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alibi_shopThe Invisibles volume 3 #4-1 (2000)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #4 by Steve Yeowell/Ashley Wood/John Ridgway/Philip Bond/Jill Thompson/Steve Parkhouse, #3 by Yeowell/Rian Hughes/Ridgway/Paul Johnson/Michael Lark/Thompson/Chris Weston, #2 by Yeowell/The Pander Brothers/Ridgway/Cameron Stewart/Mark Buckingham/Dean Ormston/Grant Morrison, #1 by Frank Quitely
It's not great, but it's an ending that fits with how the series went overall. That is: the core themes are hammered in some more, some narrative is raced through while other narrative is dragged out, there's a wild variety of artwork, and a few well-chosen words and images stand out. I won't try to sum up my opinion of the whole thing right now, this is just about the last four issues.
Jill Thompson getting even looser and doing her own inking—I like it Issues 4-2 are infamously (like, pretty much everyone at the time said this, including Morrison) a mess in terms of the art, due to a decision to bring back a bunch of previous series artists plus some new ones and have them alternate every few pages. I've seen it called an artist jam, but "jam" usually means something improvisational, whereas this is pretty specifically scripted* and there's a clear structure of having each artist handle particular subplots or sets of characters, usually ones they were associated with earlier in the series (so for instance John Ridgway gets to do all the stuff about the Earl). Despite some occasional "wait, is this the same person that the other artist was drawing or not" moments, and a few bits that just don't look good at all,
I've never seen any other Pander Brothers art; is it always like this? I actually kind of like this; there's a kind of getting-the-band-back-together effect, a treat for anyone who was kind of hoping to get a little more Thompson or Yeowell or whoever, and it's sort of thematically appropriate since Morrison is now leaning very hard on the "everything's a story, all points of view are valid" thing.
Besides the art, what this part is actually about is pretty straightforward. First, after a bunch of buildup about a big showdown at Westminster Abbey where the bad guys will do a final ritual and permanently take over the world for real this time (like, way more than they already did; as usual the stakes are incredibly unclear), we see that showdown. Second, if we need to be reminded that the real cosmic goal is not to defeat evil but to reconcile everything and have the two sides become one, and that the conflict is all a game or a story that's required for our spiritual growth, we are verbally reminded of this many times.
not that I expect the comic to engage in a serious examination of pacifism, but presumably Gideon does remember that he killed those people to make them stop committing mass murder and torture, not because they "didn't agree"—or, if that's the same thing, then presumably his murders are also just a disagreement and no big deal Third, a lot of old characters* and abandoned story threads have to make brief appearances to suggest that everything was part of a plan all along, which I don't remotely believe, although the return of Audrey from "Best Man Fall" is a good idea.** All of this could have been expanded on in interesting ways; the way it's done instead is so perfunctory and full of filler that there's barely two issues' worth of material in these three. The big showdown, despite many attempts to jazz it up with portentous dialogue ("The stakes are higher than we thought"—like, how??), and a frame-story narration that keeps pausing to tell you how nobody expected that last thing to happen, and now wait till you hear what happened next, etc., goes about as predictably as it possibly could; there's a series of reversals where one side or the other gets surprised and briefly stymied, but the only ones that are actually surprising are also very arbitrary, working only to fill space and get rid of characters (always the ones you expect to be gotten rid of). Now, based on all of the in-story editorializing about metafictional intent, you could argue that the predictability is part of the point and that the conflict isn't supposed to be interesting. If so, I feel like it might have been possible to achieve a similar goal in a way that wasn't so hard to distinguish from an author vamping listlessly in between the parts where we're being literally told what the point is.
John-A-Dreams has done literally nothing in this series except look cool and deliver redundant philosophical exposition, but he's good at those things
Where this finally gets to by the end of #2 is that the forces of evil have been sort of defeated, at least in terms of their ostensible plan so far, and most of our heroes have survived and semi-retired from the war—still recruiting for the cause, but the cause is now more philosophical and geared toward whatever's supposed to happen in 2012. So the final issue is about that, and it immediately signals that all the noodling around from the last three issues is now done with by 1. leaving the present behind as we go back to Robin's shiny future world, and 2. having everything be drawn by Frank Quitely, one of the most precise cartoonists who ever lived.
Quitely's art is a pleasure; I always love his linework and designs, and in this case I even like his faces some of the time, which I usually don't. I would've loved to see him get to depict more of this setting, but (not unlike the first Robin-future story) the script is pretty focused on what the main characters are doing in a couple of locations, and on what it all means. The main thing we find out about the world (expanded from a brief mention in the earlier story) is that people in 2012 are into "MeMes"—a kind of artificial dissociative thing where you can switch your personality on a whim—and that maybe this is a liberating development, or maybe it's a tool of the Conspiracy and the media corporation Technoccult. But instead of showing any of that to us in the form of human beings interacting, it's described verbally and then we almost immediately jump to an explanation of how Technoccult is really run by King Mob, and it's all a big undercover operation to use the enemy's capitalist propaganda system against them. So basically we've already won, we just need to win some more to get people's minds opened up enough for the real apocalypse to happen: the good one, where the limitations of our reality go away. The cosmic stuff that eventually happens is so beautifully drawn by Quitely, and in the final scene—recurring throughout as a frame story where Dane has reunited with his ruined childhood friend, Gaz,
I do wish I could know what Gaz has been doing all this time, but I'm glad to see him, and I like that he complains about future people talking "like rocket scientists about fuck-all" the best of all the callbacks because Dane has become kind of unknowable due to his spiritual ascension and Gaz brings back a more human point of view—the writing feels so much more intentional and emotionally present than it's been in a long time, that it's not hard to forget the previous 11 issues and daydream about an alternate volume 3 that actually led up to this in an organic way, and gave any of these ideas room to breathe and live.
If references to other works are your thing... the spray can from Ubik is the obvious one; there's also a nod to Jamie Delano's Hellblazer in the form of a butcher-aproned executioner sacrificing homeless people; and I'm sure there are many others I'm missing, but (characteristically for me) the one I'm most amused-yet-irritated by is a brief description of the monster Orlando as "a hunter-killer macrobe." Macrobe is a real scientific word meaning a colony of microbes, but in a fantasy context it's almost certainly another homage to C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, where it's a category meaning "life forms that are more advanced than humans to the same degree that microbes are simpler"—which the evil Dr. Frost has made up to describe the invisible demons he's working for. It contributes nothing to our idea of Orlando, since we already know he's a demon who hunts and kills, but it's kind of unintentionally funny to me because of the context. In Lewis's novel, the point is that Frost has made up this term for these things, instead of calling them demons or spirits, because it fits with his belief that he's purely rational and that he's living in an SF story rather than a religious one, and it's also a better tone for indoctrinating other academics. In The Invisibles, since we already know that this is a religious story with SF trappings and there's no reason not to use already-familiar words, writing dialogue in this style (from a cosmically-enlightened character who knows the real deal about everything) is just a gesture to suggest more levels of complication that we will never hear about, or to make a thing that's scary in basic ways sound a little scarier by using a spookier name. I don't have anything against such gestures in general, but there's a handful of them like this that Morrison has relied on so heavily throughout the series (another one being "describe atrocities that have been done to throwaway characters," which we also get some more of with Orlando) that I have an eye-rolling reflex instead of the intended atmospheric effect.
Obviously I'm complaining a lot, so to be clear, I do appreciate that these last four issues are at least very strange. If anyone else had been tasked with wrapping up The Invisibles, they might have hacked out something that I wouldn't have liked any better or worse on a story level, but there's no way it would've been this particular combination of "throw all of my past notes in a blender" and "follow through on one idea with great conviction" and "constantly tell people that it's all bullshit." I like it better than some long stretches of volume 2 and volume 3 that were far more coherent. I think it could have been made into something way better if so many deep aimless holes hadn't been dug up to that point... but that ship has sailed, and speaking as someone who is pretty terrible at plans and endings in general, I'm always interested in seeing different approaches to bringing a damaged vehicle in for a landing even when they involve a lot of flailing around.
Next: final thoughts and a fan book
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #4 by Steve Yeowell/Ashley Wood/John Ridgway/Philip Bond/Jill Thompson/Steve Parkhouse, #3 by Yeowell/Rian Hughes/Ridgway/Paul Johnson/Michael Lark/Thompson/Chris Weston, #2 by Yeowell/The Pander Brothers/Ridgway/Cameron Stewart/Mark Buckingham/Dean Ormston/Grant Morrison, #1 by Frank Quitely
It's not great, but it's an ending that fits with how the series went overall. That is: the core themes are hammered in some more, some narrative is raced through while other narrative is dragged out, there's a wild variety of artwork, and a few well-chosen words and images stand out. I won't try to sum up my opinion of the whole thing right now, this is just about the last four issues.
Jill Thompson getting even looser and doing her own inking—I like it Issues 4-2 are infamously (like, pretty much everyone at the time said this, including Morrison) a mess in terms of the art, due to a decision to bring back a bunch of previous series artists plus some new ones and have them alternate every few pages. I've seen it called an artist jam, but "jam" usually means something improvisational, whereas this is pretty specifically scripted* and there's a clear structure of having each artist handle particular subplots or sets of characters, usually ones they were associated with earlier in the series (so for instance John Ridgway gets to do all the stuff about the Earl). Despite some occasional "wait, is this the same person that the other artist was drawing or not" moments, and a few bits that just don't look good at all, I've never seen any other Pander Brothers art; is it always like this? I actually kind of like this; there's a kind of getting-the-band-back-together effect, a treat for anyone who was kind of hoping to get a little more Thompson or Yeowell or whoever, and it's sort of thematically appropriate since Morrison is now leaning very hard on the "everything's a story, all points of view are valid" thing.Besides the art, what this part is actually about is pretty straightforward. First, after a bunch of buildup about a big showdown at Westminster Abbey where the bad guys will do a final ritual and permanently take over the world for real this time (like, way more than they already did; as usual the stakes are incredibly unclear), we see that showdown. Second, if we need to be reminded that the real cosmic goal is not to defeat evil but to reconcile everything and have the two sides become one, and that the conflict is all a game or a story that's required for our spiritual growth, we are verbally reminded of this many times.
not that I expect the comic to engage in a serious examination of pacifism, but presumably Gideon does remember that he killed those people to make them stop committing mass murder and torture, not because they "didn't agree"—or, if that's the same thing, then presumably his murders are also just a disagreement and no big deal Third, a lot of old characters* and abandoned story threads have to make brief appearances to suggest that everything was part of a plan all along, which I don't remotely believe, although the return of Audrey from "Best Man Fall" is a good idea.** All of this could have been expanded on in interesting ways; the way it's done instead is so perfunctory and full of filler that there's barely two issues' worth of material in these three. The big showdown, despite many attempts to jazz it up with portentous dialogue ("The stakes are higher than we thought"—like, how??), and a frame-story narration that keeps pausing to tell you how nobody expected that last thing to happen, and now wait till you hear what happened next, etc., goes about as predictably as it possibly could; there's a series of reversals where one side or the other gets surprised and briefly stymied, but the only ones that are actually surprising are also very arbitrary, working only to fill space and get rid of characters (always the ones you expect to be gotten rid of). Now, based on all of the in-story editorializing about metafictional intent, you could argue that the predictability is part of the point and that the conflict isn't supposed to be interesting. If so, I feel like it might have been possible to achieve a similar goal in a way that wasn't so hard to distinguish from an author vamping listlessly in between the parts where we're being literally told what the point is. John-A-Dreams has done literally nothing in this series except look cool and deliver redundant philosophical exposition, but he's good at those thingsWhere this finally gets to by the end of #2 is that the forces of evil have been sort of defeated, at least in terms of their ostensible plan so far, and most of our heroes have survived and semi-retired from the war—still recruiting for the cause, but the cause is now more philosophical and geared toward whatever's supposed to happen in 2012. So the final issue is about that, and it immediately signals that all the noodling around from the last three issues is now done with by 1. leaving the present behind as we go back to Robin's shiny future world, and 2. having everything be drawn by Frank Quitely, one of the most precise cartoonists who ever lived.
Quitely's art is a pleasure; I always love his linework and designs, and in this case I even like his faces some of the time, which I usually don't. I would've loved to see him get to depict more of this setting, but (not unlike the first Robin-future story) the script is pretty focused on what the main characters are doing in a couple of locations, and on what it all means. The main thing we find out about the world (expanded from a brief mention in the earlier story) is that people in 2012 are into "MeMes"—a kind of artificial dissociative thing where you can switch your personality on a whim—and that maybe this is a liberating development, or maybe it's a tool of the Conspiracy and the media corporation Technoccult. But instead of showing any of that to us in the form of human beings interacting, it's described verbally and then we almost immediately jump to an explanation of how Technoccult is really run by King Mob, and it's all a big undercover operation to use the enemy's capitalist propaganda system against them. So basically we've already won, we just need to win some more to get people's minds opened up enough for the real apocalypse to happen: the good one, where the limitations of our reality go away. The cosmic stuff that eventually happens is so beautifully drawn by Quitely, and in the final scene—recurring throughout as a frame story where Dane has reunited with his ruined childhood friend, Gaz,
I do wish I could know what Gaz has been doing all this time, but I'm glad to see him, and I like that he complains about future people talking "like rocket scientists about fuck-all" the best of all the callbacks because Dane has become kind of unknowable due to his spiritual ascension and Gaz brings back a more human point of view—the writing feels so much more intentional and emotionally present than it's been in a long time, that it's not hard to forget the previous 11 issues and daydream about an alternate volume 3 that actually led up to this in an organic way, and gave any of these ideas room to breathe and live.If references to other works are your thing... the spray can from Ubik is the obvious one; there's also a nod to Jamie Delano's Hellblazer in the form of a butcher-aproned executioner sacrificing homeless people; and I'm sure there are many others I'm missing, but (characteristically for me) the one I'm most amused-yet-irritated by is a brief description of the monster Orlando as "a hunter-killer macrobe." Macrobe is a real scientific word meaning a colony of microbes, but in a fantasy context it's almost certainly another homage to C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, where it's a category meaning "life forms that are more advanced than humans to the same degree that microbes are simpler"—which the evil Dr. Frost has made up to describe the invisible demons he's working for. It contributes nothing to our idea of Orlando, since we already know he's a demon who hunts and kills, but it's kind of unintentionally funny to me because of the context. In Lewis's novel, the point is that Frost has made up this term for these things, instead of calling them demons or spirits, because it fits with his belief that he's purely rational and that he's living in an SF story rather than a religious one, and it's also a better tone for indoctrinating other academics. In The Invisibles, since we already know that this is a religious story with SF trappings and there's no reason not to use already-familiar words, writing dialogue in this style (from a cosmically-enlightened character who knows the real deal about everything) is just a gesture to suggest more levels of complication that we will never hear about, or to make a thing that's scary in basic ways sound a little scarier by using a spookier name. I don't have anything against such gestures in general, but there's a handful of them like this that Morrison has relied on so heavily throughout the series (another one being "describe atrocities that have been done to throwaway characters," which we also get some more of with Orlando) that I have an eye-rolling reflex instead of the intended atmospheric effect.
Obviously I'm complaining a lot, so to be clear, I do appreciate that these last four issues are at least very strange. If anyone else had been tasked with wrapping up The Invisibles, they might have hacked out something that I wouldn't have liked any better or worse on a story level, but there's no way it would've been this particular combination of "throw all of my past notes in a blender" and "follow through on one idea with great conviction" and "constantly tell people that it's all bullshit." I like it better than some long stretches of volume 2 and volume 3 that were far more coherent. I think it could have been made into something way better if so many deep aimless holes hadn't been dug up to that point... but that ship has sailed, and speaking as someone who is pretty terrible at plans and endings in general, I'm always interested in seeing different approaches to bringing a damaged vehicle in for a landing even when they involve a lot of flailing around.
Next: final thoughts and a fan book
