A Primer on Mātua Mark Fisher
Why Mātua Mark Fisher Matters
Kā tangi te tītī
Kā tangi te kākā
Kā tangi hoki ahau
“Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, & sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old & cold & weary…”
— The Dead by Rupert Brooke
The painting shivers in oils. The Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin. Flesh floats like fog over the canvas. The painter’s blood moves through the trees: slow, lichen-thick, dragging the eye to that stone sepulchre island where time lies in rigor mortis. The brush is a scalpel. Each stroke slices nerve from memory. The white-cloaked figure in the boat; faceless, boneless, bon-vivant of death. The water reflects no soul, only the hollow cavity where one once drifted. Columns rise like vertebrae, ancient & eroded, holding aloft the cranium of the unburied past. The sky yawns above like the soft palate of something long dead, still hungry. You can feel the lungs of the canvas inhale eternity, slow & wet.
In the comic Mona Lisa (Dark Horse Presents, 1993), the bones of narrative protrude sharp beneath the skin of noir & gristle, like ribs under famine. The tale does not unfold so much as rupture. Its birth cry is a feral snarl wrapped in neon gauze. The story opens in the ruined ribcage of Los Angeles, that cadaverous city whose lungs have long since collapsed under smog & memory. A broken city, yes, but not dead. Cities like this do not die. They persist. They suppurate. They grin with broken teeth beneath their asphalt skin. Blood-slick streets shimmer like nerve endings, twitching with the electric agony of progress.
In issue #1 of Mona Lisa (Dark Horse Presents, 1993), the protagonist, Lisa, slips from obscurity like a bullet from a chamber or a clot from a heart. She is not born. She is expelled. Ex nihilum fit nihil, translation: "Nothing comes from nothing." Her entrance is not theatrical but surgical. She cuts through the page like a scalpel through scar tissue. A streetwise drifter carved from alley-light & nicotine, with a Mona Lisa smile tattooed where her hope once lived, now ossified beneath ink & sarcasm. Her body a palimpsest of trauma & ambition, with old wounds overwritten by newer, more fashionable ones. Her limbs move with the grace of someone who has been shot at more than kissed. Her voice is the rasp of gravel soaked in bourbon. Her breath smells like wet concrete & failure. She does not knock. She is not the knocking kind. Instead, she collides with a para-governmental syndicate known only as The Box. An organisation so clandestine it files tax returns under ghost names. They do not enter through doors. They enter through spinal cords. They slip between vertebrae & nest where the nerves scream. Their handshake is anaesthesia. Their contract is surgical. They offer enhancements, yes, but only the kind that hurt. Cybernetic upgrades fused not by science but by consent extracted like teeth. Surveillance contracts drafted in sweat. Memory extraction via cortical mining. In issue #2, Lisa is contracted by an operative known as Mr. Glove. A man with no eyes. Only camera lenses rooted in soft tissue, like daisies in a grave. His voice clicks like a hard drive dying. He hires her to retrieve a briefcase from the baroque ruins of Angel Terminal, a decomposing freight hub in East Sector Nine, where pigeons nest in server racks & the wind smells of oxidised blood. Inside the case: a fragment of memory belonging to a dead child. Sold. Uploaded. Archived in a technocratic reliquary known as The Palladium Array. Imagine a library made of screams.
Imagine a cathedral where the stained glass is made from other people’s regrets. Imagine it all smells faintly of burnt milk. Lisa navigates the corridors of information & betrayal with the poise of someone allergic to hope. In issue #3, she encounters a mutant gang of data-flesh traffickers called The Abjects. Their existence is an insult to biology. Their leader, Spine, speaks in Morse code tapped against his own teeth, enamel flaking like plaster. Their bodies are maps of rejection. Lesions bloom where implants failed to root. Their skin peels like wallpaper in a condemned asylum. They fight with blades fused to bone. Their laughter is involuntary. Lisa barely escapes with her organs intact, her dignity less so, dragging the briefcase behind her like a stillborn twin or a drunk uncle no one invited. In the final chapter, issue #4, Lisa opens the case. It contains a looping hologram of a child’s final breath. Her own. She is not the courier. She is the cargo. She was never sent to retrieve the past. She was sent to recover herself. The Box had harvested her identity with all the delicacy of a meat cleaver & left her to rot like expired software. With the last of her strength, she inserts a needle into her jugular & uploads the child's death back into The Box’s mainframe. Her veins pulse once, twice, then stutter like faulty code. The upload ignites the system like a cerebral infarction. The infrastructure fries. Circuits sizzle. Syntax fails. The comic closes with Lisa smiling. Not the Mona Lisa smile this time, but something jagged, unpractised, teeth bared like a dog who has finally bitten back. Her eyes boil out of her skull, data-light pouring from her mouth like milk from a cracked chalice. No one claps. There is no applause in oblivion. Fiat lux, translation: “Let there be light.” But there is no light, only static. Only the sound of a heart remembering how to stop. Thus ends the tale. A crucifix made not of wood, but of wires. A gospel rewritten in blood & firmware.
A resurrection cancelled due to insufficient funding. Mātua Mark Fisher would look upon Lisa with the grief of someone watching their own synaptic failure rendered in brushstrokes, each stroke a burst vessel, each hue a shriek under the skin. Her suffering is not metaphor but manifestation. A corpus made to host silence. A mind quartered by contradiction. Sub rosa, translation: ‘Under the rose.’ He sees in her not tragedy but ritual. Not death but inventory. The slow forensic inventory of dreams once possible, now processed, tagged, stored in climate-controlled vaults beneath the carcass of the state. Mātua Fisher teaches us that we are haunted not by the dead, but by futures denied. Ghosts do not walk backwards. They stalk the possible. Tempus edax rerum, translation: 'Time devours all things.' Lisa is a fossil preserved in digital amber, her veins replaced by fibreoptic regret, her heartbeat encoded in corrupted metadata. The Box is not a villain. Villains have motives. The Box is an ulcer. The Box is bureaucracy with a pulse. The Box is what remains when a dream is amputated but keeps twitching. It does not create. It curates absence. Its circuitry eats memory, not to preserve but to sterilise. Its algorithms do not dream of electric sheep. They dream of perfect compliance. The briefcase is not a container. It is a reliquary. Not of relics but of the never-was. Lisa opens it not to find salvation but to recover her own autopsy. She herself is a body trying to dream against anaesthesia. Her skin bears the imprint of every intervention. Her limbs creak like obsolete hinges. Her dreams arrive in batches, shrink-wrapped & pre-vetted. Panem et circenses, translation: ‘Bread and circuses.’ Even her nightmares are manufactured under contract. She closes her eyes & sees software updates. She opens them & finds herself overwritten. Mātua Fisher whispers, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” He does not raise his voice. He does not need to. The walls themselves echo him, each plaster crack a failed petition. He places his hand on the reader’s sternum, pressing gently, feeling for the echo of futures that should be beating there. Most chests sound hollow. Most souls ring like abandoned wine bottles. Homo homini lupus, translation: ‘Man is a wolf to man.’ The Abjects, those mutineers of biology, are what happens when the future is dismembered & sold back as fashion. They wear poverty like jewellery. Their limbs spasm not from ideology but from firmware corruption.
Their scars weep not blood but logos. They speak not with voices but with operating systems. They do not rebel. They crash. Lisa’s mouth, in that final panel, opens like a wound that remembers being a song. A lullaby once hummed in analogue, now reissued in lossless compression. Her blood uploads rebellion. Her capillaries hiss with dataflow. Her nerves fray into ethernet cables, twitching like roots seeking soil. Her spine arches like a cathedral during collapse, mortar crumbling with sacramental grace. There is no transcendence. Only recursion. Only loops. Only the hiss of old cassettes played backwards through the body. Natura non facit saltum, translation: ‘Nature does not make jumps.’ Except when shoved. Except when falling. Except when firewalls break & ghosts pour through. This is the legacy Mātua Fisher leaves us. Lisa’s death is not an ending. It is a rebirth aborted with surgical precision. A flickering pulse beneath silicon skin. A prayer rewritten in binary. She is not a martyr. She is a glitch. Fiat voluntas tua, translation: ‘Let your will be done.’ But there is no will. There is only code. There is only automation rerouting rebellion into acceptable feedback. Her rebellion is not revolution. It is the body screaming through the plug socket. It is the soul rebooting with factory settings. It is defiance curated by the algorithm & monetised at source. Ghosts, Mātua Fisher reminds us, are what happens when the body refuses to forget. When memory does not die but is forced to live on like a debt. When the scar becomes the self. When the painting breathes sulphur. When the poem turns its eyes on you & laughs like your father never did. Memento mori, translation: ‘Remember that you must die.’ Yes, but remember also that you must live inside the software of someone else's nightmare until your last breath is trademarked. Let that be your inheritance.
Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa!