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alibi_shopThe Invisibles #10-12 (1995)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #10 by Chris Weston, #11 by John Ridgway, #12 by Steve Parkhouse
When Morrison set out their plans in the author's note for issue 1, one of the more plausible parts was that the main plot would alternate with some single-issue stories about marginal characters. That can be a good approach in long serialized works, especially in fantasy where you can use it to explore some less-important consequence of the main premise, or see what the premise would look like through the lens of a different subgenre or a different kind of protagonist; it was often used that way to good effect in pre-Vertigo series like Swamp Thing and The Sandman. But, for whatever reason, that ended up barely happening at all in The Invisibles. This run of three standalone issues is pretty much it. So, given that they'll be the only showcases for this kind of storytelling, it's appropriate that they go in three very different directions: trying for extreme horror and social commentary and ending up with something a bit unfortunate; trying for something safer and executing it handsomely; and trying for something completely unexpected and ending up with an unforgettable and humane gut-punch of a story that's a high point of the series and really of this author's career.
Standalone stories are of course also a chance to let the regular art team take a break and bring in guest artists, and these three are the right choices for the material. In particular, Chris Weston's distinctive art for #10, "Season of Ghouls", goes a fair distance toward salvaging a thing that shouldn't have worked at all.
There's just no way around the fact that Grant Morrison was not the right person to try to do a story about American racism in which corporate creeps are using magic crack cocaine to inhabit the bodies of Black men in Chicago and use them to do horrible murders,* until an Invisibles agent/magician/superhero/celebrity rapper called Jim Crow, who uses his TV fame to lecture Black people about how they should be getting into Vodou instead of Islam, tracks the villains down and zaps them with his death ray and turns them into blackface minstrel zombies. For them to pull that off non-cringily would take a miracle, and a miracle did not occur. Besides being clumsily written it's also tonally out of place, with most of the stuff that's set in the human world coming across like hacky exploitation-horror whose connection to the rest of the series is mostly just the general premise of "evil rich people can do magic"—as if an especially unrestrained guest writer (say, Mark Millar), who was also fond of painfully ultra-'90s coinages like "cybergnosis", had stepped in with only the vaguest idea of what the series was about.
how Chicago looks to the British On the bright side, Jim Crow also spends some time in an utterly gonzo spirit world where Weston gets to run wild with surrealist imagery (and where the prose gets a lot better too), and even in the mundane scenes there's a deeply unpleasant quality to his cartooning (everyone's very precisely drawn but has a kind of sweaty and rubbery look) that makes the ickiness of the writing at least feel more deliberate.** And this story also arguably accomplishes the difficult task of making James Cameron's script for Strange Days, released in the same year, look by comparison like a subtle, humble, and culturally well-informed portrayal of a hip-hop activist.
I don't know if it was a coincidence or a formal device or a desperate leap back to steadier ground that caused the pseudo-American "Season of Ghouls" to be immediately followed by the most British type of story imaginable, but whatever the reason, the second standalone is a solid piece that immediately feels like it belongs in The Invisibles. "Royal Monsters" manages to imbue one of Morrison's "do the worst possible things to these nice people" horror setups with an unusual amount of emotion and dignity, as we get to know Sutton, a miserable deep-cover Invisibles agent working as a butler for the all-time worst aristocrats in Scotland (even counting Macbeth, whose castle they're in). His employers have been keeping, and feeding people to, a 174-year-old half-demon mutant that—thanks to some poor decisions by the royal family in the past—is the rightful Earl of Strathmore, destined to be secretly crowned King when it's time for the forces of evil to come into their full power. Sutton's voice is haunting and distinctive (it's also the first time we've had a first-person narrator, if you don't count Jim's goofy "magickal record"), and it's nice to see an acknowledgement of how unequipped most normal people would be to handle this shit: he's been stuck there for six years, out of touch with the Invisibles, unable to follow through on his mission because he's paralyzed by fear and loneliness.
all we ever see of the Earl are a couple of appendages and that horrible little piece of starlight The story also does a lot to fill out our sense of who the bad guys are. We've only really seen two inhuman characters before: the "King in Chains" that the main bad guy worshipped in issue 1, which looked sort of like one of the less interesting monsters from Doom Patrol, and Orlando who's a human-shaped demon. Ridgway's design for the Earl of Strathmore and the description of how it got this way (it's what happens when a human body can't handle what's been conjured into it) help to get across the idea that we're not just dealing with a few gross creatures, but a whole other reality trying to break through, some kind of hell dimension that's incompatible with life and sanity. But it's the main human monster, Sir Miles—seen only briefly in issue 2, but a major character from here on—who really makes the whole conspiracy feel like something connected to our world, and provides a human character focus for the other side that's a balance to Dane. 
Sir Miles, talking about a regular human person, acknowledges that this isn't totally a meritocracy Sir Miles isn't manic or mutilated or greedy or compulsively violent like some of the other villains we've seen; he's a calm and put-together old-school upper-class British conservative of the more intelligent variety, who can be horribly cruel if he feels like someone's not minding their place but is otherwise very practical. We often see a character like this portrayed in one of two ways: either he wrongly thinks that his allies are good old boys like him, or else he knows his allies are insane monsters but wrongly thinks he can use them and outwit them. But Miles is fully aware that the cause he serves is about the violation of pretty much everything; he's fine with that as long as there's a place for him in the new order, which he's willing to work hard to ensure. There's nothing terribly deep about him at this point but Morrison's dialogue is spot-on, and Miles feels like the believable person that (unfortunately) he is: this is what it looks like when competent people with standard reactionary views join up with a wildly destructive totalitarian movement like Nazism, because they've decided other people simply don't matter. That said, he's got a nice mustache.
While "Royal Monsters" is well written, and Ridgway's art is a treat that wouldn't be out of place in a classy '60s or '70s horror anthology comic,* it's also the kind of self-contained story where you can see where it's going pretty early (the main surprise is that Morrison finds a way to make something even worse happen first). Issue 12, "Best Man Fall", is something else entirely. If you haven't read it and don't know what it's about, you might want to go read it before continuing here—although I found that rereading it now, even when I know exactly where it's going, is still almost as effective.
"Best Man Fall" is sort of the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead of The Invisibles: a side story that takes some background character who had the bad luck to cross paths with the main plot and shows you things from their confused perspective. Like those two guys, we know early on that our protagonist Bobby is doomed somehow—we're getting out-of-order flashbacks from different periods as if his life is flashing before his eyes, and we see him as a soldier getting blown up in the Falklands War.
before But a bit later we see that he survived and came home to be a family man, so whatever we're leading up to, that wasn't it. And we have reason to think he can't be just anybody, because of a mysterious voice when he's a toddler that seems to be a message from Edith (an older Invisibles agent we've seen briefly before), leading us to expect some kind of follow-up which keeps not arriving; the only unusual thing in his life from there on is that he's terrified of a particular random object and doesn't know why. The things grinding Bobby down are all mundane: his big brother is a bully (having the source of trauma be a sibling and not a parent is one of many little choices that make the story feel specific), joining the army was a terrible mistake, he can't cope with his child's disability, he's become a violent man. It's not all a straight-line descent; he gets away from his brother, there's still some love in his marriage, he's not as hardened as the other guard he hangs out with at his creepy prison job, he might still turn his life around. 
after Except he's stayed at that job one day too long, and right near the end you finally see where that is—Harmony House, the facility in issue 1, where Bobby is about to be shot in the face by the horrifying apparition down the hall who is King Mob.
Of course it's not a new idea to take a sympathetic look at someone on the enemy side—who either thinks his side is correct, or, like Bobby, has virtually no idea what's really going on—but everything about this story works to convince you that it's different and important. There's the presence of death right from the start, presented simultaneously as a kid's game, an adult's fear, and something an unseen narrator is comforting us about. There's a skillful pacing that gets us used to the random flashback structure a page at a time, then starts mixing it up with shorter and shorter pieces so that we feel like we're accelerating toward some terrible event, but then rolls right through that event to leave us with some moments of peace. There's beautifully expressive art by Steve Parkhouse, who I think is mainly an SF/fantasy illustrator but makes all these normal places and people feel lived-in. And there's that inexplicable voice that Bobby never hears again,* which frames all of this as not exactly a predestined tragedy but a series of failures that could've been avoided somehow, a story that was supposed to go differently. Maybe he could've listened harder to his conscience and gotten out of that job; maybe Edith could've done better at whatever she was trying to do. It's a real loss, and it implies that there are similar losses going on all the time that aren't any less real just because they don't affect the main characters.
It also makes it harder to think of King Mob as any kind of hero, even a dickish one. KM's little quips to his victims were never cute, but the same lines now come across as really chilling. At one point a few issues ago while mowing down a whole slew of soldiers, he semi-joked that "life just gets cheaper and cheaper", and it felt like Morrison hanging a lampshade on that unease—doing the bare minimum to reassure us that they understand this is kind of fucked up, but then moving on. Similarly, we got a brief bit earlier where one of the enemy commandos gave his squad a pep talk about getting payback for various colleagues who were gruesomely killed by the Invisibles, and it registered as a gesture toward the idea that these people might matter, but only a gesture. This story isn't a gesture, it's the real thing. It may not be something the series ever recaptures in quite that way but, like the brighter moments in Bobby's life, knowing it still exists back there is worth something.
Next: Lord Fanny takes the stage
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #10 by Chris Weston, #11 by John Ridgway, #12 by Steve Parkhouse
When Morrison set out their plans in the author's note for issue 1, one of the more plausible parts was that the main plot would alternate with some single-issue stories about marginal characters. That can be a good approach in long serialized works, especially in fantasy where you can use it to explore some less-important consequence of the main premise, or see what the premise would look like through the lens of a different subgenre or a different kind of protagonist; it was often used that way to good effect in pre-Vertigo series like Swamp Thing and The Sandman. But, for whatever reason, that ended up barely happening at all in The Invisibles. This run of three standalone issues is pretty much it. So, given that they'll be the only showcases for this kind of storytelling, it's appropriate that they go in three very different directions: trying for extreme horror and social commentary and ending up with something a bit unfortunate; trying for something safer and executing it handsomely; and trying for something completely unexpected and ending up with an unforgettable and humane gut-punch of a story that's a high point of the series and really of this author's career.
Standalone stories are of course also a chance to let the regular art team take a break and bring in guest artists, and these three are the right choices for the material. In particular, Chris Weston's distinctive art for #10, "Season of Ghouls", goes a fair distance toward salvaging a thing that shouldn't have worked at all.
There's just no way around the fact that Grant Morrison was not the right person to try to do a story about American racism in which corporate creeps are using magic crack cocaine to inhabit the bodies of Black men in Chicago and use them to do horrible murders,* until an Invisibles agent/magician/superhero/celebrity rapper called Jim Crow, who uses his TV fame to lecture Black people about how they should be getting into Vodou instead of Islam, tracks the villains down and zaps them with his death ray and turns them into blackface minstrel zombies. For them to pull that off non-cringily would take a miracle, and a miracle did not occur. Besides being clumsily written it's also tonally out of place, with most of the stuff that's set in the human world coming across like hacky exploitation-horror whose connection to the rest of the series is mostly just the general premise of "evil rich people can do magic"—as if an especially unrestrained guest writer (say, Mark Millar), who was also fond of painfully ultra-'90s coinages like "cybergnosis", had stepped in with only the vaguest idea of what the series was about.
how Chicago looks to the British On the bright side, Jim Crow also spends some time in an utterly gonzo spirit world where Weston gets to run wild with surrealist imagery (and where the prose gets a lot better too), and even in the mundane scenes there's a deeply unpleasant quality to his cartooning (everyone's very precisely drawn but has a kind of sweaty and rubbery look) that makes the ickiness of the writing at least feel more deliberate.** And this story also arguably accomplishes the difficult task of making James Cameron's script for Strange Days, released in the same year, look by comparison like a subtle, humble, and culturally well-informed portrayal of a hip-hop activist.I don't know if it was a coincidence or a formal device or a desperate leap back to steadier ground that caused the pseudo-American "Season of Ghouls" to be immediately followed by the most British type of story imaginable, but whatever the reason, the second standalone is a solid piece that immediately feels like it belongs in The Invisibles. "Royal Monsters" manages to imbue one of Morrison's "do the worst possible things to these nice people" horror setups with an unusual amount of emotion and dignity, as we get to know Sutton, a miserable deep-cover Invisibles agent working as a butler for the all-time worst aristocrats in Scotland (even counting Macbeth, whose castle they're in). His employers have been keeping, and feeding people to, a 174-year-old half-demon mutant that—thanks to some poor decisions by the royal family in the past—is the rightful Earl of Strathmore, destined to be secretly crowned King when it's time for the forces of evil to come into their full power. Sutton's voice is haunting and distinctive (it's also the first time we've had a first-person narrator, if you don't count Jim's goofy "magickal record"), and it's nice to see an acknowledgement of how unequipped most normal people would be to handle this shit: he's been stuck there for six years, out of touch with the Invisibles, unable to follow through on his mission because he's paralyzed by fear and loneliness.
all we ever see of the Earl are a couple of appendages and that horrible little piece of starlight The story also does a lot to fill out our sense of who the bad guys are. We've only really seen two inhuman characters before: the "King in Chains" that the main bad guy worshipped in issue 1, which looked sort of like one of the less interesting monsters from Doom Patrol, and Orlando who's a human-shaped demon. Ridgway's design for the Earl of Strathmore and the description of how it got this way (it's what happens when a human body can't handle what's been conjured into it) help to get across the idea that we're not just dealing with a few gross creatures, but a whole other reality trying to break through, some kind of hell dimension that's incompatible with life and sanity. But it's the main human monster, Sir Miles—seen only briefly in issue 2, but a major character from here on—who really makes the whole conspiracy feel like something connected to our world, and provides a human character focus for the other side that's a balance to Dane. Sir Miles, talking about a regular human person, acknowledges that this isn't totally a meritocracy Sir Miles isn't manic or mutilated or greedy or compulsively violent like some of the other villains we've seen; he's a calm and put-together old-school upper-class British conservative of the more intelligent variety, who can be horribly cruel if he feels like someone's not minding their place but is otherwise very practical. We often see a character like this portrayed in one of two ways: either he wrongly thinks that his allies are good old boys like him, or else he knows his allies are insane monsters but wrongly thinks he can use them and outwit them. But Miles is fully aware that the cause he serves is about the violation of pretty much everything; he's fine with that as long as there's a place for him in the new order, which he's willing to work hard to ensure. There's nothing terribly deep about him at this point but Morrison's dialogue is spot-on, and Miles feels like the believable person that (unfortunately) he is: this is what it looks like when competent people with standard reactionary views join up with a wildly destructive totalitarian movement like Nazism, because they've decided other people simply don't matter. That said, he's got a nice mustache.While "Royal Monsters" is well written, and Ridgway's art is a treat that wouldn't be out of place in a classy '60s or '70s horror anthology comic,* it's also the kind of self-contained story where you can see where it's going pretty early (the main surprise is that Morrison finds a way to make something even worse happen first). Issue 12, "Best Man Fall", is something else entirely. If you haven't read it and don't know what it's about, you might want to go read it before continuing here—although I found that rereading it now, even when I know exactly where it's going, is still almost as effective.
"Best Man Fall" is sort of the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead of The Invisibles: a side story that takes some background character who had the bad luck to cross paths with the main plot and shows you things from their confused perspective. Like those two guys, we know early on that our protagonist Bobby is doomed somehow—we're getting out-of-order flashbacks from different periods as if his life is flashing before his eyes, and we see him as a soldier getting blown up in the Falklands War.
before But a bit later we see that he survived and came home to be a family man, so whatever we're leading up to, that wasn't it. And we have reason to think he can't be just anybody, because of a mysterious voice when he's a toddler that seems to be a message from Edith (an older Invisibles agent we've seen briefly before), leading us to expect some kind of follow-up which keeps not arriving; the only unusual thing in his life from there on is that he's terrified of a particular random object and doesn't know why. The things grinding Bobby down are all mundane: his big brother is a bully (having the source of trauma be a sibling and not a parent is one of many little choices that make the story feel specific), joining the army was a terrible mistake, he can't cope with his child's disability, he's become a violent man. It's not all a straight-line descent; he gets away from his brother, there's still some love in his marriage, he's not as hardened as the other guard he hangs out with at his creepy prison job, he might still turn his life around. after Except he's stayed at that job one day too long, and right near the end you finally see where that is—Harmony House, the facility in issue 1, where Bobby is about to be shot in the face by the horrifying apparition down the hall who is King Mob.Of course it's not a new idea to take a sympathetic look at someone on the enemy side—who either thinks his side is correct, or, like Bobby, has virtually no idea what's really going on—but everything about this story works to convince you that it's different and important. There's the presence of death right from the start, presented simultaneously as a kid's game, an adult's fear, and something an unseen narrator is comforting us about. There's a skillful pacing that gets us used to the random flashback structure a page at a time, then starts mixing it up with shorter and shorter pieces so that we feel like we're accelerating toward some terrible event, but then rolls right through that event to leave us with some moments of peace. There's beautifully expressive art by Steve Parkhouse, who I think is mainly an SF/fantasy illustrator but makes all these normal places and people feel lived-in. And there's that inexplicable voice that Bobby never hears again,* which frames all of this as not exactly a predestined tragedy but a series of failures that could've been avoided somehow, a story that was supposed to go differently. Maybe he could've listened harder to his conscience and gotten out of that job; maybe Edith could've done better at whatever she was trying to do. It's a real loss, and it implies that there are similar losses going on all the time that aren't any less real just because they don't affect the main characters.
It also makes it harder to think of King Mob as any kind of hero, even a dickish one. KM's little quips to his victims were never cute, but the same lines now come across as really chilling. At one point a few issues ago while mowing down a whole slew of soldiers, he semi-joked that "life just gets cheaper and cheaper", and it felt like Morrison hanging a lampshade on that unease—doing the bare minimum to reassure us that they understand this is kind of fucked up, but then moving on. Similarly, we got a brief bit earlier where one of the enemy commandos gave his squad a pep talk about getting payback for various colleagues who were gruesomely killed by the Invisibles, and it registered as a gesture toward the idea that these people might matter, but only a gesture. This story isn't a gesture, it's the real thing. It may not be something the series ever recaptures in quite that way but, like the brighter moments in Bobby's life, knowing it still exists back there is worth something.
Next: Lord Fanny takes the stage
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2020-07-22 19:34 (UTC)