that, I really enjoyed reading the New X-Men series. Henry the Cat is my favourite character: 'Sunspot activity, manic depressive mood swings; I feel like a Hindu sex god, Jean...'
