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Time Zone J by Julie Doucet (2022): It'd be hard to overstate what a big deal Doucet was to indie comics readers in the '90s, including me, and it was a bummer (but understandable) that the unrewardingness of the field led her to give it up for a long time. This wild book isn't a return to the kind of things she used to do but it's unmistakably hers and I love it. It's definitely comics, even though it has no familiar layout cues and starts out looking like just an especially good sketchbook until a narrative thread starts emerging from Doucet's many faces that wend their way through the riot of images—she doesn't ever literally depict the story she's telling, only her internal process of reliving it. Great at evoking stormy youth seen through older sadder eyes, while the energy and beauty of all the tangential stuff on every page, and the sharpness of the writing, make it clear that she's as strong as ever. Time Zone J by Julie Doucet (2022): It'd be hard to overstate what a big deal Doucet was to indie comics readers in the '90s, including me, and it was a bummer (but understandable) that the unrewardingness of the field led her to give it up for a long time. This wild book isn't a return to the kind of things she used to do but it's unmistakably hers and I love it. It's definitely comics, even though it has no familiar layout cues and starts out looking like just an especially good sketchbook until a narrative thread starts emerging from Doucet's many faces that wend their way through the riot of images—she doesn't ever literally depict the story she's telling, only her internal process of reliving it. Great at evoking stormy youth seen through older sadder eyes, while the energy and beauty of all the tangential stuff on every page, and the sharpness of the writing, make it clear that she's as strong as ever.
notes on Busybody #1
September 7th, 2023 10:25I wrote these because I just reprinted the first issue of my solo-anthology thing and the second one is finally underway. There's really no need to read these notes but I just like writing them.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
Not sure anybody is reading this, but just FYI, the reason there hasn't been much here for a while except Letterboxd movie review links isn't because I stopped writing anything else. It's because most of what I've written in the last year is theater/performance art material for the San Francisco Neo-Futurists.
The SF Neos are a relatively recent (10 years) offshoot of the original Chicago company that's now 35 years old, by way of the New York sister group. Pretty much everyone in Chicago knows what that is, but I haven't spent much time in Chicago and so I only found out about it when I had the great good luck to meet Dave Awl and Diana Slickman in 2005. I could see immediately that this was something I needed in my life, so it was pretty exciting when the SF group started in 2013, and I became a loyal fan to a possibly annoying degree, and unsuccessfully auditioned for them early on. More recently I did some work for them as a theater tech, and then last year I finally got my nerve up to audition again and got in. It's been pretty great, not just in general because I'd been itching to perform more after many years of not pursuing theater, but also because I specifically love this group and their work.
But, being theater, it's mostly ephemeral work. I might post some of my own short pieces online at some point, and maybe one day we'll do a big book like the ones Dave and Diana did, but right now I'm content to have a couple of them in the little anthology chapbook/zine that we publish every year. The 2022 chapbook (which also includes a bunch of little drawings I did) is available at the merch table at our shows; people in Chicago may also find one at Quimby's.
There are various comics projects that I keep working on very slowly, and this year I printed a few small zine/minicomic things, like this and this and this.
The SF Neos are a relatively recent (10 years) offshoot of the original Chicago company that's now 35 years old, by way of the New York sister group. Pretty much everyone in Chicago knows what that is, but I haven't spent much time in Chicago and so I only found out about it when I had the great good luck to meet Dave Awl and Diana Slickman in 2005. I could see immediately that this was something I needed in my life, so it was pretty exciting when the SF group started in 2013, and I became a loyal fan to a possibly annoying degree, and unsuccessfully auditioned for them early on. More recently I did some work for them as a theater tech, and then last year I finally got my nerve up to audition again and got in. It's been pretty great, not just in general because I'd been itching to perform more after many years of not pursuing theater, but also because I specifically love this group and their work.
But, being theater, it's mostly ephemeral work. I might post some of my own short pieces online at some point, and maybe one day we'll do a big book like the ones Dave and Diana did, but right now I'm content to have a couple of them in the little anthology chapbook/zine that we publish every year. The 2022 chapbook (which also includes a bunch of little drawings I did) is available at the merch table at our shows; people in Chicago may also find one at Quimby's.
There are various comics projects that I keep working on very slowly, and this year I printed a few small zine/minicomic things, like this and this and this.
Watching the current shockingly well done TV adaptation of The Sandman*, I figured a lot of things would have to be reworked to set it in 2022 instead of 1989; those were mostly handled in pretty reasonable ways. Only one thing has really made me feel old though, and it's this: in episode 9, the creepy serial-killer-fan dude now writes a blog instead of a zine.
It's not that that makes any real difference; it's just that that particular brief subplot always stuck out in my mind due to a combination of two things, which are really one thing:
1. I got very grossed out as a teenager in 1988 by running across a copy of Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture anthology—a mishmash of transgressive outsider art and horrible edgelord bullshit, which was framed by pseudo-scholarly ruminations about what it all means, even though Parfrey pretty clearly just thought the horrible edgelord bullshit was cool.**
2. This subplot in The Sandman—where fascist incel ultra-creep "Philip Sitz", author of Chaste, manages to finally meet some real monsters and regrets it very much—is the only bit I know of in the series that's a gleeful Dante-style personal attack on a contemporary writer. That's Peter Sotos, who put out only two issues of Pure in the '80s and then got busted for possession of child porn, but got a worshipful profile and interview in Apocalypse Culture (so it's possible Gaiman found out about him the exact same way I did) and some ironic art cred out of it. Gaiman was clearly not amused.
I'm aware (due to the Internet) that other people figured this out too of course, but in 1990 I felt like that comic book was aiming this inside joke directly at me, in a friendly way, like: "Hey, sorry you had to find out so dramatically early on that there are a lot of unbelievable assholes mixed in with the kind of art-weirdos you're curious about. Would it help if I make one of them ironically die?"
It's not that that makes any real difference; it's just that that particular brief subplot always stuck out in my mind due to a combination of two things, which are really one thing:
1. I got very grossed out as a teenager in 1988 by running across a copy of Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture anthology—a mishmash of transgressive outsider art and horrible edgelord bullshit, which was framed by pseudo-scholarly ruminations about what it all means, even though Parfrey pretty clearly just thought the horrible edgelord bullshit was cool.**
2. This subplot in The Sandman—where fascist incel ultra-creep "Philip Sitz", author of Chaste, manages to finally meet some real monsters and regrets it very much—is the only bit I know of in the series that's a gleeful Dante-style personal attack on a contemporary writer. That's Peter Sotos, who put out only two issues of Pure in the '80s and then got busted for possession of child porn, but got a worshipful profile and interview in Apocalypse Culture (so it's possible Gaiman found out about him the exact same way I did) and some ironic art cred out of it. Gaiman was clearly not amused.
I'm aware (due to the Internet) that other people figured this out too of course, but in 1990 I felt like that comic book was aiming this inside joke directly at me, in a friendly way, like: "Hey, sorry you had to find out so dramatically early on that there are a lot of unbelievable assholes mixed in with the kind of art-weirdos you're curious about. Would it help if I make one of them ironically die?"
The 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.
( Read more... )
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.
( Read more... )
The 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.
( Read more... )
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.
( Read more... )
Movies: A Castle for Christmas (2021, **), Batman Returns (1995, ***), The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992, ****), Eyes Wide Shut (1999, ****½), West Side Story (2021, *****)
Books/comics: Leviathan Falls—Corey (2021, ****), Dynamic Light and Shade—Hogarth (1958, ****), Secret Life—VanderMeer/Ellsworth (2021, *****)
Books/comics: Leviathan Falls—Corey (2021, ****), Dynamic Light and Shade—Hogarth (1958, ****), Secret Life—VanderMeer/Ellsworth (2021, *****)
Movies: ParaNorman (2012, ***), Vamps (2012, **½), Doctor Sleep (2019, ****), Soul (2020, ***½), Cabaret (1972, ****½)
Books/comics: Bezkamp—Sattin/Hickman (2019), The Outsider—King (2018, ***), Psychological Warfare—Linebarger (1948, ****), Exhalation—Chiang (2019, ****)
Books/comics: Bezkamp—Sattin/Hickman (2019), The Outsider—King (2018, ***), Psychological Warfare—Linebarger (1948, ****), Exhalation—Chiang (2019, ****)
The Invisibles volume 3 #12-9 (1999)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: Warren Pleece/Philip Bond, except #12 by Bond
So we're back and it's the home stretch. I was surprised to see, now, that the gap after volume two was only two months in publishing time; somehow it had felt longer to me than the four-month gap after volume one. Maybe I was more impatient at the time because at the end of volume one it had seemed like anything could happen and it was cool just to think that the series might continue at all, whereas here it seemed like only a limited number of things could happen and I wanted them to get on with it. And the tone and framing of these issues basically announces "we know you've been waiting for us to get on with it." The reverse numbering* is a smart move because "this really is building toward something specific, the end is in sight" is something readers might be feeling a need for by now. Toward the same goal, there's a clear effort in the first few issues to check in with characters and ideas that have been important at various times, with a tone that suggests we're finally going to see them all come together in some unexpected satisfying way. I'm skeptical about that of course,** due to past experience and also because a fair amount of what we're getting here isn't so much exploring earlier ideas as just rehashing them with minor variations.
( Read more... )
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: Warren Pleece/Philip Bond, except #12 by Bond
So we're back and it's the home stretch. I was surprised to see, now, that the gap after volume two was only two months in publishing time; somehow it had felt longer to me than the four-month gap after volume one. Maybe I was more impatient at the time because at the end of volume one it had seemed like anything could happen and it was cool just to think that the series might continue at all, whereas here it seemed like only a limited number of things could happen and I wanted them to get on with it. And the tone and framing of these issues basically announces "we know you've been waiting for us to get on with it." The reverse numbering* is a smart move because "this really is building toward something specific, the end is in sight" is something readers might be feeling a need for by now. Toward the same goal, there's a clear effort in the first few issues to check in with characters and ideas that have been important at various times, with a tone that suggests we're finally going to see them all come together in some unexpected satisfying way. I'm skeptical about that of course,** due to past experience and also because a fair amount of what we're getting here isn't so much exploring earlier ideas as just rehashing them with minor variations.
( Read more... )
The 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.
( Read more... )
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.
( Read more... )
The 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.
( Read more... )
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.
( Read more... )
The 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.
( Read more... )
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.
( Read more... )
The Invisibles volume 2 #1-4 (1997)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Phil Jimenez & John Stokes
When I mentioned the three-issue segment in volume 1 that introduced all the extra violence and shiny things and Phil Jimenez art, I said that even though that wasn't my favorite flavor of The Invisibles, there wasn't anything boring about it. That's no longer the case. I know it was probably necessary to slow down a lot in the storytelling department, and do some recaps and reintroductions to give the hoped-for new readers an easy start... but wow, some of this stuff is lazy to the point that it drags even when things are blowing up.
( Read more... )
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Phil Jimenez & John Stokes
When I mentioned the three-issue segment in volume 1 that introduced all the extra violence and shiny things and Phil Jimenez art, I said that even though that wasn't my favorite flavor of The Invisibles, there wasn't anything boring about it. That's no longer the case. I know it was probably necessary to slow down a lot in the storytelling department, and do some recaps and reintroductions to give the hoped-for new readers an easy start... but wow, some of this stuff is lazy to the point that it drags even when things are blowing up.
( Read more... )
The Invisibles #20-25 (1996)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #20 by Tommy Lee Edwards, #21 by Paul Johnson, #22-24 by Steve Yeowell & Dick Giordano, #25 by Mark Buckingham & Mark Pennington
I don't know what if any overarching structure Morrison had in mind for the series ahead of time, but by this point it's apparent that the current version of the series will be closed out soon and designated as Volume 1, and that the Phil Jimenez-illustrated Volume 2 will follow after a short break—so it's time to wrap up the current threads, reinforce the main things that Volume 1 has been about (establishing who the main team members are, the general kind of evil they're facing, and why Dane is so important), and drop in a couple of mysterious new things for us to be curious about during the break. These six issues do all of that in a way that to me feels pretty awkward about half of the time; for the other half, I'm still into it.
( Read more... )
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #20 by Tommy Lee Edwards, #21 by Paul Johnson, #22-24 by Steve Yeowell & Dick Giordano, #25 by Mark Buckingham & Mark Pennington
I don't know what if any overarching structure Morrison had in mind for the series ahead of time, but by this point it's apparent that the current version of the series will be closed out soon and designated as Volume 1, and that the Phil Jimenez-illustrated Volume 2 will follow after a short break—so it's time to wrap up the current threads, reinforce the main things that Volume 1 has been about (establishing who the main team members are, the general kind of evil they're facing, and why Dane is so important), and drop in a couple of mysterious new things for us to be curious about during the break. These six issues do all of that in a way that to me feels pretty awkward about half of the time; for the other half, I'm still into it.
( Read more... )
Nine Faces of Nothing
August 30th, 2020 18:22I've finished a self-published thing that I feel good about, even though its subject is a massive bummer and even though this is kind of a weird time (given the state of the world) to be putting out something so interior-focused and solipsistic. In a way, it functions as an excuse for why I haven't been very productive with previous projects. It's also something I just felt compelled to do.
Nine Faces of Nothing is a 60-page small-format black-and-white comic collection that looks at the experience of major depression from different angles and in different styles. Some of it is directly autobiographical; some is pretty abstract; there's some comedy, some very grim stuff, some grim comedy, the kind of self-indulgent formal experimentation that I find hard to resist, and also an adaptation of an early 20th century Gothic classic by someone even less sane than me. I can't say I have any great insights, and there's no advice here at all, but maybe it at least succeeds at making visual drama out of some of the failure modes of human consciousness.
Click here to see how to get it—there's a paper version and an e-book.
Now I'll see about getting back to making other kinds of things!
Nine Faces of Nothing is a 60-page small-format black-and-white comic collection that looks at the experience of major depression from different angles and in different styles. Some of it is directly autobiographical; some is pretty abstract; there's some comedy, some very grim stuff, some grim comedy, the kind of self-indulgent formal experimentation that I find hard to resist, and also an adaptation of an early 20th century Gothic classic by someone even less sane than me. I can't say I have any great insights, and there's no advice here at all, but maybe it at least succeeds at making visual drama out of some of the failure modes of human consciousness.
Click here to see how to get it—there's a paper version and an e-book.
Now I'll see about getting back to making other kinds of things!
The Invisibles #17-19 (1996)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Phil Jimenez and John Stokes
Even if you hadn't read any of the source material that "Gideon Stargrave" is a riff on, nor the author's note in the letters column where they tell you what that is, it'd be pretty obvious that the zany thriller nonsense that opens #17 and keeps recurring at intervals is not a jarring new subplot in the series, but an homage to or parody of something; a key quality of the style it's borrowing is that it very loudly claims to be a story, but clearly isn't one. There are several reasons it makes sense to throw in that kind of thing at this point. One (which I think any cartoonist can identify with) is that it's an excuse for Morrison to recycle some of their juvenilia and make it look really cool this time, like it was supposed to. Another is the in-story excuse: our critically injured dickhead hero King Mob (real name Gideon Starorzewski*) actually wrote this stuff, and has embedded it in his head in order to confuse enemy mind-readers. But there's also a practical aspect: you can't hire Phil Jimenez and not give him as much awesome shit to draw as possible.
( Read more... )
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Phil Jimenez and John Stokes
Even if you hadn't read any of the source material that "Gideon Stargrave" is a riff on, nor the author's note in the letters column where they tell you what that is, it'd be pretty obvious that the zany thriller nonsense that opens #17 and keeps recurring at intervals is not a jarring new subplot in the series, but an homage to or parody of something; a key quality of the style it's borrowing is that it very loudly claims to be a story, but clearly isn't one. There are several reasons it makes sense to throw in that kind of thing at this point. One (which I think any cartoonist can identify with) is that it's an excuse for Morrison to recycle some of their juvenilia and make it look really cool this time, like it was supposed to. Another is the in-story excuse: our critically injured dickhead hero King Mob (real name Gideon Starorzewski*) actually wrote this stuff, and has embedded it in his head in order to confuse enemy mind-readers. But there's also a practical aspect: you can't hire Phil Jimenez and not give him as much awesome shit to draw as possible.
( Read more... )
The Invisibles #13-16 (1995-1996)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #13-15 by Jill Thompson, #16 by Paul Johnson
The closest thing we've had to a deliberate structural device in this series so far, the idea of occasional one-off stories, didn't exactly happen as intended. But late in the first chapter of this next story arc, Edith Manning* gives us a new one—basically a story outline in the guise of a mystical insight—that right away feels like an obvious and good move: the team's been shaken up by finding and losing Dane, and now they're destined to each face some kind of personal ordeal, one at a time. That's a good excuse to finally give us some idea of who these people are, and even though we're already a whole year into this story, better late than never.
( Read more... )
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #13-15 by Jill Thompson, #16 by Paul Johnson
The closest thing we've had to a deliberate structural device in this series so far, the idea of occasional one-off stories, didn't exactly happen as intended. But late in the first chapter of this next story arc, Edith Manning* gives us a new one—basically a story outline in the guise of a mystical insight—that right away feels like an obvious and good move: the team's been shaken up by finding and losing Dane, and now they're destined to each face some kind of personal ordeal, one at a time. That's a good excuse to finally give us some idea of who these people are, and even though we're already a whole year into this story, better late than never.
( Read more... )
The Invisibles #10-12 (1995)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #10 by Chris Weston, #11 by John Ridgway, #12 by Steve Parkhouse
When Morrison set out their plans in the author's note for issue 1, one of the more plausible parts was that the main plot would alternate with some single-issue stories about marginal characters. That can be a good approach in long serialized works, especially in fantasy where you can use it to explore some less-important consequence of the main premise, or see what the premise would look like through the lens of a different subgenre or a different kind of protagonist; it was often used that way to good effect in pre-Vertigo series like Swamp Thing and The Sandman. But, for whatever reason, that ended up barely happening at all in The Invisibles. This run of three standalone issues is pretty much it. So, given that they'll be the only showcases for this kind of storytelling, it's appropriate that they go in three very different directions: trying for extreme horror and social commentary and ending up with something a bit unfortunate; trying for something safer and executing it handsomely; and trying for something completely unexpected and ending up with an unforgettable and humane gut-punch of a story that's a high point of the series and really of this author's career.
( Read more... )
Written by Grant Morrison
Art: #10 by Chris Weston, #11 by John Ridgway, #12 by Steve Parkhouse
When Morrison set out their plans in the author's note for issue 1, one of the more plausible parts was that the main plot would alternate with some single-issue stories about marginal characters. That can be a good approach in long serialized works, especially in fantasy where you can use it to explore some less-important consequence of the main premise, or see what the premise would look like through the lens of a different subgenre or a different kind of protagonist; it was often used that way to good effect in pre-Vertigo series like Swamp Thing and The Sandman. But, for whatever reason, that ended up barely happening at all in The Invisibles. This run of three standalone issues is pretty much it. So, given that they'll be the only showcases for this kind of storytelling, it's appropriate that they go in three very different directions: trying for extreme horror and social commentary and ending up with something a bit unfortunate; trying for something safer and executing it handsomely; and trying for something completely unexpected and ending up with an unforgettable and humane gut-punch of a story that's a high point of the series and really of this author's career.
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The Invisibles #5-9 (1995)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Jill Thompson and Justine Mara Andersen (credited as Dennis Cramer)
A few big changes are obvious at the start of this section, "Arcadia." There's extremely different art by Jill Thompson working with the prolific DC inker Justine Mara Andersen, which immediately gives the series a brighter and messier and more tactile feel, making our main cast look less smoothly iconic and more like a bunch of people with incompatible ideas of how to be cool; Dane now looks closer to 13 than 16, and King Mob is considerably less butch. The main cast gets more dialogue now (even though it's still not super clear who they are; more on that in a minute). And we're mostly leaving modern London behind, as the comic focuses on a time-travel mission to the French Revolution, alternating with interludes about Percy Shelley and Lord Byron that are pretty much unconnected to the plot and consist mostly of philosophical musings—plus a lengthy thesis on why Donatien Alphonse François de Sade was an important genius, which includes literally depicting a bunch of excerpts from The 120 Days of Sodom. Even though some supernatural monsters do show up and some of the theoretical content is genuinely interesting, this is the section where I can imagine a lot of Vertigo readers dropping out because they wanted a certain amount of basic genre satisfactions to accompany the mind-bendingness, or at least more of a feeling that Morrison is telling a story rather than showing us their notes for one.
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Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Jill Thompson and Justine Mara Andersen (credited as Dennis Cramer)
A few big changes are obvious at the start of this section, "Arcadia." There's extremely different art by Jill Thompson working with the prolific DC inker Justine Mara Andersen, which immediately gives the series a brighter and messier and more tactile feel, making our main cast look less smoothly iconic and more like a bunch of people with incompatible ideas of how to be cool; Dane now looks closer to 13 than 16, and King Mob is considerably less butch. The main cast gets more dialogue now (even though it's still not super clear who they are; more on that in a minute). And we're mostly leaving modern London behind, as the comic focuses on a time-travel mission to the French Revolution, alternating with interludes about Percy Shelley and Lord Byron that are pretty much unconnected to the plot and consist mostly of philosophical musings—plus a lengthy thesis on why Donatien Alphonse François de Sade was an important genius, which includes literally depicting a bunch of excerpts from The 120 Days of Sodom. Even though some supernatural monsters do show up and some of the theoretical content is genuinely interesting, this is the section where I can imagine a lot of Vertigo readers dropping out because they wanted a certain amount of basic genre satisfactions to accompany the mind-bendingness, or at least more of a feeling that Morrison is telling a story rather than showing us their notes for one.
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The Invisibles #1-4 (1994)
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Steve Yeowell
If you get to the end of the first issue of this, which shows you a psychic teenager on the run from demonic authorities and visions and violence and gross things in jars and guns and explosions and a bizarre-ass secret agent costume and the ghost of the fifth Beatle, and then you look at the page-long author's note, the first thing you see is their advice to throw that issue away once you're done and not keep any comic books around (I failed to do this). Then, after a complaint about how no one appreciated Doom Patrol (which sounds odd to me now because at the time I thought it was generally considered to be cool), there's a statement of purpose for The Invisibles that's like... well, the author isn't holding back.
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Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Steve Yeowell
If you get to the end of the first issue of this, which shows you a psychic teenager on the run from demonic authorities and visions and violence and gross things in jars and guns and explosions and a bizarre-ass secret agent costume and the ghost of the fifth Beatle, and then you look at the page-long author's note, the first thing you see is their advice to throw that issue away once you're done and not keep any comic books around (I failed to do this). Then, after a complaint about how no one appreciated Doom Patrol (which sounds odd to me now because at the time I thought it was generally considered to be cool), there's a statement of purpose for The Invisibles that's like... well, the author isn't holding back.
( Read more... )