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alibi_shopThe Invisibles volume 3 #8-5 (1999)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: Sean Phillips/Jay Stephens
After the previous four issues kicked off with a sense of things potentially moving into some new configuration, this next stretch circles around in a holding pattern that doesn't give much of a hint as to where things are going. But it does at least give us some contemplative time with Edith, an interesting character who'd been sidelined a long time; I'd been missing her, and her cynical-but-gentle point of view is one that Morrison seems to understand the series really needs as a counterbalance to the manic ideological certainty of other characters. We've also been getting a somewhat mellower King Mob, but a mellower King Mob just comes across as one of Morrison's letter-column travelogue pieces and I've already read lots of those, whereas Edith taking one look at de Sade's grandiose "I'm creating a new sexual utopia that will solve all psychological and medical problems" schtick and basically going "whatever, bless his heart" is (for me at least) pretty satisfying.
In terms of actual events, mainly what happens is Edith tells Gideon that there are benevolent interdimensional beings among us (something that's been brought up a few times already, although it's unclear why the Invisibles would only be figuring that out now after dealing with all this stuff for centuries), and then dies; Gideon trips out a lot and rambles about the grand design; the Invisibles mess with Sir Miles's mind some more, then let him go back to the enemy in a freaked-out state; Mister Six makes contact with some more creepy mystery figures who turn out to be the Harlequinade again; we get a date of August 25 for some big part of the apocalypse to happen; and Helga has an epiphany after experimenting on herself with drugs and alien writing. That last part with Helga may or may not end up having any significance beyond the usual "now we're really about to find out the real meaning of everything" wheel-spinning, and there are some logical reasons why it makes no sense* so it's a little irritating to me, but at least it is a kind of event that hasn't happened before, and it gives more of a purpose to this character than we had before... maybe.
There's one thing that goes beyond irritating and makes me kind of angry; it's a brief thing without any relevance to the story, but I'll dig into it a little more here because it gets at something that's bothered me before. So: during a standard "we're so evil, here are some more of the evil things we're responsible for" speech by one of Miles's minions, we're asked to consider "why do you think the United Kingdom is participating in genocide"—the implied answer being that the Archons and their British allies have to commit a bunch of atrocities to prepare for crowning the Moonchild as King and invading the world. But what current genocide in particular does Morrison have in mind, in late 1999?
Remarks elsewhere clarify that it's the just-ended Kosovo War, which the UK entered into as part of NATO in March 1999, conducting a two-month bombing campaign to get Slobodan Milošević's forces out of Kosovo. Morrison here is saying that NATO's involvement constituted "genocide" (or as Gideon later says, "mass human sacrifice in the Balkans") and clearly feels either that this is obvious enough that it needs no further explanation, or that readers will learn it's true if they go look it up. Now, it is totally legit to have legal and ethical and practical objections to how this went down: NATO's involvement was against international law, it did kill civilians, and it escalated the war before finally stopping it. But you'd have to squint really hard to see this as a case of the UK and allied forces committing "genocide" and "mass human sacrifice" since, even if you accepted the highest estimates of how many civilians were killed in NATO attacks, those amounted to a couple of hundred, a tiny fraction of the death toll from Milošević's explicitly ethnic-cleansing-motivated wars. That particular wording is what you could politely call tendentious, that is, partisan without wanting to admit it; specifically it's borrowing Milošević's own preferred framing in which the Serbs were the real victims, bravely resisting the Western establishment. But it's a point of view one could have decided to argue for in 1999, if one felt strongly about it and had a prominent platform—and didn't mind controversy, since it was an unpopular point of view to say the least.
So why would a controversy-friendly writer with such an opinion decide not to really get into the subject or even exactly say what the subject was, but just obliquely reference it as a sign of the British government's wickedness, and assume that readers would naturally get the point? Well, let's assume uncharitably that the writer 1. was not well informed about current events, because they considered politics in general to be bullshit for suckers, but also 2. was invested in being the kind of contrarian leftist who sees nearly all other leftists as sell-outs, and therefore 3. had read a lot of Alexander Cockburn. Far from being an anarchist, Cockburn was a second-generation tankie; but during the 1990s—lacking a Cold War, and having no real interest in progressive politics within his adopted country—he found that he could appeal to general anti-war sentiment by arguing that the Balkan Wars in their entirety were all about US imperialism, and that Slobodan Milošević had gotten a bad rap (the equivalent today would be a defense of Putin). That was also a running theme for the former actual progressive hero Ramsey Clark, who in the '90s had become a figurehead for a faction that was trying to present itself as the leader of anti-war activism in general but was largely driven by Stalinist die-hards like the Workers World Party, and took more or less the same line as Cockburn, holding up Milošević as an anti-American hero. Someone who read a lot of Cockburn and Clark, and generally distrusted other forms of news they might read, could easily get the impression that this was obviously the real story. Now I may be projecting here, because that was basically me for a while in college; Morrison is 12 years older than me, and had seen more of the world. But frankly, based on a lot of Morrison's writing at the time, I think they had very little critical thinking ability about anything that sounded anti-establishment. And just as they didn't see any problem with treating Timothy-McVeigh-style right-wing paranoia, and anti-vaccine paranoia, as true for story purposes regardless of whether those were harmful bullshit in real-world terms, because at least that might get young people into the general habit of distrusting authority, maybe they didn't really care whether "the UK and NATO are trying to kill all the Serbs" was true in a literal sense as long as it was metaphorically in the ballpark.
Back to things I like. I like the art for this section: Sean Phillips and Jay Stephens work well together, and their shadow-heavy designs help to give the occasional emotional moments and/or horror moments more weight (I especially like the final scene between Edith and Tom's ghost, which is kind of both). You can see that I didn't include any art excerpts this time, because I just couldn't find anything that I felt was great out of context, but everything looks good. I like that Jack and Jolly Roger are now teamed up, because Roger insulting Jack is sometimes funny whereas Roger insulting Fanny was usually cringey. I like that I can imagine there will be an ending of some kind.
Next: an ending of some kind
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: Sean Phillips/Jay Stephens
After the previous four issues kicked off with a sense of things potentially moving into some new configuration, this next stretch circles around in a holding pattern that doesn't give much of a hint as to where things are going. But it does at least give us some contemplative time with Edith, an interesting character who'd been sidelined a long time; I'd been missing her, and her cynical-but-gentle point of view is one that Morrison seems to understand the series really needs as a counterbalance to the manic ideological certainty of other characters. We've also been getting a somewhat mellower King Mob, but a mellower King Mob just comes across as one of Morrison's letter-column travelogue pieces and I've already read lots of those, whereas Edith taking one look at de Sade's grandiose "I'm creating a new sexual utopia that will solve all psychological and medical problems" schtick and basically going "whatever, bless his heart" is (for me at least) pretty satisfying.
In terms of actual events, mainly what happens is Edith tells Gideon that there are benevolent interdimensional beings among us (something that's been brought up a few times already, although it's unclear why the Invisibles would only be figuring that out now after dealing with all this stuff for centuries), and then dies; Gideon trips out a lot and rambles about the grand design; the Invisibles mess with Sir Miles's mind some more, then let him go back to the enemy in a freaked-out state; Mister Six makes contact with some more creepy mystery figures who turn out to be the Harlequinade again; we get a date of August 25 for some big part of the apocalypse to happen; and Helga has an epiphany after experimenting on herself with drugs and alien writing. That last part with Helga may or may not end up having any significance beyond the usual "now we're really about to find out the real meaning of everything" wheel-spinning, and there are some logical reasons why it makes no sense* so it's a little irritating to me, but at least it is a kind of event that hasn't happened before, and it gives more of a purpose to this character than we had before... maybe.
There's one thing that goes beyond irritating and makes me kind of angry; it's a brief thing without any relevance to the story, but I'll dig into it a little more here because it gets at something that's bothered me before. So: during a standard "we're so evil, here are some more of the evil things we're responsible for" speech by one of Miles's minions, we're asked to consider "why do you think the United Kingdom is participating in genocide"—the implied answer being that the Archons and their British allies have to commit a bunch of atrocities to prepare for crowning the Moonchild as King and invading the world. But what current genocide in particular does Morrison have in mind, in late 1999?
Remarks elsewhere clarify that it's the just-ended Kosovo War, which the UK entered into as part of NATO in March 1999, conducting a two-month bombing campaign to get Slobodan Milošević's forces out of Kosovo. Morrison here is saying that NATO's involvement constituted "genocide" (or as Gideon later says, "mass human sacrifice in the Balkans") and clearly feels either that this is obvious enough that it needs no further explanation, or that readers will learn it's true if they go look it up. Now, it is totally legit to have legal and ethical and practical objections to how this went down: NATO's involvement was against international law, it did kill civilians, and it escalated the war before finally stopping it. But you'd have to squint really hard to see this as a case of the UK and allied forces committing "genocide" and "mass human sacrifice" since, even if you accepted the highest estimates of how many civilians were killed in NATO attacks, those amounted to a couple of hundred, a tiny fraction of the death toll from Milošević's explicitly ethnic-cleansing-motivated wars. That particular wording is what you could politely call tendentious, that is, partisan without wanting to admit it; specifically it's borrowing Milošević's own preferred framing in which the Serbs were the real victims, bravely resisting the Western establishment. But it's a point of view one could have decided to argue for in 1999, if one felt strongly about it and had a prominent platform—and didn't mind controversy, since it was an unpopular point of view to say the least.
So why would a controversy-friendly writer with such an opinion decide not to really get into the subject or even exactly say what the subject was, but just obliquely reference it as a sign of the British government's wickedness, and assume that readers would naturally get the point? Well, let's assume uncharitably that the writer 1. was not well informed about current events, because they considered politics in general to be bullshit for suckers, but also 2. was invested in being the kind of contrarian leftist who sees nearly all other leftists as sell-outs, and therefore 3. had read a lot of Alexander Cockburn. Far from being an anarchist, Cockburn was a second-generation tankie; but during the 1990s—lacking a Cold War, and having no real interest in progressive politics within his adopted country—he found that he could appeal to general anti-war sentiment by arguing that the Balkan Wars in their entirety were all about US imperialism, and that Slobodan Milošević had gotten a bad rap (the equivalent today would be a defense of Putin). That was also a running theme for the former actual progressive hero Ramsey Clark, who in the '90s had become a figurehead for a faction that was trying to present itself as the leader of anti-war activism in general but was largely driven by Stalinist die-hards like the Workers World Party, and took more or less the same line as Cockburn, holding up Milošević as an anti-American hero. Someone who read a lot of Cockburn and Clark, and generally distrusted other forms of news they might read, could easily get the impression that this was obviously the real story. Now I may be projecting here, because that was basically me for a while in college; Morrison is 12 years older than me, and had seen more of the world. But frankly, based on a lot of Morrison's writing at the time, I think they had very little critical thinking ability about anything that sounded anti-establishment. And just as they didn't see any problem with treating Timothy-McVeigh-style right-wing paranoia, and anti-vaccine paranoia, as true for story purposes regardless of whether those were harmful bullshit in real-world terms, because at least that might get young people into the general habit of distrusting authority, maybe they didn't really care whether "the UK and NATO are trying to kill all the Serbs" was true in a literal sense as long as it was metaphorically in the ballpark.
Back to things I like. I like the art for this section: Sean Phillips and Jay Stephens work well together, and their shadow-heavy designs help to give the occasional emotional moments and/or horror moments more weight (I especially like the final scene between Edith and Tom's ghost, which is kind of both). You can see that I didn't include any art excerpts this time, because I just couldn't find anything that I felt was great out of context, but everything looks good. I like that Jack and Jolly Roger are now teamed up, because Roger insulting Jack is sometimes funny whereas Roger insulting Fanny was usually cringey. I like that I can imagine there will be an ending of some kind.
Next: an ending of some kind
