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alibi_shopThe Invisibles volume 2 #17-22 (1998)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #17/19/20/21 by Chris Weston/Ray Kryssing, #18 by Ivan Reis/Mark Pennington, #22 by Weston/John Stokes
[Update: shortly after posting the original version of this, I learned a bit late that Grant Morrison came out as nonbinary/genderqueer last year and prefers "they". I'll respect that going forward and I'll revise past posts as soon as I have a chance.]
The big event that closes out volume two is that King Mob blows up Mason's mansion and tells him it's for his own good. That's a reasonable choice in several ways: 1. Mason's whole "I have all the money and I know all the secrets, whose side am I really on" deal was narratively a dead end, and incompatible with the "scrappy rebels with no time for logic" vibe that Morrison wanted to explore. 2. There's not much else left to do—nearly everything that was set up earlier has been either resolved or discarded, our heroes seem to have more or less won (and/or established that some aspects of the conflict are bogus* and don't need to be won). And 3. as volume two has often reminded us, explosions are cool; that's not an aspect of the series I ever enjoyed, but it's there, so we might as well go all the way with it. So, OK, but since I didn't like a lot of volume two I'm not too invested in a competent follow-through on volume two's plot threads and ideas. I'd rather write about the surprisingly effective and less literal-minded moments, of which there are a few more than I had remembered.
The subplot about Quimper is a good example. What started out as a weird one-off character idea in an equally weird one-off issue (v1 #25) soon turned into a much more straightforward one: Quimper is just about the most important tool the enemy has, he's some kind of interdimensional being with mind-control powers over almost everyone*, and it seems the enemy created him by torturing some benign creature (v2 #3). And it turns out... that's basically all there is to it; the only new information we get** is that Fanny witnessed that creature's ordeal years ago during her own ordeal in Rio. But that allows Morrison and the artists to pull off, in issue 20, one of those visually distinctive and emotionally satisfying moments that have often helped to keep the series from completely disappearing up its own ass: Fanny defeating Quimper not in a psychic battle, but by melding with him in a joyful mystical love apotheosis, with a great (literal) kiss-off line: "You shall go to the ball!" That's a satisfying moment rather than a satisfying scene, because the frame for it is just another one of the "things looked hopeless but actually our heroes have been totally in control this whole time, due to actions that we're now being told about and were never shown" setups that we've seen before (and also because Chris Weston's art, for me at least, has gotten shockingly clunky and boring). Still, it's a type of thing we badly needed at this point.
There's also a line in that scene that's one of the better examples of philosophical ideas being actually integrated into the story, as opposed to the stuff where Morrison is just telling us repeatedly about their idea of what Gnosticism is, etc. Quimper and Friday have often been mouthpieces for the kind of ultimate-fascist-villain and fate-worse-than-death monologues that Morrison likes so much, going on about how they mean to create a universe of total suffering and oppression forever, just like their own hell dimension. Fanny's response isn't to tell them (for instance) that they'll fail because they're weak, or because they don't understand love; instead she says they don't understand death, as she does: "Only in your world are tortures eternal. I am from the solid world where things pass." Morrison in The Invisibles often doesn't seem too interested in "the solid world"; the belief system they're into requires them to treat it as a corrupt illusion, or at best a frivolous playground. Once in a while—especially, but not always, when they're writing for Fanny—we do get a different side, with more of an appreciation for flesh and blood and things as they are.
That brings me to another bit of writing in this section that I really like, to the point that I'd put it up there with the best pieces of prose in the series. It happens in a short scene in issue 19 where King Mob and Jolly Roger are briefly caught in a psychic trap that's like a dream of permanent ennui. Gideon, imagining himself as a pudgy middle-aged suburban ex-punk in gray tones, narrates his version of damnation like this:
To me this is worth 1000 paragraphs of Quimper's and Friday's villain-rants—"We will replace contact with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept", etc.—because instead of just referencing "contact", "joy", etc. as abstract things that the enemy doesn't like, it's actually giving us those things. The gross insect imagery we see in Gideon's dream-world isn't really necessary to make the scene scary; it's scary because he thinks he's lost love, which we can feel because the writing has allowed us to feel love. And not "as a concept", but in things. There hasn't been much of this since the Dane/Archon scenes in v1 #22-24, and I'd been missing it.
Suggesting transcendent feelings without words is another thing Morrison and the artists at their best have sometimes pulled off, and there's one striking example here in #21 as we get some more (mostly superfluous) flashbacks about how Robin got sent on her time-travel mission. As Robin gets blasted through reality, she's suddenly in a white void facing the guardian spirit of the forces of good—not the elaborate and verbose psychedelic alien stuff that Jack and Mason ran into, and not the cool liquid-metaly "magic mirror" effect that the artists have been increasingly called upon to draw (with a very literal-minded explanation that it looks shiny because it reflects all of space-time), but Barbelith in its original design: just a big solid red circle with no line art and no shading. It doesn't speak, it doesn't move, there's no explanation for why it looks like that, it's just there, a disorienting evocative image that demands your attention. The series has at times talked about Barbelith in ways that kind of diminish it into a familiar fantasy idea (it's a machine, a satellite, a tool Dane's higher self created, etc.), but I think moments like this are much stronger in conveying the idea of an encounter with the divine: everything falls away and you're face to face with something huge that you can't possibly understand, and you're seen.
I haven't included other art excerpts in this section because mostly I just don't think the art is working, but I do really like this Chris Weston drawing. However, the idea that The Invisibles is a work of fiction in Robin's future, which totally blew her mind and changed her life, is pretty hilariously self-serving even if Morrison doesn't actually allow this "old man" author-insert to impress the characters in person
Next: volume three starts with a Miles-long side trip
p.s. After a long hiatus, due to a combination of life events and some irritation about the decreasing percentage of stuff I liked in this part of the series, I managed to get going on this reread again and I do intend to finish it. I'll probably do volume 3 in three posts.
p.p.s. I want to give a shout-out to a blog that I started reading a lot during that hiatus: Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy, by "Arthur", whom I had read a little before in the late webzine FerretBrain. Arthur's interests as expressed in JToaFGB include science fiction/fantasy, videogames, occultists, and conspiracy theorists, and the critical pieces there range from straightforward but very solidly written reviews to really impressive deep-dives that make me feel like a total dilettante. There are only brief references there to The Invisibles itself, but lots about related subjects and authors, for instance Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, David Icke (whose synthesis of New Age ideas, pseudo-Gnosticism, and conspiracism was way more influential on this stuff than I had realized), The X-Files, and chaos magic (which Arthur seems to be not much more impressed with than I am, but which he writes about as a cultural phenomenon with a clarity and attention that for me is a kind of respect). Highly recommended.
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #17/19/20/21 by Chris Weston/Ray Kryssing, #18 by Ivan Reis/Mark Pennington, #22 by Weston/John Stokes
[Update: shortly after posting the original version of this, I learned a bit late that Grant Morrison came out as nonbinary/genderqueer last year and prefers "they". I'll respect that going forward and I'll revise past posts as soon as I have a chance.]
The big event that closes out volume two is that King Mob blows up Mason's mansion and tells him it's for his own good. That's a reasonable choice in several ways: 1. Mason's whole "I have all the money and I know all the secrets, whose side am I really on" deal was narratively a dead end, and incompatible with the "scrappy rebels with no time for logic" vibe that Morrison wanted to explore. 2. There's not much else left to do—nearly everything that was set up earlier has been either resolved or discarded, our heroes seem to have more or less won (and/or established that some aspects of the conflict are bogus* and don't need to be won). And 3. as volume two has often reminded us, explosions are cool; that's not an aspect of the series I ever enjoyed, but it's there, so we might as well go all the way with it. So, OK, but since I didn't like a lot of volume two I'm not too invested in a competent follow-through on volume two's plot threads and ideas. I'd rather write about the surprisingly effective and less literal-minded moments, of which there are a few more than I had remembered.
The subplot about Quimper is a good example. What started out as a weird one-off character idea in an equally weird one-off issue (v1 #25) soon turned into a much more straightforward one: Quimper is just about the most important tool the enemy has, he's some kind of interdimensional being with mind-control powers over almost everyone*, and it seems the enemy created him by torturing some benign creature (v2 #3). And it turns out... that's basically all there is to it; the only new information we get** is that Fanny witnessed that creature's ordeal years ago during her own ordeal in Rio. But that allows Morrison and the artists to pull off, in issue 20, one of those visually distinctive and emotionally satisfying moments that have often helped to keep the series from completely disappearing up its own ass: Fanny defeating Quimper not in a psychic battle, but by melding with him in a joyful mystical love apotheosis, with a great (literal) kiss-off line: "You shall go to the ball!" That's a satisfying moment rather than a satisfying scene, because the frame for it is just another one of the "things looked hopeless but actually our heroes have been totally in control this whole time, due to actions that we're now being told about and were never shown" setups that we've seen before (and also because Chris Weston's art, for me at least, has gotten shockingly clunky and boring). Still, it's a type of thing we badly needed at this point.
There's also a line in that scene that's one of the better examples of philosophical ideas being actually integrated into the story, as opposed to the stuff where Morrison is just telling us repeatedly about their idea of what Gnosticism is, etc. Quimper and Friday have often been mouthpieces for the kind of ultimate-fascist-villain and fate-worse-than-death monologues that Morrison likes so much, going on about how they mean to create a universe of total suffering and oppression forever, just like their own hell dimension. Fanny's response isn't to tell them (for instance) that they'll fail because they're weak, or because they don't understand love; instead she says they don't understand death, as she does: "Only in your world are tortures eternal. I am from the solid world where things pass." Morrison in The Invisibles often doesn't seem too interested in "the solid world"; the belief system they're into requires them to treat it as a corrupt illusion, or at best a frivolous playground. Once in a while—especially, but not always, when they're writing for Fanny—we do get a different side, with more of an appreciation for flesh and blood and things as they are.
That brings me to another bit of writing in this section that I really like, to the point that I'd put it up there with the best pieces of prose in the series. It happens in a short scene in issue 19 where King Mob and Jolly Roger are briefly caught in a psychic trap that's like a dream of permanent ennui. Gideon, imagining himself as a pudgy middle-aged suburban ex-punk in gray tones, narrates his version of damnation like this:
I remember when it all seemed to mean something. I remember feeling things intensely. The little stars of scar tissue where her piercing went wrong, the cats fucking about in the sun, the Knowledge and Conversation of My Holy Guardian Angel, the smell of a new book ... Every sensation as sharp and as startling as a color seen for the first time. I'm not sure what happened. .... I was holding her hand and then it felt horrible so I let go. I've been here ever since.
To me this is worth 1000 paragraphs of Quimper's and Friday's villain-rants—"We will replace contact with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept", etc.—because instead of just referencing "contact", "joy", etc. as abstract things that the enemy doesn't like, it's actually giving us those things. The gross insect imagery we see in Gideon's dream-world isn't really necessary to make the scene scary; it's scary because he thinks he's lost love, which we can feel because the writing has allowed us to feel love. And not "as a concept", but in things. There hasn't been much of this since the Dane/Archon scenes in v1 #22-24, and I'd been missing it.
Suggesting transcendent feelings without words is another thing Morrison and the artists at their best have sometimes pulled off, and there's one striking example here in #21 as we get some more (mostly superfluous) flashbacks about how Robin got sent on her time-travel mission. As Robin gets blasted through reality, she's suddenly in a white void facing the guardian spirit of the forces of good—not the elaborate and verbose psychedelic alien stuff that Jack and Mason ran into, and not the cool liquid-metaly "magic mirror" effect that the artists have been increasingly called upon to draw (with a very literal-minded explanation that it looks shiny because it reflects all of space-time), but Barbelith in its original design: just a big solid red circle with no line art and no shading. It doesn't speak, it doesn't move, there's no explanation for why it looks like that, it's just there, a disorienting evocative image that demands your attention. The series has at times talked about Barbelith in ways that kind of diminish it into a familiar fantasy idea (it's a machine, a satellite, a tool Dane's higher self created, etc.), but I think moments like this are much stronger in conveying the idea of an encounter with the divine: everything falls away and you're face to face with something huge that you can't possibly understand, and you're seen.
I haven't included other art excerpts in this section because mostly I just don't think the art is working, but I do really like this Chris Weston drawing. However, the idea that The Invisibles is a work of fiction in Robin's future, which totally blew her mind and changed her life, is pretty hilariously self-serving even if Morrison doesn't actually allow this "old man" author-insert to impress the characters in personNext: volume three starts with a Miles-long side trip
p.s. After a long hiatus, due to a combination of life events and some irritation about the decreasing percentage of stuff I liked in this part of the series, I managed to get going on this reread again and I do intend to finish it. I'll probably do volume 3 in three posts.
p.p.s. I want to give a shout-out to a blog that I started reading a lot during that hiatus: Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy, by "Arthur", whom I had read a little before in the late webzine FerretBrain. Arthur's interests as expressed in JToaFGB include science fiction/fantasy, videogames, occultists, and conspiracy theorists, and the critical pieces there range from straightforward but very solidly written reviews to really impressive deep-dives that make me feel like a total dilettante. There are only brief references there to The Invisibles itself, but lots about related subjects and authors, for instance Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, David Icke (whose synthesis of New Age ideas, pseudo-Gnosticism, and conspiracism was way more influential on this stuff than I had realized), The X-Files, and chaos magic (which Arthur seems to be not much more impressed with than I am, but which he writes about as a cultural phenomenon with a clarity and attention that for me is a kind of respect). Highly recommended.
