Then suddenly, y'know, things got boring, they ran out of heroic muscle men, they run out of Rambos, they run out of the entire Reagan-Thatcher's driven philosophy that we were all going on, and suddenly they've turned to the freaks and the weirdoes and the outcasts and the geeks and the beatniks and the hippies and whoever's left to provide some infusion of interest into a flagging culture. And it seems to be working.

The interesting thing is that it's bending their culture towards our culture to the point where the two things become interchangeable. There's no difference between them I think.

Richard Metzger

When you started The Invisibles in 1995 what was your intention? There was a grand idea behind it.

Grant Morrison
(Nods.)

I mean, the comic had two starts, one was a false start where all I wanted to do was a William Burroughs version of Jack Kirby's The Boy Commandos because I thought it was such a cool name and DC owned the characters so you had Boy Commandos that just sounds like a Burroughs story, so it started out as this basic notion of psychic boy scouts and Baden-Powell was involved in it at one point but, it just completely changed and they said well this is so far from the original that why should they leave the title and why don't you just make something up and I went through Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and found the 'Invisibles'. So that was it.

The first four issues I knew it was gonna be a boy's initiation in to this occult secret society. Then in issue 2 I went to Kathmandu and had basically an alien abduction experience. And that changed the entire series because what I then wanted to do with the series was to make something that was alive rather than just tell a story, I wanted to do something that was a spell, that actually moved, that people who'd read it would be changed by it or would be led in to situations whereby they might be changed.

And also, ultimately, to simulate the experience that I had in Kathmandu, which I don't have any explanation for and in The Invisibles I went through every possible one: I read Whitley Strieber, I read Philip K. Dick, I read everyone who'd reported this type of unusual experience and the parameters are all the same, all their nervous systems reported slightly differently and used their own sci-fi language or technological language or mythological language depending on who they are.

But ultimately the thing's the same and it's like the shamanic process whereby you appear to be taken out of reality into a higher dimension, the body is stripped and destroyed and then you are put back with extra knowledge which then leads in to weird synchronicities and unusual experiences which began to proliferate as The Invisibles was being written so the whole thing - I was living that comic as a diary, as it was being written and the occult stuff in it and the martial arts, that's all real stuff and as it was happening it was going in to the comic so it's probably about 60% biography in there.

Richard Metzger

I'm gonna pry open that last answer a little bit here.

First up, what happened to you in Kathmandu? What was the alien visitation experience like?

Grant Morrison

The short version is that I was sitting up on the roof garden of the BajaRat Hotel and this thing happened and - it's hard to describe, we're going into areas that are unusual, so all I remember is getting back downstairs and laying on the bed and - some unusual things happened, and then it seemed like there were entities in the room it was like those silver morphing blobs you see in rave videos. It was like computer generated things and they claimed to be cross-sections of fifth-dimensional entities as expressed through four-dimensional spacetime and they claimed that I was one of them and that I had to come back and see what the old homestead was like. And that was when I felt like I was peeled off the surface of spacetime and they took me out of my body and then to what seemed to be the fifth dimension because I could see the entirety of space and time as a dynamic object in which Shakespeare was over here, and I was over here and the dinosaurs were here and we were all in the same object, and time was a thing.

So, I appeared to be in a fifth dimensional fluid, an information space that I could say was maybe kinda bluish, extending out infinitely. These things swam through it and interacted with it and they told me that what the universe was, was a larval form of what they are, which is fifth-dimensional entities. And the only way to grow a fifth-dimensional entity is to plant it in time, henceforth our universe.