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alibi_shop) wrote2020-07-30 01:27 am
alibi_shop) wrote2020-07-30 01:27 am
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The Invisibles reread, part 4
The Invisibles #13-16 (1995-1996)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #13-15 by Jill Thompson, #16 by Paul Johnson
The closest thing we've had to a deliberate structural device in this series so far, the idea of occasional one-off stories, didn't exactly happen as intended. But late in the first chapter of this next story arc, Edith Manning* gives us a new one—basically a story outline in the guise of a mystical insight—that right away feels like an obvious and good move: the team's been shaken up by finding and losing Dane, and now they're destined to each face some kind of personal ordeal, one at a time. That's a good excuse to finally give us some idea of who these people are, and even though we're already a whole year into this story, better late than never.
Lord Fanny, whose civilian name is Hilde, has the potential for all kinds of awkwardness if written badly. She's a trans woman who presents as an archetypal over-the-top glamorous sarcastic drag queen (and I'm not totally sure Morrison, at least in 1995, knows that those characteristics don't always go together); she's from Brazil and half Mexican, with the latter being mined here for mythological fantasy material in a way that did take at least a little research but still comes across as pretty exoticizing; and her usual persona is so comedically over-it-all that if she hadn't saved Dane from Orlando that one time, it'd be easy to assume she had no actual function on the team or interest in its mission. But each time I've read this part, I've been surprised at how well the character comes to life all of a sudden, and how this double story (her origin intercut with the current storyline, with a better-than-usual plot justification for doing that) hits the ground running with a momentum that the series hasn't really had since the first issue.
sadly, magic exposition dog is not a recurring character, but I like this childlike mix of goofy and creepy There are a lot of good ideas here, and I'll also praise the art in a minute, but I think the main thing that makes this all work is that it takes elements that could easily be played for coolness and style—chiefly, 1. Fanny having been entirely defined so far by being a drag queen, and 2. a super-gothic take on Mayan cosmology—and instead plays them for emotional immediacy so they're either moving or really unsettling. Fanny herself immediately feels as friendly and candid as most of the other heroes aren't, with her mannerisms and rigorous fashion now coming across as playful instead of distancing (she's so unlike the paranoid King Mob that in a time of crisis she'll just get very high and go out looking for love*). There's trauma in her past, but this isn't a haunted basket case or a jaded hardass.
a Jill Thompson panel I've always liked, where the scary thing is scarier because you can just barely see it off in the distance, brightly lit On the unsettling side, it turns out the one weird thing we've seen Fanny do, summoning the god of death to banish Orlando in issue 8, wasn't just a standard "magic character is on good terms with ethnically-appropriate forces, as dictated by plot needs and author's interests/research" type deal (which "Jim Crow" in #10 really felt like to me); nor was it the kind of Buffy-esque gag where you bring in some massive cosmic thing but then blow it off as a tacky annoyance, which is how Fanny described it at the time. Instead, it had serious consequences; she's in touch with huge powers that she can barely negotiate with, and they're calling in her debts. Magic is depicted here as something that'll transform you and probably destroy you, in ways that feel totally unfair: the flashbacks here show Hilde as a child flashing forward from her initiation ordeal, watching these future events that the gods are already pissed off about. Even though this is framed as inescapable destiny, it unfolds in a pretty suspenseful way as we see present-day Fanny being set up for doom in a mundane form, from an enemy agent who knows nothing about any of this stuff and thinks he's just gotten lucky.
I fully approve of Grant Morrison liking cats a lot and having characters talk about cats; I also like that Miles has no patience for psychological anything, even though he knows the supernatural is real There isn't a whole lot to that guy, Brodie, beyond some smarmy sadism, an appreciation of cats, and a slightly better sense of humor than Sir Miles has, but the way he goes out is memorable—and the fight scene that leads up to it, a rare one where you actually see people getting tired, is one of many things Jill Thompson manages to adapt well into her unusual style.* Thompson's art is just right for this: her figure drawing is anti-streamlined, making everyone look both a little softer and a little more uncomfortable than most artists in this genre** would draw them; it's almost the opposite of what you might expect for a story about the most put-together superhero ever (especially one whose power derives from one of the most graphic-design-intensive religions ever), but it allows for some subtle acting that lets people's faces tell the story, and its sunny and casually-hatched look can segue easily into darker and weirder areas.
Some pretty gross violence happens and we see some otherworldly stuff—which, thanks to the artist, feels appropriately tactile and non-shiny—but one of the strongest moments for me is a quiet one, when Mictlantecuhtli tells young Hilde that her time's up. An adult telling a kid flat-out that they're definitely about to die is bad enough (it always gets me when Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz hears this from the Wicked Witch, and instantly breaks down), and the lord of the dead is sort of the ultimate adult, but the way he says it adds insult to injury: "You never truly lived and now you must die." The series gives us a lot of different ideas of the worst thing you could imagine happening to you, or to the world, but this is one that it comes back to a few times: that the worst thing is to not have lived fully enough or, like Bobby in #12, to have failed to become whatever you had the potential to be. Of course we know it's not all over for Hilde then after all, since that's a flashback... but since we've heard a lot in the story about how past and future are all one, that's not necessarily much of a relief: Mictlantecuhtli could be saying that line to you at any moment, or maybe he always is, and you'll always feel like a kid who's not ready. Morrison is capable of being subtle when they want to be, and here they pull it off well, never spelling out why this should be so deeply upsetting but making the point clear through the story's relationship with time.
After #15 leaves off on a massive cliffhanger, we get another Dane-in-transit chapter that's a lot more eventful than the one we got in #9 but still somehow feels like filler—I've always found it hard to remember anything from this issue, even though we get a flashback/vision of Dane being abducted by psychedelic aliens and then a big confrontation with Sir Miles in which Dane finally unleashes the violent psychic powers that of course he has (Miles has some too, which hasn't really been set up before but I guess it makes sense that you can't get far in his organization if you're totally un-magic). It's just clunkily written, giving Dane a bunch of repetitive fuck-you moments and Miles a very generic "you're special and you should join us" speech... and I like Paul Johnson sometimes, but his art is an awkward fit for this. Still, it's easier to feel OK about an unsatisfying interlude like this when the story's been hitting so hard recently; it seems likely that some more dramatic things will be going down soon.
Back matter update: After I mentioned that I'd like to revisit some of the letter column/author's note stuff but I didn't have the original comics any more, Chris Brandt very kindly dug up his collection and sent me photos of the back pages. (Plug: watch Chris's latest documentary, it's good.) Reading this stuff again now is, as I expected, a trip. There's a fair amount of what you'd expect from this early paper version of a tiny online message board: some general praise and questions, a few antagonistic letters about how Morrison is pretentious or shouldn't use drugs or whatever (when one guy accuses them of being a poser who talks shit, they reply simply that they enjoy posing and talking shit), some interminable ramblings by people who were really into being letterhacks, and the occasional person trying to outdo Morrison in terms of anarchist fervor or stylish incoherence. Our author not surprisingly continues to say things that may be a little grandiose or overconfident about how the comic definitely has a plan and will reveal the meaning of life, but it's sort of refreshing to see them skip past irony and subtext and just come right out and say for instance that they're against political involvement of any kind, or that they totally believe in microwave-based mind control. Anyway, there's a special letter-column moment in #16 that I'll get to in the next installment; for now, the main thing is that it's obvious a subset of readers who'd been excited about the first issue had lost interest at some point during "Arcadia." If you're curious to see this stuff in detail, it turns out someone did in fact put all the letters in text form online here; I found that because, after Chris gave me the photos, I looked up one of the letter writers and found them mentioned on yet another ambitious Invisibles blog project that didn't get very far (I hope there isn't some kind of curse about that).
Next: Phil Jimenez heralds an attack of coolness
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #13-15 by Jill Thompson, #16 by Paul Johnson
The closest thing we've had to a deliberate structural device in this series so far, the idea of occasional one-off stories, didn't exactly happen as intended. But late in the first chapter of this next story arc, Edith Manning* gives us a new one—basically a story outline in the guise of a mystical insight—that right away feels like an obvious and good move: the team's been shaken up by finding and losing Dane, and now they're destined to each face some kind of personal ordeal, one at a time. That's a good excuse to finally give us some idea of who these people are, and even though we're already a whole year into this story, better late than never.
Lord Fanny, whose civilian name is Hilde, has the potential for all kinds of awkwardness if written badly. She's a trans woman who presents as an archetypal over-the-top glamorous sarcastic drag queen (and I'm not totally sure Morrison, at least in 1995, knows that those characteristics don't always go together); she's from Brazil and half Mexican, with the latter being mined here for mythological fantasy material in a way that did take at least a little research but still comes across as pretty exoticizing; and her usual persona is so comedically over-it-all that if she hadn't saved Dane from Orlando that one time, it'd be easy to assume she had no actual function on the team or interest in its mission. But each time I've read this part, I've been surprised at how well the character comes to life all of a sudden, and how this double story (her origin intercut with the current storyline, with a better-than-usual plot justification for doing that) hits the ground running with a momentum that the series hasn't really had since the first issue.
sadly, magic exposition dog is not a recurring character, but I like this childlike mix of goofy and creepy There are a lot of good ideas here, and I'll also praise the art in a minute, but I think the main thing that makes this all work is that it takes elements that could easily be played for coolness and style—chiefly, 1. Fanny having been entirely defined so far by being a drag queen, and 2. a super-gothic take on Mayan cosmology—and instead plays them for emotional immediacy so they're either moving or really unsettling. Fanny herself immediately feels as friendly and candid as most of the other heroes aren't, with her mannerisms and rigorous fashion now coming across as playful instead of distancing (she's so unlike the paranoid King Mob that in a time of crisis she'll just get very high and go out looking for love*). There's trauma in her past, but this isn't a haunted basket case or a jaded hardass. a Jill Thompson panel I've always liked, where the scary thing is scarier because you can just barely see it off in the distance, brightly lit On the unsettling side, it turns out the one weird thing we've seen Fanny do, summoning the god of death to banish Orlando in issue 8, wasn't just a standard "magic character is on good terms with ethnically-appropriate forces, as dictated by plot needs and author's interests/research" type deal (which "Jim Crow" in #10 really felt like to me); nor was it the kind of Buffy-esque gag where you bring in some massive cosmic thing but then blow it off as a tacky annoyance, which is how Fanny described it at the time. Instead, it had serious consequences; she's in touch with huge powers that she can barely negotiate with, and they're calling in her debts. Magic is depicted here as something that'll transform you and probably destroy you, in ways that feel totally unfair: the flashbacks here show Hilde as a child flashing forward from her initiation ordeal, watching these future events that the gods are already pissed off about. Even though this is framed as inescapable destiny, it unfolds in a pretty suspenseful way as we see present-day Fanny being set up for doom in a mundane form, from an enemy agent who knows nothing about any of this stuff and thinks he's just gotten lucky. I fully approve of Grant Morrison liking cats a lot and having characters talk about cats; I also like that Miles has no patience for psychological anything, even though he knows the supernatural is real There isn't a whole lot to that guy, Brodie, beyond some smarmy sadism, an appreciation of cats, and a slightly better sense of humor than Sir Miles has, but the way he goes out is memorable—and the fight scene that leads up to it, a rare one where you actually see people getting tired, is one of many things Jill Thompson manages to adapt well into her unusual style.* Thompson's art is just right for this: her figure drawing is anti-streamlined, making everyone look both a little softer and a little more uncomfortable than most artists in this genre** would draw them; it's almost the opposite of what you might expect for a story about the most put-together superhero ever (especially one whose power derives from one of the most graphic-design-intensive religions ever), but it allows for some subtle acting that lets people's faces tell the story, and its sunny and casually-hatched look can segue easily into darker and weirder areas.Some pretty gross violence happens and we see some otherworldly stuff—which, thanks to the artist, feels appropriately tactile and non-shiny—but one of the strongest moments for me is a quiet one, when Mictlantecuhtli tells young Hilde that her time's up. An adult telling a kid flat-out that they're definitely about to die is bad enough (it always gets me when Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz hears this from the Wicked Witch, and instantly breaks down), and the lord of the dead is sort of the ultimate adult, but the way he says it adds insult to injury: "You never truly lived and now you must die." The series gives us a lot of different ideas of the worst thing you could imagine happening to you, or to the world, but this is one that it comes back to a few times: that the worst thing is to not have lived fully enough or, like Bobby in #12, to have failed to become whatever you had the potential to be. Of course we know it's not all over for Hilde then after all, since that's a flashback... but since we've heard a lot in the story about how past and future are all one, that's not necessarily much of a relief: Mictlantecuhtli could be saying that line to you at any moment, or maybe he always is, and you'll always feel like a kid who's not ready. Morrison is capable of being subtle when they want to be, and here they pull it off well, never spelling out why this should be so deeply upsetting but making the point clear through the story's relationship with time.
After #15 leaves off on a massive cliffhanger, we get another Dane-in-transit chapter that's a lot more eventful than the one we got in #9 but still somehow feels like filler—I've always found it hard to remember anything from this issue, even though we get a flashback/vision of Dane being abducted by psychedelic aliens and then a big confrontation with Sir Miles in which Dane finally unleashes the violent psychic powers that of course he has (Miles has some too, which hasn't really been set up before but I guess it makes sense that you can't get far in his organization if you're totally un-magic). It's just clunkily written, giving Dane a bunch of repetitive fuck-you moments and Miles a very generic "you're special and you should join us" speech... and I like Paul Johnson sometimes, but his art is an awkward fit for this. Still, it's easier to feel OK about an unsatisfying interlude like this when the story's been hitting so hard recently; it seems likely that some more dramatic things will be going down soon.
Back matter update: After I mentioned that I'd like to revisit some of the letter column/author's note stuff but I didn't have the original comics any more, Chris Brandt very kindly dug up his collection and sent me photos of the back pages. (Plug: watch Chris's latest documentary, it's good.) Reading this stuff again now is, as I expected, a trip. There's a fair amount of what you'd expect from this early paper version of a tiny online message board: some general praise and questions, a few antagonistic letters about how Morrison is pretentious or shouldn't use drugs or whatever (when one guy accuses them of being a poser who talks shit, they reply simply that they enjoy posing and talking shit), some interminable ramblings by people who were really into being letterhacks, and the occasional person trying to outdo Morrison in terms of anarchist fervor or stylish incoherence. Our author not surprisingly continues to say things that may be a little grandiose or overconfident about how the comic definitely has a plan and will reveal the meaning of life, but it's sort of refreshing to see them skip past irony and subtext and just come right out and say for instance that they're against political involvement of any kind, or that they totally believe in microwave-based mind control. Anyway, there's a special letter-column moment in #16 that I'll get to in the next installment; for now, the main thing is that it's obvious a subset of readers who'd been excited about the first issue had lost interest at some point during "Arcadia." If you're curious to see this stuff in detail, it turns out someone did in fact put all the letters in text form online here; I found that because, after Chris gave me the photos, I looked up one of the letter writers and found them mentioned on yet another ambitious Invisibles blog project that didn't get very far (I hope there isn't some kind of curse about that).
Next: Phil Jimenez heralds an attack of coolness
no subject
In Edith's speech that sets up the idea that each person in the team will have their own personal ordeal (and therefore their own story arc showing us their origins), she mentions that Invisibles teams traditionally have a classical-elements-based structure: air/fire/water/earth, plus Dane being a wild card of "spirit". I don't think we ever find out who makes up these rules (the larger Invisibles organization is pretty far offstage in the series, exposition like this is usually brought in by someone like Edith or King Mob who just knows everything somehow)... but this one has a sort of comics-inside-joke aspect: it's been a very popular theory about the Fantastic Four since pretty much forever. I'm not sure Lee or Kirby ever actually said anything about whether that idea was intentional, but basically if you bring up the Fantastic Four, someone will eventually pop up to say that of course they're the elements and that's why there are four of them and everyone knows that.