As I’ve said more than once, to paraphrase Jarvis Cocker, I am not Grant Morrison though I have the same initials.

I’ve always had an affinity for the writer, going all the way back to their Zoids and Zenith work way back in the late '80s (I’m old), and that’s something that’s only grown more true in the subsequent decades where they’ve moved in different directions at a time when I’ve found myself particularly receptive to what they’re writing. The '90s one-two punch of The Invisibles and Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery, arguably two of their defining works, felt particularly potent, but I could say the same about things like The Filth or Seven Soldiers of Victory: The Bulleteer.

That’s especially true when it comes to their latest venture, Luda. Their first full-length novel — they’ve written short prose before, as well as the non-fiction prose Supergods — it’s a glamorous, over-the-top confession on behalf of the protagonist, one-time drag supernova Luci LaBang, that encompasses a history of pantomime, a series of lessons in magical thinking, and an increasingly paranoid relationship with Luci’s co-star, the eponymous Luda, amongst many other things. It’s extravagant, hilarious, heartbreaking, and — thrillingly to someone who grew up just outside of Glasgow — entirely Scottish. It feels like the most Grant Morrison thing they’ve ever written, and it resonated with me as I eagerly read it.

(Those who get to “Vultures and Crows” in the book will find another reason why it resonated with me in particular, but I won’t spoil anything here.)

After finishing the book, released September 6, I had the opportunity to talk to Morrison over Zoom about… well, a lot of the above, and more. Read on for a freewheeling conversation about Luda, Scottishness, and the existential nature of reality.

Popverse: Where did this book come from? It feels like the most personal thing you've written in a long time, and it feels personal in a way that even things like Flex Mentallo or The Invisibles didn't. This felt like something akin to St. Swithin's Day and things way back in the '90s. This felt like very You.

Grant Morrison: I'd agree with that. Honestly, it came from being asked to do one.

So everything in it is kind of real, but it's happening to someone from a parallel universe.

I've never quite managed to write a novel. I've tried since I was 18, when I wrote a big fantasy thing, but I've never managed to finish one. I just can't, it's not my form. But once I got asked to do it, I thought [that] I had this story that I was almost going to do as a comic with Frank Quitely, and this was an episode of it. It was kind of a bunch of stories like an Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City, sort of thing, and this was one of them. Really, the kind of idea hooked me, and it was just a part of me and my life I wanted to talk about, but at the same time, I kind of let the character take over and steal from my experience. So everything in it is kind of real, but it's happening to someone from a parallel universe. And that's what I find weird about it because, yeah, I think you're right.

The actual things in it are real. Some of the weirdest stuff is actually real, but at the same time, the character takes over. It's the character's life, not mine, and it deals in directions that I never went in, or I didn't do that when I was in that situation. But yeah, I definitely agree. I think it's much more [personal], it's digging into a particular route that I don't think I've really done before. And there was a lot of energy and material in there to be mined.

I feel like Luci is similar to Lord Fanny from The Invisibles. There's a causticness, there's a sort of stage bitchiness, but it's masking this intense love of humanity and kindness and desire to connect with someone.

I mean, I think that Fanny is much more of a superhero. I think Fanny is way more proactive and way more obviously operating at a higher level. It's more of a superheroic level. This character, I think, has lots of really dodgy angles, and that's what I love about it. I wanted to go to places where she's got all that stuff, but there is a sadness of the heart of it that isn't there in Fanny.

I think Fanny is way more indomitable in that sense, and although there are some connections, the Luci character for me is much more -- she's more vulnerable, and she does have big hopes for people and for humanity, and doing the right thing, but she's constantly fucking up and constantly saying the wrong thing and constantly trying really hard to fit into the world we live in today and failing. So that's what I like about it, is the unpleasant edges or the bits that are not heroic, are not friendly or not nice. I think that allowing the character to have those edges was quite interesting.

Something that Luci feels is regret. That's something running through the book; especially as it heads towards the end, more and more of that comes out. It feels like it's a book about growing older as well. Fanny gets to be a superhero because Fanny is only ever going to be the age that she is in The Invisibles; she's never going to have to look back at the things she did wrong, or didn't get to do at all.

Honestly, for me, there was the moment where it was just like, 'I'll never look good in this dress again and it's terrible!'

Well, I mean Fanny is 23 in the comic. And then when you see her [in the future], she's in the Divine part of her life where she's gone big, but the reason I wanted to do that was to reflect Divine's importance to that community. But yeah, Fanny was 23, Fanny's a young person. [Luci] is someone who's double that age. Honestly, for me, there was the moment where it was just like, 'I'll never look good in this dress again and it's terrible!' But I found it really interesting, the idea of all these things that you used to wear when you were a lot young and slender just hanging in the cupboard now, and you'll just never get into them, never, ever look right again, but there's still a part of you that wants to be that. There's always a flame within that never goes out, but the horror of the mirror starts to reflect, you know, it's not working there. [Laughs] You really have to lose about three, four, five stone before you can even fit in that!

So there was that desire to try and explore that, because I think it's a thing that certainly vain people go through -- but I think a lot of people just go through that sense of, there are things I can no longer do and things that are just no longer -- "Even though I want to get up and dance, I'm just going look fucking stupid and old," and so, there was a poignancy of that that I thought was worth talking about. And that notion of, what would happen if you were given someone that you could mold and be the mentor figure, would you be a good mentor? Would you be a bad mentor? Would you try to turn them into you? And what would that mean? Yeah, definitely that. Ultimately, I think that I set myself the kind of task of, can I do a book about nothing?

Ultimately, I think that I set myself the kind of task of, can I do a book about nothing?

The character is putting on makeup, but in actual fact, as she's putting on makeup, she's revealing more. So by the time that the makeup's on, the character's naked to the audience, you know? We know everything about her. I was kind of thinking, the idea of the Glamour and putting on makeup is just, you're putting on makeup around my favorite, the hole in things -- the center of our lives, the gravity that's pulling us all towards it, the black hole at the center of the galaxy. The hole in everything that is dragging us towards that last moment. I thought, can I write a whole book about the nothing, just swirling around the nothingness? I tried a little bit of that in Annihilator back in the day, can I make sense of the nothing at the heart of our lives by at least understanding the perimeter. This book became way more of that, like can I talk about nothing? I put so much makeup and put so much drag on nothing that it appears flamboyant and exciting.

You're talking about it being a book about nothing, but – are all the sort of genre trappings and the pantomime and everything, is that the Glamour for you? Does the Glamour become all of these things that we fill our lives with?

Yeah. The Glamour is everything. It's the lipstick we put on the pig that is our lives! [Laughs] The Glamour is how we address that hole and how we surround it with meaning and movement in order to kind of either avoid it or to make it look more interesting. So yeah, the Glamour is the story that we tell to make the alleged meaningless universe have meaning because, like the character, I went through the whole nihilistic period. You can see it in things like Nameless and Annihilator -- really, I was trying to ask, okay, what if there's no magic? What if there was just this existential horror?

And the more I looked at the existential horror, the more it became obvious that at the heart of existential horror was just more meaning. No matter how much they tell me that we live in a meaningless universe that's a churn of particles that has no direction, it's just emerged this way, everywhere we look as humans we see meaning. We can't help it, it's everywhere. If we see an ant crawling across the table, the ant becomes super important if we study it.

We can turn the smallest things into the biggest and most important things, you know?

We can turn the smallest things into the biggest and most important things, you know? Little animals or little things that you've saved through your life become massively important. And so what I saw in the human faculty is the Glamour. Everywhere we look, we see meaning and magic. We animate the entire universe with our gaze and with our attention. So if it's all meaningless out there, then we are providing the meaning. My own belief is that the meaning is out there and we are just really good receivers for meaning. But if you want to look at it from a purely materialistic way, there's no denying that we supply meaning. We look at inanimate objects and we give them life and we animate things, we anthropomorphize things.

So I felt that magic and the Glamour was ultimately, that's what we do to stay alive, and the book became about -- although there's the feel of the supernatural or the occult -- it's about a way of seeing that transforms the world.

You mentioned Nameless and Annihilator as well. I feel like this is one of the kindest things you've written in a while. You went through this Annihilator period that was existentially dark.

I was going through awful things in my life. Everything you could imagine going wrong was just, fuck it. It was awful. But for me then that just becomes, well, how do you turn that into some kind of poetry or art? It was very much the record of that, and coming through that. I think on the other side of it, I'm slightly more compassionate to people.

You're a compassionate writer, though. You've always been compassionate. Even going back to [Morrison’s early 1980s toy tie-in comic] Zoids, however long ago.

There's always that Scottish thing, but with that comes a kind of, ah, fuck it. It's all just shit. And it's like, there is just a mean spirited Scottishness that came and is always there I think as well. And it's that I recognize as the kind of punk element where I can be really just dismissive of everything.

You say mean spirited Scottishness but Scottish people are sentimental as fuck, right?

Yeah. Absolutely, I remember mentioning that in Animal Man, [with] the Mirror Master being super sentimental. So yeah. I mean, we have that in us, but there's a shield that we always put up of yeah, I'm really soppy inside, but fuck you, how dare you? You're not allowed to say that! That's for me to express and you to just not mention!

I think this is a really Scottish book, and I don't know if it's because pantomime for me is a very Scottish thing. How did pantomime come into this? It feels uniquely connected with the gender themes you're talking about in the book, as well the magical themes you're talking about; it feels like it's this perfect marriage of all the things you're talking about. But, at the same time, pantomime feels also really local. You and I are from roughly the same place, and we have similar cultural experiences. I don't know how people from Illinois are going to read this, if they're going to think, “I don't know what pantomime is.”

It's why I tried to explain it as much as I could, but, at the same time, I thought it was exotic enough and exciting enough and magical enough that people could just get into it in the way that you can get into the Lord of The Rings or Game of Thrones. Even if it's not your culture, it's not your surroundings or your background, I think it's interesting enough. At least I hope it's interesting enough that people will just come to as, okay, there's this thing. But yeah, Americans don't quite understand what it is, but as you see I chose it specifically because it did reflect that world, it's a world with a microcosm where you can look at that kind of gender chaos, the way they play with culture and mash things together, and it's really quite weird. It's quite provocative in a lot of ways.

So I thought it was the perfect place to have it. And I just loved the idea of Widow Twankey as well. There's a song by Momus -- he's another of us from round here, he actually has a song called Widow Twankey, and that was one of the things that fed into this. I remember listening to it and thinking it was about this exact theme: It's about someone giving up drag and having to walk away from the scene, and they're no longer Widow Twankey. It turns out the song's not about that at all; as usual, I kind of interpreted it one way and it fed into this in quite an important way, and it added this kind of soundtrack in this sense of musicality that I was looking for, but, yeah, it had nothing to do with the theme at all.

So there were a lot of things, but just that character of Twankey and the notion of the widow, which is quite important in Masonry as well, the widow's son. Aladdin is the widow's son, Christ is the widow's son, Osiris is the widow's son -- these are all quite esoteric things. For that side of it, the main thing about the book is, it's just really retelling the story of Merlin and Vivien, the witch specifically from Idylls of the King by Tennyson. That story was about the old wizard passing on the power to the beautiful young witch who then locks him in a tree for all eternity, so when you see Luci looking at the oak framed mirror, that's what that is, being trapped in the oak forever, but trapped with your own awful reflection. So there's a lot. There's a lot of stuff in the book that includes Widow Twankey, Merlin, and I was trying to put all these together and somehow make them work.

What was it like writing prose? You said the prose wasn't your thing, but this reads really well.

No, I loved it. I would do it again, but I don't know if I ever will. I just really enjoyed it. It was just being me on the page and just playing with words. The idea was just, I want the prose to be in drag, because at least I can bring all the stuff from comics, that bombast and the Kirby stuff that I love. I love comic dialogue, I love over-the-topness of it, and I thought I can maybe get away with that if I just say the prose itself is in drag. The whole book is an expression of drag, it's like every sentence is pimped up and made ridiculous, and then made glittering and flamboyant. I loved doing it, because once I hooked into the voice, I couldn't stop. It was really fun to do.

Another thing is the idea of it being kind of a local book. I just read Frankie Boyle's book Meantime. And it's like, it's the same book almost. There's so much that's similar between them -- even though they're not, they're telling very different stories -- But... You should read it, it's actually it's really, really good. But There's so much similarities. I feel as if there's this kind of weird new Scottish literary renaissance, just dealing with the bleakest and darkest aspects of the Scottish experience and turning it into something.

You read Bobby Gillespie's book, right?

Yeah, yeah!

That's a similar thing where he's talking about stuff that is really dark, but it's such an enjoyable book.

I really enjoyed it. There was so much of what he was saying was like, “Hey, that's my life. Yeah, I did that!” That's what freaked me out the most.

You had similar hairstyles back in the day, as well. You are Bobby Gillespie.

I could accuse him of stealing my haircut! His whole book is about, there was no bands in Glasgow and nobody dressed up. We fucking did! We were dressed up like the Rolling Stones!

You show up in the book.

I do, but he didn't even understand what we were wearing that night! [Laughs]

I love the localness of this, because that's where I come from, but... why "Gasglow" [as the alternate Glasgow setting for the book], besides it being good word play? Where did Gasglow come for you, specifically?

For me, it came from years and years ago, like 30 years ago -- I think I mentioned this in an interview, even back in the day -- I had this dream where there was a huge wall map on an underground police station and it was a version of Glasgow that was way bigger. And the notion in the dream, which I used in the book, was that the police have access to this larger version of the city and they have a map and they keep the rest of us confined to a smaller compacted version of it. We're not aware of the way the unfolded version of Glasgow that the police are aware of. So it allows them to do their work more easily. And in this dream, there was a plaque at the base of the map and it said, "Mystery City" on it.

So way back then, I decided I'm going to write a book called Mystery City, what a great title. I think subsequently somebody's used the title, but it stayed in my head. There's a little bit of it in Bible John, where there's the idea of the map being dissected on the table and that sort of thing. It was just something that stuck, and I just wanted to bring that back. If I'm going to write a book setting, a kind of version of Glasgow, then I want to reference that idea. I like the idea of having this little, almost supernatural notion of the Flat Police and these dimension cops, and there's this sort of sci-fi element too, that you don't know if it's real or not.

The whole book's a drag performance, where you can't tell what's real, what Luci's lying about, what Luci's just exaggerating and making you believe because you're the audience. She explicitly says that all the way through the book.

All the way through!

What's your relationship with drag? I don't think people automatically think of you as being part of that culture, even though, again, way back when the Invisibles launched, you were talking about it.

That's what I was doing in my 20s, a little bit. I mean, no, I was always doing it – since I was 10 years old, I was kind of obsessed with that. It came from a comic for me. There was a British comic character called Danny Merlin, Son of the Wise, and he appeared in a strip called Spellbinder, I think? Danny Merlin was this character who's a young wizard, kind of like Doctor Strange but cooler. His whole thing was he wore this mini toga and a pair of sandals and he would go about fighting these little mystical things. [Laughs]

And you were like, that looks amazing.

I remember the moment where I looked in the mirror, and I basically had on what was a miniskirt, and I just thought, “fuck, you look hot!”

I remember one day, I was 11 years old and I thought, “I'm going to dress up as Danny Merlin because all I have to do is get my vest and pull it down a bit, and put one of mom's belts on and a pair of flip-flops and I'm Danny Merlin!” I remember the moment where I looked in the mirror, and I basically had on what was a miniskirt, and I just thought, “fuck, you look hot!” For me, that was the secret origin, the fact that it was to do with magic and comics and drag. It was this moment of, okay, this is it, I want to be able to do this, because I can.

Like the character, Luci, this isn't a book about trans people and I don't want it to be about that. It's about showbiz people. It's about people like me who feel like we have multiple personalities and multiple things that we can present. I never wanted to be a woman. I just wanted to wear fabulous clothes, and I liked pictures of model girls and I had a slim body, so I could do it, and I thought I looked okay in those things. For me, it was about the expression of that. It was about my inner sense of myself, is kind of there's nothing there. It was a, like the character says in the book, there's a flame, there's something that's inhuman. I don't identify with men or masculinity. I barely identify with the human species. I'm kind of ashamed to be one of them. [Laughs]

So, a lot of it for me was about, so how do I express that sense of... My personality, it seems to not exist. There's a kind of Justice League in there that works together and does things. There's a leader guy and there's a tough guy and there's a kind of camp guy and there's a hot girl or there's a goth girl and there's the clever girl and they're all there.

I wanted ways to express that. When I was younger, I would just wear the clothes, you know? So some days I'd be a skinhead, and some days I'd be a dominatrix, and some days I'd be a '60s girl in a miniskirt, and some days I'd be like the Rolling Stones or something. That's what it's about. I feel that I was onto something with this notion of things I was talking about in the Invisibles, the idea of, almost multiple personalities as the way forward to break down the sense of individual self, which can actually become quite restricting and claustrophobic. So to me, there was always the sense of this, there's a ton of us in here and I can wear different things and express that.

Certainly for me, there's all those voices, and you'll see them in the comics. The connection between, say an Emma Frost or a Lord Fanny, this goth girl, the drag one. There's either a girl or a boy in drag that does the smart [thing] you know, the girl who gets things done like Jean Grey or Ragged Robin. I find myself repeating these characters or variations of them, and they are just my inner pantheon. I wanted to talk about it. I think there's a lot of us like this, where there is no [singular] personality. There's lots going on in here, and they're all different. I'll say things sometimes when I'm so embarrassed, when I see it back, I'm like, how did I come up with this? But it's just a part of me that did that, the idea that day. So I feel like there's something there worth exploring and the book kind of starts to open that up.

Does it feel freeing doing this? Because I think in terms of how people have viewed you, you had the periods where you're doing Arkham Asylum, Bible John, New Adventures of Hitler, all that stuff, and you were seen as one type of writer, and then you were seen as the Invisibles and the Justice League writer, this ultimate superhero writer... And Luda feels like something where you're just able to be like, "I'm all of these things. I'm purposely rejecting the idea of, I am one binary thing.”

Absolutely. I think that's it. Again, it's why I want to take it away from gender and sexuality. It's kind of not about gender or sexuality. There are those elements, but it's about trying to express a sense of multiplicity rather than that, and as you say, it's not binary. I was awarded this kind of non-binary thing almost. I think genderqueer comes closer to [my experience]. I reject labels of all kinds, and I appreciate that people have been kind enough to bring me in, but I just -- labels, I can't live up to any label. So I'm kind of like, no, no, no, no. There's something else going on. And for me, it's not to do with binaries or non-binaries, it's to do with a multiplicity, it's way bigger, it's way more fractal than any of that.

What do you want people to get from Luda?

Honestly, I hope they just enjoy it. I could see how it could be fabulous to be in the company of this person and it could be quite glamorous. I just want people to enjoy it! I tried to make it funny and flamboyant, I tried to make the sentences fun to read, and I want it to feel like comics in the sense that it's got a lot of energy to it.

What can I say? I hope people like it, I hope they get into it. I hope they get into the underneath of it. It's a book, like most of the things I do, that I hope you can read many, many times and you start to see the new things. Like everything else, you throw it out into the world and if people like it, you're quite happy about it. If people don't like it, you're completely, it's just my orphan child! [Laughs]

I hope people like it because then I can continue to like it, because if everyone hates, I'll just reject it utterly! [Laughs]

Morrison is but one of a number of important figures in the comic book industry from Scotland; earlier this year, we lost another. Read the obituary for Batman and Judge Dredd writer Alan Grant.