The Invisibles reread, part 0.9 (The Cornelius Quartet and Gideon Stargrave)

[alibi_shop]

This section is mostly about things that aren't comics and aren't by Grant Morrison. After that, I promise I'll get to the main subject.

The Final Programme (1968)
A Cure for Cancer (1971)
The English Assassin: A Romance of Entropy (1972)
The Condition of Muzak (1977)
Novels by Michael Moorcock

Moorcock needs no introduction from me, but here's one anyway. He's most widely known as an author of high fantasy; anything written in that genre after 1961 that has a sort of Gothic poetic sensibility and isn't a Tolkien riff owes a lot to his Elric series. He was also at the center of the hard-to-define-but-unmistakable New Wave movement in SF, during his time as editor of New Worlds magazine. He wrote some lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult. And he's the creator of the psychedelic fashion-forward homicidal incestuous metafictional dimension-hopping secret agent Jerry Cornelius, who appears in various forms in these four novels plus assorted shorter works.

That's the basis of Moorcock's gigantic animosity to Grant Morrison, who he thinks went beyond Cornelius homage into ripoff territory, particularly with Morrison's very early strip Gideon Stargrave and parts of The Invisibles. Moorcock has said that Morrison's done nothing but imitate him, which I don't think is true, but I do think anyone with any interest in avant-garde SF/fantasy who grew up in the '70s would be certain to absorb this stuff by osmosis even if they didn't like it—and Morrison clearly did like it. I wasn't a huge fan as a kid (at least, I thought not; I'll explain below), but I was pretty sure I had read these things too young, so I wanted to try again. Well... I'm still not a fan, but it's an undeniably unique work that I think might work better as an influence than as itself; that is, these manage to suggest all kinds of other interesting books that they're choosing not to be. John Clute in his introduction to The Final Programme makes about the best case for the series that I can imagine, and I can see what he's talking about now and then.

So, who is Jerry Cornelius? That depends, since one big feature of the Cornelius Quartet is that Jerry's appearance and backstory are subject to extreme change in ways that aren't explained by any narrative element, but there are some constants. He's an ultra-stylish ultra-modern guy in his twenties with a cool car, cool sci-fi guns, almost unlimited resources, and almost no scruples; he's sexually irresistible and heteroflexible; sometimes he has special powers, like being a sort of energy vampire; he jams with bar bands; he hates his evil junkie mad scientist brother; he's in love with his doomed or dead sister; he likes the Beatles a lot. The setting is more or less our own world up until the late '60s at which point it goes off the rails in different ways. There's a supporting cast that reappears throughout the series, but these aren't really characters in the usual sense—more like the stock figures in commedia or The Goon Show or Looney Tunes, where Pantalone or Minnie Bannister or Daffy Duck can show up in different roles each time with only the general personality being the same; Moorcock presents this as a deliberate homage to commedia/pantomime, but whereas someone like Pantalone is recognizable not just by being like other versions of Pantalone but by being a particular type of guy you've probably met or worked for or had in your family, Moorcock's crew is mostly defined in reference to archetypes you would only have encountered in pop culture: secret agent, femme fatale, mad general, decadent supervillain, etc., but done in a weirder or wronger way.

Jerry himself starts out, somewhat misleadingly, as more or less "What if James Bond, but in a counterculture style and more science-fictiony and less competent and less sane and with almost no loyalty to anything." The Ian Fleming homages are pretty thick in terms of lovingly described cars, weapons, clothes, luxury items, and international locales, and thuddingly play-by-play action scenes; but for every eight or nine bits where Moorcock is building Jerry up as an outrageous badass, there's one or two where he deflates the character's grandiosity in an anti-Bond way by calling him "sad and scared" or saying that "logic had never been his strong point", or that he's "a child" because the only drink he likes is Pernod. That stuff is refreshing to read because Moorcock is able to write well about people when he feels like it, but it still doesn't really make Cornelius into an interesting character, for me; whenever he kills someone, or falls in love, or kills the person he fell in love with, or ascends to godhood, or (as happens for most of the third book) does literally nothing because he's a comatose wreck, it's rarely for any particular reason and it's hard to give a shit.

That's not totally inappropriate, since not giving a shit is a major theme, whenever the books flirt with having a theme: there's always a big element of the world all going to hell (with very 1970-era ideas about what an apocalypse is: Vietnam-style war in Europe, military rule in America, men and women being harder to tell apart, and of course inflation), and insofar as the protagonists are trying to accomplish anything it's often to help the world end sooner because it's a lost cause—possibly hoping that something better will follow, although that's not given much thought. There are brief suggestions that the antagonists are evil because they're authority figures trying to make the world too ordered and logical (or trying to stop it from ending like it should)—and here I think the influence of William Burroughs shows through strongly—but that's not really pursued either, and it's hard to distinguish between sides on the basis of principles or behavior since everyone just lays waste to everything and self-destructs in similar ways. And most of the time it's deliberately impossible to tell what the conflict is about; you just know that certain characters are the antagonists because that's what the characters with these particular names always are, so they want to stop Jerry from doing whatever he's trying to do, which isn't portrayed as particularly a bad or a good thing, it's just a conflict that's written in a particular style.

my favorite of Malcolm Dean's occasional illustrations, although not necessarily the most memorable one—that one, which of course was what my high-school friend picked to convince me to read this, is a little too obscene for this blog An author I adore, Thomas M. Disch, made his name at New Worlds and has more than a few echoes of Moorcock's style (or vice versa), both in terms of a certain ironic flavor and in the construction of the prose. But Disch wanted to use SF to talk about identifiable things, and when he brought an idea into a story he would mine it for all of its possible implications; that's unlike Moorcock, who seems to want the style in which he's deploying these genre ingredients to be the whole point. Intentionally exaggerating them, separating them from their context, and hinting in broad strokes at a narrative that there's no actual intention of pursuing, highlights them as basically flavors—in sort of the same way that Roy Lichtenstein used comic-book material, deliberately decoupled from the stories it was trying to tell and from the reasons why it looked the way it did. I do like the Moorcock/Cornelius version of this better than the Lichtenstein version, because Moorcock seems to like and understand the genre effects he's using better than Lichtenstein liked or understood comic art.

Occasionally this is straightforward parody, but more often it's the kind of thing where the structure of the writing itself has been made absurdly non-functional—like the action scenes in The Final Programme that are written in the shortest and dullest possible declarative sentences, or the bit in A Cure for Cancer where Jerry has sex with a random woman in between the first and third words of a four-word line of dialogue. There can be a great playful energy in this (and I have personal experience of its infectiousness: some SF-adventure-parody stuff I tried to write in college was, in hindsight, totally a riff on the Cornelius books which I had read a few years earlier but had no conscious memory of). These books are sometimes very, very funny—even if that's almost never in the context of anything that's sustained or followed through on for more than a paragraph. My favorite comic setpiece that actually builds for a little while is a multi-page list of all the people who attend Jerry's three-month-long party in The Final Programme, including two hundred Hungarians, two small children, and "a heterosexual". Very rarely, there are also extended passages of fairly specific dark political satire in which an English or American authority figure expounds on his horrifying ideals, and while that material is pretty obvious in some ways, it's written with a good ear. Of the many memorable shorter turns of phrase, two of my favorites are when he describes a town only as "a stunned, wronged place" (places in general are often beautifully evoked), and this line: "He had watched her bottom for a sign, but got nothing."

At other times, especially in the last book, Moorcock is just seriously, temporarily, writing some type of more grounded material and doing it well—like, if it's a war story then it'll be a vividly written war story, and if it's Jerry's teen years then it'll be a vividly written story about '60s London. But, for me, this is always undermined by how committed he is to not following through on any of that stuff; it's as if it's very important to him that you not be able to understand the events for too long or get interested in any character as an actual person, because it's only style and attitude that matter here, so storylines must be constantly cancelled and reset with no explanation (other than very general hand-waving about how reality is falling apart), statements by the omniscient narrator must turn out to be false and meaningless, and Jerry must do horrible things every so often with barely any motivation. (There's also a formal/schematic element that I guess some readers might appreciate more than I do: some of the events and characters are closely based on stuff from the Elric series. I've read less of Elric, but I think even if I recognized all those things, I might not feel there was much to be gained by redoing them in an absurdist spy thriller format.)

And there are parts where I think he thinks he's saying something serious, and I'm skeptical. There's the aforementioned apocalypse stuff, which doesn't convey much for me beyond "things sure are crappy, maybe total chaos is for the best even though it'll suck even worse for anyone in the world who isn't Jerry." There are gestures toward social liberation in that the bad guys are sometimes uptight people who say bigoted things and Jerry sometimes sleeps with men, but that's undermined by the general misanthropy and by how often Moorcock (a writer ahead of his time in some ways, but definitely not in all ways) reduces women to sexual vehicles and non-white/non-Western characters to exoticized clichés. And—something that'll be familiar to anyone who's read any genre fiction in the last 50 years where the author had a few esoteric interests they enjoyed mentioning—there are expository/didactic dialogue scenes where people muse about strange but true(?) items, like how the Gnostics allegedly had the exact same measure of a cosmic era as the Hindu yugas and that "modern physics" is now confirming their ideas.

Those are all frustrating, but they're also things that an experimentally-minded and word-loving teenager could certainly get pretty excited about. And sure enough:

Gideon Stargrave, in Near Myths #3-5 (1978-79)
Written and drawn by Grant T. Morrison

one major difference between Gideon Stargrave and Jerry Cornelius is that Gideon is blond I've only read 17 pages of Gideon Stargrave, and not much more of it was published. Near Myths was a short-lived Scottish anthology series that, from what I've seen, aimed roughly for 2000 AD and Métal hurlant territory but with material that ranged from fairly polished (like Bryan Talbot's Luther Arkwright, another series with a heavy Moorcock influence) to semi-ambitious fan art. Morrison's contribution here is more in the latter category, not surprisingly since they were 18 years old.

I don't want to pick on it too much, they're a lot better at drawing than I was at that age and they're clearly making an effort to do a lot of different things in every layout, but story-wise it's a pretty incoherent pastiche that deploys recognizable riffs on various Corneliusisms to no particular effect. Young Grant did have a sense of how to recognize and inhabit a style—and there are a few elements that aren't quite so directly ripped from their main source that give more of a sense of their own interests. One is that even though Jerry Gideon is an amoral force of chaos, the bad guys really are evil in a way that none of Moorcock's characters quite are; the human authority figures are fronts for some kind of devilish destructive power, and there's a lurid focus on their sadism. More interestingly, there's an effort to suggest ineffable and disorienting experiences by cutting together images with short bits of text in non-literal ways. The kid may not have known what they wanted to say, but they had some ideas about how to say it.

Next: a bad lad gets his mind blown in Liverpool