| Art by Steve Parkhouse |
Joe McCulloch: [...] The great virtue of this book is its accessibility; I found it a concise guide to a variety of esoteric topics, organized with a good sense of intuition.5 This is creditable to not only the authors, but its predominant visual force, John Coulthart, an artist I mostly know through his extensive involvement with Manchester's Savoy Books as a designer, illustrator and cartoonist, though he has been a consistent presence in Moon and Serpent projects though his album art for A. Moore's live performance works with the musicians Tim Perkins, David J and others (The Highbury Working, Angel Passage, etc.). Here, Coulthart is credited with the Bumper Book's overall design, its cover art, large illustrations for nine different sections and many spot illustrations throughout. Sections are differentiated often by page color — white, blue, several shades of brown — while individual illustrations repeat themselves on successive pages to prompt the readers through the authors' esoteric thickets: the image of the Tree of Life repeats page after page as the Moores run down its branches, each of its 10 emanations glowing one by one by alchemical color as they are discussed; Tarot cards are displayed both as in the Tarot de Marseille and in iconographic forms devised by Coulthart himself, running along the tops of pages for quick reference. Decorative borders on most pages pulse dim to strong on a gradient; colors glow cold under glassy digital frost, which is not my favorite look, but further imposes unity on the book as if from an aloof mechanical Demiurge. [...]
[...] the authors draw a distinction between "high" magic, "the urge towards greater understanding, transcendent experience and the ecstatic enhancement of consciousness," and "low magic ... the attempt to bring about desired changes in material reality that are to the magician's personal advantage." In advocating for high magic, the Moores urge the practice of magic for magic's sake, whereby personal, creative, intellectual boons present themselves as if guided by magic itself, "the practitioner left marveling at an abundance of results that he or she had neither asked for nor expected." Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, to add an inappropriate note of my own. The "Great Enchanters" of the comics in this Bumper Book are often buffeted by politics, but they are not usually individuated as activists; rather, magic itself is treated as an expression of anarchy – the promotion of unmediated self-governance vs. the compulsory obedience of doctrinal religion. That magical orders have tended to regiment into elitist fraternities and doom cults does not dim magic as "a subjective practice of the individual, a means by which a single self may come to its own understanding of and make it its own peace with the wonderful and terrible phenomenon that is existence." Importantly, the work of "material" security is a condition precedent to magic practice, because “if we do not have our material circumstances under our control it will be difficult, if not impossible, to progress spiritually.” [...]
[...] A. Moore has said that this book is “intended purely as a statement about magic, rather than as a statement about comics.” But if art is magic, and comics are art, then this is also a book about comics, one that positions the drawn image, the picture story, as fundamental to social beings. This romance feels like a way of raising the art far above the mess of its mercantile circumstances, the shell which too often defines it, the mess from which he fled, a comics that is not just cruel tricks to cop money from suckers, comics preserved in the sky with wizards to voyage far on the silver foam of dreams.
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