Drugs are good: In his meandering "Permanent Damage," Steven Grant comes a little late to Grant Morrison's party by proclaiming, "Comics should be the new drugs." Steven realizes he's a little slow on the draw, but it's the sentiment, and not necessarily the timing, that counts.

Steven wants a return to upredictability, and an unleashing of "alternate realities." He wants real imagination:

"I'm not talking about 'dark' or 'bright' or 'realism' or 'fantasy.' I mean imagination. Real imagination. We can turn comics in a real literature of imagination if we want to. There's absolutely no reason why a good comic book can't trigger the same sense of wonder and sense that there's more to this life, this world, than we experience everyday that a good acid trip or a good jolt of ecstasy does. The experience wouldn't be as internalized, sure, but it would still be vivid when it was over, and you could go back to it any time you want to.

"But part of the appeal of drugs is the sheer danger of them. So to do this, we have to make comics dangerous again, open up the possibility that it's not only possible you'll walk away from a comic changed in some way but that that's what's supposed to happen. Because there's danger implicit in every true adventure. But danger attracts the attention of the status quo, because they don't like danger. There's no safe ground on this. We've got to walk on unsafe ground and, to be convincing, be thrilled to do it."