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alibi_shopThe Invisibles #1-4 (1994)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Steve Yeowell
If you get to the end of the first issue of this, which shows you a psychic teenager on the run from demonic authorities and visions and violence and gross things in jars and guns and explosions and a bizarre-ass secret agent costume and the ghost of the fifth Beatle, and then you look at the page-long author's note, the first thing you see is their advice to throw that issue away once you're done and not keep any comic books around (I failed to do this). Then, after a complaint about how no one appreciated Doom Patrol (which sounds odd to me now because at the time I thought it was generally considered to be cool), there's a statement of purpose for The Invisibles that's like... well, the author isn't holding back.
It starts out on sort of a practical note—
—and describes a general plan to have a main ongoing story about five main characters that alternates with single issues about "various ordinary and extraordinary folk drawn into a web of conspiracy", which sounds promising, and then Morrison pledges allegiance to all the awesome people out there in their early teens in 1994 (not actually coining the term "millennials" here, instead it's "les enfants du siècle", which I kind of wish had caught on) who are going to be the coolest people ever, and then promises by the end of the comic to—
Well, maybe. In the meantime, they urge you to write to the letter column, which I remember people definitely did and it was a pretty lively crowd. All my single-issue comics are in storage so I may not have access to that stuff for this reread—I just found a copy of that author's note*—but you get the idea: this was meant to feel like an interactive thing on some level (we'll get to the unusually interactive part later), and it was important for us to hear that the whole thing was planned out and was going to be great, and also the most pro-teenager thing ever.
To me that sort of suggests that Morrison, and/or their editor Stuart Moore, realized that it might be a little bit tricky to get people to stick with an extremely complicated story where it might be hard to tell what it's about right away, so let's psych them up for it. If so, that instinct was pretty good—even though if you had just read that first issue, you wouldn't really feel the need for that, because this thing really hits the ground running.
a somewhat Doom-Patrol-flavored moment; I like how much Dane doesn't give a shit— It's nearly a double-length issue, and within the first two pages we get 1. a tried and true form of mysterious cold open (also favored by Michael Moorcock)* where cool-looking people in Egypt are discussing mythology in the context of some unknown mission, and 2. a young guy gleefully yelling FUUUUUUUUUCK!** before throwing a Molotov cocktail at his high school. This is our teen hero Dane, and we learn through a series of nicely paced little scenes how Dane spends his time dicking around in Liverpool with his pals, stealing cars, rejecting the counsel of a concerned teacher, getting no love from his mean mom (I think we meet her again later, but only just barely), and sometimes seeing ghosts. 
—and also how Yeowell conveys desperate motion in frozen moments While Dane acts out more and more and finally gets busted and sent to an ominous juvie facility, we also get brief interludes with the cool bald guy from the first scene, King Mob, meeting with various people we don't know, continuing to be mysterious about what he's up to, and giving us a sense of what the supernatural side of this story might be like when he takes LSD and asks a giant psychedelic head of John Lennon for advice. When we see that Dane has fallen into the clutches of hideous people working for some kind of hell-creatures and he's about to be zombified with science, King Mob shows up in his alarming combat gear consisting of a scuba mask and a 50-pound wig, shoots everyone, rescues Dane, and then abandons him in London.
The wild energy and narrative efficiency of this chapter lays out all kinds of stuff for you to get excited and curious about; that's also kind of misleading, since immediately after this it's going to go off in a different direction for a few months and then something even differenter. More noticeably than most other series, the named story arcs in this one aren't used just as plot markers but also as a chance to make big changes in style, or to deliberately push part of the story back behind the curtain and let you wonder about it while Morrison tries to figure out what the hell they're actually going to do with it.* The one in #2-4, "Down and Out in Heaven and Hell"**, slows things way down as Dane hangs out on the streets with another mystery agent, an old guy who goes by Tom O'Bedlam; Tom gives him a lot of crazy magic visions and exposition, puts him through an emotional catharsis that involves beating him up***, then exits the world as Jack finally meets up with the Invisibles proper. We get no more of the larger story during this section except a glimpse of another subset of bad guys: they don't just run child prisons, they also play fox-hunt-style homicide games in plain sight in the city, so England's problems clearly run deep.
an encounter with something benevolent(?) There's not a lot to say about the other Invisibles at this point, so I'll just say I really like how Dane is portrayed here. Morrison is clearly on the side of youth and rebels and rebel youth in general no matter what, and sets up the big conflict in sort of familiarly Romantic terms as "civilization wants to literally kill your soul; being imaginative and disobedient is the same thing as magic", and yet Dane's style of rebellion in the beginning is pretty miserable. Even if he's right that school is bullshit, he's trying way too hard to play dumb, and his history teacher—a sympathetic character whom he attacks in the first shocking moment of violence in the comic—seems correct in warning that Dane could grow up into "just another blank, brutalized face." He gets no peace when he's alone, because of his apparitions; the odd little interlude where he watches Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe hanging out in 1961 may not have much to do with the story, but it's oddly sweet because it's the one time when he's sort of paying attention, and he seems to wish he knew what's going on with them. It's a more interesting characterization than you'd expect from how he's introduced, and the way he loosens up post-catharsis really is nice to see, especially with Steve Yeowell's art doing the acting for him.
It's a shame that these are the only issues that Yeowell will get to draw for a while, but he's a great choice. It's not immediately obvious why, because for a while he's drawing a lot of mundane backgrounds and cars and so on that are a little busy and stiff—then as soon as there are a couple of quiet moments with people, you can see what a deft and expressive way he has with faces, and then as soon as violence happens, there's a clean fluidity to his style that makes it really visceral and disturbing. In the mystical journey with Tom, he finds good ways to depict altered states and visitations that help to give the story a very distinctive tone, hallucinatory not so much in how things look as how they feel (more so than the text Morrison provides for the big LSD scene, which to me has a very clunky sound). He's also extremely British, a quality the series will have more at some times than others as we'll soon see.
Next: Jill Thompson draws some severed heads and stuff
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Steve Yeowell
If you get to the end of the first issue of this, which shows you a psychic teenager on the run from demonic authorities and visions and violence and gross things in jars and guns and explosions and a bizarre-ass secret agent costume and the ghost of the fifth Beatle, and then you look at the page-long author's note, the first thing you see is their advice to throw that issue away once you're done and not keep any comic books around (I failed to do this). Then, after a complaint about how no one appreciated Doom Patrol (which sounds odd to me now because at the time I thought it was generally considered to be cool), there's a statement of purpose for The Invisibles that's like... well, the author isn't holding back.
It starts out on sort of a practical note—
The Invisibles is what I'm going to be concentrating on for the foreseeable future, and I think I've at last found a concept wide-ranging enough to accommodate all the ideas I've had which would otherwise be spread through a succession of one-shot books and specials
—and describes a general plan to have a main ongoing story about five main characters that alternates with single issues about "various ordinary and extraordinary folk drawn into a web of conspiracy", which sounds promising, and then Morrison pledges allegiance to all the awesome people out there in their early teens in 1994 (not actually coining the term "millennials" here, instead it's "les enfants du siècle", which I kind of wish had caught on) who are going to be the coolest people ever, and then promises by the end of the comic to—
reveal who runs the world, why our lives are the way they are and exactly what happens to us when we die.
Well, maybe. In the meantime, they urge you to write to the letter column, which I remember people definitely did and it was a pretty lively crowd. All my single-issue comics are in storage so I may not have access to that stuff for this reread—I just found a copy of that author's note*—but you get the idea: this was meant to feel like an interactive thing on some level (we'll get to the unusually interactive part later), and it was important for us to hear that the whole thing was planned out and was going to be great, and also the most pro-teenager thing ever.
To me that sort of suggests that Morrison, and/or their editor Stuart Moore, realized that it might be a little bit tricky to get people to stick with an extremely complicated story where it might be hard to tell what it's about right away, so let's psych them up for it. If so, that instinct was pretty good—even though if you had just read that first issue, you wouldn't really feel the need for that, because this thing really hits the ground running.
a somewhat Doom-Patrol-flavored moment; I like how much Dane doesn't give a shit— It's nearly a double-length issue, and within the first two pages we get 1. a tried and true form of mysterious cold open (also favored by Michael Moorcock)* where cool-looking people in Egypt are discussing mythology in the context of some unknown mission, and 2. a young guy gleefully yelling FUUUUUUUUUCK!** before throwing a Molotov cocktail at his high school. This is our teen hero Dane, and we learn through a series of nicely paced little scenes how Dane spends his time dicking around in Liverpool with his pals, stealing cars, rejecting the counsel of a concerned teacher, getting no love from his mean mom (I think we meet her again later, but only just barely), and sometimes seeing ghosts. —and also how Yeowell conveys desperate motion in frozen moments While Dane acts out more and more and finally gets busted and sent to an ominous juvie facility, we also get brief interludes with the cool bald guy from the first scene, King Mob, meeting with various people we don't know, continuing to be mysterious about what he's up to, and giving us a sense of what the supernatural side of this story might be like when he takes LSD and asks a giant psychedelic head of John Lennon for advice. When we see that Dane has fallen into the clutches of hideous people working for some kind of hell-creatures and he's about to be zombified with science, King Mob shows up in his alarming combat gear consisting of a scuba mask and a 50-pound wig, shoots everyone, rescues Dane, and then abandons him in London.The wild energy and narrative efficiency of this chapter lays out all kinds of stuff for you to get excited and curious about; that's also kind of misleading, since immediately after this it's going to go off in a different direction for a few months and then something even differenter. More noticeably than most other series, the named story arcs in this one aren't used just as plot markers but also as a chance to make big changes in style, or to deliberately push part of the story back behind the curtain and let you wonder about it while Morrison tries to figure out what the hell they're actually going to do with it.* The one in #2-4, "Down and Out in Heaven and Hell"**, slows things way down as Dane hangs out on the streets with another mystery agent, an old guy who goes by Tom O'Bedlam; Tom gives him a lot of crazy magic visions and exposition, puts him through an emotional catharsis that involves beating him up***, then exits the world as Jack finally meets up with the Invisibles proper. We get no more of the larger story during this section except a glimpse of another subset of bad guys: they don't just run child prisons, they also play fox-hunt-style homicide games in plain sight in the city, so England's problems clearly run deep.
an encounter with something benevolent(?) There's not a lot to say about the other Invisibles at this point, so I'll just say I really like how Dane is portrayed here. Morrison is clearly on the side of youth and rebels and rebel youth in general no matter what, and sets up the big conflict in sort of familiarly Romantic terms as "civilization wants to literally kill your soul; being imaginative and disobedient is the same thing as magic", and yet Dane's style of rebellion in the beginning is pretty miserable. Even if he's right that school is bullshit, he's trying way too hard to play dumb, and his history teacher—a sympathetic character whom he attacks in the first shocking moment of violence in the comic—seems correct in warning that Dane could grow up into "just another blank, brutalized face." He gets no peace when he's alone, because of his apparitions; the odd little interlude where he watches Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe hanging out in 1961 may not have much to do with the story, but it's oddly sweet because it's the one time when he's sort of paying attention, and he seems to wish he knew what's going on with them. It's a more interesting characterization than you'd expect from how he's introduced, and the way he loosens up post-catharsis really is nice to see, especially with Steve Yeowell's art doing the acting for him.It's a shame that these are the only issues that Yeowell will get to draw for a while, but he's a great choice. It's not immediately obvious why, because for a while he's drawing a lot of mundane backgrounds and cars and so on that are a little busy and stiff—then as soon as there are a couple of quiet moments with people, you can see what a deft and expressive way he has with faces, and then as soon as violence happens, there's a clean fluidity to his style that makes it really visceral and disturbing. In the mystical journey with Tom, he finds good ways to depict altered states and visitations that help to give the story a very distinctive tone, hallucinatory not so much in how things look as how they feel (more so than the text Morrison provides for the big LSD scene, which to me has a very clunky sound). He's also extremely British, a quality the series will have more at some times than others as we'll soon see.
Next: Jill Thompson draws some severed heads and stuff
