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alibi_shopThe Invisibles volume 2 #1-4 (1997)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Phil Jimenez & John Stokes
When I mentioned the three-issue segment in volume 1 that introduced all the extra violence and shiny things and Phil Jimenez art, I said that even though that wasn't my favorite flavor of The Invisibles, there wasn't anything boring about it. That's no longer the case. I know it was probably necessary to slow down a lot in the storytelling department, and do some recaps and reintroductions to give the hoped-for new readers an easy start... but wow, some of this stuff is lazy to the point that it drags even when things are blowing up.
The plot, presented in big chunks of exposition that alternate with big action sequences, is now pretty easy to understand. The bad guys have a huge underground base in New Mexico where they're doing a lot of evil things—even though they already control all the governments and are in league with interdimensional demons that are planning to destroy all reality and sanity in 2012, so it's unclear why they bother with this other business. The heroes have all the cool types of magic and ESP and action-hero skills, and New Age insights about how the 2012 apocalypse will actually be great like Terence McKenna said. After volume 1's big showdown in Liverpool, they've regrouped in the US and chilled out for a year at the home of a conveniently enlightened billionaire (a one-note new character, Mason Lang, who's like Bruce Wayne except instead of trauma leading him to become Batman, a psychedelic UFO encounter led him to join the Invisibles and sit around being annoying). Now they want to break into the evil base (home of main villain 1, Col. Friday), and there's a big armed conflict. But the enemy also has a new mind-control power (wielded by main villain 2, Quimper), so some of the heroes are being secretly taken over. Also, Ragged Robin is now a major character and instead of being kind of nerdy and apathetic, now she's super psychic and super sexy and super into having sex with King Mob.
some particularly incoherent visual storytelling—all the action on this page seems to take place in a single area but I'm damned if I can see how anything connects with anything else It's easy to see how all this could've seemed like a good approach to making the series more of a flashy crowd-pleaser, and Morrison bluntly acknowledged that more than once on the letters page, calling it a "Hollywood" style before somewhat unconvincingly spinning it as an ambitious artistic device (basically: we're not just becoming more commercial because of commercialism, we're doing that as a comment on doing that).* But there are some inherent problems. The new setting requires some new characters, so some readers' favorites will get sidelined for a while. Morrison doesn't actually want to simplify the metaphysical plot, so when they need to have some villains just literally say what the evil goal is (rather than evoking it through a wider variety of horror imagery and corrupted character types), they do it through gritted teeth in the most leaden style possible.** And, for me, Jimenez's hyper-technical drawing was way more effective in that earlier three-issue run where everything was either baroque nuttiness or close-up violence in stylized horror-SF spaces; now, the script requires him to focus on stuff he's less fluent with, like people just walking around in regular-world environments or doing action stuff in large vaguely composed sets, and the larger cast of characters makes the very narrow range of figure drawing and acting style more apparent.
The parts of this I like best include some startling horror visuals in the first real glimpse we get of the horrible dimension the Archons are from, when the two main villains have to make an emergency visit there: Jimenez does a bravura spread of disturbing imagery that's neither abstract nor representational, a wild composition of harsh illustration-structures and little bubbles of assorted cryptic creepy tableaux.
about 20% of that hell-spread; not a place you'd want to be, but I can't stop looking at it That happens in issue 3, and those are two of my favorite pages in the series in concept and design, so much more memorable than the very literal-minded high-tech evil lair locations that we get the rest of the time. There's also a tiny bit of the kind of real-world-emotion-based writing that Morrison can do when they feel like it, like how Gideon experiences a supernatural essence of Weltschmerz as "like when Jacqui walked out... like when my cats died", or how Quimper's past identity as sort of an angel isn't explained in terms of a bunch of fantasy jargon but just as a child's imaginary friend. And about 25% of the jokes are actually pretty funny; Col. Friday is basically a familiar weird-government-villain type from Doom Patrol but with more profanity, so Morrison is already good at writing his dialogue (possibly I just have a stupid sense of humor, because I can't help cracking up at the line where Friday calls his car a "piece-of-shit piece of shit").
in a quiet moment, Robin sees her 9-year-old self; sadly this won't amount to much, but it's good to have a quiet momentWhat I like least, by far, is the X-Files-ish strategy of using "here are a bunch of conspiracy theories you may have heard of" as a story generator and a marker of anti-establishment attitude, while the attempts to pretend that those things fit with the big overarching story (or with the odder and less familiar notions that appeared in one-off stories) become increasingly awkward. It hurts the storytelling because it makes a lot of the evil plans seem redundant and bathetic; I mentioned this last time with the Rex 84 stuff, and I guess you could rationalize that one by saying the guys with the concentration-camp scheme just weren't aware of the bigger cosmic conflict, but Col. Friday is certainly aware and yet his big manifesto is about... building a standard industrial dystopia where people are unhappy and stupid.* And unlike the actual X-Files, which made good use of a wide variety of American places and subcultures to make the country feel big enough to hold endless kinds of monsters, the America of The Invisibles so far comes across as an abbreviated travel guide with almost no real-life touches—not surprising since Morrison hasn't spent much time here, just disappointing after London and Liverpool were so vividly evoked. But there's also something about it that's more offensive to me, a kind of glib co-optation of actual human suffering and fetishization of paranoia for the sake of making readers feel savvy.
The Rex 84 storyline basically relied on the idea that racist police violence only really matters inasmuch as it's a front for a big secret plot against rebellious people in general. What we get in issue 1 of this section is, in my opinion, equally gross: Morrison is dabbling in HIV denialism, proposing that it's not really a virus but a "sophisticated nanomachine" which the bad guys created for the sake of being evil (because, again, even though they have the power to control reality and kill just about anyone at any time, they prefer to fuck with people in the least efficient ways possible) and they're keeping the secret antidote underground in a small keg labeled HIV ANTIVIRAL. I realize they're not trying to convince readers that this is literally true; what bothers me is that I don't think they think that even matters. I don't say that lightly, I'm sure that Morrison knew victims of AIDS and didn't think of that as a joke or a story idea, but similarly I can believe they've known people who suffered or died due to political repression and yet they're happy to say that politics is a bunch of irrelevant bullshit for suckers. This particular storyline implies that the huge advances in AIDS treatment that had already been made by 1997 could not have happened the way they did (since the well-understood mechanisms of antiviral drugs couldn't have worked on a "nanomachine"), so the people doing that work were either lying or wasting their time—something I take a little personally due to having been an AIDS nurse. But it doesn't even acknowledge that implication; it's just like "AIDS is a thing you've heard of, and here's a conspiracy idea you've heard of, so let's throw that in to show that the bad guys really are very bad" and then the whole idea is completely discarded. And in case anyone in health care wasn't pissed off enough yet, there's also a bit about how the polio vaccine was really a mind-control thing—again, that's just thrown in arbitrarily and then forgotten about. Morrison is hardly alone in doing this kind of thing, it's a standard type of SF/horror thriller premise, but it's easier for me to deal with when it's purely for kicks and not presented as part of a high-minded statement about questioning authority. Fortunately, if I remember right, the rest of volume 2 isn't all like that.
Back matter update: The letter column features a couple of fans saying how confident they are that the whole series has been perfectly planned out from the start. Morrison talks about Terence McKenna's "Timewave" some more, and is "expecting some kind of unprecedented, radical transformation of society and culture within the next fifteen years." They also apologize again for the "Arcadia" storyline, calling it "an ill-judged catastrophe on my part."
Next: time travel, torture porn, and King Mob's exes
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Phil Jimenez & John Stokes
When I mentioned the three-issue segment in volume 1 that introduced all the extra violence and shiny things and Phil Jimenez art, I said that even though that wasn't my favorite flavor of The Invisibles, there wasn't anything boring about it. That's no longer the case. I know it was probably necessary to slow down a lot in the storytelling department, and do some recaps and reintroductions to give the hoped-for new readers an easy start... but wow, some of this stuff is lazy to the point that it drags even when things are blowing up.
The plot, presented in big chunks of exposition that alternate with big action sequences, is now pretty easy to understand. The bad guys have a huge underground base in New Mexico where they're doing a lot of evil things—even though they already control all the governments and are in league with interdimensional demons that are planning to destroy all reality and sanity in 2012, so it's unclear why they bother with this other business. The heroes have all the cool types of magic and ESP and action-hero skills, and New Age insights about how the 2012 apocalypse will actually be great like Terence McKenna said. After volume 1's big showdown in Liverpool, they've regrouped in the US and chilled out for a year at the home of a conveniently enlightened billionaire (a one-note new character, Mason Lang, who's like Bruce Wayne except instead of trauma leading him to become Batman, a psychedelic UFO encounter led him to join the Invisibles and sit around being annoying). Now they want to break into the evil base (home of main villain 1, Col. Friday), and there's a big armed conflict. But the enemy also has a new mind-control power (wielded by main villain 2, Quimper), so some of the heroes are being secretly taken over. Also, Ragged Robin is now a major character and instead of being kind of nerdy and apathetic, now she's super psychic and super sexy and super into having sex with King Mob.
some particularly incoherent visual storytelling—all the action on this page seems to take place in a single area but I'm damned if I can see how anything connects with anything else It's easy to see how all this could've seemed like a good approach to making the series more of a flashy crowd-pleaser, and Morrison bluntly acknowledged that more than once on the letters page, calling it a "Hollywood" style before somewhat unconvincingly spinning it as an ambitious artistic device (basically: we're not just becoming more commercial because of commercialism, we're doing that as a comment on doing that).* But there are some inherent problems. The new setting requires some new characters, so some readers' favorites will get sidelined for a while. Morrison doesn't actually want to simplify the metaphysical plot, so when they need to have some villains just literally say what the evil goal is (rather than evoking it through a wider variety of horror imagery and corrupted character types), they do it through gritted teeth in the most leaden style possible.** And, for me, Jimenez's hyper-technical drawing was way more effective in that earlier three-issue run where everything was either baroque nuttiness or close-up violence in stylized horror-SF spaces; now, the script requires him to focus on stuff he's less fluent with, like people just walking around in regular-world environments or doing action stuff in large vaguely composed sets, and the larger cast of characters makes the very narrow range of figure drawing and acting style more apparent.The parts of this I like best include some startling horror visuals in the first real glimpse we get of the horrible dimension the Archons are from, when the two main villains have to make an emergency visit there: Jimenez does a bravura spread of disturbing imagery that's neither abstract nor representational, a wild composition of harsh illustration-structures and little bubbles of assorted cryptic creepy tableaux.
about 20% of that hell-spread; not a place you'd want to be, but I can't stop looking at it That happens in issue 3, and those are two of my favorite pages in the series in concept and design, so much more memorable than the very literal-minded high-tech evil lair locations that we get the rest of the time. There's also a tiny bit of the kind of real-world-emotion-based writing that Morrison can do when they feel like it, like how Gideon experiences a supernatural essence of Weltschmerz as "like when Jacqui walked out... like when my cats died", or how Quimper's past identity as sort of an angel isn't explained in terms of a bunch of fantasy jargon but just as a child's imaginary friend. And about 25% of the jokes are actually pretty funny; Col. Friday is basically a familiar weird-government-villain type from Doom Patrol but with more profanity, so Morrison is already good at writing his dialogue (possibly I just have a stupid sense of humor, because I can't help cracking up at the line where Friday calls his car a "piece-of-shit piece of shit"). in a quiet moment, Robin sees her 9-year-old self; sadly this won't amount to much, but it's good to have a quiet momentWhat I like least, by far, is the X-Files-ish strategy of using "here are a bunch of conspiracy theories you may have heard of" as a story generator and a marker of anti-establishment attitude, while the attempts to pretend that those things fit with the big overarching story (or with the odder and less familiar notions that appeared in one-off stories) become increasingly awkward. It hurts the storytelling because it makes a lot of the evil plans seem redundant and bathetic; I mentioned this last time with the Rex 84 stuff, and I guess you could rationalize that one by saying the guys with the concentration-camp scheme just weren't aware of the bigger cosmic conflict, but Col. Friday is certainly aware and yet his big manifesto is about... building a standard industrial dystopia where people are unhappy and stupid.* And unlike the actual X-Files, which made good use of a wide variety of American places and subcultures to make the country feel big enough to hold endless kinds of monsters, the America of The Invisibles so far comes across as an abbreviated travel guide with almost no real-life touches—not surprising since Morrison hasn't spent much time here, just disappointing after London and Liverpool were so vividly evoked. But there's also something about it that's more offensive to me, a kind of glib co-optation of actual human suffering and fetishization of paranoia for the sake of making readers feel savvy.The Rex 84 storyline basically relied on the idea that racist police violence only really matters inasmuch as it's a front for a big secret plot against rebellious people in general. What we get in issue 1 of this section is, in my opinion, equally gross: Morrison is dabbling in HIV denialism, proposing that it's not really a virus but a "sophisticated nanomachine" which the bad guys created for the sake of being evil (because, again, even though they have the power to control reality and kill just about anyone at any time, they prefer to fuck with people in the least efficient ways possible) and they're keeping the secret antidote underground in a small keg labeled HIV ANTIVIRAL. I realize they're not trying to convince readers that this is literally true; what bothers me is that I don't think they think that even matters. I don't say that lightly, I'm sure that Morrison knew victims of AIDS and didn't think of that as a joke or a story idea, but similarly I can believe they've known people who suffered or died due to political repression and yet they're happy to say that politics is a bunch of irrelevant bullshit for suckers. This particular storyline implies that the huge advances in AIDS treatment that had already been made by 1997 could not have happened the way they did (since the well-understood mechanisms of antiviral drugs couldn't have worked on a "nanomachine"), so the people doing that work were either lying or wasting their time—something I take a little personally due to having been an AIDS nurse. But it doesn't even acknowledge that implication; it's just like "AIDS is a thing you've heard of, and here's a conspiracy idea you've heard of, so let's throw that in to show that the bad guys really are very bad" and then the whole idea is completely discarded. And in case anyone in health care wasn't pissed off enough yet, there's also a bit about how the polio vaccine was really a mind-control thing—again, that's just thrown in arbitrarily and then forgotten about. Morrison is hardly alone in doing this kind of thing, it's a standard type of SF/horror thriller premise, but it's easier for me to deal with when it's purely for kicks and not presented as part of a high-minded statement about questioning authority. Fortunately, if I remember right, the rest of volume 2 isn't all like that.
Back matter update: The letter column features a couple of fans saying how confident they are that the whole series has been perfectly planned out from the start. Morrison talks about Terence McKenna's "Timewave" some more, and is "expecting some kind of unprecedented, radical transformation of society and culture within the next fifteen years." They also apologize again for the "Arcadia" storyline, calling it "an ill-judged catastrophe on my part."
Next: time travel, torture porn, and King Mob's exes
