There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles)
Light Bend Backwards
by Clive Nolan
Clive Patrick Nolan is a photographer and psychotherapist who lives in Snowdonia, Wales.
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6.0
Disobedience Pt. 1
Anthony Nine
“My earthly power. It’ll be yours to do with as you please. I’ll not need it where I’m headed. In the end, I’ve only one true teaching for you, Dane. One simple word: Disobedience.” – Tom a Bedlam
I had just turned 19 when issue #1 of The Invisibles came out in September 1994. One of my friends had got it first and brought it round to my house to show me, as we had both loved Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell’s earlier collaboration Zenith in 2000AD.
The comic’s fluorescent hand grenade cover image was almost like a sigil to me in itself, encoded with promise and mystery. An explosive key that might unlock dangerous possibilities of anarchy and magic if I were to pull the pin.
My interest in the occult had always been nurtured by comics. My favorite superheroes when I was as young as five had been Dr Strange and the Son of Satan in J. M. DeMatteis’s 1980s run on The Defenders, and the deep compulsion to look for magic had never gone away.
I had already begun seeking out real occult texts, my options limited by whatever I could find in North Shields public library or whatever chance occult works I might encounter on the shelves of second-hand bookshops. It would be some years before I would get access to the internet and information scarcity was still very much the climate for occult learning.
I’d tried out a few things here and there with mixed results. Clumsy attempts at the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, some fucking around with tarot cards, trying to predict winners on the horses for my dad, and so on. It had never seemed as practical and workable as I wanted it to be though, because when I went looking, all I ever found were permutations of the Victorian reset of magic espoused by the Golden Dawn, which never quite hit the mark for me. Or else incomplete excerpts from the grimoires detailing demon summoning and infernal pacts, which were much more up my street, but always fragmentary and never enough to make it workable.
Suddenly here though, across those first few issues of The Invisibles as well as the clues and pointers referenced within the letters pages and columns written by Morrison, was everything I needed to put together an accessible version of magic. Not only practical and geared towards real world results, but also relevant to the moment, written with a no-nonsense swagger, and imbued with mod pop art style. I had never heard of chaos magic before but made it my mission to track down all the books that were name checked in the back of the comics, supplemented by Robert Anton Wilson, William Burroughs and whatever other breadcrumbs I could follow.
Something almost unique to The Invisibles, which it isn’t typically given very much credit for, is the audacity of including a system of magic in your sci-fi/ fantasy narrative that the reader themselves can start to learn. Present a depiction of magic set in a world that seems like only a slightly more fantastical version of our own, give or take a few Shoggoths and instances of time travel, and then offer practical instructions for getting started in the same system of magic employed by the characters in that world. A form of magic that is also openly practiced by the author, and the means by which he claims to have personally experienced many of the alien and otherworldly realities suggested in the text. It was an irresistible rabbit hole that beckoned to me, and I decided there and then that this was something I wanted to further pursue.
An important anchoring factor for me in this was the juxtaposition of The Invisibles‘ supernatural elements – its Lovecraftian monsters, extraterrestrial encounters and spirit summoning – with the very recognizable and relatable landscape of working class England. Grant Morrison was from Glasgow, Dane McGowan was a Scouser, and I had myself grown up in Newcastle. This wasn’t any frightfully posh boarding school magic with little twats swooping around on broomsticks and getting into jolly hockey sticks occult scrapes. Dane and his pals lived on council estates, did Es and went joyriding in stolen cars. This was the England that I knew.
It felt like a purer uncut version of what had already resonated with me in Jamie Delano’s Hellblazer. Occultism in fiction was typically presented as the preserve of learned men from the upper echelons of society, such as the Duke de Richleau from Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out or his Crowley stand-in enemy Mocata. Studious wizards surrounded by musty tomes practicing an arcane art reserved for the few. John Constantine, dreamed into being by Alan Moore, another working class arch-wizard of the illustrated panel, turned this trope on its head by locating magic within the blasted landscape of Thatcher’s England.
Constantine wasn’t any special chosen one with an occult nepo-baby bloodline or birthright that granted him access to magic powers. He was to all intents and purposes, a regular bloke from Liverpool who had taught himself enough magic from scraps and fragments that he could move in the same world as supernatural powers such as Swamp Thing and The Sandman. He inhabited a world of pubs and betting shops that looked like where I lived, and while sometimes morally ambiguous, his magic and how he wielded it were assembled from this perspective.
Hellblazer had also directly referenced Newcastle as the scene of the occult incident that had traumatized Constantine when he was younger. I had never seen my home town mythologized in that sort of way before, because Geordie representation in the 80s was usually just the comedy sidekick or a London TV script writer’s idea of what dim, amiable, salt-of-the-earth working class people might be like. If Newcastle was ever mentioned in anything at all it was always in this “know your place” sort of way. So locating magic here – weaving Newcastle into Constantine’s backstory – made it seem closer to lived reality somehow, almost within reach.
John Constantine was canonically a generation older than me though. He had been an original punk before I had been born and then had this Silk Cut and gin and tonic, London cocktail bar smooth operator era that was culturally well before my time. Dane McGowan by contrast was a few years younger than me, but aspects of his backstory seemed inspired by events that took place in Tyneside in 1991, which was the year I left school.
The policies of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, in power since 1979, had decimated the economic foundation of the region by eradicating its mining and shipbuilding industries, resulting in mass unemployment and entire generations coming of age with nothing waiting for them except dole lines and economic recession, my generation among them.
The Meadow Well housing estate in North Shields, formerly known as The Ridges and notorious locally for being rough as fuck, had been created in the 1930s to house residents displaced by the clearance of the Dockwray Square and Low Town slum areas. Historically poverty stricken to begin with, the ravages of Thatcherism had led to growing anti-government and anti-police sentiment, which exploded into days of violence in September 1991 following the death of two teenage boys during a high speed police chase.
The two young men, Dale Robson and Colin Atkins, were alleged to have been joy riding in a car they had stolen, but as further details of the pursuit that led to their deaths emerged, the community blamed the police and turned to large scale rioting. Locals began looting shops on the estate and setting buildings on fire, including a health center, community center and electricity power station, as well as cars and derelict houses. When fire fighters arrived to control the blazes they were pelted with bricks as hundreds of youths fought a pitched battle against an army of police. I still remember the blood on the streets in North Shields.
The rioting soon spread to other areas in Newcastle and is regarded as one of the worst riots in British history with nothing like it seen until the London riots of 2011. In this context, Dane McGowan and his escapades, joy riding in stolen cars, throwing Molotov cocktails, setting fire to his school, and the searing, no future, kick it till it breaks, nihilist impulses that permeate issue one of The Invisibles spoke to me directly.
The fluorescent hand grenade on the cover didn’t mean some abstract poser thing like an ironic Che Guevara t-shirt. It represented this explosive, conflagratory potential condensed out of battered and brutalized lives and diminished expectations. It was how people felt. It was how I felt. It seemed like there was nothing there for me in the north east, so magic looked like as good a road to pursue as anything else, and all the comics I had been reading were pretty unanimous that London was the place to go to find it.
Luan-Dun Calling. It would be a few years after reading Dane’s initiatory journey on the streets of London at the hands of Tom a Bedlam before I would be able to conjure the opportunity to move to London myself. I had never so much as visited the capital before so knew its landmarks and monuments only through their fictional representation in various media.