Birboid

Have you seen all the birds that there are? Do you wish there were more unrealistic birds? Do you want them to be in a small booklet even though you could also find them on Instagram? If so, why not order my new art zine Birboid. Countless beloved illustrators have produced massive beautifully observed and educational collections of avian splendor, but this... this is something else entirely.

The Invisibles reread, part 10

The Invisibles volume 2 #17-22 (1998)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #17/19/20/21 by Chris Weston/Ray Kryssing, #18 by Ivan Reis/Mark Pennington, #22 by Weston/John Stokes

[Update: shortly after posting the original version of this, I learned a bit late that Grant Morrison came out as nonbinary/genderqueer last year and prefers "they". I'll respect that going forward and I'll revise past posts as soon as I have a chance.]

The big event that closes out volume two is that King Mob blows up Mason's mansion and tells him it's for his own good. That's a reasonable choice in several ways: 1. Mason's whole "I have all the money and I know all the secrets, whose side am I really on" deal was narratively a dead end, and incompatible with the "scrappy rebels with no time for logic" vibe that Morrison wanted to explore. 2. There's not much else left to do—nearly everything that was set up earlier has been either resolved or discarded, our heroes seem to have more or less won (and/or established that some aspects of the conflict are bogus* and don't need to be won). And 3. as volume two has often reminded us, explosions are cool; that's not an aspect of the series I ever enjoyed, but it's there, so we might as well go all the way with it. So, OK, but since I didn't like a lot of volume two I'm not too invested in a competent follow-through on volume two's plot threads and ideas. I'd rather write about the surprisingly effective and less literal-minded moments, of which there are a few more than I had remembered.
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