Rogan Gosh is probably Brendan McCarthy's most recognized comic work, and regarded as the Milligan/McCarthy team's finest work so far. The story first saw publication in 2000AD's sister title `Revolver' in 1990 before been collected for the American market by Vertigo in 1994.

Pete Milligan:
"The whole idea of calling it `Rogan Gosh,' (the name of an Indian specialty, which tastes pretty vile) and having this food leitmotif running through it, is that both Brendan and I were interested in the fact that you can talk about the most sublime and the most important thing in the world e.g. Spiritual enlightenment and use as your tools the most banal and the most mundane things. It's like, if you talk about a piece of sugar long enough, you would eventually work out something like spiritual enlightenment, or something like the secret of the universe. It's the idea that you can take anything, and if you examine it and use it enough you can then come to some truths. We were sitting in an Indian restaurant, and Brendan had the idea for an Indian science-fiction story, and originally that's what we were going to do. But as we began to talk about it, what it could mean began to present more opportunities to us. It always reminds me of that story about the novelist who, every night, was going to write "the great novel." But every night he'd write a few pieces of rubbish, just to get him- self going, then he'd chuck it in the wastepaper

bin and then work on his novel. Then it transpired that his novel was useless, but someone had picked up all these bits that he'd thrown away in his wastepaper bin, and that was his great novel. Brendan and I were talking at the time about doing this great Milligan/McCarthy magnum opus, this great big thing. But we hadn't worked together for a little while, so we thought to warm up, we'd do this really small, simple, light thing called "Rogan Gosh." But it didn't work out that way! `Cause as we started to talk about it, and as we started to both get into it, and both brought our separate interests to it, it grew, as these things have a habit of doing. And the rest is history"

Brendan McCarthy:
"After our last project together, Skin, which was very stripped down, no subplots, just designed to be a very straightforward narrative-we just wanted to do something incredibly convoluted. It was just going to be a minor piece before we went on to something bigger. And it ended up becoming this ridiculous demon. I think when you look at Indian film, and the whole of Indian culture, it is very lavish, it's very decorative and overdone. But it's all fake-it's all fake gold. So, that was the idea-to make it sort of ostentatious. What is good about the way that Pete and I work together is that we tend to bounce off each other stylistically. So far as I know, "Rogan Gosh" is the only comic written in the style of an Indian restaurant menu. And because the writing style is so lavish, you can then do the same with the art."

Peter Milligan:
"On this one we're putting Brendan's name first, because often there's an assumption that because ' I'm the writer and Brendan's the artist, that all the things that are intellectual, the philosophical points, are the things that interest me, and all the visual things are things that interest Brendan. `Rogan Gosh' is much more mix and match than that. I wouldn't have written something that went totally against something that Brendan believed in, nor would he have illustrated something in a way that I felt would have conflicted with what I thought the story was supposed to be about.

One of the things that I thought was misunderstood about 'Rogan' was that people went, 'Oh, it's realty druggy and incomprehensible,' whereas 'Rogan' is actually an anti-drug story ... that is, it's against the idea of using drugs for spiritual enlightenment. Personally, I feel that if there is such a thing as enlightenment, if there is such a thing as spiritual growth, then it's something that has to be done in the real world, dealing with real people and real things. Now, that can be seen as an anti-drug message, but it could also be seen as an anti-nunnery message.

Isolation's all very well and good, but as Rudyard Kipling finds out when he sees a baby dead in the arms of its mother, it seems that that's the path where perhaps he's going to get some enlightenment. That's the rocky road he has to travel, rather than sitting in some opium stupor in the House of Smoke."

Brendan McCarthy:
"The dead baby incident that Pete refers to is something I actually witnessed while travelling in India. It's from one of my old sketchbooks, which I drew in India. It was a very moving and frightening thing to see. One of the things I wanted to look at was the whole Hindu philosophy of Maya, illusion. But Rudyard comes out of the House of Smoke having learned something that everything is Maya. That's one of the key passages for me.

As the characters learn, even their own personalities are many-levelled, just a succession of different masks. The overall thing about `Rogan' that interested me was that it had multiple points of view-there was a multiple voice going on in it. Most comics are written from one point of view only, there's an authorial voice, or there's a character voice. `Rogan' starts off being about Raju Diwan and Dean Cripps, but then it becomes about Rogan Gosh the Karmanaut. After a while, it's actually about this guy who's a loner, who's basically dreaming the whole thing. Then it becomes about Rudyard Kipling, who's actually hallucinating the whole thing, and then it's about this guy who wants to kill himself. Later, the guy who has just died at an acid house party becomes a disembodied voice.

There was one character who only existed in the captions, who never actually materialised in terms of visuals. Obviously, it's not new; Philip K. Dick has probably done it the most. But that kind of multiple perspective.. it's almost like the difference between Cubism and single-point perspective in painting. It's constructed more like a tapestry; it interweaves, rather than slingshots, from A to B. It's almost like quantum physics storytelling. Everything could be everything else depending on your perspective. Which is good; obviously post-modernism was about that."

Pete Milligan:
"It's totally easy to follow-as long as you turn off your mind and float downstream. And that's how you have to do it; you can't read it like a Dashiell Hammett novel, `cause it's not. `Rogan Gosh' can be read time and time again, because, depending upon the mood you're in, you can get a completely different idea of it. It's almost a do-it-yourself story, you can follow a different track each time. It could be a story about Rudyard Kipling, or about the boy who's committed suicide on the phone, or about India and the Karmanauts-take your pick. They're all as real as any of the others. It's no good saying, `Okay, so who's it really about? What's really happening?' because they're all happening, and none of them are happening. One of the things we wanted to do was do a story about enlightenment, but not a story about enlightenment a story that, if you like, mirrors the process of spiritual enlightenment, rather than just do a dry commentary on it. We were trying to make it be the territory, rather than the map of the territory.

A lot of Rogan Gosh was very personal. But I was also opening myself up. It was as though Brendan and I were connected on some strange psychic level, because I was writing stuff, and Brendan would get really spooked, because it echoed things that had happened in his life. It was a strange hybrid of me and Brendan. But then, as James Joyce said, `In the particular lies the universal.' So, if you can make something particular enough, you're going to say something that's universal. Obviously, the story's a trickster as well; it's full of lies, and as soon as it gets too full of itself, someone farts offstage. Even this idea of the Corridor Of Uncertainty which I think is a beautiful spiritual term, is actually a term coined by Geoff Boycott for when the cricket ball bounces just outside the off stump, and the batsman is uncertain whether to hit it or leave it alone.

The end of the story is only one end, there is a sense that it's not really the end. And really, `Rogan Gosh' is the kind of comic book that you can open up at any page and start reading and go back through the beginning again."