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alibi_shop) wrote2020-06-14 01:09 pm
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The Invisibles reread, part 0.75 (Sebastian O)
While Karen Berger's project of bringing oddball British writers into DC Comics had produced a lot of distinctive stuff like Shade and The Sandman with "for mature readers" on the covers, it wasn't until 1993 that this became a separate imprint, Vertigo. From the start Berger tried not to focus on any one subject matter or style, so if you picked up a new Vertigo series you wouldn't know what to expect other than something genre-related and kind of morbid, very likely by someone British, with an amount of swearing and/or nudity that wouldn't have been allowed before, and a level of polished colorfulness that didn't fit with what "indie comics" meant in the '90s. Other companies had been dipping their toes in the mature-readers pool too; the miniseries I'm about to get to was originally supposed to be a Disney project (and if you think that's implausible: so was Enigma). But Vertigo was unusually successful partly because they had a good instinct for what people at the time either were already into, like Sandman-related stuff, or were about to be into but didn't know it yet, like steampunk.
The idea of putting SF/fantasy stories in a Victorian setting with lots of extra retro-styled technology had been around for a few years (I'm not sure what all the antecedents were, it's never really been my thing, much as I like James Blaylock), but it still felt somewhat new and didn't yet have the kind of following where you'd see people with brass gears on their top hats at every kind of genre fan event. It made sense to be trying different variations on steampunk in 1993, especially in comics: there was a general visual aesthetic you could play up with whatever level of shiny/grimy you preferred, and story-wise you could choose to treat it as just a lark or get into darker aspects of the period (say, Jack the Ripper, or colonialism, though the former tended to get about 1000 times more attention than the latter). But one approach that I'm pretty sure no one had tried before—and one that probably would've had no chance of being published if it didn't have Grant Morrison's name on it—was to leave both the milieu and the SF/fantasy element almost totally unexplored, and focus on a nihilist super-fop inspired by the works of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde.
Sebastian O #1-3 (1993)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Steve Yeowell
Since in the last installment it took me a while to get around to saying I didn't really like Zenith, I'll get this out of the way now: I don't really like Sebastian O. While I can see Morrison picking up some interesting ideas and toying with them, I think what made it onto the page is mostly an empty exercise in style, plus references to other works that may or may not be actually saying anything about them because all bets are hedged by ironic distancing. I get the general impression that Morrison has no interest in steampunk per se, and is instead doing kind of a bait-and-switch where the superficially cool setup hides what they're actually up to, which is fine; I'm less sure whether the frequent and blatant references to Alan Moore's V for Vendetta are because they like that book and think it has some cool moments that are worth repeating, or because they think it's bullshit and enjoy forcing those moments into a context that Moore wouldn't have liked. And I'm even less sure whether they have any real interest in Wilde or Beardsley or the Romantics or any of the 19th century cultural and social currents alluded to here, or just find them archetypally convenient for a long-running theme of repressive authority versus entertainingly whacked-out rebels. I do have some appreciative things to say, which will be in the last two paragraphs of this, in case you want to skip over the ranting.
So anyway, what is this comic about? Sebastian O is a mad dandy genius in an alternate-history version of Victorian London where, even though they have a lot of computer stuff, everything else seems remarkably unchanged from the real world (or at least from more straightforward historical-fantasy versions of it). He's the most dangerous man alive, and he's been rotting in prison (which of course has only made him madder and more dangerous) because his lifestyle and his writing were so scandalous. Sebastian breaks out and goes on a revenge quest against the powers that be, killing the villains one by one while being glamorous and witty. He succeeds in everything he does. The main villain, Theo Lavender, has a secret scheme that's revealed in a big twist at the very end... which changes everything, and also makes very little sense, but sort of works as a joke at least.
Sebastian kills yet another government agent and reminds us that he's an asshole And in one way or another, nearly everything in this is a joke, not exactly in the sense of being funny but just as stuff Morrison is doing because they know it's perverse. As I said, some of this is clearly winking hard toward V for Vendetta (which Vertigo's audience had a decent chance of having read) but whereas V renounced his own identity, and his revenge quest was part of a larger effort to bring down the whole system, Sebastian is doing all this strictly for himself and for fun and he explicitly doesn't give a shit about anyone except as an audience for his displays of style. His friends are a generic lesbian aristocrat and a clerical pedophile—except he has no friends, they're just theoretically on the same side because they're all disapproved of by society; the backstory about their group and its devotion to being "unnatural" as a philosophical principle is just barely sketched in, and, based on the other sort-of-twist at the end, Sebastian's scandalous writing was irrelevant too. Lavender is defined by being sick of it all and being desperate to achieve an insane goal that, it turns out, he's already achieved (meaning that all his displays of anxiety were just more of Morrison's jokes, and that the events of the story were even less consequential than they seemed). Calling these "characters" would be generous; they're personalities.
Morrison either couldn't be bothered to come up with any reasons why Sebastian is the way he is, or liked the idea of deliberately refusing to do so—but when the collected book came out 11 years later, they changed their mind about that to a hilarious degree: now it starts with three pages of dense text, providing a timeline of how all the technological changes started hundreds of years earlier (making it even more ridiculous that so many things stayed the same, something that he might think he is ironically acknowledging, I don't know) plus heaps of backstory for Sebastian. It turns out he was planned by computer eugenics to be a perfect child, then suffered all kinds of abuses, spent some time learning ninja Batman skills, inherited a fortune from a mystery benefactor who's implied to be supernatural, gave up a previous interest in helping humanity (?!) because of too much Rimbaud, and started an aestheticist dissident society that apparently Lavender was also in (which is so fleetingly implied in the comic that I didn't have a clue before; it's incredibly unclear who that guy is). Also it clarifies that he was persecuted specifically for being gay, so, rather than just being reminiscent of Oscar Wilde's caricatures of cool libertines, now he's being compared to Wilde himself—which sits oddly with this book's depiction of a narcissist who loves no one and desires no one and doesn't even believe in his own writing. Needless to say, none of this adds anything to the story, in fact it's such a poor fit for the rest of the comic that it reads as kind of a smart-ass prank on new readers: "Look at the densely thought-out world-building and plotting and social commentary and international action you're about to get! Ha ha, psych."
one of the more Beardsleyesque moments My memories of reading this when it came out were foggy and mostly negative, but I had a feeling it'd make sense to revisit it along with The Invisibles and I think I was right. First, this writer and artist were clearly fated to work together: by this point Yeowell's figures and his inking are really a delight, his precise minimalist backgrounds give the story an appropriate feeling of the whole world being brightly lit and highly organized but just off somehow, and the pacing of the script shows a good understanding of what Yeowell can do with a given amount of space on the page (usually; once in a while there's some unclear action due to a tiny crowded panel). The promotional comments about Yeowell taking inspiration from Beardsley were kind of misleading, he's drawing like himself, but there's a slightly similar design sense and deadpan tone sometimes. When more overt horror imagery takes over (in the subplot about the Roaring Boys, a trio of sadistic assassins in a Clive Barker mode), the clarity and simplicity of the art intensifies the gross-out effect of the implied actions in a way that a grungier style wouldn't. And, while I think that that part doesn't contribute much to the book and is just there for (alleged) fun, the demonic mania of the Roaring Boys and Lavender's more miserable type of evil both touch on a thread that's shown up with this author before and will turn up in different ways later on: Morrison is partly a horror writer, but the kind of horror they like isn't exactly about a fear of what might happen (although it's mandatory for awful things to happen), more like a fear of a state of mind.
two of the Roaring Boys; the one in the background speaks in the kind of automatic-writing prose that showed up a lot in Doom Patrol, and he is a South Asian-looking person who's into flesh hook suspension, which I suspect is due to Morrison having read Modern Primitives in 1989 like everyone else Morrison's villains and monsters generally aren't evil because of their goals or their lack of scruples, but because they're irredeemably sick, manifesting a diseased way of seeing the world that's not compatible with life at all. Importantly, that's the reason all kinds of other things in the world are the way they are too; it's baked into the system. Smaller-scale problems and pathologies don't totally escape their interest, but they don't hold their attention the way this kind of Satanic nihilist authority figure does (and I mean Satanic in the sense of a really hateful destructive force corrupting everything, not the Romantic or Miltonian idea of a proud rebel—worth noting because both kinds of Satans will show up in The Invisibles). One of their references that I didn't catch until now is that the icky character of the Abbé, being (1) obsessed with his garden of mechanical trees and (2) Italian, is an obvious nod to a specific fucked-up guy in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength—a novel that isn't talked about much these days and has yards of problems, but that I think is one of the foundational works of modern SF-flavored horror-fantasy, and while I doubt Morrison would have much good to say about its Christian themes and its social conservatism, I think it's close to their heart in a lot of ways. The human antagonists in THS are all severely mentally damaged due to either some supernatural effect of contact with demons, or their own self-imposed philosophical contortions, and the damage might show up as violence or coldness or just a frightening vacuity. They're only the latest in a long line of representatives of what's wrong with us (Lewis in 1945 doesn't directly tie this in with Hitler or any non-British threat, but he makes a point of putting the Black and Tans and Oliver Cromwell on the devil's team), and the reason they're more dangerous this time is technology. Their downfall isn't exactly due to human heroism; it involves friends hanging out at home and playing dress-up and tripping out on angelic emanations, an apocalyptic outbreak of wild magic from Arthurian legend, and a gross-out joke about a possessed severed head and a bear. With a few alterations and maybe some Terence McKenna references, that could easily be a Morrison storyline—and I mean that in a good way: this kind of radical evil may not make for deep characters, but it's a valid use of horror as a framework for ideas about spirituality, and it makes sense for it to be opposed by somewhat frightening forces of joyful chaos because logic has been co-opted by the other side. Sebastian O fails for me because its chaos figure is such an empty vessel and because the story is so lost in a fog of irony, but you can see a desire there for a kind of ecstatic conflict narrative where the basis of the whole world is open to question.
Next: what is Jerry Cornelius doing in this blog?
The idea of putting SF/fantasy stories in a Victorian setting with lots of extra retro-styled technology had been around for a few years (I'm not sure what all the antecedents were, it's never really been my thing, much as I like James Blaylock), but it still felt somewhat new and didn't yet have the kind of following where you'd see people with brass gears on their top hats at every kind of genre fan event. It made sense to be trying different variations on steampunk in 1993, especially in comics: there was a general visual aesthetic you could play up with whatever level of shiny/grimy you preferred, and story-wise you could choose to treat it as just a lark or get into darker aspects of the period (say, Jack the Ripper, or colonialism, though the former tended to get about 1000 times more attention than the latter). But one approach that I'm pretty sure no one had tried before—and one that probably would've had no chance of being published if it didn't have Grant Morrison's name on it—was to leave both the milieu and the SF/fantasy element almost totally unexplored, and focus on a nihilist super-fop inspired by the works of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde.
Sebastian O #1-3 (1993)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Steve Yeowell
Since in the last installment it took me a while to get around to saying I didn't really like Zenith, I'll get this out of the way now: I don't really like Sebastian O. While I can see Morrison picking up some interesting ideas and toying with them, I think what made it onto the page is mostly an empty exercise in style, plus references to other works that may or may not be actually saying anything about them because all bets are hedged by ironic distancing. I get the general impression that Morrison has no interest in steampunk per se, and is instead doing kind of a bait-and-switch where the superficially cool setup hides what they're actually up to, which is fine; I'm less sure whether the frequent and blatant references to Alan Moore's V for Vendetta are because they like that book and think it has some cool moments that are worth repeating, or because they think it's bullshit and enjoy forcing those moments into a context that Moore wouldn't have liked. And I'm even less sure whether they have any real interest in Wilde or Beardsley or the Romantics or any of the 19th century cultural and social currents alluded to here, or just find them archetypally convenient for a long-running theme of repressive authority versus entertainingly whacked-out rebels. I do have some appreciative things to say, which will be in the last two paragraphs of this, in case you want to skip over the ranting.
So anyway, what is this comic about? Sebastian O is a mad dandy genius in an alternate-history version of Victorian London where, even though they have a lot of computer stuff, everything else seems remarkably unchanged from the real world (or at least from more straightforward historical-fantasy versions of it). He's the most dangerous man alive, and he's been rotting in prison (which of course has only made him madder and more dangerous) because his lifestyle and his writing were so scandalous. Sebastian breaks out and goes on a revenge quest against the powers that be, killing the villains one by one while being glamorous and witty. He succeeds in everything he does. The main villain, Theo Lavender, has a secret scheme that's revealed in a big twist at the very end... which changes everything, and also makes very little sense, but sort of works as a joke at least.
Sebastian kills yet another government agent and reminds us that he's an asshole And in one way or another, nearly everything in this is a joke, not exactly in the sense of being funny but just as stuff Morrison is doing because they know it's perverse. As I said, some of this is clearly winking hard toward V for Vendetta (which Vertigo's audience had a decent chance of having read) but whereas V renounced his own identity, and his revenge quest was part of a larger effort to bring down the whole system, Sebastian is doing all this strictly for himself and for fun and he explicitly doesn't give a shit about anyone except as an audience for his displays of style. His friends are a generic lesbian aristocrat and a clerical pedophile—except he has no friends, they're just theoretically on the same side because they're all disapproved of by society; the backstory about their group and its devotion to being "unnatural" as a philosophical principle is just barely sketched in, and, based on the other sort-of-twist at the end, Sebastian's scandalous writing was irrelevant too. Lavender is defined by being sick of it all and being desperate to achieve an insane goal that, it turns out, he's already achieved (meaning that all his displays of anxiety were just more of Morrison's jokes, and that the events of the story were even less consequential than they seemed). Calling these "characters" would be generous; they're personalities.Morrison either couldn't be bothered to come up with any reasons why Sebastian is the way he is, or liked the idea of deliberately refusing to do so—but when the collected book came out 11 years later, they changed their mind about that to a hilarious degree: now it starts with three pages of dense text, providing a timeline of how all the technological changes started hundreds of years earlier (making it even more ridiculous that so many things stayed the same, something that he might think he is ironically acknowledging, I don't know) plus heaps of backstory for Sebastian. It turns out he was planned by computer eugenics to be a perfect child, then suffered all kinds of abuses, spent some time learning ninja Batman skills, inherited a fortune from a mystery benefactor who's implied to be supernatural, gave up a previous interest in helping humanity (?!) because of too much Rimbaud, and started an aestheticist dissident society that apparently Lavender was also in (which is so fleetingly implied in the comic that I didn't have a clue before; it's incredibly unclear who that guy is). Also it clarifies that he was persecuted specifically for being gay, so, rather than just being reminiscent of Oscar Wilde's caricatures of cool libertines, now he's being compared to Wilde himself—which sits oddly with this book's depiction of a narcissist who loves no one and desires no one and doesn't even believe in his own writing. Needless to say, none of this adds anything to the story, in fact it's such a poor fit for the rest of the comic that it reads as kind of a smart-ass prank on new readers: "Look at the densely thought-out world-building and plotting and social commentary and international action you're about to get! Ha ha, psych."
one of the more Beardsleyesque moments My memories of reading this when it came out were foggy and mostly negative, but I had a feeling it'd make sense to revisit it along with The Invisibles and I think I was right. First, this writer and artist were clearly fated to work together: by this point Yeowell's figures and his inking are really a delight, his precise minimalist backgrounds give the story an appropriate feeling of the whole world being brightly lit and highly organized but just off somehow, and the pacing of the script shows a good understanding of what Yeowell can do with a given amount of space on the page (usually; once in a while there's some unclear action due to a tiny crowded panel). The promotional comments about Yeowell taking inspiration from Beardsley were kind of misleading, he's drawing like himself, but there's a slightly similar design sense and deadpan tone sometimes. When more overt horror imagery takes over (in the subplot about the Roaring Boys, a trio of sadistic assassins in a Clive Barker mode), the clarity and simplicity of the art intensifies the gross-out effect of the implied actions in a way that a grungier style wouldn't. And, while I think that that part doesn't contribute much to the book and is just there for (alleged) fun, the demonic mania of the Roaring Boys and Lavender's more miserable type of evil both touch on a thread that's shown up with this author before and will turn up in different ways later on: Morrison is partly a horror writer, but the kind of horror they like isn't exactly about a fear of what might happen (although it's mandatory for awful things to happen), more like a fear of a state of mind. two of the Roaring Boys; the one in the background speaks in the kind of automatic-writing prose that showed up a lot in Doom Patrol, and he is a South Asian-looking person who's into flesh hook suspension, which I suspect is due to Morrison having read Modern Primitives in 1989 like everyone else Morrison's villains and monsters generally aren't evil because of their goals or their lack of scruples, but because they're irredeemably sick, manifesting a diseased way of seeing the world that's not compatible with life at all. Importantly, that's the reason all kinds of other things in the world are the way they are too; it's baked into the system. Smaller-scale problems and pathologies don't totally escape their interest, but they don't hold their attention the way this kind of Satanic nihilist authority figure does (and I mean Satanic in the sense of a really hateful destructive force corrupting everything, not the Romantic or Miltonian idea of a proud rebel—worth noting because both kinds of Satans will show up in The Invisibles). One of their references that I didn't catch until now is that the icky character of the Abbé, being (1) obsessed with his garden of mechanical trees and (2) Italian, is an obvious nod to a specific fucked-up guy in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength—a novel that isn't talked about much these days and has yards of problems, but that I think is one of the foundational works of modern SF-flavored horror-fantasy, and while I doubt Morrison would have much good to say about its Christian themes and its social conservatism, I think it's close to their heart in a lot of ways. The human antagonists in THS are all severely mentally damaged due to either some supernatural effect of contact with demons, or their own self-imposed philosophical contortions, and the damage might show up as violence or coldness or just a frightening vacuity. They're only the latest in a long line of representatives of what's wrong with us (Lewis in 1945 doesn't directly tie this in with Hitler or any non-British threat, but he makes a point of putting the Black and Tans and Oliver Cromwell on the devil's team), and the reason they're more dangerous this time is technology. Their downfall isn't exactly due to human heroism; it involves friends hanging out at home and playing dress-up and tripping out on angelic emanations, an apocalyptic outbreak of wild magic from Arthurian legend, and a gross-out joke about a possessed severed head and a bear. With a few alterations and maybe some Terence McKenna references, that could easily be a Morrison storyline—and I mean that in a good way: this kind of radical evil may not make for deep characters, but it's a valid use of horror as a framework for ideas about spirituality, and it makes sense for it to be opposed by somewhat frightening forces of joyful chaos because logic has been co-opted by the other side. Sebastian O fails for me because its chaos figure is such an empty vessel and because the story is so lost in a fog of irony, but you can see a desire there for a kind of ecstatic conflict narrative where the basis of the whole world is open to question.Next: what is Jerry Cornelius doing in this blog?