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alibi_shopThe Invisibles #20-25 (1996)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #20 by Tommy Lee Edwards, #21 by Paul Johnson, #22-24 by Steve Yeowell & Dick Giordano, #25 by Mark Buckingham & Mark Pennington
I don't know what if any overarching structure Morrison had in mind for the series ahead of time, but by this point it's apparent that the current version of the series will be closed out soon and designated as Volume 1, and that the Phil Jimenez-illustrated Volume 2 will follow after a short break—so it's time to wrap up the current threads, reinforce the main things that Volume 1 has been about (establishing who the main team members are, the general kind of evil they're facing, and why Dane is so important), and drop in a couple of mysterious new things for us to be curious about during the break. These six issues do all of that in a way that to me feels pretty awkward about half of the time; for the other half, I'm still into it.
First we get the designated origin-of-an-Invisible issue for Boy. While I appreciate that Morrison is trying to use a different style and structure for each of these segments based on who they're about, so it makes sense that the most down-to-earth character has a relatively mundane story that's drawn like a regular cops-and-spies comic, there's still a deep laziness to this one that reinforces the impression that they've given very little thought to who this person is. Based on what we already know—Boy is from New York, she used to be a cop, she doesn't have any magic powers—and what we've already seen of the shallow and stereotype-based way The Invisibles has approached Black characters in general, it wouldn't be hard to predict nearly every part of this story. Boy is a well-meaning ordinary citizen who joined the police force out of respect for her older brother who's also a cop; her other brother is a rapper and a drug dealer (and of course is the only person who questions authority, and is 100% right about everything); she stumbles on a plot by shadowy feds who are kidnapping activists, so they kill both of her brothers; she gets recruited by the Invisibles but she doesn't care about saving the universe, she just wants revenge.
a subtle clue that we should assume Eezy is 100% right is that Boy can't think of any reply except "you are wrong!" Morrison's not an idiot, they surely could've come up with something more creative than naming a rapper "Eezy D" and describing an African-American family that's had some domestic troubles as "the Cosby Show on crack", or a framing device that wasn't just Boy reminiscing about everything during a train ride; this all comes across as half-hearted filler written by someone who's aware that their main audience is white teenagers who will appreciate a general anti-authority message and a few familiar cultural references. The laziness extends to the way this ties into the larger conspiracy plot: there's a random ranting-street-person-knows-the-real-deal scene that serves only to drop a Philip K. Dick reference, and the shadowy-feds setup is based on a somewhat confused retread of an '80s conspiracy theory about the Reagan administration setting up concentration camps, which not only twists the details of that story* in order to make it into a more generic X-Files premise but also comes off as laughably anticlimactic in context of what we've seen before. That is, there's a centuries-old satanic high-tech interdimensional conspiracy that rules the whole world and controls the very foundations of language, and they're planning to unleash literal hell on earth very soon, and as part of that plan they are... arresting and shooting some political activists. Tommy Lee Edwards's art is solid, but that's the best I can say about this.
Next there's another Dane-on-his-own chapter, again drawn by Paul Johnson and covering much of the same ground as the one in #16: Dane keeps getting betrayed and almost caught, but he saves himself with his vaguely defined magic power, while having more flashbacks of repressed memories from issues 2-4 where he met the otherworldly forces who are on the good side—expanded verbosely from the much briefer and, to me, more interesting unexplained images we got then. We do get a little more new information and cool imagery here than last time, including the idea that the spiritual ally that's visualized as a big red circle is really a satellite hiding behind the Moon (this is more P.K. Dick, from Valis and Radio Free Albemuth). And we find out in a couple lines of exposition that one of the very few sympathetic characters we've seen in the series who was just an ordinary person, Dane's history teacher Mr. Malcolm from issue 1, isn't an ordinary person but an Invisible sorcerer called Mr. Six. This is set up pretty hastily, but since the point of it is to get Dane and Boy and Six into position to save the other characters from the cliffhanger of issue 19, there's some energy to the story (and Dane's mom briefly gets a chance to be helpful).
Dane is unimpressed by an Archon The three-issue resolution to that cliffhanger brings back Steve Yeowell's art for the most sustained and satisfying depiction so far of the kind of dreamlike horror that Yeowell briefly got to establish in issue 1, and in his earlier work on Zenith. Some of this is pretty thin in terms of story, dragging out a few plot threads (King Mob and Fanny are near death and being menaced by Miss Dwyer, Jim Crow and Ragged Robin* see a lot of weird demon stuff that Jim deals with easily, Mr. Six does magic while Boy stands around being helpless) in repetitive ways, but Yeowell makes it all look great with his stripped-down linework and expressive figures, and whenever the writing isn't just filling space with repartee or with interchangeable SF-horror technobabble** there are some really strong and surprising moments. The simplest is the punchline to the setup from the previous Sir Miles scenes, where the "words become real to you" drug is used in conjunction with a "World's Greatest Dad" coffee mug to confront an unstoppable monster-woman with a vision of the world's greatest dad; Morrison wisely doesn't show us what she sees, but just gives us the perfectly timed revelation of the idea and the surprisingly touching result. Less well set up and kind of arbitrary, but also touching, is a section where Mr. Six, in order to do some emergency magic (allowing Yeowell to revel in the Dr. Strange-ish imagery he tried out in Zenith), has to sacrifice his "Mr. Malcolm" identity—which we only ever saw for a few pages, but he's been living as Malcolm for nine years—and this is presented as a real loss, made concrete by little mundane details: among the ingredients of the sacrifice are his house keys and his teacher's union card.
But the best part of #22-24, which feels the most like it's following through on the stronger ideas in the series, has to do with Dane (whom I guess I should start calling Jack now, since I think he mostly uses his Invisibles name of Jack Frost from here on), the visionary ordeal he's put through by one of the satanic Archons, and his new awareness of being some kind of cosmic spiritual figure that the other Invisibles don't understand at all.
Dane experiences nirvana—evidence that Morrison's narration of fantasy stuff works best when it's written in character The characterization of Dane/Jack has been kind of all over the place from one story arc to another, in both writing and appearance—when Jill Thompson and Paul Johnson drew him as respectively a petulant waif and a beefy slab of rage, he was written to match—and as his look returns to Yeowell's original design, Morrison returns to the wider emotional range of #1-4 and to the idea that personal life journeys might be equally important to the big evil conspiracy stuff, while keeping in touch with the character's roots as an unpretentious foul-mouthed teen. Jack goes through a series of dream challenges as the Archon tries to bamboozle him with power fantasies or despair or the illusion of premature victory, and the whole sequence has a great grasp of tone and clever use of fantasy tropes that could plausibly be true in The Invisibles but then turn out to be red herrings—at one point, an illusory future version of Jack tells him that the 2012 apocalypse will be caused by his soul being detonated as a bomb—but it's also grounded in the specificity of the character, starting with a sweet and sad scene where he's just a horny kid learning about heartbreak ("The only person you were really allowed to love was your girlfriend. It was just so great being allowed to feel that way"). (A similar emotional grounding gives weight to a throwaway scene about the Archon psychically killing a background character, where Morrison uses mundane human feelings to convey the fantasy idea of a soul being destroyed.) There's a frame story where a different future version of Jack is describing all this to an unknown friend, while they peacefully await a different apocalypse (one that'll be like whatever each person wants it to be), which works both to remind us that the entire current conflict could also be a red herring, and to give us a more conversational narrative voice that pushes against the more flowery and grandiose parts. And once he's gotten through that, he surreptitiously undoes the mortal psychic injury that King Mob inflicted on Sir Miles, a level of kindness no one else has shown, leaving us with a great shot of Miles's terrified angry eyes as Jack walks off. I love all of this stuff, and it helps to remind me that the comic isn't only about the cool violence in #17-19 or the generic paranoia in #20.
I guess it's in keeping with the structure of the series so far that after an intense multi-issue storyline there must be a relatively unsatisfying one-off chapter, and the one in #25 that closes out the first volume is one of those, but at least it's a weird one. It's a comedic thing about the three-person occult spy agency that Mr. Six works for on the side, which is basically a cross between The X-Files and the Peter Wyngarde spy series Department S and Jason King, providing an excuse to give Six and his pals a lot of retro fashion* and boozy bonhomie**, drawn by Mark Buckingham in a very goofy cartoony style that bears no resemblance to anything else in the series (nor to Buckingham's more naturalistic art in other comics of the time like Hellblazer and Miracleman).
I guess after nine years of teaching high school, the guy deserves a chance to be silly The plot doesn't make much sense since it means the government is sending powerful magical spy detectives to investigate a plot by the villains who control the government (who make only desultory attempts to stop the heroes), and I can't help being a little sad that the previous interesting version of Mr. Six barely got started before being basically killed off and replaced by a nostalgia joke character, but it does serve to introduce a creepy antagonist who will become important later: Mr. Quimper, a nattily dressed little person in a full-face mask who has some kind of mind-control power. I'm pretty sure Morrison didn't yet know what Quimper's role would be—the idea that he's sort of a small-time gangster who makes occult porn films doesn't fit at all with the later story, nor does his reliance on a gadget to make his power work—but he does have a memorable character design. The other notable thing about this issue is that it's very, very, very British... and it's the last chance for Anglophile readers to stock up on that feeling for a while, because there won't really be any of it in the next 22 issues.
Back matter update: In the letter column for #20, Morrison predicts that something cosmically significant will happen in 1996 "if Terence McKenna's loopy Timewave graph is correct, and if that big dip towards the zero axis means what I think it does"; I don't know if they later decided what it was. Then in #22, the dickish recent Morrison collaborator Mark Millar takes over and dickishly announces "GRANT MORRISON IS DEAD" before explaining that he's kidding and Morrison is just seriously ill; Morrison returns in #24 to tell the story of their hospital ordeals in gruesome detail, theorizing that their earlier storyline about King Mob's brush with death either predicted this or caused it, and you can see some of their experiences directly translated into the nightmare imagery of #22-24.
Next: guns, soldiers, guns, Jimenez, guns, hell, America
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #20 by Tommy Lee Edwards, #21 by Paul Johnson, #22-24 by Steve Yeowell & Dick Giordano, #25 by Mark Buckingham & Mark Pennington
I don't know what if any overarching structure Morrison had in mind for the series ahead of time, but by this point it's apparent that the current version of the series will be closed out soon and designated as Volume 1, and that the Phil Jimenez-illustrated Volume 2 will follow after a short break—so it's time to wrap up the current threads, reinforce the main things that Volume 1 has been about (establishing who the main team members are, the general kind of evil they're facing, and why Dane is so important), and drop in a couple of mysterious new things for us to be curious about during the break. These six issues do all of that in a way that to me feels pretty awkward about half of the time; for the other half, I'm still into it.
First we get the designated origin-of-an-Invisible issue for Boy. While I appreciate that Morrison is trying to use a different style and structure for each of these segments based on who they're about, so it makes sense that the most down-to-earth character has a relatively mundane story that's drawn like a regular cops-and-spies comic, there's still a deep laziness to this one that reinforces the impression that they've given very little thought to who this person is. Based on what we already know—Boy is from New York, she used to be a cop, she doesn't have any magic powers—and what we've already seen of the shallow and stereotype-based way The Invisibles has approached Black characters in general, it wouldn't be hard to predict nearly every part of this story. Boy is a well-meaning ordinary citizen who joined the police force out of respect for her older brother who's also a cop; her other brother is a rapper and a drug dealer (and of course is the only person who questions authority, and is 100% right about everything); she stumbles on a plot by shadowy feds who are kidnapping activists, so they kill both of her brothers; she gets recruited by the Invisibles but she doesn't care about saving the universe, she just wants revenge.
a subtle clue that we should assume Eezy is 100% right is that Boy can't think of any reply except "you are wrong!" Morrison's not an idiot, they surely could've come up with something more creative than naming a rapper "Eezy D" and describing an African-American family that's had some domestic troubles as "the Cosby Show on crack", or a framing device that wasn't just Boy reminiscing about everything during a train ride; this all comes across as half-hearted filler written by someone who's aware that their main audience is white teenagers who will appreciate a general anti-authority message and a few familiar cultural references. The laziness extends to the way this ties into the larger conspiracy plot: there's a random ranting-street-person-knows-the-real-deal scene that serves only to drop a Philip K. Dick reference, and the shadowy-feds setup is based on a somewhat confused retread of an '80s conspiracy theory about the Reagan administration setting up concentration camps, which not only twists the details of that story* in order to make it into a more generic X-Files premise but also comes off as laughably anticlimactic in context of what we've seen before. That is, there's a centuries-old satanic high-tech interdimensional conspiracy that rules the whole world and controls the very foundations of language, and they're planning to unleash literal hell on earth very soon, and as part of that plan they are... arresting and shooting some political activists. Tommy Lee Edwards's art is solid, but that's the best I can say about this.Next there's another Dane-on-his-own chapter, again drawn by Paul Johnson and covering much of the same ground as the one in #16: Dane keeps getting betrayed and almost caught, but he saves himself with his vaguely defined magic power, while having more flashbacks of repressed memories from issues 2-4 where he met the otherworldly forces who are on the good side—expanded verbosely from the much briefer and, to me, more interesting unexplained images we got then. We do get a little more new information and cool imagery here than last time, including the idea that the spiritual ally that's visualized as a big red circle is really a satellite hiding behind the Moon (this is more P.K. Dick, from Valis and Radio Free Albemuth). And we find out in a couple lines of exposition that one of the very few sympathetic characters we've seen in the series who was just an ordinary person, Dane's history teacher Mr. Malcolm from issue 1, isn't an ordinary person but an Invisible sorcerer called Mr. Six. This is set up pretty hastily, but since the point of it is to get Dane and Boy and Six into position to save the other characters from the cliffhanger of issue 19, there's some energy to the story (and Dane's mom briefly gets a chance to be helpful).
Dane is unimpressed by an Archon The three-issue resolution to that cliffhanger brings back Steve Yeowell's art for the most sustained and satisfying depiction so far of the kind of dreamlike horror that Yeowell briefly got to establish in issue 1, and in his earlier work on Zenith. Some of this is pretty thin in terms of story, dragging out a few plot threads (King Mob and Fanny are near death and being menaced by Miss Dwyer, Jim Crow and Ragged Robin* see a lot of weird demon stuff that Jim deals with easily, Mr. Six does magic while Boy stands around being helpless) in repetitive ways, but Yeowell makes it all look great with his stripped-down linework and expressive figures, and whenever the writing isn't just filling space with repartee or with interchangeable SF-horror technobabble** there are some really strong and surprising moments. The simplest is the punchline to the setup from the previous Sir Miles scenes, where the "words become real to you" drug is used in conjunction with a "World's Greatest Dad" coffee mug to confront an unstoppable monster-woman with a vision of the world's greatest dad; Morrison wisely doesn't show us what she sees, but just gives us the perfectly timed revelation of the idea and the surprisingly touching result. Less well set up and kind of arbitrary, but also touching, is a section where Mr. Six, in order to do some emergency magic (allowing Yeowell to revel in the Dr. Strange-ish imagery he tried out in Zenith), has to sacrifice his "Mr. Malcolm" identity—which we only ever saw for a few pages, but he's been living as Malcolm for nine years—and this is presented as a real loss, made concrete by little mundane details: among the ingredients of the sacrifice are his house keys and his teacher's union card.But the best part of #22-24, which feels the most like it's following through on the stronger ideas in the series, has to do with Dane (whom I guess I should start calling Jack now, since I think he mostly uses his Invisibles name of Jack Frost from here on), the visionary ordeal he's put through by one of the satanic Archons, and his new awareness of being some kind of cosmic spiritual figure that the other Invisibles don't understand at all.
Dane experiences nirvana—evidence that Morrison's narration of fantasy stuff works best when it's written in character The characterization of Dane/Jack has been kind of all over the place from one story arc to another, in both writing and appearance—when Jill Thompson and Paul Johnson drew him as respectively a petulant waif and a beefy slab of rage, he was written to match—and as his look returns to Yeowell's original design, Morrison returns to the wider emotional range of #1-4 and to the idea that personal life journeys might be equally important to the big evil conspiracy stuff, while keeping in touch with the character's roots as an unpretentious foul-mouthed teen. Jack goes through a series of dream challenges as the Archon tries to bamboozle him with power fantasies or despair or the illusion of premature victory, and the whole sequence has a great grasp of tone and clever use of fantasy tropes that could plausibly be true in The Invisibles but then turn out to be red herrings—at one point, an illusory future version of Jack tells him that the 2012 apocalypse will be caused by his soul being detonated as a bomb—but it's also grounded in the specificity of the character, starting with a sweet and sad scene where he's just a horny kid learning about heartbreak ("The only person you were really allowed to love was your girlfriend. It was just so great being allowed to feel that way"). (A similar emotional grounding gives weight to a throwaway scene about the Archon psychically killing a background character, where Morrison uses mundane human feelings to convey the fantasy idea of a soul being destroyed.) There's a frame story where a different future version of Jack is describing all this to an unknown friend, while they peacefully await a different apocalypse (one that'll be like whatever each person wants it to be), which works both to remind us that the entire current conflict could also be a red herring, and to give us a more conversational narrative voice that pushes against the more flowery and grandiose parts. And once he's gotten through that, he surreptitiously undoes the mortal psychic injury that King Mob inflicted on Sir Miles, a level of kindness no one else has shown, leaving us with a great shot of Miles's terrified angry eyes as Jack walks off. I love all of this stuff, and it helps to remind me that the comic isn't only about the cool violence in #17-19 or the generic paranoia in #20.I guess it's in keeping with the structure of the series so far that after an intense multi-issue storyline there must be a relatively unsatisfying one-off chapter, and the one in #25 that closes out the first volume is one of those, but at least it's a weird one. It's a comedic thing about the three-person occult spy agency that Mr. Six works for on the side, which is basically a cross between The X-Files and the Peter Wyngarde spy series Department S and Jason King, providing an excuse to give Six and his pals a lot of retro fashion* and boozy bonhomie**, drawn by Mark Buckingham in a very goofy cartoony style that bears no resemblance to anything else in the series (nor to Buckingham's more naturalistic art in other comics of the time like Hellblazer and Miracleman).
I guess after nine years of teaching high school, the guy deserves a chance to be silly The plot doesn't make much sense since it means the government is sending powerful magical spy detectives to investigate a plot by the villains who control the government (who make only desultory attempts to stop the heroes), and I can't help being a little sad that the previous interesting version of Mr. Six barely got started before being basically killed off and replaced by a nostalgia joke character, but it does serve to introduce a creepy antagonist who will become important later: Mr. Quimper, a nattily dressed little person in a full-face mask who has some kind of mind-control power. I'm pretty sure Morrison didn't yet know what Quimper's role would be—the idea that he's sort of a small-time gangster who makes occult porn films doesn't fit at all with the later story, nor does his reliance on a gadget to make his power work—but he does have a memorable character design. The other notable thing about this issue is that it's very, very, very British... and it's the last chance for Anglophile readers to stock up on that feeling for a while, because there won't really be any of it in the next 22 issues.Back matter update: In the letter column for #20, Morrison predicts that something cosmically significant will happen in 1996 "if Terence McKenna's loopy Timewave graph is correct, and if that big dip towards the zero axis means what I think it does"; I don't know if they later decided what it was. Then in #22, the dickish recent Morrison collaborator Mark Millar takes over and dickishly announces "GRANT MORRISON IS DEAD" before explaining that he's kidding and Morrison is just seriously ill; Morrison returns in #24 to tell the story of their hospital ordeals in gruesome detail, theorizing that their earlier storyline about King Mob's brush with death either predicted this or caused it, and you can see some of their experiences directly translated into the nightmare imagery of #22-24.
Next: guns, soldiers, guns, Jimenez, guns, hell, America
