From Barbelith:
BY: I like that whole idea of ripping open space within the environment
whether it’s solid or virtual and y’know the whole paperverse interface
that you explored, or have explored countless times, but you’ve really
started to look at the technology of it in “The Filth” and I’m fascinated
by it. What’s the idea behind it?
GM: That idea was me making sense of when I’d taken mushrooms and
read “Doom Patrol” — I was aware that I was holding a continuum, that’s
when I started to
develop ideas of comics as magic, comics as sigils, because I got
to page 22 then I turned back to page 8; I thought, “I’m in this story
which I don’t understand, I’ve read this bit, I can go back to the point
where the characters don’t know what’s about to happen to them and I
can experience it out of sequence and I saw that this comic was this entire
little universe/ continuum in
it’s own right and also the wider implications; that the DC Universe
and the Marvel Universe were also continuums in their own way created
by people when I was a kid or before I was born. Maintained by people,
who like these Demonic Corporations, maintained and kept these characters
which were sustained by people who would come in and look after them; people
who would come in and look after Scott Summers – it was that notion of
the universe in your hands and the possibilities in that.
BY: Do you think that informed your experience of Space-Time?
GM: Yeah – because it was a metaphor for that. I mean “Zoids”-
BY: I’ve not read it but I know of it.
GM: It winds up that the prime movers of the story are five-dimensional
being aliens who manipulate them all because the Zoids are toys-
BY: That’s hilarious – in “Zoids”!
GM: I thought, ‘What if I treat them literally as toys?’ When I was a kid I’d try and draw the fourth dimension. To me it’s something that’s always been there – it’s a refinement of ideas.
As you grow older you bring backup and other people’s ideas to scaffold
things you’ve thought yourself and you begin to assemble some kind of structure
from it and make some kind of sense of it.
BY: It’s always very comforting when you find someone in the pubic
realm who’s producing work that matches what you’re thinking and articulates
it when I couldn’t articulate it myself. I think comics lends itself to-
GM: Comics is like poetry. It’s a miracle that it has the circulation
that it does
BY: The chord it strikes in people who are attracted to it is so
strong it can be impossible to explain to someone who doesn’t experience
that.
GM: It’s the virtual world aspect of them. You’re actually inside
it. When you’re really enjoying a comic you’re inside the space like
nothing else. The way you have control over the time it takes to read
it. You’ve got control over this continuum. I just wanted to do that
with “Animal Man.” It was an experiment with those characters – I wasn’t
happy with that continuum. I wanted to do more of that with DC – I might
still do it with the HyperCrisis idea to explore that emotion of the comic
talking to you, developing it’s own language, to control how you read the
comic and how you would have certain kind of experiences while you read
the comic. So those are ideas ready to be played with: the actual thing
in your hand and how the characters react with it. The Challengers
of the Unknown standing on the boundaries of the comic saying ‘There’s
something massive…a massive lifeform out there. The entire continuum
is trembling.’
… We’re all drawn on the same paper. Even in a physical way
– our bodies are exchanging atoms with the environment all the time –
there is no solid boundary. In seven years you’ll have a completely different
atomic structure from the one you have now. So we’re constantly exchanging
with the environment. Our molecules are composed
of bits of stars, there really is not much distinction between us and the
environment apart from the ones we make in order to function as individual
selves.
Arthur Magazine 