Grant Morrison

The other declared practitioner, and the other pole. Morrison came up through chaos magic — sigils, Austin Osman Spare's method, results over reverence — and has described writing The Invisibles as a magical operation performed on their own life, a hypersigil, with consequences that ran back into it.

The pair is the point, and naming them together is the right question. Moore's magic is literary and antiquarian — a god he knows is a puppet, a bibliography in the appendix, provenance treated as part of the art. Morrison's is operational and modern — chaos magic explicitly discards the lineages, the robes and the grades and keeps only what produces an effect, which makes it the exact inversion of the Golden Dawn's org chart. Two of the most-read comics writers alive, both openly practising, arriving at opposite answers to the same question this bench keeps asking: does it matter where it came from? Moore: yes, enormously, and say so on the page. Morrison: no, and here is what it did.

⚠ The claim that the comic acted on the world is reported and attributed and not adjudicated — the same treatment the Mahatma letters get.