![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alibi_shopThe Invisibles volume 2 #5-10 (1997)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Phil Jimenez & John Stokes, except #6 by Jimenez/Keith Aiken/Michael Lark/Marc Hempel, #9 by Jimenez/Chris Weston [credited as "Space Boy"]/Stokes
After having blown up all the whatnot in the last installment, there's now more space to find other things for the series to be about. The big three at this point seem to be time travel (the psychic kind we've seen before), time travel (a different kind using machines), and getting more in touch with mysterious higher powers. It's all over the place, often alternating between tediousness and frantic complications that don't quite go anywhere, and there are a couple bits I would've been happy to have never seen, but at least there's variety. I do want to know where this is going—and this is the part where even though I've read it before, I remember very little about what happens, which might be a bad sign but does make it more suspenseful.
this is a cool panel, I like it, that's all The time machine business is meant to connect up Robin's future origin with the main plot without actually committing to anything yet in terms of what it's about. A time machine has been invented (by Takashi, a new character who works for Mason; he's slightly more interesting than Mason but that's not saying much) which the Invisibles will eventually use to send Robin back from 2012 to do... whatever she's doing; all we really know is that she got out at the last minute under enemy attack, was in a mental hospital for a while in the '90s due to time travel trauma, and has a very vague message about how the universe is "much simpler than we thought." Takashi gets targeted by a couple of incredibly gross and pointless new villain characters, Japanese gangster sadist cultists 
you really don't need the rest of this panel and this dialogue, and neither did I; it's like a 13-year-old bad boy's idea of what the worst thing to do would be who are out to steal the time machine for apocalypse-related reasons that they don't seem to be very clear on, which accomplishes basically nothing except to get some extreme violence in.
Bookended by the ghastly crap about those guys, there's half an issue that takes place in the ultra-futuristic world of 2012, which mostly establishes that 1. in the future most people are all fucked up on drugs and pop culture* and 2. there are a bunch of different potential apocalypses that could happen. It's an odd and frustrating choice to give us a future-flashback piece that's ostensibly Robin's origin story while still telling us almost nothing about her: she seems like a nice person, she feels sorry for her junkie brother, she got involved with the Invisibles somehow at some point, and that's about it. (Do we at least see some of the hard times she had after arriving in the past? We do not.) It's still nice to get away from all the familiar types of coolness and go to a super-different place for a while; the guest artists for the future story give it a look that I like, lusciously graphic-designy while still feeling more solid and grounded than the Jimenez/Stokes type of shininess. There's a moment when Robin and future-Jack share a hug before the mission, and it's genuinely touching not just because the dialogue makes them really seem like old friends, but also because Jack looks realistically grown-up and Robin is drawn with a regular human body instead of Barbie-style.
The other time-travel plot is a little more successful at filling out the characters: Gideon has to astrally visit 1924, where young Edith and young Tom meet him for the first time, so we spend some time with them. The plot reason for this involves a new Macguffin, the Hand of Glory, which was abruptly dropped into the story by some irritating supernatural beings that Jack and Fanny met in San Francisco.* Our heroes don't know what they're supposed to do with it, and they know Edith and Tom encountered it before so Gideon wants to get a first-hand look at whatever they did. Like the other plotlines I mentioned, this leads to almost no new developments: Gideon comes back all freaked out having only learned that the Hand is dangerous and has to do with dimensional travel and time (two things that they already seem pretty familiar with, but it does them in a bigger way, I guess) and there's a lot of dialogue along the lines of "But what was it?" "It was like nothing I've ever seen!" But what this is really about is letting us hang out in a more comfortable place for a while, the 1920s being presented as the coolest possible time to be alive (the '20s Invisibles are jazz musicians and flappers and communists), and finally giving us a little of Edith's and Tom's tragic backstory that's been hinted at a few times. I like the general idea of the characters: Edith is a manic sophisticate, Tom is a lonely gay kid with a confused crush on her, they're psychically connected but still not honest with each other, and they're using all this magical intrigue as a distraction.
a particularly nice bit of design; I like these artists best when they use shadows Their dialogue is convincing, and I think the Jimenez/Stokes artwork really starts to come to life at this point in terms of acting and atmosphere.** I just don't think Morrison knew what to do with them, except to keep reinforcing the initial setup: Edith acts shallow and mean to Tom, she fucks around a lot, he's sad, Gideon tells her to be nicer to Tom (actually, Gideon tells her to sleep with Tom because that'll "save his life"—W T F), but Edith says she has to be cold because it'll be good for Tom... somehow. (Then she has sex with King Mob because that's magically necessary.) Years later, Edith acknowledges that she was an asshole, but it seems like she was also right?—or at least the narration gives us to understand that Tom was destined to go nuts and become a great magician and die, and Edith's part in that was to be an asshole. There's a portentous creepy sentimentality to this which sort of makes me think of John Fowles.*** I think that's pretty much the last we see of Edith and Tom, and that's a shame; their introduction early on in the series makes them seem fascinating and mysterious and very unlike the other Invisibles, and there ends up not being much of a place for them in the story.
I have to say that is not how a hologram works, but it does seem right that Bootsy Collins is in a celestial realm Briefly surfacing in between the rest, there's some more development of what I guess you could call the theology of the series. In one of those "stuff King Mob already knows, because he knows everything" scenes, Gideon explains how our reality is the intersection between a heaven-ish universe of pure imagination, where all the good magic comes from, and the Outer Church universe where everything is sick and terrible. Ours will eventually fall apart as those two diverge. That's not a bad idea and it's explained here pretty clearly—and it seems to me like another one of Morrison's surprising (to me) flirtations with C.S. Lewis, adapting into a New Age framework the setup of Lewis's allegorical novel The Great Divorce. Lewis describes the basic afterlife as a shoddy Purgatory where people muddle along in a mundane environment that exists because they expect it to, but it's losing coherence and it'll eventually devolve into hell; meanwhile they're freely able to travel to heaven, which is a much bigger and more real place, but most of them don't like to go there because it's too weird.
unrelated: I'm so weary of this bit, which relies on ignorance about medicine and hasn't changed in at least 40 years; neither has the rule that whenever an argument ends in "Think about it", there's nothing else to be thought about it Morrison of course has to present this premise as some form of ancient wisdom that all the cool people already know about, and the form they pick is Gnosticism—that is, a selective version of what some Gnostic sects believed, which anyone who'd even skimmed a few pages of Pagels would know was oversimplified, but it's sort of in the spirit of giving the audience some suggested reading so why not. What's a little harder to reconcile is that even though this is presented as objectively true, it's seriously at odds with other philosophical content in The Invisibles where ideas like this are dismissed because, Gnostic or not, they're still too much like Christianity. Gideon makes fun of his ex Jacqui for being too anti-violence, saying she must think "some benevolent nonentity from the sky's going to save us all"—so then how come we've been told a half-dozen times that Barbelith, a benevolent thing in the sky, is going to save us? Further on in issue 12, Gideon in turn will get ragged on by Jack, for having called the evil dimension "hell": "Is that where God puts all his prisoners, then? Is that where he has them tortured forever for not doing what he says? 
that cat is a bit weird but this is a good look for Gideon How come you don't believe in God but you believe in the Devil?"—which doesn't make sense in itself (if Gideon doesn't believe in God, then presumably he doesn't think God puts prisoners anywhere), and is also the kind of one-sided didactic dialogue where there's a really simple obvious reply that no one can say because the author wants Jack to get the last word. The obvious reply would be: "Jack, there are a bunch of devil-type things who live in a bad place. They're trying to put us all in there and make us suffer, and as far as we know that's a thing they can do. No one said anything about morality, this is just stuff you've actually seen." I feel like all this is less about what the characters believe, and more about Morrison worrying that the readers might think someone has said a traditional-sounding thing, so it's time to push the Question Authority button. Probably I'm overthinking it but this kind of thing does make me cranky.
There's a cliffhanger where Boy steals the Hand of Glory (if you can call it a cliffhanger when no one notices for two issues), so it's time to mostly forget about all of the above and hit the road.
Back matter update: Not much to note in the letter column, but in #13 Morrison announces that their "entire creative thinking and style of writing has gone through a massive sea change in the last couple of months" and that "the Gideon Stargrave story in the Vertigo Winter's Edge Holiday Special" is an example of this. I hope they're kidding because that story was a whole lot of nothing. Also, they advise a self-described skeptic to try using a Ouija board; Morrison says it moves even when no one's touching it at all, something I don't think I've ever seen even the most credulous Ouijists claim. Also, apparently the BBC was planning to make an Invisibles series in 1998.
Next: gaslighting, romance, Weston
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Phil Jimenez & John Stokes, except #6 by Jimenez/Keith Aiken/Michael Lark/Marc Hempel, #9 by Jimenez/Chris Weston [credited as "Space Boy"]/Stokes
After having blown up all the whatnot in the last installment, there's now more space to find other things for the series to be about. The big three at this point seem to be time travel (the psychic kind we've seen before), time travel (a different kind using machines), and getting more in touch with mysterious higher powers. It's all over the place, often alternating between tediousness and frantic complications that don't quite go anywhere, and there are a couple bits I would've been happy to have never seen, but at least there's variety. I do want to know where this is going—and this is the part where even though I've read it before, I remember very little about what happens, which might be a bad sign but does make it more suspenseful.
this is a cool panel, I like it, that's all The time machine business is meant to connect up Robin's future origin with the main plot without actually committing to anything yet in terms of what it's about. A time machine has been invented (by Takashi, a new character who works for Mason; he's slightly more interesting than Mason but that's not saying much) which the Invisibles will eventually use to send Robin back from 2012 to do... whatever she's doing; all we really know is that she got out at the last minute under enemy attack, was in a mental hospital for a while in the '90s due to time travel trauma, and has a very vague message about how the universe is "much simpler than we thought." Takashi gets targeted by a couple of incredibly gross and pointless new villain characters, Japanese gangster sadist cultists you really don't need the rest of this panel and this dialogue, and neither did I; it's like a 13-year-old bad boy's idea of what the worst thing to do would be who are out to steal the time machine for apocalypse-related reasons that they don't seem to be very clear on, which accomplishes basically nothing except to get some extreme violence in.Bookended by the ghastly crap about those guys, there's half an issue that takes place in the ultra-futuristic world of 2012, which mostly establishes that 1. in the future most people are all fucked up on drugs and pop culture* and 2. there are a bunch of different potential apocalypses that could happen. It's an odd and frustrating choice to give us a future-flashback piece that's ostensibly Robin's origin story while still telling us almost nothing about her: she seems like a nice person, she feels sorry for her junkie brother, she got involved with the Invisibles somehow at some point, and that's about it. (Do we at least see some of the hard times she had after arriving in the past? We do not.) It's still nice to get away from all the familiar types of coolness and go to a super-different place for a while; the guest artists for the future story give it a look that I like, lusciously graphic-designy while still feeling more solid and grounded than the Jimenez/Stokes type of shininess. There's a moment when Robin and future-Jack share a hug before the mission, and it's genuinely touching not just because the dialogue makes them really seem like old friends, but also because Jack looks realistically grown-up and Robin is drawn with a regular human body instead of Barbie-style.
The other time-travel plot is a little more successful at filling out the characters: Gideon has to astrally visit 1924, where young Edith and young Tom meet him for the first time, so we spend some time with them. The plot reason for this involves a new Macguffin, the Hand of Glory, which was abruptly dropped into the story by some irritating supernatural beings that Jack and Fanny met in San Francisco.* Our heroes don't know what they're supposed to do with it, and they know Edith and Tom encountered it before so Gideon wants to get a first-hand look at whatever they did. Like the other plotlines I mentioned, this leads to almost no new developments: Gideon comes back all freaked out having only learned that the Hand is dangerous and has to do with dimensional travel and time (two things that they already seem pretty familiar with, but it does them in a bigger way, I guess) and there's a lot of dialogue along the lines of "But what was it?" "It was like nothing I've ever seen!" But what this is really about is letting us hang out in a more comfortable place for a while, the 1920s being presented as the coolest possible time to be alive (the '20s Invisibles are jazz musicians and flappers and communists), and finally giving us a little of Edith's and Tom's tragic backstory that's been hinted at a few times. I like the general idea of the characters: Edith is a manic sophisticate, Tom is a lonely gay kid with a confused crush on her, they're psychically connected but still not honest with each other, and they're using all this magical intrigue as a distraction.
a particularly nice bit of design; I like these artists best when they use shadows Their dialogue is convincing, and I think the Jimenez/Stokes artwork really starts to come to life at this point in terms of acting and atmosphere.** I just don't think Morrison knew what to do with them, except to keep reinforcing the initial setup: Edith acts shallow and mean to Tom, she fucks around a lot, he's sad, Gideon tells her to be nicer to Tom (actually, Gideon tells her to sleep with Tom because that'll "save his life"—W T F), but Edith says she has to be cold because it'll be good for Tom... somehow. (Then she has sex with King Mob because that's magically necessary.) Years later, Edith acknowledges that she was an asshole, but it seems like she was also right?—or at least the narration gives us to understand that Tom was destined to go nuts and become a great magician and die, and Edith's part in that was to be an asshole. There's a portentous creepy sentimentality to this which sort of makes me think of John Fowles.*** I think that's pretty much the last we see of Edith and Tom, and that's a shame; their introduction early on in the series makes them seem fascinating and mysterious and very unlike the other Invisibles, and there ends up not being much of a place for them in the story. I have to say that is not how a hologram works, but it does seem right that Bootsy Collins is in a celestial realm Briefly surfacing in between the rest, there's some more development of what I guess you could call the theology of the series. In one of those "stuff King Mob already knows, because he knows everything" scenes, Gideon explains how our reality is the intersection between a heaven-ish universe of pure imagination, where all the good magic comes from, and the Outer Church universe where everything is sick and terrible. Ours will eventually fall apart as those two diverge. That's not a bad idea and it's explained here pretty clearly—and it seems to me like another one of Morrison's surprising (to me) flirtations with C.S. Lewis, adapting into a New Age framework the setup of Lewis's allegorical novel The Great Divorce. Lewis describes the basic afterlife as a shoddy Purgatory where people muddle along in a mundane environment that exists because they expect it to, but it's losing coherence and it'll eventually devolve into hell; meanwhile they're freely able to travel to heaven, which is a much bigger and more real place, but most of them don't like to go there because it's too weird. unrelated: I'm so weary of this bit, which relies on ignorance about medicine and hasn't changed in at least 40 years; neither has the rule that whenever an argument ends in "Think about it", there's nothing else to be thought about it Morrison of course has to present this premise as some form of ancient wisdom that all the cool people already know about, and the form they pick is Gnosticism—that is, a selective version of what some Gnostic sects believed, which anyone who'd even skimmed a few pages of Pagels would know was oversimplified, but it's sort of in the spirit of giving the audience some suggested reading so why not. What's a little harder to reconcile is that even though this is presented as objectively true, it's seriously at odds with other philosophical content in The Invisibles where ideas like this are dismissed because, Gnostic or not, they're still too much like Christianity. Gideon makes fun of his ex Jacqui for being too anti-violence, saying she must think "some benevolent nonentity from the sky's going to save us all"—so then how come we've been told a half-dozen times that Barbelith, a benevolent thing in the sky, is going to save us? Further on in issue 12, Gideon in turn will get ragged on by Jack, for having called the evil dimension "hell": "Is that where God puts all his prisoners, then? Is that where he has them tortured forever for not doing what he says? that cat is a bit weird but this is a good look for Gideon How come you don't believe in God but you believe in the Devil?"—which doesn't make sense in itself (if Gideon doesn't believe in God, then presumably he doesn't think God puts prisoners anywhere), and is also the kind of one-sided didactic dialogue where there's a really simple obvious reply that no one can say because the author wants Jack to get the last word. The obvious reply would be: "Jack, there are a bunch of devil-type things who live in a bad place. They're trying to put us all in there and make us suffer, and as far as we know that's a thing they can do. No one said anything about morality, this is just stuff you've actually seen." I feel like all this is less about what the characters believe, and more about Morrison worrying that the readers might think someone has said a traditional-sounding thing, so it's time to push the Question Authority button. Probably I'm overthinking it but this kind of thing does make me cranky.There's a cliffhanger where Boy steals the Hand of Glory (if you can call it a cliffhanger when no one notices for two issues), so it's time to mostly forget about all of the above and hit the road.
Back matter update: Not much to note in the letter column, but in #13 Morrison announces that their "entire creative thinking and style of writing has gone through a massive sea change in the last couple of months" and that "the Gideon Stargrave story in the Vertigo Winter's Edge Holiday Special" is an example of this. I hope they're kidding because that story was a whole lot of nothing. Also, they advise a self-described skeptic to try using a Ouija board; Morrison says it moves even when no one's touching it at all, something I don't think I've ever seen even the most credulous Ouijists claim. Also, apparently the BBC was planning to make an Invisibles series in 1998.
Next: gaslighting, romance, Weston
