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STIC 7 (1) pp.

49–72 Intellect Limited 2016

Studies in Comics
Volume 7 Number 1
© 2016 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.7.1.49_1

IAN STUART GARLINGTON


Kansaigaidai University

A context for the supercontext: On


the function of psychedelics in Grant
Morrison’s The Invisibles

Keywords Abstract
Grant Morrison Grant Morrison is one of the most prolific and well-known superhero comic writers of all time. He wrote his
psychedelics magnum opus, The Invisibles, as a 59-issue comic book series that was published under DC comics’ Vertigo
The Invisibles label from 1994 to 2000. At the end of the narrative humanity supposedly enters into a 5th dimensional
The Illuminatus! space called the ‘Supercontext’, which Morrison has at one point described as ‘everyone peaking on the acid
Trilogy trip that never ends’. This article clarifies and contextualizes the role of psychedelics in Grant Morrison et
universal al.’s The Invisibles. There has been a lack of critical attention regarding the influence of psychedelics in
consciousness Morrison’s work despite Morrison’s frequent comments regarding their significance in his life and writing.
The first section of this article introduces some of the common formal attributes found in prior attempts to
express various aspects of the psychedelic experience in the comics medium. The Invisibles is then compared
with these, thereby confirming the various functions of psychedelics within the text. The next section goes

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Ian Stuart Garlington

on to demonstrate The Invisibles’ formal similarities with a largely overlooked influence: Robert Anton 1. Illuminatus! was written
as one book, but one
Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy (1984). By examining the way in which Wilson and Shea of Dell’s publishing
utilized William Burroughs’s ‘fold-in’ technique in order to attempt to depict a higher dimensional ‘universal requirements was that
consciousness’ through the formal attributes of the text, one can identify an analogous relationship to it be divided into three
volumes for its initial
Morrison’s use of braiding to show readers the perspective of the ‘supercontext’ as a higher-dimension outside publication in 1975. In
time. This relationship is identified in order to finally assert that The Invisibles can be grouped alongside this article the trilogy
other texts of an emerging genre of fiction characterized by its depictions of consciousness at a future stage of will be referred to as
‘Illuminatus!’ based on
human evolution as envisioned through the author’s psychedelic experiences. the authors’ original
intentions.

Introduction
This article clarifies and contextualizes the role of psychedelics in Grant Morrison et al.’s The
Invisibles. There has been a lack of critical attention regarding the influence of psychedelics in
Morrison’s work despite Morrison’s frequent comments regarding their significance in his life and
writing. In order to establish a point of reference, the first section of this article introduces some of
the common formal attributes found in prior attempts to express various aspects of the psychedelic
experience in the comics medium. The Invisibles is then compared with these, thereby confirming
the various functions of psychedelics within the text. The next section goes on to demonstrate The
Invisibles’ formal similarities with a largely overlooked influence: Robert Anton Wilson and Robert
Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy (1984).1 By examining the way in which Wilson and Shea utilized William
Burroughs’s ‘fold-in’ technique in order to attempt to depict a higher dimensional ‘universal
consciousness’ through the formal attributes of the text, one can identify an analogous relationship
to the way Morrison uses the techniques of non-sequitur and braiding to show readers the perspec-
tive of the ‘supercontext’ – a higher-dimension outside time wherein individuality and subjectivity
disappear into permanent psychedelic ecstasy. This relationship is identified in order to finally assert
that The Invisibles can be grouped alongside other texts of an emerging genre of fiction characterized
by its depictions of consciousness at a future stage of human evolution in accordance with the
author’s psychedelic experiences.
Grant Morrison wrote the scripts of The Invisibles as a 59-issue comic book series that was
published under DC comics’ Vertigo label from 1994 to 2000. Several artists – most notably, Steve
Yeowell, Jill Thompson, Chris Weston, Phil Jimenez and Frank Quitely – produced the artwork with
various combinations of inkers, colourists and letterers. As The Invisibles was a ‘creator owned’
comic, Morrison was ensured a much higher degree of freedom and creative control. The plot of The
Invisibles loosely centres on a group of anarchist, time-travelling, psychic agents of the Invisible
College in their Manichean struggle with the Outer Church – the forces of death and order that are
trying to expand their control over the entire physical universe. Throughout the heroes’ adventures

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they are each contacted by a higher-dimensional being called Barbelith, represented as a large, red
orb, much like the monoliths of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 (1968). Barbelith transmits higher-dimen-
sional knowledge to the characters, which ultimately leads to both the end of the struggle with the
Outer Church and humanity’s entry in 2012 into a fifth-dimensional realm of timeless, unified
consciousness, referred to as the ‘Supercontext’.
Morrison has frequently emphasized the role that psychedelic drugs have played in his writing.
For example, he has stated that he ‘dosed like a madman for ten years, studied the effects and wrote
it all down in The Invisibles and Flex Mentallo in particular’ (2005), or ‘I did loads of DMT and all of
that went straight into The Invisibles’ (2010: 334). Later, when discussing The Filth, Morrison
(2013: 147) said that he looked back on The Invisibles as ‘so druggy utopian’ and has elsewhere
(2011: 257) said that he came up with the idea for The Invisibles in 1993 after having taken MDMA
with artist Jill Thompson at a ‘50 Years of LSD’ celebration in San Francisco.
Morrison has continued to proclaim the importance of psychedelics in his life and work in nearly
every interview, yet some of the critics and fans who have written on his comics preface their work
with a peculiar denial of the significance of psychedelics in Morrison’s writing. For example,
Christopher Butcher opens a popimage.com interview by saying, ‘The man is his own best drug and
I imagine that is propelled forward not by large doses of hallucinogens, but by simply being Grant
Morrison’. In the introduction to the omnibus edition of The Invisibles, Musician Gerard Way also
states:

There is a misconception that Grant Morrison’s work is the product of psychedelic drug use.
People believe this because it makes for a good story and it’s easy to explain, and because the
truth is a threat – the truth is that his work is the product of an individual who is completely
realized, fully formed, and 100 per cent fearless.
(2012: 10)

Much of the scholarship on Morrison does acknowledge the role of psychedelics in different aspects
of his work but without giving it the level of attention equivalent to Morrison’s enthusiasm. Timothy
Callahan (2007: 93) points out how in Animal Man #18 (1989), Buddy Baker takes peyote to ‘try to
come to grips with the mysteries of the universe’ but does not expand on the ontologically destabi-
lizing effects of the drug beyond this observation. Jeffery Kripal (2011: 21) lists the various psyche-
delics Morrison has mentioned in interviews alongside the Beatles and books when explaining the
biographical elements that are reflected in The Invisibles. Patrick Meaney makes a number of remarks
about psychedelics in his book-length analysis of The Invisibles, pointing out that ‘drugs which
expand our definition of humanity are illegal’ (2010: 160) or describing how Robin emerged from
time travel in a ‘psychedelic flourish’ (2010: 271) and introduces issue 3.5 by saying ‘This issue feels
like Morrison took some acid and wrote down whatever was happening as stream of consciousness’

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(2012: 236). Marc Singer (2012: 16) considers how Morrison makes use of both fictional drugs and
fictional languages as plot devices and observes that ‘drugs’ are one of the factors responsible for
a-typical panel layouts at different points in the narrative (2012: 104). In Chris Murray’s (2015),
study of the interrelationship between recursion and immersive strategies, he also describes how
psychedelic effects are produced on the page at various points in Morrison’s work.
In their enthusiasm to introduce what many saw as a high watermark of American Mainstream
comics to a wider audience, it appears as though some of these critics have tended to underempha-
size the two objects of nostalgia that Morrison associates with his hometown friends in Glasgow,
‘taking drugs and bullshit’. This seriousness is something Morrison (2002) laments when he
expresses disappointment at the global audience’s failure to understand ‘the sick joke’ as told at the
local pub, and refers to again when explaining the difference between himself and other comics
writers of his time:

[T]he difference between me and that strand of it, was they really wanted to be taken seri-
ously; it was very important for them to be taken seriously. […] I grew up on the Warlock
comics and Steve Englehart’s Doctor Strange. There’s something more freewheeling, prob-
ably better drugs, than the kind of plodding stuff which I really got tired of.

The relationship between this lack of seriousness, i.e. ‘bullshitting’, and ‘drugs’, can be better under-
stood by locating Morrison’s supercontext within the context of psychedelics and the counterculture.
Before considering this broader cultural background, however, the following section will first clarify
the various roles of psychedelics have played in other comics as well as in The Invisibles.

Psychedelics in the Comics Medium and The Invisibles


Morrison is in no way the first person working in the comics medium to emphasize the influence of
psychedelics in their work. He has specifically mentioned a few examples of psychedelic-inspired
writers and artists, such as Jim Starlin or Brenden McCarthy and Peter Milligan (Morrison 2011: 135,
209). In much of Starlin’s work, he tended towards narratives that would express his psychedelic
visions of the universe on a cosmic scale, yet these depictions were limited to the dimensions of
standard American comic book page. For example, Starlin’s ‘The Origin of God!’ presents a narra-
tive that strives for a ridiculous cosmic significance within a single page (Figure 1).
Here the reader is presented with the dichotomy of a white void and an image of the colourful
universe whose totality composes a cosmic deity, thereby demonstrating the opposing vectors of
psychedelic expansive vision and physical page constraints. These work to simultaneously stretch
and compress the narrative so that the meaning of everything is reduced to a single, absurd panel.

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Figure 1: A white void prior to the birth of universe. ‘The Origin of God’, Star*Reach
Classics. Art by Jim Starlin, ©Eclipse.

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Figure 2: Everything and nothing juxtaposed on a single page. Rogan Gosh, p. 40.
Art by Brendan McCarthy, ©DC Comics.

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2. The Invisibles citations The work of McCarthy and Milligan also reveals the same peculiar psychedelic style wherein ‘every-
are listed as: volume,
issue, page (e.g. ‘1.2.18’
thing’ and ‘nothing’ are aligned on a single page, thereby compressing comics’ production of narra-
refers to volume 1, tive through juxtaposition to a simplified configuration while still locating the icons of our ordered,
issue 2, page 18). perceptible world in a collage that is on the verge of returning to undifferentiated chaos (Figure 2).
Morrison’s The Invisibles expresses these same extremes of nothing and everything at several
points throughout the fourteen-hundred-page narrative. The second to last issue of the series
features a clear example of this same juxtaposition in representations of the supercontext on a single
page (Figure 3).
In the upper-left there is a white panel featuring a stippled outline of Takashi’s grandfather who
is folding an origami model of the time machine that Takashi builds in the future. This white panel
which implies a Zen-like nothingness sits above the two panels of Dane and Harlequin whereas the
backdrop is a chaotic mixture of images that resemble the ‘everything’ of McCarthy and Milligan’s
Rogan Gosh (1994). These distorted images are from the cover art of earlier issues in the series. This
is reminiscent of the earlier sequence in which time travel is represented through the succession of
Takashi’s grandfather, a white void, a series of overlapping cosmic images and finally the faces of
many characters from the series (Figure 4).
This white void is also the backdrop when Dane encounters Barbelith as a Buddha in a fifth-
dimensional space that features the worm-like trails that are repeatedly used to signify a perspective
exterior to time (1.23.22).2 Singer (2012: 104) explains these trails of characters in time by observing
how artist Phil Jimenez ‘is fond of showing multiple images of a character moving through continu-
ous space’ and suggests that this technique is later adopted in the series to show ‘what time–space
might look like from Takashi’s external vantage point’. However, this technique can also be observed
much earlier in the psychedelic comics of French artist and creator, Philippe Druillet, who represents
timeless higher dimensions through the same style of repeating several instances of the same char-
acter that shrink towards the vanishing point (Figure 5).
The most common association of psychedelics with comics is found in the underground comix of
the 1960s and early 1970s. Underground comix were outlets for their authors to portray comical
extremes of sex, drug use, and violence. These works were primarily published independently, or
self-published by their authors, in gritty black and white formats (which often mirrored their
content). Patrick Rosenkranz, a historian who interviewed many authors of underground comix,
documented the influence of psychelics in many of prominent artists’ works. In his interviews with
Robert Crumb, the author and illustrator claimed ‘my comic thing flowered in this fertile
environment [San Francisco, 1967]. I figured it out somehow – the way to put the stoned [LSD]
experience into a series of cartoon panels’ (2002: 67).
A few scholars have attempted to identify the effects of psychedelics in comics. Building on the
results of Oscar Janiger’s 1954 study (Dobkin de Rios, M. and Janiger 2003) study regarding LSD’s

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Figure 3: White nothing juxtaposed to colourful everything. The Invisibles, 3:11, p. 15 (excerpt). Art by John Ridgeway,
©Grant Morrison.

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Figure 4: Time travel through higher dimensions as the contrast between a white nothing and a chaotic everything. The Invisibles,
2:21, p. 1 (excerpt). Art by Phil Jimenez, ©Grant Morrison.

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Figure 5: An external view of time through multiples instances of the character in the same panel. Les Six Voyages de Lone
Sloane, p. 7 (excerpt), ©Philippe Druillet.

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effects on creativity in artists, Jones’ (2007) research on Robert Crumb’s comix artwork looks at the
change in the rate of appearance of the psychedelic characteristics in Crumb’s art at different key
points in his career. Jones conducted a statistical analysis of the rate of occurrence of the character-
istics identified by Janiger in order to demonstrate how Crumb’s artistic expression had been altered
following the start of his LSD use. What Jones’ study did not address, however, was the impact of
LSD on elements unique to the comics medium, rather than those shared by painting or drawing.
In order to identify possible effects of psychedelics on the form of comics I (Garlington, 2014)
previously made use of McCloud’s transition-type tallying method for more than thirty underground
comics, which I had deemed ‘psychedelic’. I noted that while the two most common transition types
were still the standard type-2 (action-to-action) and type-3 (subject-to-subject) transitions, there
was also an increase in type-1 (moment to moment), type-5 (aspect to aspect) and type-6 (non-
sequitur) transitions. This increase of non-sequitur transitions is in line with LSD therapy patients’
descriptions of constantly changing images projected on the mind’s screen and is significant because
there are very few examples of extended type-6 (non-sequitur) transitions outside of these psyche-
delic underground comix. While there are only a few panel transitions in The Invisibles that can be
truly labelled non-sequitur (2.3.14 contains multiple small ovals that depict wholly unrelated
content), there are passages where the semantic distance between panels approaches this limit,
especially in the context of a serialized narrative.
The following are examples that demonstrate the various roles of psychedelics in The Invisibles.
First, early on in the series when the character Dane is being initiated into his Invisible cell, his
mentor, Tom O’Bedlam, has him smoke a mysterious blue mould in the abandoned subway tunnel,
whereupon Dane has his first encounter with the red orb, Barbelith. For Dane this experience is
manifested as classic alien abduction imagery (1.2.18). Although the mould is later revealed to lack
psychedelic properties, this initial association of smoking a substance before the onset of intense
hallucinations is suggestive of DMT. As contact with Barbelith is supposedly occurring outside of the
time–space of the narrative continuum, the scenes from his initiation reappear at various times
including 1.16.9–13, again in 1.21.4–5, 8, 15–16, and finally in 2.10.7.
The character Fanny also re-experiences her own timeless initiation in a non-linear sequence of
traumatic moments after she suddenly vomits up a metallic liquid called the magic mirror in the
bathroom at a club. The reader is informed that she was on unspecified drugs at the time which she
describes as, ‘nothing I can’t normally handle’ (1.13.9). Here, smoke-like panel contours emerge
from all of her facial orifices. These contain a partial image of the statue, Christ the Redeemer, which
serves as a transition to the story of the first ritual she participated in as a child in Brazil, wherein she
is given a hallucinogenic tea. Here she, too, first encounters Barbelith, depicted as a red dot located
in the centre panel on the bottom of the page (1.13.18). Time in this scene becomes ambiguous.
Fanny becomes uncertain about whether or not she drank the tea and this is compounded by

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various overlapping images of a praying mantis, lizards, a cat, and aliens, who appear again later in 3. In a later interview
Morrison (2008) ex-
the series when Fanny has another flashback triggered by a separate encounter with the magic plained that this scene
mirror inside a compound in New Mexico (2.20.5–6). was ‘actually real and
The psychedelic experience is further associated with an external perspective of time when the dialogue is taken
from a tape-recorded
Robin bounces along its ‘surface’ in a time machine throughout 2.21. During this sequence she is conversation’. In
shown embracing King Mob (Morrison’s 2D avatar in the series) in a bedroom with a painting of Supergods (2011: 255)
a desert sunset on the wall behind them (2.21.6). Later the pair is shown on the hood of King Morrison adds that,
prior to starting The
Mob’s car against the same desert backdrop as featured the painting, where she exclaims, ‘Baby, Invisibles, he took a trip
we’re fucking on acid. It all came true’ (2.21.18). This desert is also reminiscent of the location of to visit an old friend
in New Mexico, which
the military installation where King Mob, Dane, Mason, and their associates take LSD on a mesa ended with ‘an acid
top (2.2.6–9).3 trip on the sacred mesa
In addition to the repeated associations with linear discontinuity within the story, psychedelics overlooking the Rio
Grande, as it flowed
are frequently utilized in the series as a device to retain the ontological uncertainty of the text. This like a river of chocolate
is achieved by displaying the characters’ inability to determine whether what they are seeing is a through a dawn Eden’.
supernatural phenomenon or some extraordinary result of the ambiguity produced by psychedelics’
intermingling of subjective and objective. For example, when the characters use a form of astral
projection to psychically travel back in time to the French Revolution, Dane compares the physio-
logical sensations and accompanying nausea to ‘tripping’ (1.6.7). In the scene of Fanny’s initiation,
described above, this same uncertainty arises when she finds herself unable to determine whether
what she is experiencing is a result of the psychedelic drugs she usually takes when going out to a
club or whether she is facing something entirely different. In another scene, when the higher dimen-
sional being, Harlequin, appears and transports Dane and Fanny to a room where they dance in
exchange for the Hand of Glory, Dane is disoriented by the shift in dimensions and asks, ‘Did some-
thing weird happen there or is it just the e [MDMA]?’ (2.7.15).
King Mob uses LSD as part of the ritual for summoning John Lennon as the godhead (1.1.18–19)
and again with Ragged Robin in New Orleans (2.14.6–7).
Between the top half and bottom half of page seven they suddenly teleport to a hotel room. The
background of the upper-right-hand panel shows them in the cemetery immediately before their
jump in time and has what at first appears as a bolt of lightening in the background; however, on
closer examination this can also be viewed as a rip in the panel, exposing the white of the page
behind it. In the next panel, which shows the couple naked on a bed in the hotel, King Mob asks,
‘was that the acid?’ In this way, psychedelics become a source of ambiguity as it also pushes the
characters towards the realization that their universe is nested within a higher-dimensional
continuum.
Morrison also creates fictional psychedelics to serve as plot devices. In an interrogation scene
near the end of Volume 1, the villain, Sir Miles, injects King Mob with ‘Key-17’, a drug that makes

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Figure 6: Lightning, or a rip in the panel? The


Invisibles, 2:14, p. 7 (excerpt). Art by Chris
Weston, © Grant Morrison.

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Ian Stuart Garlington

one ‘unable to tell the difference between the word describing an object and the object itself’
(1.18.6). In Volume 3, a stronger relative of Key-17, Key-23, is used on the character Jack Flint
during his initiation into The Invisibles (3.3.5), as well as in combination with LSD when the
heroes kidnap Sir Miles (3.4.18). Beyond these scenes, Morrison repeatedly plays with the corre-
spondence between language and drugs, equating both as technologies to alter people’s percep-
tion of reality. For example, when the team goes to rescue Boy in Volume 2, security guards at the
installation where she is being held captive deploy a weapon that consists of a secret language
composed of a 64-letter alphabet that occupies ‘the language processing areas of your cerebral
cortex’ (2.13.6). In an interview, Morrison (2010: 334) explains that the 64-letter alien alphabet
was based on a DMT experience. In these pages, Robin, who has supposedly travelled back in
time from 2012 compares the experience of the 64-letter alien alphabet to a drug that appeared in
2005, called ‘sky’, which she says, ‘simulates alien contact […] or it is alien contact’ (2.13.6). In
DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Dr Rick Strassman (2001: 279) states that one of the reasons they
discontinued their clinical studies of DMT at the University of New Mexico in the early 1990s was
the unanticipated high number of reports of direct contact with alien-like entities during the
30-minute duration of the effects of the drug.
Later in the series the reader learns that when Robin was a high school student she would take
‘two tabs of sky’ before entering a machine called the ‘Ganzfeldt Tank’ at the University of California,
Berkley. Doing so allowed her to write a complex piece of fiction titled The Invisibles. This narrative,
authored by high school aged, psychedelic Robin, is described as having a structure in which one
can move around in the same way that ‘Mozart talks about how he’s able to move around inside his
composition, as though music has an architecture’ (2.20.2). Although ‘Ganzfeld’ refers to a classic
experiment to test for telepathic ability in the field of parapsychology, this combination of psyche-
delics and an immersion tank also appears to be a reference to dolphin researcher and psychonaut
John Lilly, who developed sensory deprivation tanks for the US government and used them as part
of various experiments involving psychedelics, such as LSD or ketamine. During Dr. Lilly’s prolonged
experiments – he claims to have injected ketamine for 100 days in a row – he started to believe that
he had come into direct contact with cosmic entities called the Earth Coincidence Control Office
(ECCO) and that he alone was positioned to alter the future course of humanity in the Manichean
struggle between the light and dark forces of the universe (Gorightly 2005: 40–41). It should be
noted that Lilly is one of the counterculture figures that Morrison (2011: 254) has mentioned when
describing the influential figures of his youth and that this perception of the world as a
transdimensional cosmic drama between good and evil corresponds with the main plotline of The
Invisibles as well as several other psychedelic users’ models of the universe.4
In Volume 2 of The Invisibles, Mason ‘finds’ Robin in 2008 in an insane asylum in Portland,
Oregon after her parents had her committed for a breakdown that supposedly resulted from the

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4. In Acid Dreams (1992), prolonged use of sky, the fictional psychedelic described above. In her interview with the hospital’s
Lee and Shlain
describes one such
psychiatrist, she says, ‘I saw … I saw everything from the outside. Time and space like an X-ray. It’s
group: ‘Cooke and his just a single obvious thing’ (2.21.3). Due to the frequent jumps in the non-linear narrative of this
Psychedelic Rang- issue and the borderless white panel on the left side of the same page containing Takashi’s grandfa-
ers believed that by
spreading the LSD ther’s origami model of the time machine that Takashi will later build, the reader cannot determine
revelation they were whether her claim of having seen time from the outside was the result of her time travel or from her
helping to enlighten repeated use of sky, or both.
mankind. They fancied
themselves cosmic Finally, in the last issue of the series, King Mob presents the character Jack (previously known as
Good Guys secretly Dane) with an aerosol drug labelled ‘The Invisibles’, which is described as a hallucinatory game that
battling the Forces of
Darkness in an all-out
allows the user to ‘play any of 300 characters, some more involving than others’ (3.12.7). Murray
struggle that would ul- discusses the significance of Morrison’s presentation of multiple adaptations in different media of an
timately determine the emancipatory narrative all titled The Invisibles as it relates to recursion in Morrison’s work. This
destiny of the planet.
Their world-view was repetition of the same story in new forms suggests that there is an ur-narrative for The Invisibles. The
distinctly Manichaean: following section will argue that this ur-narrative had already existed in counterculture discourse,
Eros versus Thana- and can be directly observed in Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! (1984).
tos, the great mythic
showdown, with
history merely the
echo of these titanic The supercontext of the counterculture
opposites locked in
eternal conflict’. In Tom While Callahan (2007: 35) demonstrates that within Morrison’s own body of work, ‘Zenith is
Wolfe’s The Electric Acid Morrison’s ur-text: it provides a template for everything that follows’, Morrison (2011: 212) later
Kool-Aid Test (1968)
Ken Kesey repeated explicitly mentions the strong influence of Shea and Wilson’s Illuminatus! (1984) in Zenith, and in an
uses superhero analo- earlier interview (2003: 255) he explains that The Filth stands as a companion piece to The Invisibles
gies to describe his in much the same way that Wilson’s novel, Masks of the Illuminati (1981), stands in relation to the
group. Also, in Robert
Shea and Robert Anton Illuminatus!. When discussing the cosmology of The Invisibles, Morrison (2002) has said that he
Wilson’s Illuminatus! hopes young people will read the series ‘the same way I read Robert Anton Wilson […] just pass on
trilogy, the fictional
psychedelic anarchist,
the flame’. In this way Morrison has repeatedly drawn parallels between The Invisibles and
Simon Moon, makes Illuminatus! and suggests that The Invisibles is his version of the same tale. This reading is reinforced
stoned speeches of a by Morrison’s final lines in the ‘Invisible Ink’ column in the final issue of Volume 3 of The Invisibles:
similar tone.
‘I’ve shown you mine. Now show me yours. I anticipate fireworks’.
In Supergods (2011: 254), Morrison explains that while growing up, he ‘knew by heart the biog-
raphies of the sixties psychonauts like Kesey, Timothy Leary, and John Lilly’. In the next sentence he
states that he used Robert Anton Wilson’s book, Quantum Psychology (1990), for ‘debugging my
glitchy personality’. Quantum Psychology (1990) contains lengthy descriptions of the ‘eight-circuit’
model of consciousness which was originally set forth in Timothy Leary’s Neurologic (1973) and
expanded on in Leary and Wilson’s co-authored Neuropolitics (1977). Critics have often speculated
on the hyper-fictional aspects of Morrison’s public persona, which appears to have some similarities

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Ian Stuart Garlington

with Timothy Leary’s LSD-induced awareness of the fictional nature of self. Lee and Shlain explain
this aspect of Leary:

‘Of course I’m a charlatan,’ he often joked in public. ‘Aren’t we all?’ To Leary the PR was all
pretense, a cosmic put-on. That was what he had learned from LSD – all social roles were a
game, and he could change personalities like so many different sets of clothing as the occa-
sion warranted. His close friends never took him seriously as a guru or prophet or high priest.
(1992: 94)

How does the eight-circuit model relate to this psychedelic awareness of one’s social persona as
nothing more than a game? In short, this model proposes that the brain has evolved in different
stages or circuits, wherein each one performs different survival functions. Human behaviour and
social roles can be explained as nothing more than complex interactions between these circuits,
thereby giving a person a distanced perspective from which they can more consciously determine
how they interact with others. Currently humans are said to have access to the first four circuits –
our evolutionary, instinctual drives – while circuits five through eight are still undeveloped and will
not begin functioning until humans have migrated to space. Wilson and Leary do say, however, that
some of the higher circuits can be temporarily accessed through the use of certain psychedelics. In
this case, a ‘universal consciousness’ of humanity, which is said to be a feature of the sixth circuit, is
supposedly accessible through high doses of LSD. In Prometheus Rising (1983: 197), Wilson describes
the sixth circuit, saying, ‘With neurogenetic consciousness, [our] DNA archives become accessible to
brain scanning, while awake. (They are always accessible, as archetypes of the Jungian “collective
unconscious,” during dreaming sleep)’. This is also explained in Illuminatus! when one of the minor
characters suddenly begins to describe how the connection of all life through DNA results in this
universal consciousness:

You and me and the fish and bugs are that kind of life made from adenine, cytosine, guanine,
and thymine: DNA life. What we call dead matter is another kind of life: non-DNA life. Okay
so far? If awareness is life and life is one, then the awareness of the individual is just one of
the universe’s sensory organs.
(Shea and Wilson 1975: 579)

This idea of life being singular – all strung together through time by DNA – matches with Wilson’s
description of the brain’s function after the development of the sixth circuit.
Morrison has also repeatedly expounded the interconnectedness of all life when viewed from a
higher dimension. This is represented repeatedly throughout The Invisibles, for example, in the pages

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that were substituted into the TPB and omnibus editions in order to clarify a scene that was intended
to depict the interconnection of all life from a perspective outside of time. While presenting at the
Disinformation Conference in 2000, Morrison’s opening words were, ‘Fuck man, I’ll tell you – when
I was a kid I read Robert Anton Wilson and all this shit and here we are, we’re standing here, and
we’re talking about this shit and it’s real’. He then announced that ‘in half-an-hour I’m gonna come
up on drugs, so watch for it’. He subsequently talked at length about higher dimensions and used
the example of the fingers of a three-dimensional hand passing through a two-dimensional plane to
make the same point. ‘The two-dimensional entities that live on there, they will see four circles,
right? Four distinct, completely separate circles. But no, it’s the one hand’.
Callahan (2007: 209) includes in his book, Grant Morrison: The Early Years, an extended quota-
tion from an interview wherein Morrison likens the LSD experience to that of the supercontext:
‘basically everyone will start peaking on the acid trip that never ends. “Individuality” will dissolve
and your minds will start to merge into one mass mind’. Morrison then suggests that psychedelics
are a key for gaining experiential knowledge of our future condition: ‘I have a feeling that psyche-
delic drugs provide a flashforward glimpse of this kind of consciousness and help prepare the human
mind for when that mode of consciousness is permanent’. Indeed, it seems Morrison has adopted a
very similar model for a psychedelic utopia as that found in Wilson and Leary.
Over time, Leary began to embrace science fiction as a literature capable of promoting a future
un-individuated mind of the species. He began challenging authors of the genre to start depicting
radical, non-human, models of consciousness in order to lay a blueprint for the next evolutionary
step.

Whatever the mind can conceive it tends to create. As soon as humans accept and neuro-
logically imprint the notion of higher levels of intelligence and of circuits of the nervous
system as yet unactivated – a new philosophy of evolution will emerge. It is natural to call
this extra-planetary perspective of human evolution Exo-psychology – human nature seen
in the context of an evolving nervous system, from the vantage point of older species which
now exist in our extra-terrestrial future.
(Leary, 1977: 3)

This led to his misgivings about the absence of greater vision among the majority of science fiction
authors of the era. Leary insisted that pulp origins should be abandoned for a new ‘Psi-Phy’ or
‘psychology of physics’ that would be built upon truths uncovered by psychedelic experiences. These
experiences, he hoped, would provide insight beyond an authors’ individual reality, thereby over-
coming the paradox in which ‘caterpillars cannot write with convincing reality about post-larval life’
(1977: 21).

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Buckminster Fuller, a famous polymath, also felt a strong imperative for a drastic shift in
consciousness. Explaining his position in the introduction to Expanded Cinema, he describes the
importance of new narratives, mirroring many aspects of Leary’s ‘ideal’ science fiction:

It is a matter of educating everyone everywhere to the realities of the emerging of man from
the womb of permitted ignorance into the womb of required comprehension and compe-
tence. That education will have to be brought about by the extraordinary discarding of yester-
day’s inadequate amusements, shallow romances and drama, and make-believe substitute
worlds to cover up the inadequacies of misinformed and underinformed, physically slavish or
bureaucratically dogmatic, thoughtless life.
(1970: 33)

Earlier historical events and conflicts have produced the narratives through which the world’s
current power structures justify the naturalness of their positions. Consequently, SF and its presen-
tation of a future history set the stage for the education of humankind, which Fuller believed was
imperative to the survival of humanity on planet Earth. Rather than seeing SF as a leisurely diver-
sion; Robert Anton Wilson (1989: 20) describes its more important role when he states: ‘The func-
tion of science fiction is to break mental sets. Science fiction is liberation’.

Higher dimensions through the form of The Invisibles and Illuminatus!


Robert Shea and Robert Wilson’s Illuminatus! is a sprawling narrative that loosely centres on the
efforts of the Legion of Dynamic Discord, a group of telepathic, psychedelic-consuming, playful
anarchists, in their struggle to prevent the end of the world as the result of an Illuminati plot. While
describing the Illuminati, the narrative follows innumerable conspiracy theories regarding the
contradictory goals, origins, and history of the group. Described as a secret organization bent on
world domination, the Illuminati appears to have been working at this purpose for centuries or even
millennia. Each new conspiracy theory promotes a continually telescoping connection of ideas;
where stories of Atlantis begin rubbing elbows with extra-dimensional entities, the Kennedy assas-
sinations, and the Catholic church. Contrary to the intent of illumination inherent in the content of
Illuminatus! is the experience of navigating its fragmented form. The fractured narrative and writing
style, in the end, more readily promotes the agnostic stance of its authors than an overarching and
god-like creation story of humanity’s elites.
The Invisibles contains many superficial references to Illuminatus!. The most apparent of these,
the continuous repetition of the numbers 5, 17 and 23, has been noted throughout the annotations
available online at the Barbelith Forums’ ‘The Bomb’ project, as well as in Cowe-Spigai and Neighly’s

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annotations. These numbers are sacred in the neo-pagan joke religion, Discordianism, whose
founders, Kerry Thornley and Gregory Hill, are the two people to whom Illuminatus! is dedicated. In
The Invisibles, the minor character Coyote describes his group as operating in the ‘Discordian tradi-
tion’ as ‘strictly non-violent agitators and pranksters’ (2.12.6). The Invisibles has other overlapping
elements with Illuminatus! and Wilson’s various book-length essays, including: the brain-washing of
Boy (2.11.11); the mild telepathy displayed by King Mob (1.18.10–11) and Robin (1.9.11, 2.15.10–11);
the reassignment of roles among the protagonists’ Invisibles cell (2.2.15); the references to the
Lovecraftian Shoggoth and Yog Sothoth (2.15.18, 3.12.7); the phrase ‘ontological terrorism’ (2.22.16);
and so on.
More important, yet less easily observed, are the structural similarities between the narratives of
both works. Much of Illuminatus! appears to have been written using a style adapted from one of
William Burroughs’s techniques: the fold-in. The fold-in technique is a literary device used to fold
pages of a narrative in on themselves; accomplished in some cases by taking a pages from the begin-
ning and end of a text and stirring their sentences and paragraphs together. This results in the crea-
tion of content that can be reinserted anywhere else in the story. Combined with the author’s flair
and style this technique produces a subtle echoing of thoughts, words, and ideas. Neal Oxenhandler
in his writing on Burroughs, explained the technique of the fold-in as a re-appropriation of the text
from earlier or later pages in the narrative:

Not only does it create a counterpoint or beat, but it produces junctures and discontinui-
ties which are points at which the two-cycle rhythm can shift. Hence, a theme is always
prevented from too-lengthy development by a break in continuity which carries the
reader off on an opposite current. In this way the powerful ambivalencies of the work are
maintained.
(1975: 199)

Wilson’s work appropriates this technique to introduce confusion into conspiracy theories by shuf-
fling information in a way which continuously breaks the continuity. Used in this fashion the tech-
nique provides the further benefit of collapsing past and future into a single eternal present, thereby
producing an image of the timeless realm of the universal consciousness.
For example, the following passage marks the start of a sudden page-and-a-half long fold-in, in
the middle of Illuminatus!, signalled only by parentheses:

(In 1923, Adolph Hitler stood beneath a pyramidal altar and repeated the words of a
goat-headed man: ‘Der Zweck heiligte die Mittel.’ James Joyce, in Paris, scrawled in crayon
words that his secretary, Samuel Beckett, would later type: ‘Pre-Austeric Man in Pursuit of

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Ian Stuart Garlington

Pan-Hysteric Woman’. In Brooklyn, New York, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, returning from a
party at which Hart Crane had been perfectly beastly – thereby confirming Mr. Lovecraft’s
prejudice against homosexuals – finds a letter in his mailbox and reads with some amuse-
ment: ‘Some of the secrets revealed in your recent stories would better be kept out of the
light of print […] Remember what happened to Ambrose Bierce …’ And, in Boston, Robert
Putney Drake screams, ‘Lies, lies, lies. It’s all lies. Nobody tells the truth. Nobody says what
he thinks […]’ His voice trails off.
(1984: 181)

The events from 1923 are described in an ethereal present tense; jumping between Hitler, Lovecraft,
Joyce and the fictional Robert Putney Drake. In this way readers are lured into a sense that these are
concurrent events, belayed by a writing style which introduces doubt as to the reality of each event’s
connection to the other. On the previous page, however, the story jumps from a scene in New York
in 1976 to another at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, without standard literary indi-
cations of the shift in time and space, thus leaving the reader in an extended state of unknowing as
they attempt to establish these fundamentals for themselves.
This style is extended throughout most of the 800 pages of Illuminatus! placing it beyond the
tolerance threshold for most casual readers. Shapiro (2013: 39), who emphasizes Wilson’s influence
more than most, has observed that Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson and William Burroughs
‘could never be part of the mainstream’. When discussing the supercontext, Morrison himself has
said that ‘this is higher-dimensional shit, and it’s hard to process through words’ (2010: 288).
Indeed, Morrison’s retelling of this narrative of a higher-dimensional unified psychedelic conscious-
ness in the comics medium is particularly effective through his use of braiding to produce the same
experience of narrative stasis for the reader as the fold-in did in Illuminatus!. The added visual track
of comics has the benefit of providing the reader with additional footholds in ambiguous experi-
mental works, thereby increasing readability.
Braiding, as described by Groensteen (2007: 146) is a technique wherein physically distant recur-
ring semantic units echo each other, forming meaning that goes beyond the semantic relationships
produced through juxtapositions with their adjacent panels or pages. As braiding in comics is the
closest equivalent to the fold-in in prose fiction, it is important to note that while fold-ins are rela-
tively uncommon in fictional prose, braiding is quite common, particularly in mainstream serialized
superhero titles where narratives involving several characters are typically compressed to fit within a
limited number of pages. Morrison’s talent, much like that of Shea and Wilson’s, is how he appro-
priates these stylistic techniques in order to give texture to his highly unusual content. Morrison’s
usage of braiding in The Invisibles, albeit sometimes described in different terminology, has been
demonstrated in some of the above examples of time travel and psychedelics as well as having been

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the main focus of much scholarship on Morrison’s works and does not need to be reiterated at
length here.

Conclusion
This article has sought clarify the importance of psychedelics in The Invisibles in terms of its form and
content, as well as attempt to locate the story within the context of psychedelic utopias of the coun-
terculture. The relationship between psychedelics in the text as they relate to depictions of higher
dimensions and time travel was then framed within Leary and Wilson’s eight-circuit, wherein
psychedelics are considered a tool used to preview future evolutionary stages of unified, timeless
consciousness. This connection is further developed through demonstrating several points of inter-
section between The Invisibles and Illuminatus!
This relationship between the two works would remain unacknowledged if Morrison’s magnum
opus were only considered within the context of comics history. Yet, when viewed in light of Russian
Formalist Victor ShklovskiĬ’s (ShklovskiĬ and Sher 1990: 190) observation that, ‘the legacy that is
passed on from one literary generation to the next moves not from father to son but from uncle to
nephew’, the significance of their similarities becomes more apparent. From this perspective it can
be argued that both Illuminatus! and The Invisibles belong to an emerging genre of psychedelic
emancipatory fiction described by Leary and Fuller, which will most likely reappear in various forms
of new media in years to come.

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Suggested citation
Garlington, I. S. (2016), ‘A context for the supercontext: On the function of psychedelics in Grant
Morrison’s The Invisibles’, Studies in Comics, 7: 1, pp. 49–72, doi: 10.1386/stic.7.1.49_1

Contributor details
Ian Stuart Garlington was born and raised in Oregon. He received his Ph.D. in 2015 from Osaka
University and is currently an assistant professor at Kansaigaidai University in Osaka, Japan. His
current research interests include counterculture SF (Rudy Rucker, Robert Anton Wilson), psyche-
delic parody religions (Discordianism, the Neo-American Church, Church of the SubGenius), and
various applications of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

www.intellectbooks.com    71
Ian Stuart Garlington

Contact: 2-2-207 Nakamiya kitamachi, Hirakata-shi Osaka-fu, Japan 573-1194.


E-mail: iang08@gmail.com

Ian Stuart Garlington has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

72   Studies in Comics


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