Grant Morrison deciding to write their fav as a sexual predator in a book that would go on to become many people’s first introduction to that character in the comics
WithDark Crisis approaching and my bitterness rising as it looks more and more like an off-ramp to the idea of a next-gen DCU than anything else - with titles like Son of Kal-ElandI Am Batman completely fizzling out in the meantime while Wonder Girl goes under entirely - I’ve gone back to thinking about the original 5G plan. Those who follow me on Twitter know I’ve gone over the last couple years from 'hmm, I’m interested in Jon as Superman, but gosh that timeline is dumb’ to a hardcore '5G WAS THE TRUTH AND THE WAY, THE MOMENT THE STOPPED CLOCK WAS RIGHT, DC WHAT IN GOD’S NAME HAVE YOU DONE’ partisan, even if the timeline’s still kinda dumb.
It was always going to alienate the existing fanbase: it’s an approach that besides the face-value shakeup itself puts slow-burn soap development on the backburner in favor of moving fast and breaking things, and potentially results in your faves not graduating to the 'right’ positions or ending up in the 'right’ relationships to boot, plus a new generation of heroes composed in large part of original characters rather than those who 'earned it’ via decades of mostly clinging to life in team books or guest appearances. My being way more interested in the potential of the vast revision of the archetypes and a proper injection of mythic sweep and enduring legacy into a shared universe ostensibly built on those is at the end of a day a difference of taste, but as for my arguments beyond that:
I don’t think it can be reasonably argued that The Son of Superman and The Next Batman treated with seriousness wouldn’t have been far more attention-getting to broader audiences (and a richer template for that sweet sweet IP farming DC publication now explicitly exists in service of) than rebooting the classic bunch for the 5th or 6th time.
The classic folks still would’ve been in Black Label and the like forever; yes, for the most part their classic-mold ongoing adventures would be over, but being extremely real most Batman stories would work pretty much the same with someone else under the cowl, and if there’s something ala Tom King’s Batman that’s character-driven and demands space to breathe, it’s been shown there’s space for that outside of continuity with the likes of…sigh. White Knight.
DC having to ride or die by the new names as their headliners would have meant those characters wouldn’t have had the opportunity to immediately languish in genuinely crappy books the way they have - they would have had to immediately sell at least their new Justice League on the strength of their immediate quality with little pertinent backlog to lean on and basically no fallback option.
The loglines of characters built for those gigs tend to be a lot more straightforward than the baggage of folks who’ve been around for decades having been created to fulfill different functions.
Let’s again be real, the significant majority of the existing readership would’ve sighed and still bought everything with the big names on the covers if not been actively hyped.
Anyway, with all that in mind and the likely-forsaken potential of the concept being a frequent topic of discussion with some friends of mine, I felt the urge to once again revive the Tumblr and put together a rough outline of what we know about the '5G’ setup. From assorted scoops (mostly from Bleeding Cool, which I won’t be linking to but demonstrated they knew at least the broad strokes of what was happening here), interviews, and indicators in comics that actually have been published, I wanted to see the shape of the baby thrown out with DiDio’s bathwater. Starting someplace unexpected:
When I was first getting into comics, my dad informed me of a rumor he’d heard about that at the end of the new event comic Final Crisis, the Justice League was going to die and would become the NEW New Gods, with their sidekicks and children stepping up in their place, making it a truly 'final’ crisis for the DCU as we knew it. While that didn’t play out, apparently there was something to it: according to BC, this was in fact the big idea at one point, reportedly under the banner of 'The Fifth World’ paying off some notions from Grant Morrison’s JLA that were being revived in Final Crisis. This seems shocking given Dan DiDio’s notorious antipathy towards the likes of Dick Grayson and Wally West, but his primary complaints about them - that Dick was forever stuck between his iconic past as Robin and grand future as Batman, he and Wally both breaking the DCU by their very existences in aging while their predecessors remain eternal - would have been solved by this shift. His old declaration that Nightwing could only survive Infinite Crisis if something was done to justify him makes a lot more sense if the gears had immediately started turning to make him Batman.
Along with Dick, and likely Cassie Sandsmark as Wonder Woman since Donna Troy had just filled that spot, with the benefit of hindsight it’s clear the stage was being set for a new generation lineup: Bart Allen had become The Flash and even after his death was set up for an immediate resurrection, Kurt Busiek was establishing a new Aquaman, Roy Harper had taken a seat in the JLA as Red Arrow, and Freddie Freeman was the new Captain Marvel, with Hal presumably sticking around as rep for the old guard given Johns had just returned him to glory. And right around the corner was Blackest Night to give the kids a trial by fire in the face of their zombie predecessors, with the get out of jail free card of the white rings to bring all the originals back at the end if this whole experiment immediately flopped.
Conner Kent as Superman was presumably going to be a crown jewel, with Chris Kent perhaps being set up as his Superboy with a background conceptually near-identical to Damian Wayne as the new Robin (scion of a major villain taken in by a Superdad, they’re separated, by the time the kid makes it back dad is gone and a big brother has to step up). You’ve even got a big easy passing-of-the-torch moment at the end of Final Crisis with Clark giving up everything he has to activate the Miracle Machine - an odd non-sequitur with no consequences in the story as-is - and a final declaration 'look up in the sky’ at an army of approaching Supermen Conner could well have been leading as his grand debut.
And there’s a VERY interesting context if you consider what ultimately happened in place of The Fifth World in the form of the New 52 - a younger, cockier Superman who ends up dating a Wonder Woman who’s now Zeus’s kid. It seems some of the big ideas were still carried over, especially considering under Grant Morrison that new Superman in a t-shirt and jeans fights Luthor who considers him a lab specimen (alongside Brainiac, as Conner would in Johns and Manapul’s brief Adventure Comics run in place of all this, and who Morrison reconceptualizes as a preservationist dedicated to holding a newly-changed world in amber), and then new equivalents and 'successors’ to the likes of Mxyzptlk, the classic Phantom Zoners, Terra-Man, and the Kryptonite Man, culminating in a battle with a combination of Bizarro - the ultimate Superman clone - and Doomsday - the franchise-killer whose existence roundabout birthed Conner - for the right to the Superman brand. Was Morrison going to do Conner as Superman alongside Batman and Robin, and they repurposed those 'Superman 2’ ideas along with that one All-Starspinoff to create their Action Comics run? Did they just hear that was the plan and kick around some ideas of how they’d handle it that were reused later? Or do those pieces mostly just fit because 'new era’ ideas can make near-equal sense whether applied a reboot or a new guy in the cape?
(Perhaps a strike against coincidence: All-Star Superman ends with the conception of a test-tube child of Superman via what was once Cadmus, essentially Conner’s origin. Morrison’s gone on the record that Batman R.I.P. ends the way it does to provide an iconic 'death’ for Bruce setting up Dick as the new guy for those who weren’t reading Final Crisis; it seems at least a little bit possible that All-Star at the same time had a similar idea at the back of its mind if it wasn’t outright geared to serve that purpose.)
An interesting bunch of notions, but let’s go from the Fifth World to the Fifth Generation:
Between all the stuff I mentioned earlier there’s actually a pretty clear picture of how 5G would’ve looked, at least concerning the big names.
Kal-El lands on Earth in 1938 as the kickoff to this world’s history, though Wonder Woman emerges in 1939 as the first public superhero (shown by Snyder and Hitch in Wonder Woman #750); she leads the Justice Society of America until leaving man’s world after the atomic bomb’s dropped. Clark operates quietly in Smallville as Superboy, but he stops when the JSA disbands in 1955 in protest of HUAC wanting them to disclose their identities (though according to the solicit for the cancelled Generation One: Age of Mysteries there was a secret 'real’ reason they disassembled; apparently a Golden Age hero would also become a great villain, and a secret deal of some sort would be struck to “keep the Wayne family dynasty alive” after Thomas and Martha’s murders).
Clark is operating in secret as Superman by 1963 and meets Kennedy who encourages him to gather other heroes in service of a finer world (as seen in the opening of Superman and The Authority; as published after 5G was scrapped this was recontextualized as a time-travel adventure), with him and Batman both publicly debuting in 1965 and the Justice League of America forming soon after with a returned Wonder Woman. The events of 1965-1985 were meant to be depicted one year per issue in a 20-part series by Mark Russell which would later be heavily reimagined as Superman: Space Age.
Crisis on Infinite Earths occurs in 1985, and everything from then to Death Metal is largely the same, just over an elongated expanse of time and with a few irreconcilable continuity-specific bits like Superman/Wonder Woman excised. Apparently the assorted Crisis events cause years to be 'skipped’, allowing key characters to retain some relative youth.
(The Other History of the DC Universe while not a 1:1 appears to have been constructed to roughly fit with this given John Ridley was a 5G architect, with the JLA emerging in the 70s or possibly 60s if you fudge the narration a bit and still going strong in 2010.)
By the present day, the bulk of the JLA have passed, retired, or otherwise stepped back; the Titans now fill the traditional 'old guard’ slot.
The initial prompt offered by DiDio to creators was notoriously for an aged Clark to pursue a totalitarian path and assemble a new version of The Authority as his vanguard. Apparently that wasn’t a hard-and-fast direction, as it was radically reconfigured by Grant Morrison into Superman and The Authority, which in the original 5G version would have ended with the revelation that Clark had somehow secretly been split into 'Red’ and 'Blue’ versions increasingly representing his dueling conservative and revolutionary instincts, with leftie Blue forming the team we currently see, and rightwing Red reforming the classic lineup swapping out Midnighter and Apollo with a likely unwitting Damian Wayne and Jon Kent. When the dust settled and presumably a reconstituted Clark pursued his own adventures, a 23 year old Jonathan would become the new main Superman, likely written by Matt Fraction according to a Word Balloon podcast and reportedly dating Jenny Sparks. Between being duped into following Red and under unknown circumstances bottling Metropolis he would likely be starting on the backfoot and needing to prove himself to the world as a worthy inheritor, with Smallville acting as his 'Fortress’ with the citizens working to maintain his privacy when visiting.
As originally pitched by Tynion when his run was meant to lead into 5G, at the climax of Joker War the Clown Prince of Crime is shot and left in a permanent comatose state by Selina Kyle, ending her relationship with Bruce. Left with no resources, no Alfred, no Gordon, no arch-nemesis, and a Gotham being radically rebuilt in a new image, Bruce concludes the time of Batman is over and that he should find other ways to help the world with his remaining years, leaving Gotham (presumably this period was pitched for by Tom Taylor and later became The Detective with Andy Kubert) and asking his allies not to pick up his mantle. Damian would take his place at the throne of Leviathan in his own move to remake the world and become the 'Magneto’ to Jon’s 'Professor X’ per internal DC opinion on the subject. Jace - in early rumors Luke, but John Ridley has said it was Jace for as long as he was onboard - becomes the next Batman. Tynion also had an idea for a 5G Joker title about a teenager radicalized by Joker’s legacy that instead became Punchline.
Regarding several of the other books: Green Lantern was to be written by Jeff Lemire, spearheading a 'horror line’ for 5G and presumably starring Jo Mullein. Tim Sheridan would write a Nightwing/Oracle title and the new Flash book; the latter was reportedly the child of Captain Boomerang, so his ideas there were likely recycled into Bolt for his Titans Academy, the daughter of Australian criminals. Phillip Kennedy Johnson was doing something for a 'space line’.
Matt Fraction, Warren Ellis, and Chip Zdarsky were collectively working on a project involving the new Superman and Batman that ultimately fell through, whether as soon as Warren Ellis’s involvement in any of DC’s affairs was taken off the table, or if it would have proceeded without him but collapsed with the line. Presumably Zdarsky’s end of it morphed in some fashion into Justice League: Last Ride, showing the sundowning days of the now-disbanded League.
(Pure personal speculation: the roughly contemporaneous The Batman’s Grave when Ellis was part of the 5G braintrust may have been intended to provide a non-continuity perennial 'ending’ to Bruce which would still leave him alive in accordance with his upcoming setup, same as All-Star would’ve provided a clean continuity-free transition point from Clark to Conner.)
So your mileage will vary tremendously here, because even aside from the seismic nature of the shift everybody would find themselves pissed off by something or another in here, myself included ('everything counts’ except Golden Age Superman? At least Clark’d be doing that kind of stuff in the present, but. Plus that’s kind of a shame of a fate for Damian pending his inevitable face turn, though I haven’t liked much else with him since he was brought back and this could still at least be interesting. And, again, an exact timeline’s pretty dopey and fruitlessly doomed to near-immediate expiration) - that’s the nature of a big swing. But there’s also stuff for everybody here: Superman gets a huge thematic tip of the hat to his nature as the first superhero while Wonder Woman is the public first to line up with the movies, the JSA have their role to make those fans happy, the Titans fulfill their promise as the inheritors, and again between the likes of that proto-Space Age book and Black Label miniseries there were still regularly going to be titles about the classic heroes at their peaks alongside their new adventures as elder statesmen. You have that deep history for the longtime fans, and a completely clean slate jumping-on point for anyone curious about headlines of NEW SUPERMAN NEW BATMAN THIS IS PROBABLY WHAT THE MOVIES ARE GONNA BE IN 10 YEARS, with easy-in loglines like “Just as the crown is passed the legacy of Superman is perhaps irreparably tarnished, can Lois and Clark’s son Jon Kent overcome his initial stumbles and prove himself worthy of the greatest mantle of all?”, “Even Bruce Wayne has given up on Batman…but one man hasn’t, and his ultimate rival is the seemingly destined Blood Heir”, “The new Green Lantern found her footing patrolling a single world, but now she’s thrown headlong into the most terrifying depths of the cosmos”, “Can the ultimate Legacy Hero Dynasty be lived up to by the 'legacy’ of one of its oldest enemies?” etc.
All-in-all: of course stuff was still gonna suck, his ultimate (good) brainstorm or not I’m sure DiDio was micromanaging it to hell and I imagine a lot of creators weren’t wild about the pitch “in a blitz of creative fervor unseen since the Silver Age create all our new headliners, who as directly derivative characters you won’t even collect royalties for”. But just in terms of what wound up on the stands each month I can’t imagine it wouldn’t have been so, so much better than Infinite Frontier’s weightless lack of commitment in either direction where we have a new Superman, Batman, Wonder (Girl), Aquaman, and Green Lantern, but they’re mostly in kind of subsidiary incidental roles while the classics still handle the big jobs until DC can decide for certain where it’s going - the closest being Jon, who’s basically holding down the fort while his dad’s out of town doing Regular Superman Stuff and fighting A Lex-Type Guy. I’m really, really hoping against hope that Dark Crisis is actually about letting the kids take center stage in a big way with a big push behind them and the old Justice League still sticking around but yielding at least a little bit of narrative authority, because the current neither fish nor fowl state of things can’t continue, and snuffing this out altogether would be such a shame given I truly believe 5G was for all its flaws evident and inevitable DC’s most interesting idea in years.
A new newsletter, this one a few rounds of brief thoughts. Apologies to my subscribers who apparently got an email with a massive broken link even though the image loads fine on buttondown itself, apparently I will in fact need to email myself a draft of every single article to make sure nothing went wrong.
One of my two big pieces this month (want to get the first real newsletter out before the 1st, though no promises), an examination of how the logical storytelling endpoint for Batman as we understand him has long since been reached, and how those since have in spite of their considerable efforts failed to manifest the next step.
An additional note since there wasn’t any place for it in the piece: Why on God’s Earth would you take Jace Fox’s faceplate off and not put him in the extremely rad second-stage-of-his-career suit Derington already designed?
Admittedly I’d miss the faceplate if I was still getting I Am Batman, but I get you don’t want a non-white Batman to permanently be the version who shows zero skin. It looked cool when Jason Todd had it in Battle For The Cowl though, and it looked cool with Jace. But now he’s just wearing the regular Batman costume! Why have Derington give you the suit if you’re not gonna use it?!
Day 27 #29DaysofBlackCosplay #Xorn I really love wearing this costume because it is easy to wear. I love this character in the New X-men book but was both disappointed and surprised that it turn out to be #Magneto. It was a good reveal for a comic book but I believe at some point Xorn was a really person and then somewhere along the line he was killed and replaced by Magneto. I don’t care what anyone else says. ;-) #grantmorrison #frankquitely #philliptheshycosplayguy #cosplay #xmen #marvelcomics #Marvel #comics
Day 20 #29DaysofBlackCosplay My gender swap of Jean Grey’s Xorn from the Battle of the Atom story line. #philliptheshycosplayguy #Marvel #marvelcomics #Xorn #xmen #rogue #gambit
New X-Men Vol. 1 #127 - Of Living and Dying (August, 2002)
Written by: Grant Morrison Penciller by: John Paul Leon Inker by: Bill Sienkiewicz Colorist by: Hi-Fi Design Lettered by: Comicraft Edited by: Mike Marts and Mike Raicht (editors) Published by: Marvel Comics
Rian Hughes has been one of my longest-running creative partners, with collaborations going back decades now.
Back in 2015, we talked about doing a Tarot deck reflective of my ‘Pop Mag!c’ system which could update and re-contextualise some of the familiar imagery of the cards.
This was the sample as proof of concept and I chose my personal favourite card.
Here is The Magician with accompanying commentary to suggest not only the visual style of the image but also the kind of symbolic content I wanted us to pack into the design.
The Magician #1 Final version
MAJOR ARCANA: THE MAGICIAN
KEY WORDS – MASTERY, CREATIVITY, COMMUNICATION, SELF-CONFIDENCE, SKILL, MISDIRECTION, GLAMOUR
The Magician is Trump 1 of the Major Arcana.
The Magician is the rock star, the genius, the Mastermind, the exclusive, extraordinary, especially-talented “A-number 1”.
Our Magician is the Ultimate Pop Star, the Master of all s/he surveys – all four elements in the Cardinal directions. S/he is the centre of the known physical Universe, the unique, scientific and individual, self-elected, self-directed Prime Mover of all that is; the arbiter of history, and the future that is come. The Magician, of course, represents only one potent, though very specific state of consciousness among the many available to the human organism. The Magician is how we feel when we master our art to produce a great work of any kind. The Magician is how we feel when the world seems to be doing exactly what we want and all the TV shows and record charts are aimed somehow directly at us.
To add to the pop star feel, perhaps our magician can be a little bit Ziggy Stardust or Kiss - with lightning bolt zigzags on their face. The lightning bolt is a glyph of the messenger gods, or gods of magic and language, like Hermes, Mercury, Thoth and Odin, among others. The lightning bolt – an exchange of energy, which links sky to earth – is symbolic of the contact between God (equivalent to the highest “non-dual” state of consciousness available to the human mind) and Man (representing ordinary consciousness).
The Magician card in the Tarot deck traditionally shows a confident, poised young man at an altar representing the entire material universe.
The Magician stands for human ingenuity and mastery at the height of its powers. The Renaissance, the western Enlightenment. This is the erect cock and the “1”! In binary notation that interacts with “0” to generate the known universe of phenomena and digital information.
Sometimes represented by the curving brim of a hat s/he wears or sports, sometimes shown above hir head like a halo, is the “8 on its side” INFINITY SIGN which we will depict as Mobius strip - in fact, I suggest a Mobius Orouboros snake eating its own tail to take care of the crown-of-serpents symbolism often seen on versions of this card.
The Magician raises a wand to the heavens in his right hand, while his left hand points to the earth. This gesture encodes the Hermetic axiom “as above, so below” – macrocosm and microcosm – indicating the special and unique position human consciousness occupies between the infinitesimally large and the infinitesimally small.
A PLUS sign on his right palm, a MINUS bar on the left.
The Magician traditionally stands at a 4-square altar – our version suggests a mixing desk which is also the PERIODIC TABLE - upon which there are four magical weapons. These blazing archetypal weapons also represent the 4 suits of the Tarot pack and of conventional playing cards.
S/he is Master/Mistress of the material world and its ever-changing, ever-the-same fashions. The Magician also sees everything in the universe as grist to his creative mill and in this sense is somewhat amoral and lacking in conscience.
The Magician is an alchemist engaged in the Great Work of transforming Lead (ordinary consciousness and the material world) into Gold (exalted consciousness or “Spirit”)
In our image let’s see him juggling these four elemental objects in a figure of 8.
WAND – the Wand is the magician’s magical phallus – the image of his Will, hence its resemblance to an erect penis. Also, ‘I’ and the 1 in binary notation that interacts with 0 to generate the known universe of phenomena and digital information. It can also be considered as the pointing finger which distinguishes things from other things and directs attention to the particular among the general.
Our Wand is a MICROPHONE.
It represents the Element of Fire. Its colour is RED.
SWORD – the Sword which divides, is a symbol of the intellect and of rational analysis. It is the tool by which human consciousness comprehends and classifies the universe of discrete phenomena.
It represents the Element of Air. Its traditional colour is YELLOW.
CUP – the Cup, which receives and nourishes, stands for the emotions. Our Cup is a TEST TUBE.
It is the Holy Grail of Romance and the Ever-giving Cauldron of Celtic Myth, the Undry. Both receptive and nourishing, the Cup has been considered the female counterpart to the Phallic Wand.
If the Wand is the erect 1, the Cup is the vulval 0 – the plug and the socket. The impulse and the generative matrix.
The colour traditionally associated with the Prime Cup and the Element of Water is BLUE. OR GREEN!!!
The Cup is also the bottomless “0”, the universal, unimaginable hole that’s infra-red, hot and seductive enough to attract, engulf and render limp every theory and structure created by masculine intent. The all-swallowing Black Hole of sci-fi speculative cosmology.
PENTACLE – the pentacle – or disc – represents the material world. The disc is associated with coinage, money, wealth, DNA, heritage and all the immediate physical concerns of the human organism.
In this image, the Pantacle is a PLATINUM DISC – a record with a rainbow surface.
The Pentacle stands in for the Element of Earth. Its traditional colour is BLACK. However, this black soil-loam is only how the material world appears from a higher-dimensional perspective.
In fact the material world is prismatic – therefore, the Pantacle should be divided into 4 pie sections, each a different colour, each representing one of the 4 elements. RED. BLACK. BLUE and YELLOW.
Here we need a reflective or symmetrical background.
The Magician transcends duality and the elements – therefore s/he may often be described as hermaphroditic or otherwise asexual or androgynous in appearance. S/he is metamorphic, neither one thing nor the other, becoming what is required at every turn. That’s because the Magician like language can assume any shape.
S/he can endorse any well-expressed ideology. S/he can impart undying wisdom or lead the unwary into Hell.
The God forms associated with the Magician include Hermes, Thoth, Ganesh, Nabu, Ogma and Legba. The winged heels of Mercury are depicted here as jet engine aircraft wings on a wholly futuristic androgynous figure.
The Magician is all scientists, all writers, artist, all artificers, con-men and healers, all creative people who feel justified to impose their wondrous word-driven vision of reality upon all other living things.
The Magician is also known as “Le Jongleur” or Juggler. There must always be a super-modern, populist, glitzy and deceptive element of charlatanism or showmanship to the Magician. S/he is Houdini and Derren Brown, Paul Daniels and Sooty, and all your favourite entertainers too.
At his side is the mocking APE OF THOTH, the “cynocephalus”. The Ape represents interpretation, which takes the word/the Logos of the magician and twists it to become gibberish or to shift and even reverse the intended meaning.
The Ape is sometimes regarded via information theory as the “noise” to the magician’s “signal”. He’s the bad review, the mistimed gag, the bum note, the aging idiot glimpsed in the mirror, monkey-dancing in motley.
To this card is attributed the second Hebrew letter BETH – Beth means a house – the house represents the Magician’s mastery of the material universe – the house is often represented in traditional cards by a structure arching over the magician’s head – often a bower made of rose bushes. Red 8-petalled roses – with thorns – form a bower above the Magician’s head, framing him.
In our card, I’d like the house to be the Tree of Life itself, seen as a 3-Dimensional structure – the flat circuit diagram of the Tree of Life can, be seen as a 3-D wire-frame structure which resembles a building with a pyramid roof but only when we pull the material sphere up into the sphere of the imagination. So here I’d like to see this rotated 3-D Tree structure framing our magician.
The Magician, as mentioned above, has an androgynous aspect – the idea of the Hermaphrodite combines the god forms of Hermes and Aphrodite. Hence Bowie, New Romantic, drag, and showbiz culture. This image of the magician as spiritually bisexual, of mixed or fluid gender, shows up in various forms in many cultures and philosophies.
Our card therefore should depict the Magician as a competent, confident, androgynous rock star, the ultimate entertainer putting on a dazzling show for the universe.
This card shows a performer, a performance, a gig.
The Magician #1 First version
Notes from Rian Hughes on design :
Grant - this will be much more polished when finished, but here’s the basics pinned down.
I tend to use colours in a schematic manner when laying out the shapes, just to differentiate things - hence these brash colours will change and be made more subtle as we go.
The cup I thought might work coming out of the periodic table and looking like the inflationary model of the Big Bang - creation, hot and dense inside, and shaped like a goblet:
I’ve put the Beth character on the record sleeve - it’s a bad pun on house music.
The monkey will have unplugged headphones.
There will be more detail on the Technics decks.
The sword cleaving the periodic table is a light sabre - symbol of the future sword of science.
The rose background is (are) stage curtains.
I wonder if the Ziggy lightening could also reference Harry Potter somehow?
The juggling in a figure 8 was hard to visualise - there were not enough items to convey the shape of the 8, plus the hands are otherwise occupied and so the objects looked like they wee free floating. So may need a rethink.
Tree of Life is still to be added.
Mirrorball top right - so we have the 1 of the Wand and the 0 of the mirrorball?
I’ll also design a border of some kind that will run on all the cards, and each will have a type treatment at the bottom, TBD.
I await feedback!
GM response :
Hi Rian –
The Magician card is looking fantastic – just what I hoped for. Only a couple of notes.
I like the face and head of the character in the alternate version, as the look is more feminine and less overtly Ziggy Stardust/Bowie. Maybe we could use a touch more femininity. Love the lighting bolt referencing Ziggy AND Harry Potter.
The disco ball could take on a more appropriately esoteric dimension if it was moved to the centre above the magician’s head, taking the place of Kether, the highest sephira on the Tree of Life diagram.
While traditional to the Rider-Waite imagery, the robe and cape the Magician is wearing seem slightly old-fashioned. I still like how it all looks however so any other suggestions are just thrown out as food for thought: the Magician wearing a kind of Ziggy/Paradax catsuit with the Qabalistic lightning flash on the front and a bra perhaps.
OR more convincingly a Major Tom style Mercury SPACESUIT without the helmet (a Mercury style suit would of course tie nicely into the generally “mercurial” tone of this card…hmmm..)
Having said that, I’m reluctant to have you do too much more work and the image looks so good as it is, we may not have to include any further elements of modernity at this stage.
