Or “What’s A Bottie Beast?” – A Love Story
Illogical Volume here, writing a wee introduction to an ULTIMATE CLASSIC! post by another Mindless because…. well, almost two years down the line, I’m still stuck on the Botswana’s Beast‘s last post on Multiversity, still trying to get a feel for what it’s doing, how it works.
It has something to sell you, sure, but it also wants you to ask what you’re buying.
It’s a bit like the comics themselves that way…
Some of the questions raised by this post still haunt me, primarily:
- Who the fuck is the Botwsana Beast, Duncan Falconer, the Dead Demon Rider?
- What’s the shape of our relationship?
- Why do I care?
These are transposed thoughts about my relationship with Multiversity‘s primary architect Grant Morrison, I think, though the process goes both ways – any increase in my familiarity with one seems to magnify my sense of intimacy with the other.
All of this is basically just me allowing myself to ask the standard English Lit question – “Who is this bastard and why is he lying to me?” – on a level that is disgracefully familiar. Having called him a bastard and accepted that he is probably lying to me at least some of the time – because hell, we’re all probably lying to ourselves at least some of the time – the challenge is to take this process to its unnatural conclusions…
Why do I care about Duncan?
Because he was on the Barbelith forum, where he was obviously Scottish, properly narky and endlessly left wing
Why should any of that matter?
Because it suggested that he was just like me, basically, but with better jokes.
Is that really all you wanted from the world, to go out and meet yourself in it?
No, and I won’t settle for the promise of self-knowledge either but hey – it might be a start!
If this seems like a fairly flimsy basis for letting someone into your mental space, making them a part of your consciousness and letting yourself worry about their happiness, ask yourself – who else have I made time for? Does writing some Animal Man comics provide better grounds for letting someone into your heart? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean we should write the whole thing off.
Nor does it mean that we should stop questioning what shapes we’re making ourselves into, how what we’re doing with our networks is allowing those networks to change us.
When I think of these comics, and the people that we’ve met through them, there are two words that keep coming to me, a worldview implicit within the mess of friends and fantasies I live in: “anguished materialism”, of the sort that might be understood by people who have tried to change the world using art and sigils alone and come up short. Because if we’re going to do this, if we’re going to trade in fictions that promise to rebuild the world around us, please let there be materialism in the mix. Please let there be an understanding of how bodies are exploited and turned again themselves, of how we’ll have to trade our best intentions for rent money once our spirits have been broken. Please let there be an awareness of the forces of production, but let there also be some anguish in there, let there be a determination that we can’t keep going on like this.
The sigil kids have had enough. They know that things don’t have to be this way, and that our times call for determination to fight and space to dream.
This is what I think about when I think of Duncan Falconer, the Botswana Beast, the Dead Demon Rider, without whom I would never have written for this website.
This is what his last post on Multiversity engineers, piece by piece, through its appeals to shared knowledge, to all of us… a machine built to contain the worst of the world in which it was created, but which is also designed to amplify the best of it, to give our hopes some form that might survive in the worlds yet to come.
Endtroducing…
HOW TO PASS THROUGH A PORTAL
Here, the map is the territory.
This is about to get seriously earnest, adjust your sets… I’ve read Grant Morrison comics from the age of 7, on and off (I was too much of a wimp for 2000AD as a teen and Batman: Gothic shat me right up), starting with this one and pretty much consistently every one for the last near twenty years (I didn’t get Final Crisis: Secret Files, a decision which haunts me still, and haven’t been keeping up with 18 Days, which is just barely a Grant Morrison comic), since semi-rediscovering him through The Invisibles.
“Yeah. I guess the fighting never ends, does it? It never ends.”
That’s a mid-1986 copy of Spider-Man and Zoids, no. 18 to be precise – as an aside, the time is completely ripe for a boutique Zoids comic, in the style of yer Copra or Scioli Transformers/GI Joe, get Farel Dalrymple and the Study Group lads to do it or something. Anyway, the point is this: it’s impossible, or nearly impossible, to have that kind of relationship – thirty years(!!) – with an author outside of comics; maybe I could have had with Alexander McCall Smith or something, he writes kids’ books, he writes gentle mysteries in Botswana and Scotland – could maybe have worked, seems a bit mimsy to me. Accept the premise, move on.
Multiversity is a culmination of the writer’s motifs and core interests from 1986; antithesis Alan Moore’s Watchmen and [essentially an unwriting of the monadic] Crisis on Infinite Earths, something he had striven to do since his first DC assignment on Animal Man, pics here from 1990’s #23 (of course)
(note title)
So what was Multiversity all about, how did it function? Morrison comics almost always take a while to process, can seem frustratingly elliptical and so on and the framing – issues 1 & 2 of the titular series, seemed, do still seem on some level, to expose his limitations as a writer – recapitulating everything from the Black Zoid saga that capstoned the Zoids run through JLA, Joe the Barbarian and the end of Final Crisis, in a conclusion I like to call “throw all your toys at the bad thing” and somehow the goodies win… this is quite often preluded by a lot of panels of the heroes standing around on platforms, viz.
an image taken fairly directly from Crisis on Infinite Earths, or Moore’s Swamp Thing tie-in issues
There’s nothing fundamentally dishonest about this, the series’ purpose is and Morrison’s great gift has always been interpolation and extrapolation – “I don’t invent, I innovate”, Two-Face-Two proclaims in the dark future of Batman #700 – it just can become jading over the decades, and the finales unconvincing… the heroes win because, just because. Because they are all there and what could hope to stop them? No great stratagem, just positivist fatalism… but, and hear me out now, there might be something to this – *sounds of a cube unlocking*
What purpose does this endless consumption of conflict serve, what is it inherently between? What is Ultra Comics – the character, the object, the story – the front line of defense against, here on Earth-Prime (33), where you sit reading this now, always now as the words are read…? I’ll tell you, and this is the major key, what every superhero is supposed to stand against, why they do not kill and the grave cannot contain them; Ultra Comics contains your inevitable death. Contains.
One day, when you are still, and I am gone and Grant Morrison is nothing, perhaps in 2240, or 2666, or when these numerals no longer mean anything and some advanced, alien AI hoovers up every distillate of our long since ashen human civilisation like Brainiac, who knows? Ultra Comics will live again, and we who were all him for the purpose of animating this adventure, well, someone will feel something like you or I did then, or now. Bemusement//fascination.
Even still, in pre-death, there is torment:
Ever-diminishing circles, The Gentry are similitude, fixity, ownership, cruelty; a bounded system never opening, value expropriators… the method of combating them is through colour overload, multifacets, sound harmonics, fascination, magic tricks, impossible numbers; all these things you left lying around when you were a child, that you were supposed to put away as an adult – maybe they had value, maybe they engaged your interest for a reason, maybe they made you you and you didn’t forget after all.
Multiversity is iterative, subsists on and contains numerous bifurcations, proliferating… all these tensions and axes of symmetry and arcs, wheels within wheels, a possibility generator, a microcosmology… I want to talk about how traverse works between these worlds extant on different harmonics, almost all predicated on varieties of Justice League or Society, or polarities of – most especially – Superman and Batman… Dayman vs. Nightman
this is the core thrill of it to me, the panoply, these dynamics and synaesthesia where sound = color, the motile numerology and the almost countless interfaces between each Earth-(x), a considerably more complex structure than the Qabbala…
these shapes are the post-hypnotic induction cues:- the tesseract hypercube/the Rubik and the punched möbius strip
two interlocking S shapes with an O in the centre, SoS, save our souls, or the jagged lightning…
which the S of Superman so easily transposes to, in symmetric form on the chest of Ultra, singular in the stylised SS style on Overman and then as a triple bolt on Captain and Mary Marvel and near every multiversal Flash. This is a limitation of dimensionality, you can only have a curved or a straight line after all, and a circle or a square is the only way a sphere or cube translates onto a flat page, but what if they were trying to break out…?
Here’s an excerpt from Gerard Jones’ Men of Tomorrow, about the progenitor of these universii, Jerry Siegel, that seems salient
These are the rudiments; the square within the square is the simplest way to mimic depth where none exists, hence the portal boundary – a Rubik is a hypercube, an implicational four-dimensional space, comprising 3 x 3 x 3 cubes, and twice as many (open) facets, 54*, 52 plus an entry and exit, whatever numerical set theory slippage suits, Apokolips and New Genesis if you prefer, these ultimate twinned dystopian/utopian worlds. Morrison certainly played with antinomies in Seven Soldiers, much ruminating on sixes-under-sevens and hidden eighths and the like. Assignation of values and meaning to numbers and colours and orders, the liminal space between potentiality and existence; in solving the cube Nix Uotan opens every mutiversal portal.
*coincidentally one can only ever view, as in the above illustration, 27 of these facets at a time. The others can only ever be implied in illustration as they would be in reality.
Imagine two circles conjoining, revolving, separating, creating a third circle in their Venn; imagine a square within a square, a depiction of a cube with pliant vertices, the smaller square comes to the foreground, now, and contains what once contained it, then it happens again, and again, until you and everything around you are part of the frame – this is motion, this is extensible context, this is immersion.
Just so, a cover implies a comic, the comic implies its own fictional histories – and that’s where you, the reader, come in! – MK Ultra was some mind control shit, the cordyceps fungus spores and proliferates in brainstems, sometimes the parcelling is better than the present…
“mummy i think i put some bad rubbish in my head and it’s eating me from the inside out”
What happens when the consumer becomes… the consumed?!?
It’s all about interfaces, see? You thought you were pressing your face up against a one way pane but they got in you through your eyes, the middle hole in the triple torus, shot up domino mask
and so it cycles on in perpetuum
There is something to be said for the series, and Ultra Comics in particular as an attempt to create a Marxist-materialist dialectic about what superhero, or DC if you prefer (although DC always implies Marvel on some level, and the framing sequence here does somewhat prefigure the competitor’s recent Secret Wars Event, both have the joint copyright on the term ‘superhero’ and are the duopoly of this form of Manichaean fiction, which now has leapt onto and indeed dominates mass media and, thereby, discourse in 2016AD with predictably discomfiting results), comics are, physically, what the experience of reading and interacting with them entails, in his typically bananas way of processing these ideas; but it can also be seen as subsumed to a land grab, it’s hard to imagine how a non-extant publisher could possibly create anything resembling Batman or Superman now, as Awesome with Supreme, or Big Bang – two publishers also reconstituted here as Earths- 35 & 36 here – did, given almost every semblance is now trademarked and locked down. This is the nature of capital, I can say, because I am doing this for free (although if anyone wants to pay for my ideas, notions and articulations, well…), and the author is a good liberal who has been well-rewarded for his efforts on behalf of the corporation, unlike Jerry Siegel was.
In this reading, The Empty Hand – also our universe, born as a cube, aka Neh-Buh-Loh/Qwewq – and peppered throughout Morrison’s work from JLA to All-Star Superman via Seven Soldiers – becomes analogous, in the way only a seriously overdetermined metonym could, to The Invisible Hand of free-markets, where trademarks are continually renewable, like the toyetic chibi superheroes of Earth-41 who rise again and again, and ever-higher staked fictional conflict is the resource to be mined. Disaster capitalism is literally the exploitation of perennial crises, and all there is to confront it is the loose idea of “justice”.
Because these ideas are good, because they are enduring, because they are multifarious, and because the membrane between our world and theirs is weakening; I cannot fully endorse really what the series’ apparent idea of “justice” entails, much of it seems like coping mechanisms – like Earth-0’s Nix has his antidepressants – and methods toward self-realisation, but art, numbers, colours and sonics do or can bring joy into a world apparently dominated by profit margins and exploitation, and this is something.
It’s A Start, anyway. The End is not the thing, The Struggle is.
Reading the transitions between narration techniques, from commanding singular, linear instruction, to Immortal Man’s journal, from which characters on other worlds take instruction and the codeword “S.o.S.”, to Sister Miracle’s PDA, to the radio in Pax, the Wizard Shazam, a history of the DC Universe, Jürgen Olsen’s exposé, the interactive reader-addressing multifacets of Ultra and the final symphonic, Monster Magnet/Wall of Sound inspired issue… how do you engage with all of these voices that are your inner voice, in this world, and the character’s voices, and the author’s voice, and the publisher’s voice, they are in your head, all these frequencies, and a great many of them, the ones you liked, the ones you actually cared about and felt affinity for… these are nicer voices than those of hurt, aggravation, distress and the beckoning grave – they cannot exist without the other, which will overwhelm and leave you dissolute, adrift, drowning; there again, neither does it without them. Only listen to them, what are they saying?
“Concentrate.”
“Do good.”
“Be kind.”
“Tell the truth.”
“Share.”
“You will endure this”
“You were never alone.”
“Think of something better.”
