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The theory incorporates some way of contacting these people?

Yeah, completely, I want to get one of them out here, see if I can do it.

See, I've got this thing worked out, I was going to do this Challengers of the Unknown thing as part of the whole hypertime thing, I was gonna do this thing called "Hypercrisis" which actually delved into the real big meat of it. I wrote this whole thing about the Challengers of the Unknown, but it was called Challengers Beyond the Unknown. It's them gettin' to the end of the comic book universe and actually lookin' out and lookin' up at us. And they're sayin' that the whole continuum is tremblin' and they're detecting these massive life signs out there, but they don't know where "out there" is. And I'd actually put in hypnotic commands that would make you go back and look at things. I had the whole thing worked out. You'll do certain things if you're told in the right language, so I had this thing worked out where you had to go back to page twelve, and I knew the reader would do it, and when they go back there's a message waiting for them that they hadn't noticed before. I was trying all these tricks and I was thinking "how close can we get to touching these characters?"

And then try to incorporate that into this reality...

Yeah, and see where does it go from the first level up?

Speaking of literary interpretations, this is just a bug inside my own head at the moment, but do you see any parallels between the Hindu pantheon of gods and superheroes?

I never really did. I think the Hindu pantheon's so specific.

Not really direct parallels, more the heroic stories and the...

Oh, certainly. The whole Mahabarata and the Vedic things, with Vamanas flying through space, that's like atom bombs being dropped on cities, it's like a superhero story. With the Justice League it was more specifically Greek, because you get the twelve Greek Gods and twelve Justice Leaguers and they map perfectly onto each other. On the same subject, me and Mark Millar are working on this movie about superheroes, just a different take on it, really. But what I did, was I went back to the first pantheon of all, the Mesopotamian pantheon, and I developed superheroes from them, and you get a whole different crew, a completely different type of crew. That's like the Indian thing, because they're different areas that they deal with. There's one thing that I realised, is that nobody in any superhero pantheon now has a scribe! And that'd   be great, a superhero writer, what would that be like? I came up with this notion of this girl who sits at a fantastic morphing computer thing, and what she does is she plots the adventures they go on, so she's like the controller. And whenever they're in trouble they call her and say, "What comes next in the plot?" and she works it out and tells them. But I've never looked at the Hindu gods, because... Shiva's like a billion different things, you couldn't have Superman as a destroyer and a creator, because you'd lose what makes him Superman. But to take them and make up new ones based on what they represent, that'd be interesting.

You've said that in the last couple of years, the story of The Invisibles has become the story of your life. I was wondering of you could expand on that?

It started from, as I said, I set out to do a magic sigil that was a sigil extended. A sigil's a condensation of desire into a visual form that you can use to do magic. I thought, okay if I condense the sigil into the form of a six-year long comic, it's still a sigil, but a different type. It's a moving sigil, it's a dynamic sigil that has different effects. And I quite blithely did this. I came to New Zealand and bungee jumped with the sigil, threw it down, got myself into this state, and I thought I'd see what happened. The next thing, when I give King Mob the horrible shamanic experience, he think's his face is being eaten, his lung collapses, Sir Miles is torturing him... Three months later, my face gets eaten - there's the scar - and my lung collapses and I'm thinkin' "This is what magic's about, you better fuckin' watch it here." (laughs)

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