Grant Morrison: Psychedelic Superhero | Rolling Stone Culture:
"...Morrison considers himself a magician, and not the rabbits-from-hats kind – magick with a "k" style sorcery. He's been conducting occult rituals since age 19, summoning various entities and gods and such – ranging from a flaming lion's head to what he believes to have been the spirit of John Lennon, who, he says, gave him a song...For Morrison, the "most magical thing" is the way he makes his living. "I find it quite fucked up, to be honest, the notion that the most outlandish thoughts could pay for your existence," says Morrison, intelligible syllables poking their heads up from the bog of his working-class Glasgow accent. "The most bizarre thoughts you may have had in 1994 on an Ecstasy tab can turn into money, which turns into houses, which turns into cat food. It's the Yukon in our brain, it's a gold rush, it's all sitting there, and it's worth money."
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He broke through in America in 1988 – part of a wave of glamorous, groundbreaking U.K. writers that also included Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore – by reviving an obscure DC Comics superhero named Animal Man and inserting himself as the villain of the piece. Animal Man slowly realizes he is fictional, and in one infamous sequence, gazes out from the cage of his comic-book panel and yelps, "I can see you!" at the reader. The character ends up meeting Morrison, who apologizes for killing Animal Man's family in an earlier issue, and brings them back to life. As Morrison saw it, he had invented a "fiction suit" that allowed him to enter the comic-book universe, and he had no intention of taking it off. "I was trying to become fictional," he says, "because I had all these mad ideas."
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Morrison had just hit his thirties, and Bat-cash in hand, he was ready to have the kind of fun that had eluded him in his teens. He traveled the world, visiting India, Thailand, Bali, New Zealand, Nepal. He started wearing leather and vinyl, shaved his balding head and abandoned a lifetime of sobriety, dropping acid, shrooms and Ecstasy, smoking hash. In Katmandu, he had a spiritual experience that has guided his work ever since, a revelatory vision from some kind of fifth-dimensional perspective. He saw the universe from the outside, met silvery bloblike entities who explained the connectedness of all life on Earth. "I felt it was a higher intelligence, and there's no proof it wasn't," he says. "I remember space and time being just a flat surface."
It wasn't merely a drug thing. "I was only on a little lentil-size piece of hash, and that won't give you that experience – God knows I've tried," adds Morrison, who knows how insane all of this sounds. "I was utterly sure for a long time after that when I died I would just wake up there, like looking up from a video game, realizing you're in your room, but now I don't feel like that anymore."
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"I was a pretty sexy tranny," he says. "It was a complete turn-on, but I was using it as an energy to try to manipulate it."
Morrison was into some dark stuff at the time, trying to summon monsters from the work of H.P. Lovecraft. "You can say I'm fucking nuts," he says, "but anyone can find these rituals online, and if you're too scared to do them, you're the one who believes in the devil, not me."
Around the turn of the century, Morrison had his fill of madness. He cooled it on the drugs ("9/11 happened, and you can't be a globetrotting psychedelic anything anymore") and married Kristan Anderson, a corporate insurance broker who dressed like Barbarella. They split their time between the town house, Morrison's Nineties home base, and a house in the countryside.
He also took on more mainstream work, writing DC's Justice League, Marvel's New X-Men and an upcoming major relaunch of Superman. "When I wrote Superman, it was like contemplating Buddha," he says. "I really felt elevated. Everything seemed more beautiful, more precious. Batman's different. I try not to go into Batman that much because he's nutty, and I don't really want to feel like Bruce Wayne."
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"We are fighting against it with the super-human story, which is that there is a future, something beyond this, if we can just get better. You may look at superheroes and just see trash, toilet paper. I'm looking at them and seeing William Blake angels."
Morrison continues to practice magic, most recently trying to heal his sick cat. He's had some success with supernatural veterinary work in the past. "I don't think you can get evidence of this stuff – it's like trying to prove that water boils on the sun, you can't do it. But I'm still trying to not sound like some insane person."
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"Things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa."
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