The Invisibles reread, part 2

[alibi_shop]

The Invisibles #5-9 (1995)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Jill Thompson and Justine Mara Andersen (credited as Dennis Cramer)

A few big changes are obvious at the start of this section, "Arcadia." There's extremely different art by Jill Thompson working with the prolific DC inker Justine Mara Andersen, which immediately gives the series a brighter and messier and more tactile feel, making our main cast look less smoothly iconic and more like a bunch of people with incompatible ideas of how to be cool; Dane now looks closer to 13 than 16, and King Mob is considerably less butch. The main cast gets more dialogue now (even though it's still not super clear who they are; more on that in a minute). And we're mostly leaving modern London behind, as the comic focuses on a time-travel mission to the French Revolution, alternating with interludes about Percy Shelley and Lord Byron that are pretty much unconnected to the plot and consist mostly of philosophical musings—plus a lengthy thesis on why Donatien Alphonse François de Sade was an important genius, which includes literally depicting a bunch of excerpts from The 120 Days of Sodom. Even though some supernatural monsters do show up and some of the theoretical content is genuinely interesting, this is the section where I can imagine a lot of Vertigo readers dropping out because they wanted a certain amount of basic genre satisfactions to accompany the mind-bendingness, or at least more of a feeling that Morrison is telling a story rather than showing us their notes for one.

Unlike the various literary figures and mythological references that have been explained to us in some detail, you won't learn much about the French Revolution here. Morrison drops us into a bloodbath in 1793 and portrays the Terror as an inevitable result of... whatever it was that came before that, overdetermined by its mythic significance, particularly in terms of the guillotine being a step toward mechanization of violence. It's still unclear what kind of revolution the Invisibles are trying to bring about, but this clearly isn't it; there's a nice bit about how the random 18th-century Invisibles agent they meet up with had originally assumed the Jacobins were part of their movement, and is extremely freaked out by what's going on now. Together with what Morrison has Byron say about revolutions in general ("it begins in fancy words but it always ends in blood")* and the fact that no other entirely human conflict will appear in the series, it's not hard to see this as the author declaring that even though they're anti-oppression and anti-status-quo, political action is a dead end.

* As with most of the historical figures in this, I feel like the portrayal of Byron might be not be amazingly accurate. The way he's written here makes it sound as if he started out hopeful about the Revolution but then became cynical about it (and about revolutions in general), and a reader who knows even less about Byron than I do could easily miss that 1. he later devoted everything to another revolutionary war, and 2. the Terror started when he was five years old.

The Invisibles don't really care about what's going on in Paris; they're there to pick up the Marquis de Sade, whom they're supposed to bring back to the future (sort of—in this version of time travel, what travels is sort of an astral placeholder) to contribute his transgressive ideas to "a blueprint for the future of humanity." the four main Invisibles as previously drawn by Yeowell We're told all this by King Mob, whose functions at this point are to be good at shooting people and monsters, to look cool, to know who everyone is and how to do everything, and to deliver specific chunks of exposition as unsubtly as possible at the exact moment they become important while being as mysterious as possible about everything else. His overall look makes him a pretty obvious author surrogate (and later developments will make him even more obviously so), but he's not exactly a sympathetic character—he comes across as a reckless and self-important asshole in a way that I'm pretty sure is deliberate. King Mob's club-kid look now; the goofy little emoticons and adornments around him are something Thompson tried out briefly, then abandoned His three teammates are more approachable, though still pretty vague: Lord Fanny*, a sardonic drag queen who turns out to have heavy-duty Mayan-mythology-based magic; Ragged Robin, who has clairvoyance and wild hair and doesn't say much**; and Boy, a pragmatic non-supernatural woman from New York who teaches Dane martial arts and yoga and is the only one with a casual dress style.

* Most American readers probably wouldn't have known, although I presume the editor was aware, that this is a much ruder word in the UK.

** Her entire introduction to Dane in issue 4 was "I'm Ragged Robin. I'm nuts." As mentioned earlier, she was originally meant to be another version of Crazy Jane from Doom Patrol, which is odd to me because Jane was such a major character and one that Morrison really made you feel for, whereas Robin has very little to say or do here. Later we'll get a much different backstory, with a different explanation for why she would call herself "nuts" and seem so dazed now.

Those descriptions are pretty much all we know about the main Invisibles at this point. We get much more about Shelley and the Marquis de Sade, who are shown as respectively a tragic idealist who's not particularly transgressive (but who gets a lot of sympathy here, along with Mary, in the longest and best pieces of mundane dialogue that we've had so far), and a transgressor who's not without revolutionary ideals but has mostly used his imagination to depict people at their worst. The portrayal of de Sade is very much in line with what a late 20th century writer might have picked up about him from de Beauvoir or from the Surrealists, heavily emphasizing his anti-authoritarian and anti-conformist side, and I have mixed feelings about this.

I like that Morrison wants to convey to younger readers (this is all clearly aimed at people who aren't widely read, the style is very didactic), who might have only heard of de Sade being a big perv and an aristocrat, that he was more of a complicated figure and that his work wasn't exactly straightforward pornography; I also like that we're shown an awkward schlumpy guy rather than a suave Geoffrey Rush type. But this goes beyond reappraisal into whitewashing, as there's not the slightest hint that he's being dishonest when he insists he's not a criminal: his history of non-consensual abuse isn't explained away here, it's just not mentioned. And when the 120 Days stuff starts—due to the Invisibles having gotten stuck in a sort of fictional pocket universe where there's nothing to do but watch it play out—you can practically hear the material squeaking as Morrison stretches it to fit the philosophical framework they have in mind. I'm probably not able to get through Salò but I think that's what this is aiming for De Sade here describes his novel as partly just a vengeful personal game; but the basic idea of authority figures who are obsessed with control losing themselves in escalating brutality has an obvious connection to the idea of evil in The Invisibles, and enacting all kinds of atrocities on helpless throwaway characters to establish what an unacceptable situation we're in has always been a major component of Morrison's approach to being a horror writer, so that's how this version of the book is presented. There are extremely awkward insertions (the only appropriate word in this context) of modern dialogue about things like bar codes and nuclear weapons, just in case we didn't get the point that this is about the evils of government. When we get to the point where the novel completely falls apart, around the 30th day of Sodom,* Morrison fast-forwards to an ending in which the villains destroy the world; at least he allows the de Sade character to point out that the actual planned ending just had them returning to Paris with no consequences, but that wouldn't have worked thematically for this version, whose hell-world is summed up in one of the few added lines that I think really are good and evocative: "There is nothing beyond these walls but solid rock, extending in all directions to infinity."

* King Mob correctly observes that people generally don't finish de Sade's books. I've only skimmed, but my sense is that 120 Days starts out as more of a deliberately crafted satirical novel, then gets lost in interminable lists of briefly sketched characters and all of their sexual attributes and lurid backstories, and then becomes just a recitation of one rape-murder scenario after another until, after nearly 150,000 words and about a month in solitary confinement, de Sade is no longer capable of composing fiction but is just making notes to himself about all the additional rules and atrocities he needs to include if he ever writes the rest of the novel.

Once de Sade is dropped off in the 20th century, there's a different kind of didactic passage establishing that the modern boundary-pushers who will change the world are to be found at raves, talking about DMT and Terence McKenna and the 2012 apocalypse.* I'm not sure what to make of this stuff because sometimes Morrison seems to be poking fun at '90s-style New Age grandiosity, while other times they seem pretty committed to the idea that this particular iteration of counterculture mythology and aesthetics, unlike previous ones, is exactly correct. In one bit, a burned-out ex-hippie dude in fetish gear (whose monologue is both one of the funnier passages we've had in a while and also, as he finally admits, clearly fueled by speed) shows up so that King Mob can rag on the previous generation for wanting "to sit back in [their] seat and be taken everywhere" by people like Timothy Leary, as opposed to exploring in a more independent spirit. de Sade makes friends And yet, in the final glimpse we get of de Sade going off to "rewrite the Universe" and organize a gender-fluid group of sexual rebels, the latter are just doing whatever he says and in some cases literally sitting back in their seat and being taken everywhere. That odd combination of sincere excitement and above-it-all irony shows up pretty often in The Invisibles, a series in which we're constantly given ideas about what the big conflict really is and then told "Actually no, that's not it, that's just a distraction." The side plot in this section about Ragged Robin encountering some enemy agents who have found the head of John the Baptist is sort of an extended shaggy-dog joke on that theme, where it turns out that the villains only think the head is saying important things but really it's just babbling and the whole confrontation was totally pointless.

* Eight years after the non-event, it's hard to believe just how prevalent the 2012 stuff was earlier, at least among people who were too cool to be into the 2000 stuff. The idea that the Mayan Long Count calendar had prophetic meaning for the present day was not new, it goes back mostly to Burroughs, but McKenna did a lot to popularize it and tie it in with other esoteric beliefs.

Fanny lets it all hang out The London storyline is just barely present through all this, as Dane gets more and more confused and distressed by everything he's seeing with the Invisibles and, after barely surviving an attack by a demonic assassin (who's named Orlando for no reason that I know of), flees from the group. That happens in issue 9, a weirdly rushed segment that's the first issue that really feels like filler, except for the part where Dane reminds us that he's basically a good kid by breaking down after he's shot a guy. The other notable thing in issue 9 is a brief flashback about John-a-Dreams, an Invisible who seems like a gentler person than the rest; John is presumed dead now, after an encounter with cultists in Philadelphia who were trying to summon extradimensional entities but had trouble getting them into a sturdy enough physical form—an idea that Morrison brought up in Zenith, and will bring up again in an even more disturbing context soon. At the end of "Arcadia" it's clear that they'll need to get Dane back but otherwise there's not much clue as to where this is going, other than a reference to someone called Mister Six being important. Not surprisingly, we're not about to find out more on any of this; instead it's once again time for something completely different.

Next: a mixed bag of one-offs leads up to a heartfelt tragedy