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alibi_shopThe Invisibles volume 2 #11-17 (1997-98)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #11 by Phil Jimenez/John Stokes/Ray Kryssing, #12-13 by Jimenez/Stokes, #14 by Chris Weston/Stokes, #15-16 by Weston/Kryssing
The two halves of this section, besides looking very different (with Jimenez giving way to Chris Weston as the regular series artist), unfortunately illustrate two different ways to waste narrative space over the course of three issues each. There's some enjoyable stuff here, and some displays of style, and a feeling of acceleration toward the end of volume 2, but very little sticks with me from one issue to the next.
The first example, about Boy possibly being a fake persona for an enemy agent, is the kind of self-contained story where problem A that we didn't know about before is fully resolved by solution B, leaving almost everything else unaffected. The second is the opposite: it's all setup, bringing in one new ominous suggestion after another that, based on past experience, are unlikely to lead to much.
part of a double-page spread of the carnage the enemy has in mind, very much in a Zenith style; it turns out to be bullshit, as far as I can tell In outline form, the idea of the "what if Boy was on the other side all along without knowing it" arc has potential. It comes at a time that's as good as any to give one of the characters a mysterious solo side quest. It offers hope of improving on a past decision that could really use a retcon (Lucille's clichéd and boring backstory in v1 #20), and the notion that she might be a barely-human Outer Church minion programmed with fake cliché memories might be the setup for a type of plot we haven't had yet, like maybe that minion could come over to the good guys for real. And, with the surprise reveal (here I'm giving away one of the few developments that the series has ever really tried to fool us about) that it's all just a therapeutic mind-game created by some other Invisibles and actually Lucille's past is just what we thought it was, it suggests a different type of plot we haven't had yet: a conflict between two hero groups, making our main crew out to be even more anti-authority than the anti-authority higher-ups. And then that's done with too, and everything's almost the same as before except that Boy is emotionally healthier and we may have gotten a little more distrustful about whatever the comic is asking us to believe at the moment.
The new characters, Cell 23, besides being kind of annoying with their hipster esotericisms like "I use the Infranet" and "there are 64 letters in the real alphabet, you only know the first 26"*, provide a new twist on the existing problem of one or the other side having ridiculous advantages that they barely use. Previously we'd seen the bad guys showing off all kinds of insane technology and magic that made it implausible that they'd bother doing regular evil stuff the hard way.** Now, we see this other faction of the good guys showing off all kinds of insane technology and magic that make them seem like more of an even match for the other side... which runs the risk of making our main characters seem like kind of small-timers, farting around with guns and martial arts when their side apparently could just be knocking out the enemy with secret words. They're also a focus of artificial conflict, since on the one hand Cell 23 really seem to know their shit enough to deserve respect, but they put Boy through a lot of trauma so our heroes hate them, even though apparently they had no choice. The explanation is so arbitrary, presenting this as the only way to fix a thing that we never heard of till now and never saw happen, that it comes across strongly as the writer looking for an excuse to make people fight.
There are also some more examples of characters telling us how mind-blowing something is, without much of an attempt to get that across through anything but the dialogue. First it's King Mob going on again about the Hand of Glory; then it's Boy and Jack, about their spiritual encounters with Barbelith.
Chris Weston's strengths do not include tender emotional moments—when I talk about "acting" in comics, I mean the kinds of things that are entirely lacking in this lifeless scene Both of those are more convincing than the romance that eventually plays out between Boy and Jack, where we get a lot of Jack talking about how much he likes her, and Boy being unimpressed and saying she doesn't belong with any of them, and then they kiss and they're together.
That romance is just a sideline to the big new storyline that gets going in #14-16, starting promisingly with a dream-telepathy meeting between Colonel Friday and Sir Miles.
much more effective, and one of the funnier Weston drawings I've seen; of course Sir Miles is never embarrassed This is just about the first time we've had any real antagonists again since 10 issues ago (given that Shizuka and Yoshio were random one-offs and Cell 23 were allies in disguise), and their scene plays to some strengths: Morrison is good at writing Friday and Miles as a horror-comedy odd couple, and Weston shows off his precise atmospheric fantasy chops. The down side of this setup is that it requires another passage of villains telling each other about how evil they are and all the oppressive things they want to do, which we already know pretty well by now. In #22 we get possibly the most ludicrous example of this yet, as Friday brags about how he's got a new microwave gadget that is causing Gideon and Robin to freak out repetitively for about 200 pages, so now he'll be able to make the heroes freak out whenever he wants to, even though he obviously has them at his mercy now so why wouldn't he just fucking kill them.
There's one genuinely new thing we find out at this point: Quimper is a formerly good or at least neutral spirit creature (the kind that look like basic gray aliens), who was corrupted into his current form in a violent ritual that Fanny witnessed years ago. Everything else is big portentous buildups about mysterious things. Big mystery 1: did the lost Invisible, John-a-Dreams, get taken over to the other side, and if so, will the other side ever get around to using him to crush our heroes?
Weston is also great with gross stuff like this, and John's line here is one of Morrison's best flippant jokes: in British, it means basically "I've decided that the least attractive of these people is your date" Big mystery 2: who is the spooky guy who said mysterious things to Mary Shelley (way back in v1 #6) who also now seems to be Col. Friday's boss? Big mystery 3: why did Takashi apparently sell out the time machine project to the government? Big mystery 4: what is the deal with the time machine—it seemed like a simple enough idea, it's a time machine, but Takashi keeps talking about the mysterious ideas it's giving him, so is there more? Big mystery 5: how come Mason is now acting less boring and more like he's up to something; is the whole time travel/Robin plot maybe some kind of Mason hoax? If I remember right, a few of those things will eventually be addressed. This kind of all-tease storytelling is now often ascribed to J.J. Abrams and Lost (search for "Abrams mystery box" and you'll find endless rants about how Abrams has ruined serialized TV), but The Invisibles and The X-Files used it a lot too, and I think it's a natural consequence of combining a flexible premise and ambitious scope with a schedule that has a lot of space to fill and not enough time for things to be planned out in detail; it's still frustrating though.
a goofy little interlude where our heroes are forced to "generate auto-critique", i.e. to point out clichéd aspects of the comic that are thereby rendered ironic(?) Back matter update: Morrison explains that they got way too busy with half a dozen other projects, but now the series is getting back on track with a plan to finish volume 2 around #21 and then do a 12-issue volume 3 in 1999, which basically did happen. They also promote Neuro-Linguistic Programming. In the letters, a reader suggests (correctly) that, contrary to the stereotyped hostility the comic depicts between Jolly Roger and Fanny, it's not actually that hard for "a dyke and a drag queen" to get along.
Next: metaphysics, metafiction, special effects
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #11 by Phil Jimenez/John Stokes/Ray Kryssing, #12-13 by Jimenez/Stokes, #14 by Chris Weston/Stokes, #15-16 by Weston/Kryssing
The two halves of this section, besides looking very different (with Jimenez giving way to Chris Weston as the regular series artist), unfortunately illustrate two different ways to waste narrative space over the course of three issues each. There's some enjoyable stuff here, and some displays of style, and a feeling of acceleration toward the end of volume 2, but very little sticks with me from one issue to the next.
The first example, about Boy possibly being a fake persona for an enemy agent, is the kind of self-contained story where problem A that we didn't know about before is fully resolved by solution B, leaving almost everything else unaffected. The second is the opposite: it's all setup, bringing in one new ominous suggestion after another that, based on past experience, are unlikely to lead to much.
part of a double-page spread of the carnage the enemy has in mind, very much in a Zenith style; it turns out to be bullshit, as far as I can tell In outline form, the idea of the "what if Boy was on the other side all along without knowing it" arc has potential. It comes at a time that's as good as any to give one of the characters a mysterious solo side quest. It offers hope of improving on a past decision that could really use a retcon (Lucille's clichéd and boring backstory in v1 #20), and the notion that she might be a barely-human Outer Church minion programmed with fake cliché memories might be the setup for a type of plot we haven't had yet, like maybe that minion could come over to the good guys for real. And, with the surprise reveal (here I'm giving away one of the few developments that the series has ever really tried to fool us about) that it's all just a therapeutic mind-game created by some other Invisibles and actually Lucille's past is just what we thought it was, it suggests a different type of plot we haven't had yet: a conflict between two hero groups, making our main crew out to be even more anti-authority than the anti-authority higher-ups. And then that's done with too, and everything's almost the same as before except that Boy is emotionally healthier and we may have gotten a little more distrustful about whatever the comic is asking us to believe at the moment.The new characters, Cell 23, besides being kind of annoying with their hipster esotericisms like "I use the Infranet" and "there are 64 letters in the real alphabet, you only know the first 26"*, provide a new twist on the existing problem of one or the other side having ridiculous advantages that they barely use. Previously we'd seen the bad guys showing off all kinds of insane technology and magic that made it implausible that they'd bother doing regular evil stuff the hard way.** Now, we see this other faction of the good guys showing off all kinds of insane technology and magic that make them seem like more of an even match for the other side... which runs the risk of making our main characters seem like kind of small-timers, farting around with guns and martial arts when their side apparently could just be knocking out the enemy with secret words. They're also a focus of artificial conflict, since on the one hand Cell 23 really seem to know their shit enough to deserve respect, but they put Boy through a lot of trauma so our heroes hate them, even though apparently they had no choice. The explanation is so arbitrary, presenting this as the only way to fix a thing that we never heard of till now and never saw happen, that it comes across strongly as the writer looking for an excuse to make people fight.
There are also some more examples of characters telling us how mind-blowing something is, without much of an attempt to get that across through anything but the dialogue. First it's King Mob going on again about the Hand of Glory; then it's Boy and Jack, about their spiritual encounters with Barbelith.
Chris Weston's strengths do not include tender emotional moments—when I talk about "acting" in comics, I mean the kinds of things that are entirely lacking in this lifeless scene Both of those are more convincing than the romance that eventually plays out between Boy and Jack, where we get a lot of Jack talking about how much he likes her, and Boy being unimpressed and saying she doesn't belong with any of them, and then they kiss and they're together.That romance is just a sideline to the big new storyline that gets going in #14-16, starting promisingly with a dream-telepathy meeting between Colonel Friday and Sir Miles.
much more effective, and one of the funnier Weston drawings I've seen; of course Sir Miles is never embarrassed This is just about the first time we've had any real antagonists again since 10 issues ago (given that Shizuka and Yoshio were random one-offs and Cell 23 were allies in disguise), and their scene plays to some strengths: Morrison is good at writing Friday and Miles as a horror-comedy odd couple, and Weston shows off his precise atmospheric fantasy chops. The down side of this setup is that it requires another passage of villains telling each other about how evil they are and all the oppressive things they want to do, which we already know pretty well by now. In #22 we get possibly the most ludicrous example of this yet, as Friday brags about how he's got a new microwave gadget that is causing Gideon and Robin to freak out repetitively for about 200 pages, so now he'll be able to make the heroes freak out whenever he wants to, even though he obviously has them at his mercy now so why wouldn't he just fucking kill them.There's one genuinely new thing we find out at this point: Quimper is a formerly good or at least neutral spirit creature (the kind that look like basic gray aliens), who was corrupted into his current form in a violent ritual that Fanny witnessed years ago. Everything else is big portentous buildups about mysterious things. Big mystery 1: did the lost Invisible, John-a-Dreams, get taken over to the other side, and if so, will the other side ever get around to using him to crush our heroes?
Weston is also great with gross stuff like this, and John's line here is one of Morrison's best flippant jokes: in British, it means basically "I've decided that the least attractive of these people is your date" Big mystery 2: who is the spooky guy who said mysterious things to Mary Shelley (way back in v1 #6) who also now seems to be Col. Friday's boss? Big mystery 3: why did Takashi apparently sell out the time machine project to the government? Big mystery 4: what is the deal with the time machine—it seemed like a simple enough idea, it's a time machine, but Takashi keeps talking about the mysterious ideas it's giving him, so is there more? Big mystery 5: how come Mason is now acting less boring and more like he's up to something; is the whole time travel/Robin plot maybe some kind of Mason hoax? If I remember right, a few of those things will eventually be addressed. This kind of all-tease storytelling is now often ascribed to J.J. Abrams and Lost (search for "Abrams mystery box" and you'll find endless rants about how Abrams has ruined serialized TV), but The Invisibles and The X-Files used it a lot too, and I think it's a natural consequence of combining a flexible premise and ambitious scope with a schedule that has a lot of space to fill and not enough time for things to be planned out in detail; it's still frustrating though. a goofy little interlude where our heroes are forced to "generate auto-critique", i.e. to point out clichéd aspects of the comic that are thereby rendered ironic(?) Back matter update: Morrison explains that they got way too busy with half a dozen other projects, but now the series is getting back on track with a plan to finish volume 2 around #21 and then do a 12-issue volume 3 in 1999, which basically did happen. They also promote Neuro-Linguistic Programming. In the letters, a reader suggests (correctly) that, contrary to the stereotyped hostility the comic depicts between Jolly Roger and Fanny, it's not actually that hard for "a dyke and a drag queen" to get along.Next: metaphysics, metafiction, special effects
