Travis Hedge Coke
There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles)
7.0
I Owe Grant Morrison For My Education
by Justin Farrington
I owe Grant Morrison for my education. Sure, in an indirect, metaphorical sense, which I’ll talk about later, but also in a very real, quantifiable sense involving actual qualifications and everything.
I’d been a fan of their work since one Saturday morning when my weekly 2000AD ran the first episode of Zenith. Once the shock of 2000AD dipping its toes into the waters of – gasp! – superhero comics had dissipated, I knew this was something special, and the work of a very special mind. Later I borrowed their run on Animal Man from a friend, and it blew my fucking mind.
When I moved to London to go to college, I somehow ended up doing English Literature and Philosophy, rather than the English Literature and Film Studies I thought I was going to do. I forget why now, it was a long time ago. But I was cool with that, the fun part was moving to London, after all. And I had perhaps a little too much fun, having just discovered cheap booze, drugs and ready access to live music. And comic shops.
Anyway, all of this resulted in me paying perhaps a little less attention to my studies than I ideally would have. So the end of the first semester came round, my first winter in London. If I recall correctly (which I may well not) it was snowing, or had been. Either way, it was cold as balls. I’d been round to a friend’s the night before our exam to revise, but predictably enough we’d got mashed instead. “It’ll be fine”, he said, “we’ll show up early and revise in the canteen beforehand.
Now, it was an essay question on Cartesian Dualism. Pretty straightforward, you might think (therefore etc), I mean, it’s literally Philosophy 101. Problem was Philosophy 101 was the exact course we hadn’t been attending. Realising this was a futile task, I thought “fuck it”, and decided to read the comics I’d bought the day before, which I still had on me what with not having gone home that night. They just so happened to be a lot of back issues of Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol. So while my mate was struggling with text books and notes, I was reading all about Monsieur Mallah and the Brain. Who were discussing Cartesian Dualism. I was taught the subject by a gorilla and a brain in a tank in a pram. And I passed the exam, my education was saved and I went on to get my degree.
So I’ve always felt a bit of a debt to Grant for that one. That was the point at which they went from “creator of comics I really liked” to “personal hero”.
Anyway, fast-forward to the late 90s. I’m working in a comic shop (wow, that degree really came in handy, didn’t it?) and finally catching up on the comics I couldn’t afford when I was unemployed after leaving college. Which primarily meant The Invisibles. I started buying it “live” at the beginning of volume 2, but was busily filling in back issues of volume 1. I was delighted to find out that the “mass sigil charging” to save the book (more commonly known as the “wankathon”) had taken place on the 23rd November, my birthday. The Invisibles fast became my favourite anything ever. I loved how it felt like an Illuminatus! that wasn’t aimed at an earlier generation, and also that it was funnier and smarter. I even forgave Grant for their unfortunate love of Kula Shaker (though as you can see, I never managed to forget).
And then came the internet. I was late to get online, partly due to finances and partly due to the fact getting it organised was a bit of an arse (two curses that have plagued my adult life). The weekend I finally stuck my thumb out at the edge of the information superhighway, in an era when 24 hour news was still something of a novelty to me, I found myself with ringside seats for the murder of Carlo Giuliani at the G8 summit in Genoa. The tragedy and the potential for this mass democratisation of information kicked me in both bollocks.
But it can’t all be doom and gloom. I stayed up all night Googling all the things I actually liked. The bands, the movies, the writers. And the comics.
And that’s how I discovered Barbelith Underground, and that’s where the real education started. Created by a wonderful gentleman called Tom Coates, it had (apparently) begun life as an Invisibles-focused site, but by the time I drunkenly staggered through its doors asking if anyone had a light, it had evolved into a pretty huge bulletin board/forum thing, albeit one with literal essays on its front page. And it covered everything I was even vaguely interested in. Politics, music, comics (of course), the occult, literature, science and (here comes that word again) philosophy. Even covered a bit of film studies too, but for me the ship had sailed on that one a decade previously.
And it was chock-full of wonderful, interesting people, many of whom are still valued friends to this day. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Barbelith was where I learned to internet. But I learned a lot more. Unsurprisingly, as a cis bloke in his early 30s at the turn of the century, I knew next to nothing about gender issues, for example. It had just never come up. Likewise international perspectives on things like racism and economics that went beyond the merely academic. And a couple of months later, when we saw the horrors of 9/11 and the subsequent descent into a Forever War, it became an invaluable resource. It was at Stop The War demos that I first met some of my fellow Barbelith crew in real life (“for fuck’s sake, it can’t be healthy to actually MEET your imaginary friends!” said my horrified flatmate as I was leaving the house).
Of course, the internet’s the internet, and while it may be more internet in 2024 than it was in 2001, it was already pretty fucking internet even then. So Barbelith wasn’t without its twats, trolls and downright cunts. Which was an education in itself- with a very transparent mod policy (the admin forum was open to all rather than being hidden away, with DMs only really used in the more extreme cases) you could watch how an aspirationally-Utopian community dealt with threats to its well-being from bad actors, and how the edges always have to be filed off somehow.
It didn’t entirely succeed. Aspirationally-Utopian communities never do, there are always practical problems (in this case, a bespoke code base that could only be modified by the friend of Tom’s who had written it in the first place and wasn’t about anymore). But it had a bloody good go, and failure is often the best teacher. It taught me a lot about why the real world’s so fucked, at the very least.
If I’d somehow managed to miss the last twenty years, I’d… well, I think most of us would probably be a lot happier if we’d somehow managed to miss the last twenty years. But it’s fun to think that if I went on the internet for the first time today, I’d do the same searches, and would come up with There Is Nothing Left To Say (On The Invisibles) and somehow Grant would still have indirectly managed to complete my education via Travis.
Honestly, there really is no getting away from that motherfucker. And long may that continue.
