C is for Comics.

This is a response to the Pagan Blog Project.


When I was in seventh grade, our teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. "A comic book artist," was my reply. A few years later, in another class, we were asked the same question, albeit with vaguely more adult phrasing. My answer remained the same, and it remains a dream I've never fully given up on even now.

I never had an interest in drawing the Sunday funnies - my introduction to comics was my mother's old Conan collection from the 70s. The Savage Sword books, in particular, which were packed to the gills with the Cimmerian warrior hacking the shit out of monsters and battling beautiful, treacherous witches. Magic existed everywhere in the Conan books, although our hero generally mistrusted it, as did the gods. Crom, Mitra, Set, Ishtar... fictional deities named after real in some cases. This was my first brush with mythology in visual media.

After Conan came superheroes - the X-Men, with their message of comfort for outsiders. I haunted the local comic book store, and the giant used bookstore that would sell old comics for a dollar. It was in the latter, hunting for back issues, that I discovered Vertigo.

Vertigo, for the non-comic nerds in the audience, was a subset of DC publishing that was launched in the early 90s. Like the Savage Swords I'd loved as a kid, the Vertigo titles did not bow to the Comics Code Authority and so depicted scenes of violence and sex.

In that dusty, cavernous bookshop, I pulled out several Vertigo titles. One of these was Death: The Time of Your Life by one Mr. Neil Gaiman. And you know, when you were an awkward goth teenager with an interest in the occult in the 90s? Once you met the Endless, you were hooked.

Neil Gaiman's The Sandman was a long-running series that centred around seven beings, more powerful than gods, that have existed since the dawn of time and who embody powerful and basic aspects of the universe. The series mostly followed Dream, the mopey king of the realm of sleep. In the pages of Sandman, gods, angels, and the devil all moved and spoke - living forces that seemed more than just simple fiction.

Sandman was, frankly, a magical book.

Nor was it the only comic to boldly incorporate gods and magical thought. Although at the time I wasn't aware of it, works by Alan Moore were already on the shelves. Moore, best known for looking like a hobo and being a cranky English fuck, is the mind behind such influential works as Watchmen, From Hell, and V for Vendetta. He also openly declared that he was a practising magician.

Another openly working magician is Grant Morrison, the author responsible for The Invisibles. To even try and sum up this comic would take ages, and is the sort of thing I only attempt while utterly shitfaced, so if you want to get the basics I suggest you start here.

I missed out on The Invisibles when it was published. Honestly, I don't think my local shop even carried it. It wouldn't be until I was in my twenties that I started picking it up, after being introduced to Chaos Magic. (The fact that the Wicca resurgence of the 90s coincided with the Chaos Magic current is something for another post, and another thing of drunken lectures/arguments.)

Comic books have long been considered the property of children and teenage boys. Muscled heroes in tights and capes, how much further away from magic can you get? But anyone with a serious interest will fast discover this art form hides some magical treasures worth more than yet another book on Wicca 101. Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, cat yronwode... intelligent, magical people have put their energy into comic books. There are truths in four colours.

...and maybe you can conjure Superman.