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alibi_shopThe Invisibles #17-19 (1996)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Phil Jimenez and John Stokes
Even if you hadn't read any of the source material that "Gideon Stargrave" is a riff on, nor the author's note in the letters column where they tell you what that is, it'd be pretty obvious that the zany thriller nonsense that opens #17 and keeps recurring at intervals is not a jarring new subplot in the series, but an homage to or parody of something; a key quality of the style it's borrowing is that it very loudly claims to be a story, but clearly isn't one. There are several reasons it makes sense to throw in that kind of thing at this point. One (which I think any cartoonist can identify with) is that it's an excuse for Morrison to recycle some of their juvenilia and make it look really cool this time, like it was supposed to. Another is the in-story excuse: our critically injured dickhead hero King Mob (real name Gideon Starorzewski*) actually wrote this stuff, and has embedded it in his head in order to confuse enemy mind-readers. But there's also a practical aspect: you can't hire Phil Jimenez and not give him as much awesome shit to draw as possible.
Stargrave finally gets the pinup he couldn't quite afford in 1978 Jimenez is often described as following in the footsteps of George Pérez, and it's easy to see the similarity in terms of a glossy '80s obsessively-rendered maximalism where every wrinkle is perfect, every limb is long, and every motion seems to be auditioning for its own splash page. I don't mean that in a bad way at all, there's a ton of fun and skill in it; it's just pretty far away from the feeling that this series has had so far, at its best, which I would call more haunted and more messy. The sense I get from the limited amount I've seen of their work is that Jimenez is a bit weirder than Pérez, and you can see that already in these Stargrave bits whenever the poppy spy-action farrago starts flirting with fantasy-horror imagery—leading up to a wild bravura layout in #19, when the Stargrave material breaks down and we get a more accurate view into King Mob's memories, drawn sort of like if Moebius did a giant Where's Waldo panel, which hints at some of the more ambitious stuff Jimenez will do later in the series. 
this is about a quarter of that panel I mentioned But he's also here to just deliver simple pleasures in a shiny way, something that The Invisibles is taking a sharp turn toward at this point in some combination of an artistic decision and a practical one.
This is as good a time as any to mention that thing that's mentioned nearly every time someone writes an article about The Invisibles or Grant Morrison in general. Imagine that you've been following this comic and feeling a bit lost and frustrated at times, but still being into it, and getting a bit worried (due to hints in the letter column) that maybe other people are not so into it, and that this might be one of those things the author will end up saying sad and angry things about—just like they said earlier about Doom Patrol. Now, along comes #16, which is a disappointing fill-in issue... but it has a special author's note in the letter column that addresses exactly that worry. It addresses it by asking the readers to stare at a magic symbol Morrison has drawn there and charge it with psychic energy, to make The Invisibles gain popularity and not be cancelled, by—all around the world—masturbating. In case a 21st century reader is wondering at this point what's the big deal because that's how every promotional message for everything is now, keep in mind that the '90s were a different time when this was not such a common approach.
your mission, should you choose to accept it (and if you don't, it's because you feel threatened) Part of what's startling about this in context is that while the author's persona in these columns has usually had a carefree tipsy vibe, here they're dead serious and didactic in a somewhat defensive way, deploying the kind of "there's nothing supernatural about such things, they're just a kind of practical science that happens to be exactly like the supernatural" rhetoric that I've never found any more convincing or necessary than "there's nothing religious about this, it's just a philosophical practice of making your life better by saying prayers to God in church"—and I say this as a somewhat superstitious and credulous person who can't at all rule out that this was an effective plan; I just can't help also seeing it as manic bullshit improv coming from mundane desperation. It was pretty clear that the series was in trouble due to having artistically fucked around beyond many readers' patience, and it's not hard to picture Morrison feeling a chilly editorial breath on their neck. They were not in fact going to trust everything to a collective sex spell: the series was going to take a deliberate turn toward more familiar forms of entertainment, with flashier action and more consistency of style (which Jimenez was going to be central to, both now and in the upcoming year), and since comics take time to make, that all must have been already in the works for months. But they might as well do a collective sex spell too, because why not, and also because wild ultimatums might make it easier to accept a big change; that's how I picture it, anyway.
This also lined up nicely with the idea of individual ordeals for the main characters, since if you're going to have an attack of coolness that redirects the story, it makes sense for it to happen when King Mob is in the spotlight. He's the superficially coolest character, he's also apparently a massive nerd or nerd-jock who's pretty far up his own ass and, in case we didn't recognize the fashion sense and the hairstyle, his pen name as a horror novelist was Kirk Morrison. He works as an avatar for our author and by extension the comic: they'll go through some trouble and abasement at the hands of The Man (in this case Sir Miles), but then bounce back twice as badass with the help of their magic and their friends and their extreme self-confidence—plus some good vibes from all the readers. That leads to the other semi-famous esoteric thing about this part of the comic, which is that Grant Morrison fell seriously ill for months in a way that slightly parallelled what happens to Gideon, and later became convinced (as I might have been too in that situation, so this seems sincere to me) that they'd brought on some kind of curse by putting their fictional alter ego through all that. If so, it's a shame they went to such trouble, because to me Gideon's struggles are the least interesting part of the story: we're fairly sure he won't die or give in, the villains have already told us they won't actually kill or maim him*, and it's kind of marking time till the arbitrary moment when we can finally get his life story and then see him win. It's nice to finally get that story; it's also nothing particularly surprising given how he's been portrayed so far, but it's narrated in an energetic pulpy style and it's a lot more involving than all the preceding panels of our guy continuing to sweat and bleed, which are kind of negated anyway by finding out that he's actually had the upper hand the whole time.
But there's certainly nothing boring about this, and the story energy matches Jimenez's art in terms of conveying that semi-awesome things are happening fast and often. We still don't really know how Gideon became such a kick-ass psychic assassin—other than "he really wanted to, and he was rich"—but we do see enough stylish origin montage moments to understand why he'd be so incredibly full of himself (he's the only white man allowed by Aboriginal Australian magicians to see what's inside Ayers Rock, although, in one of those arrogant flourishes that I'm not sure if Morrison thinks is cool or not, he actually declares that he's not a white man because he has such a great totem animal).
one of the cosmic monsters comes through in a very Zenith-style scene We get some good Sir Miles moments, clarifying that he's more vulnerable than we thought and isn't quite as comprehensively fucked up as the higher-level villains like Miss Dwyer who are "modified" to withstand the presence of their demonic masters. And there's some "aha, this twist was set up a few pages earlier!" suspense of a kind that the series hasn't really done before (the goofy coffee mug is another such thing, but the payoff for that will be a few issues later) which is also the first scene we've had of Fanny doing smaller-scale magic stuff in a deliberate way. It's all pretty cool.
Less effective for me is the philosophical content, namely a long rant by Sir Miles about how his side controls everything. We'll get quite a few variations throughout the series on "such-and-such aspect of human life is really a tool of the conspiracy" (in this case it's the alphabet), and I think Morrison intends that stuff to be more of a thematic flavor than a literal plot point, i.e. it's not so much supposed to make sense as just to make you Question Everything, but when you put it all together it suggests a hilariously over-egged and redundant evil plan where they've got the alphabet and the whole education system and the whole idea of cities and time travel and (here I'm getting ahead in the story a little) entities with unstoppable mind-control powers and "4-D armor" and bad things in vaccines, all on their side, any one or two of which would be a lot, and yet it's only just now that there's a threat of them totally winning. Miles also has a side-rant about how 1984 is bullshit because it's "political pornography drooled over by those who talk of freedom yet thrill to depictions of absolute control"—which to me is a bit weird because 1. nothing else he's saying is particularly out of line with the grandiose totalitarian monologues in 1984, so it's unclear what distinction he's trying to make unless it's just "our brainwashing methods are cooler than theirs", and 2. a major component of The Invisibles is, if not "political pornography", at least political-ish horror vignettes geared toward giving freedom-loving readers a particular kind of queasy thrill via depictions of absolute control.
The other unfortunate thing* is that even though Fanny gets to do some cool stuff and kill a guy, this is all a crappy deal for her story-wise, since, in order to establish that she has all this easily-deployable magic, Morrison has to explain why she couldn't have used it earlier and the explanation is just that she was doing too many drugs—so all of the dangers and disasters in the last four or five issues were totally her fault. Gideon doesn't seem upset about it though, and the friendship between them is always nicely written and touching, something that feels like Morrison writing more from personal experience than from their big ideas of what the characters represent.
Back matter notes: There's always a delay of a few months between the appearance of something in the comic or an author's note and the letters reacting to it, so there wasn't any comment on the sigil project in #16 until three issues later. We'll never know how many people followed through, but, of the letters that were printed, one person said he planned to do it; one ignored it; two made a joke out of it; and one person said "You must be desperate", advised Morrison instead to try harder to "write a better comic", and added that he'd been praying to God to help Morrison do so. The response to that last one was much more polite than you might expect.
Next: a mundane origin, Yeowell's horrors, Dane's apotheosis, and some fancy clothes
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Phil Jimenez and John Stokes
Even if you hadn't read any of the source material that "Gideon Stargrave" is a riff on, nor the author's note in the letters column where they tell you what that is, it'd be pretty obvious that the zany thriller nonsense that opens #17 and keeps recurring at intervals is not a jarring new subplot in the series, but an homage to or parody of something; a key quality of the style it's borrowing is that it very loudly claims to be a story, but clearly isn't one. There are several reasons it makes sense to throw in that kind of thing at this point. One (which I think any cartoonist can identify with) is that it's an excuse for Morrison to recycle some of their juvenilia and make it look really cool this time, like it was supposed to. Another is the in-story excuse: our critically injured dickhead hero King Mob (real name Gideon Starorzewski*) actually wrote this stuff, and has embedded it in his head in order to confuse enemy mind-readers. But there's also a practical aspect: you can't hire Phil Jimenez and not give him as much awesome shit to draw as possible.
Stargrave finally gets the pinup he couldn't quite afford in 1978 Jimenez is often described as following in the footsteps of George Pérez, and it's easy to see the similarity in terms of a glossy '80s obsessively-rendered maximalism where every wrinkle is perfect, every limb is long, and every motion seems to be auditioning for its own splash page. I don't mean that in a bad way at all, there's a ton of fun and skill in it; it's just pretty far away from the feeling that this series has had so far, at its best, which I would call more haunted and more messy. The sense I get from the limited amount I've seen of their work is that Jimenez is a bit weirder than Pérez, and you can see that already in these Stargrave bits whenever the poppy spy-action farrago starts flirting with fantasy-horror imagery—leading up to a wild bravura layout in #19, when the Stargrave material breaks down and we get a more accurate view into King Mob's memories, drawn sort of like if Moebius did a giant Where's Waldo panel, which hints at some of the more ambitious stuff Jimenez will do later in the series. this is about a quarter of that panel I mentioned But he's also here to just deliver simple pleasures in a shiny way, something that The Invisibles is taking a sharp turn toward at this point in some combination of an artistic decision and a practical one.This is as good a time as any to mention that thing that's mentioned nearly every time someone writes an article about The Invisibles or Grant Morrison in general. Imagine that you've been following this comic and feeling a bit lost and frustrated at times, but still being into it, and getting a bit worried (due to hints in the letter column) that maybe other people are not so into it, and that this might be one of those things the author will end up saying sad and angry things about—just like they said earlier about Doom Patrol. Now, along comes #16, which is a disappointing fill-in issue... but it has a special author's note in the letter column that addresses exactly that worry. It addresses it by asking the readers to stare at a magic symbol Morrison has drawn there and charge it with psychic energy, to make The Invisibles gain popularity and not be cancelled, by—all around the world—masturbating. In case a 21st century reader is wondering at this point what's the big deal because that's how every promotional message for everything is now, keep in mind that the '90s were a different time when this was not such a common approach.
your mission, should you choose to accept it (and if you don't, it's because you feel threatened) Part of what's startling about this in context is that while the author's persona in these columns has usually had a carefree tipsy vibe, here they're dead serious and didactic in a somewhat defensive way, deploying the kind of "there's nothing supernatural about such things, they're just a kind of practical science that happens to be exactly like the supernatural" rhetoric that I've never found any more convincing or necessary than "there's nothing religious about this, it's just a philosophical practice of making your life better by saying prayers to God in church"—and I say this as a somewhat superstitious and credulous person who can't at all rule out that this was an effective plan; I just can't help also seeing it as manic bullshit improv coming from mundane desperation. It was pretty clear that the series was in trouble due to having artistically fucked around beyond many readers' patience, and it's not hard to picture Morrison feeling a chilly editorial breath on their neck. They were not in fact going to trust everything to a collective sex spell: the series was going to take a deliberate turn toward more familiar forms of entertainment, with flashier action and more consistency of style (which Jimenez was going to be central to, both now and in the upcoming year), and since comics take time to make, that all must have been already in the works for months. But they might as well do a collective sex spell too, because why not, and also because wild ultimatums might make it easier to accept a big change; that's how I picture it, anyway.This also lined up nicely with the idea of individual ordeals for the main characters, since if you're going to have an attack of coolness that redirects the story, it makes sense for it to happen when King Mob is in the spotlight. He's the superficially coolest character, he's also apparently a massive nerd or nerd-jock who's pretty far up his own ass and, in case we didn't recognize the fashion sense and the hairstyle, his pen name as a horror novelist was Kirk Morrison. He works as an avatar for our author and by extension the comic: they'll go through some trouble and abasement at the hands of The Man (in this case Sir Miles), but then bounce back twice as badass with the help of their magic and their friends and their extreme self-confidence—plus some good vibes from all the readers. That leads to the other semi-famous esoteric thing about this part of the comic, which is that Grant Morrison fell seriously ill for months in a way that slightly parallelled what happens to Gideon, and later became convinced (as I might have been too in that situation, so this seems sincere to me) that they'd brought on some kind of curse by putting their fictional alter ego through all that. If so, it's a shame they went to such trouble, because to me Gideon's struggles are the least interesting part of the story: we're fairly sure he won't die or give in, the villains have already told us they won't actually kill or maim him*, and it's kind of marking time till the arbitrary moment when we can finally get his life story and then see him win. It's nice to finally get that story; it's also nothing particularly surprising given how he's been portrayed so far, but it's narrated in an energetic pulpy style and it's a lot more involving than all the preceding panels of our guy continuing to sweat and bleed, which are kind of negated anyway by finding out that he's actually had the upper hand the whole time.
But there's certainly nothing boring about this, and the story energy matches Jimenez's art in terms of conveying that semi-awesome things are happening fast and often. We still don't really know how Gideon became such a kick-ass psychic assassin—other than "he really wanted to, and he was rich"—but we do see enough stylish origin montage moments to understand why he'd be so incredibly full of himself (he's the only white man allowed by Aboriginal Australian magicians to see what's inside Ayers Rock, although, in one of those arrogant flourishes that I'm not sure if Morrison thinks is cool or not, he actually declares that he's not a white man because he has such a great totem animal).
one of the cosmic monsters comes through in a very Zenith-style scene We get some good Sir Miles moments, clarifying that he's more vulnerable than we thought and isn't quite as comprehensively fucked up as the higher-level villains like Miss Dwyer who are "modified" to withstand the presence of their demonic masters. And there's some "aha, this twist was set up a few pages earlier!" suspense of a kind that the series hasn't really done before (the goofy coffee mug is another such thing, but the payoff for that will be a few issues later) which is also the first scene we've had of Fanny doing smaller-scale magic stuff in a deliberate way. It's all pretty cool.Less effective for me is the philosophical content, namely a long rant by Sir Miles about how his side controls everything. We'll get quite a few variations throughout the series on "such-and-such aspect of human life is really a tool of the conspiracy" (in this case it's the alphabet), and I think Morrison intends that stuff to be more of a thematic flavor than a literal plot point, i.e. it's not so much supposed to make sense as just to make you Question Everything, but when you put it all together it suggests a hilariously over-egged and redundant evil plan where they've got the alphabet and the whole education system and the whole idea of cities and time travel and (here I'm getting ahead in the story a little) entities with unstoppable mind-control powers and "4-D armor" and bad things in vaccines, all on their side, any one or two of which would be a lot, and yet it's only just now that there's a threat of them totally winning. Miles also has a side-rant about how 1984 is bullshit because it's "political pornography drooled over by those who talk of freedom yet thrill to depictions of absolute control"—which to me is a bit weird because 1. nothing else he's saying is particularly out of line with the grandiose totalitarian monologues in 1984, so it's unclear what distinction he's trying to make unless it's just "our brainwashing methods are cooler than theirs", and 2. a major component of The Invisibles is, if not "political pornography", at least political-ish horror vignettes geared toward giving freedom-loving readers a particular kind of queasy thrill via depictions of absolute control.
The other unfortunate thing* is that even though Fanny gets to do some cool stuff and kill a guy, this is all a crappy deal for her story-wise, since, in order to establish that she has all this easily-deployable magic, Morrison has to explain why she couldn't have used it earlier and the explanation is just that she was doing too many drugs—so all of the dangers and disasters in the last four or five issues were totally her fault. Gideon doesn't seem upset about it though, and the friendship between them is always nicely written and touching, something that feels like Morrison writing more from personal experience than from their big ideas of what the characters represent.
Back matter notes: There's always a delay of a few months between the appearance of something in the comic or an author's note and the letters reacting to it, so there wasn't any comment on the sigil project in #16 until three issues later. We'll never know how many people followed through, but, of the letters that were printed, one person said he planned to do it; one ignored it; two made a joke out of it; and one person said "You must be desperate", advised Morrison instead to try harder to "write a better comic", and added that he'd been praying to God to help Morrison do so. The response to that last one was much more polite than you might expect.
Next: a mundane origin, Yeowell's horrors, Dane's apotheosis, and some fancy clothes
no subject
2020-08-17 03:20 (UTC)After having gotten through those four Michael Moorcock novels about Jerry Cornelius last month, I felt like I didn't need to read any more Moorcock for a while. However—and now I can't find the source for this, so maybe I imagined it—I remembered having seen that Moorcock had a more specific complaint about Grant Morrison straight-up plagiarizing some prose from a different book, which (as I remembered it) was The Great Rock and Roll Swindle.
The Great Rock and Roll Swindle was a weird project that was supposed to be a loose novelization of or companion piece to the movie of the same name that's about the Sex Pistols—except Moorcock was very up-front about not giving a shit about the Sex Pistols or the movie, so he just wrote (in about two weeks) some plotless vignettes about the supporting characters from his Cornelius stuff, and threw in a few references to Malcolm McLaren and some scenes with Steve Jones. It's pretty obscure so if there was something in there, it was plausible that no one had bothered to find it.
But I had run across a copy of that book, and I thought what the hell—if all I want is to check on this alleged plagiarism, it's not as if I have to actually read it. That is: I have a weird relationship with printed text which I'm not sure if it qualifies as some kind of hyperlexia or not, but basically while I can't read all that fast for understanding, I can speed-read at a ridiculous rate if I just want to find a particular kind of thing. What I mainly did with that as a kid was to blast through horror/thriller paperbacks, while standing around for a few minutes in a bookstore, to find all the gruesome and/or dirty parts. It's kind of exhausting and unpleasant to do, but fairly reliable, and having read through The Invisibles a fair number of times I was pretty sure that if any not-totally-generic text that I had seen in The Invisibles was in this book, it would jump out at me.
So... the punchline is of course that after cramming all of this medium-short novel-ish thing into my eyes at ludicrous speed—and catching just enough of the prose on a conscious level to recognize that it was very much like my least favorite aspects of the Cornelius books, and that I didn't enjoy it at all—I did not notice a single thing that I'd ever seen in The Invisibles. Either Moorcock was wrong, or my mutant power failed me (not impossible), or I had just misremembered what book he was talking about (even less impossible, although I can't think how I even knew about this book otherwise).
Good thing I'm not getting paid for this!