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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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While Karen Berger's project of bringing oddball British writers into DC Comics had produced a lot of distinctive stuff like Shade and The Sandman with "for mature readers" on the covers, it wasn't until 1993 that this became a separate imprint, Vertigo. From the start Berger tried not to focus on any one subject matter or style, so if you picked up a new Vertigo series you wouldn't know what to expect other than something genre-related and kind of morbid, very likely by someone British, with an amount of swearing and/or nudity that wouldn't have been allowed before, and a level of polished colorfulness that didn't fit with what "indie comics" meant in the '90s. Other companies had been dipping their toes in the mature-readers pool too; the miniseries I'm about to get to was originally supposed to be a Disney project (and if you think that's implausible: so was Enigma). But Vertigo was unusually successful partly because they had a good instinct for what people at the time either were already into, like Sandman-related stuff, or were about to be into but didn't know it yet, like steampunk.

The idea of putting SF/fantasy stories in a Victorian setting with lots of extra retro-styled technology had been around for a few years (I'm not sure what all the antecedents were, it's never really been my thing, much as I like James Blaylock), but it still felt somewhat new and didn't yet have the kind of following where you'd see people with brass gears on their top hats at every kind of genre fan event. It made sense to be trying different variations on steampunk in 1993, especially in comics: there was a general visual aesthetic you could play up with whatever level of shiny/grimy you preferred, and story-wise you could choose to treat it as just a lark or get into darker aspects of the period (say, Jack the Ripper, or colonialism, though the former tended to get about 1000 times more attention than the latter). But one approach that I'm pretty sure no one had tried before—and one that probably would've had no chance of being published if it didn't have Grant Morrison's name on it—was to leave both the milieu and the SF/fantasy element almost totally unexplored, and focus on a nihilist super-fop inspired by the works of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde.
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In this series of posts—to be written whenever I get around to them—I'll be rereading and talking about a 1994-2000 comic series written by Grant Morrison that's about (among other things) anarchist secret agents, demons, magic, mind control, time travel, psychedelia, conspiracy theories, aristocrats, teenagers, drag, and the end of the universe.
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