In this section I will begin to dive into the world of The Invisibles, presenting the book's author as well some of his prior works leading up to The Invisibles, summarizing the volume at hand with a description of the plot and its characters, and lastly explaining some allusions and literary references found in the book.
3.1. Grant Morrison, the Author
Grant Morrison is the author of The Invisibles. He is Scottish, was born in 1960 (alt.culture 1999), has been writing comics since 1978 (Shrubsole 1999), and seems to hold Invisibles as his ultimate comic achievement (Babcock 1996).
Darren Shrubsole has compiled a "comixography" of Grant Morrison, or, as he more accurately puts it, "a comprehensive list of Grant Morrison's work in comics" (Shrubsole 1999). According to it, Morrison's comic career began with writing and drawing, although nowadays he leaves the drawing for others and instead concentrates on perfecting his writing. Early on in his career, he penned episodes for the seminal and highly influential British neo-sci-fi comic 2000AD, but he also did more obscure titles such as Zoids and Action Force, which some may remember to be spin-off titles from the realm of action figures.
It was with DC's Animal Man that Morrison begun to hone his current techniques. The American comic book publisher DC, with its sublabel Vertigo (directed towards darker and more cynical persons such as adults), has been home to Morrison ever since. Animal Man was in theory a traditional super-hero comic, describing the adventures of a man with the ability to take on qualities of any animal in the vicinity, ie. flying like a bird, diving as fish do, showing bear-like strength, and moving with feline quickness. The theoretical conventions were broken, however, as Morrison started to guide his main character towards metaphysical adventures, releasing him on endless journeys of self-discovery, excursions into the condition of the planet's ecosystem, and even putting weight into depicting the troubles of family life for his "hero".
After Animal Man, Morrison started to work on his penultimate comic achievement so far, Doom Patrol. The book had existed in the so-called Silver Age of comics during the late 60's and early 70's, tagging itself as "the world's most bizarre heroes" at the time. But even though it may have seemed quite unconventional, the old Doom Patrol was still tightly connected with the Golden Age of comics ideals: that the heroes must strive to eradicate evil, that the group must constantly search for new assignments, and that they must somehow represent heroic ideals despite their origins. However, Morrison elevated the whole idea of unconventional heroes into a completely new dimension, sending the group careening into a wholly new existence. He started off his first storyline for the book, Crawling from the Wreckage by killing off most of the former main characters, leaving one psychotic cyborg and the severed yet living head of the former leader to literally pick up the pieces. The new recruits that came to join the group included, for instance, a little schitzophrenic teenage monkey-faced girl with multiple super-powered personalities, as well as a transvestite member (predicting the arrival of Lord Fanny into The Invisibles, but more on that later).
Doom Patrol was a deeply mysterious, widely alluding and highly incomprehensible foray across the underbelly of modern civilization. I cannot describe it as well as Steven Shapiro does in his essay Doom Patrols (1995):
[The old book] concerned a group of social and genetic misfits who put their strangeness to use by becoming superheroes. Morrison picks up on the theme of refusing and resisting social norms, and gives it mond-blowingly kinky new twists. The changes are enormous: the old book's naive earnestness is replaced by the tongue-in-cheek provocations of a sly hipster.
Shaviro goes on to write:
Stability, normality, conformity, and everyday boredom are always the real enemies; Doom Patrol deploys against them its vision of crazed flux in a decentered, goofily hyperreal world. It provides an exhilarating mixture of kitschy nonchalance and schizoid exaggeration; it is multilinear, eclectic, and self-consciously absurdist.(Shaviro 1995.)
And lastly, to drive the point finally home, he expounds:
Everything is in pieces, everything is borrowed or stolen. [...] A single page of Doom Patrol may also contain allusions and references to Gnostic heresies, pop music, and chaos theory, to Thomas De Quincey and Andy Warhol and Jack Kirby, to the Brothers Grimm and Salvador Dali and Mr. Ed, to X-Ray Spex and My Bloody Valentine and T.S. Eliot and Terence McKenna. The comic shows an amazing capacity for sucking up and regurgitating the detritus of Anglo-American (and world) culture. It annihilates categories of high and low, proper and improper, subjecting all distinctions to a continual play of absorption, mimicry, frantic accumulation, and prodigal display. It opposes the dreariness of standardized routine with its continual show of recombinant delirium.(Shaviro 1995.)
So, Doom Patrol is already everything The Invisibles is, maybe even more. Already we get the wide-ranging cultural borrowings from an amazing multitude of sources, the sometimes blatant, sometimes obscure references to classic literature, pop music, visual art and metaphysics. I would posit that The Invisibles is not so flamboyant in its playfulness as Doom Patrol, instead it attempts to drive the same points home in a more subtle, subliminal fashion.
In Morrison's own introductory outline of the series, presented in place of the letter column in the first issue, he gives this as his declaration of intention:
Although we have a core group of characters, anyone can belong to or oppose the Invisibles. [...] Various ordinary and extraordinary folks [will be] drawn into a web of conspiracy that extends from the back streets of your hometown to the dark blue-green planet circling Alpha Centauri and beyond, out past the horizon of the spacetime supersphere itself, giving me the oppportunity to tell stories ranging across time and genre, stories that will eventually come together and be revealed as one large-scale, shimmering holographic tapestry.(Morrison 1994.)
That seems quite heavy at first reading, but a more careful scrutiny of The Invisibles reveals that he has indeed fulfilled his objectives. In an interview made for the magazine Sci-Fi Universe (Shrubsole 1996), Morrison admits that they "confused a few people with the first book", meaning especially the time-traveling storyline of Arcadia, the arc that ends the volume discussed here. Morrison continues: "I had to be forced to admit that there's certain things that the general comics audience just can't handle." (Shrubsole 1996). In the interview, he sets his sights on still bringing out the complex and the obscure, but in a slightly more accessible vein.
This is not very surprising, considering how Morrison continues his intents above:
This is the comic I've wanted to write all my life -- a comic about everything: action, philosophy, paranoia, sex, magic, biography, travel, drugs, religion, UFOs... you can make your own list.(Morrison 1994.)
At the point of confusion, Morrison decided to end the first volume of the series and begin again, with a new team of artists and this time transferring the action into the US South-West. Bloody Hell in America, this new volume was called. Later on, a third volume was started in order to bring yet new directions to the story. Now the book is nearing its end, and the fans's breaths are taken away by the sheer barrage of fresh ideas and interesting connotations that Morrison keeps firing at them.
While producing The Invisibles, Morrison has found the time to sow his postmodern seed elsewhere. Some works deserve mention here: for instance, Flex Mentallo, that Shrubsole describes thusly (I have not had the privilege of reading it myself):
Morrison's interest in music [...] was combined with his love for comics, musclemen and hallucinogens in 1996's Flex Mentallo four-issue miniseries, a work of probable genius that weaved multiple mobius loops of narrative logic involving superheroes, has-been rock stars, nostalgia, creativity, mythology and mind-altering drugs, beautifully rendered by [the artist] Frank Quitely.(Shrubsole 1996.)
Another of his shorter, yet brilliant works is Sebastian O, a three-issue miniseries for Vertigo that is like Invisibles but set in Victorian England. The title character is an archetypal Edwardian dandy, who dabbles with the mystical, political and fantastical in an imaginary, science-fictional London of the time. Sebastian O is much concerned with his appearance like any true English gentleman, and produces wonderfully ironic one-liners reminiscent of Oscar Wilde's witticisms: "One must commit acts of the highest treason only when dressed in the most resplendent finery." (Sebastian O issue 1/3, 1993). Here is what the Vertigo introduction to the first issue has to say:
When an alternative London of the 1890s discovers computer technology, decadence, scandal, and perversion run amok behind the prudish curtain of Victorian society. And Sebastian O, a finely-coiffured insane asylum escapee, seeks unrefined vengeance on the abhorrent gents who put him away.(author unknown, Sebastian O issue 1/3, editors' column, 1993).
As Sebastian untangles the threads of the conspiracy that sent him to jail, he discovers a horrifying mystery: the world around him may be just an image, a charade controlled by his former accomplice, Theo. Theo claims to have invented a way to produce "artificial worlds created within the informational womb of the computer". Towards the end of the series, the reader is left to speculate whether Sebastian O and his adventures indeed have happened inside a kind of virtual reality.
Did that sound familiar? Yes, the movie Matrix (1999) comes to mind. Indeed, believe it or not, Matrix is based on Morrison's original storyline, which is not at all hard do realize when comparing the themes found in the movie with Morrison's recurring themes in the comic medium. Subversiveness, plays on reality and perception, inhuman feats transgressing the physical, metaphysical contemplations and alternative world views; all these are found also, for instance, in The Invisibles.
Although the more limited runs of titles like Sebastian O and Flex Mentallo have given Morrison ample room to develop his technique, they have not proved to be successful commercially. This is no wonder, considering that the majority of the comic-buying populace consists of adolescents in need of straightforward and easily comprehensible super-hero action, however science-fictional and highly fantastic it may be. This is one of the reasons why Morrison also writes another kind of comics, intended for a slightly younger audience. His main achievement here is his acclaimed run as the writer of Justice League of America, an ongoing superhero title for DC Comics. JLA has been in existence since the Golden Age of comics, and has always been a rather popular title, although not as widely purchased as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man or other canonic superhero titles.
The aforementioned interview for Sci-Fi Universe states that Morrison
sees the work he does for the "adult" audience as being separate from
the "kids' stuff", and that he is primarily using the JLA and another
title, Aztek, to earn his living. But this is not the whole truth, as
Morrison goes on to highlight the fact that what he is doing for the
kids is what he would have liked as a child: "What I'm doing with JLA
and Aztek is going back to the kind of stuff I liked when I was a kid
and trying to do an updated version of it for kids' now." (Shrubsole 1996).
3.2. Summary of plot and characters in The
Invisibles: Say You Want A Revolution
Here's a picture of The Invisibles at the point when they have arrived to recruit their newest member, Dane McGowan:
The bald man in the forefront is King Mob, the leader of this small team of Invisibles agents. He is knowledgeable in the mystic arts, has some clear picture of what the team is up against, and clearly represents the most experienced material in the team.
The white-masked, orange-haired, marionette-like woman in the back is Ragged Robin, King Mob's partner with psychic and paranormal abilities. She is also well-versed in what the Invisibles is up against, but like King Mob, she is reluctant to divulge any more than is necessary at any given time.
The black woman to the right is Boy, a street-wise Invisible with considerable expertise in oriental martial arts.
And last but by no means least, the blond woman in the back is Lord Fanny, a transvestite agent with mystical capabilities. He is an expert in summoning spirits and daemons, and is able to willfully become possessed by gods or daemons in order to use their powers in combat.
And here's Dane McGowan, the main character in the first part of the
storyline.
In this image we see Dane playing at the cost of his history
teacher. Dane and his friends had thrown a firebomb into the
school library the night before, causing great damage. As his teacher,
"Big Malkie", asks Dane a question concerning "the Russian anarchist
theorist who denounced the October revolution", Dane flippantly
answers "Molotov", causing his teacher to go lose his mental
footing.
As is apparent, Dane is not too thrilled with the modern school
system. Quote: "They fill your head with shite in here, and tell you
to be just like them. They think you can't even see it but I can."
After saying this to his friends, the gang of boys proceed to torch
down the whole school, beating up Big Malkie the teacher in the
process.
Due to the incident, Dane is sent to a correctional facility for young
miscreants, only the institution turns up to be something far more
sinister. The Harmony House, as it is called, is controlled by some
kind of a demon, with the headmaster Gelt as its minion. The aim of
the facility is to brainwash the boys, lobotomize them, leaving them
only with a robotic, preset, binary sense of good and bad. As it turns out,
Dane is also to be brainwashed, but King Mob intervenes at the last
moment, defeating Gelt and helping Dane escape.
Having rescued Dane, King Mob abandons the boy alone onto the cold streets of London. Dane undergoes hard times among the homeless, and finally befriends Mad Tom'O'Bedlam, an old, bearded man with an attitude. At times seemingly stark raving mad, at other times brilliantly knowledgeable, old Tom helps Dane gain a new perception on the world. Through a rite of passage not unlike those found in the movies Fight Club or The Matrix, Dane realizes the world and reality to be ultimately what a person makes them out to be -- a view Morrison has allegedly taken from the Situationist movement in the early 1920s, that a view of any place is governed by the situation and viewer more than anything else -- and is elevated into an enlightened state of being. Mad Tom and the experience both suggest that The Invisibles are basically a subversive, underground movement in favour of truly free thought.
After his initiation, Dane is reacquainted his fellow Invisibles, most prominent among them being his former rescuer, King Mob. Dane is renamed Jack Frost in recognition of his new status as one of the agents, and he is given some basic training and tutelage.
Now the group embarks on a journey across time to meet with Marquis de
Sade in the ages of the French Revolution. They rescue him from the
clutches of weird buzzing humanoids who speak in odd truncated
sentences and who are concealed by cloaks and gas masks:
But when the group feels something is going awry and attempt an emergency return into their own time, they become separated. Jack and Lord Fanny the trannie are returned half-conscious back to their own time, while the rest of the group, along with Marquis de Sade, enters a strange place called Arcadia.
Jack and Lord Fanny are attacked and tortured by an agent of their enemies, Orlando:
While these two are busy defeating their arch-enemy, the others try to escape from the strange place they have stranded in. It appears that the Marquis, King Mob and Boy are trapped in a scene from de Sade's own book, 120 Days of Sodom, and they can return home only by waiting for the events to come to an end. They are not in any immediate danger, they just have to follow the procession through to its conclusion.
Meanwhile, Ragged Robin is in a more sticky situation. To her, this Arcadia is represented as a churchyard, with a church, inside of which the severed head of John the Baptist lies. The curious thing about the head is that it has been somehow reanimated with a mechanism that gives it the ability to produce speech. The same buzzing drones of the opposing force that attacked the Marquis in the past are present also here, and Ragged Robin has to fight them. They claim the severed head to be a secret treasure of the templars, an oracle of some sort through its mysterious speeches. Robin quickly understands that the head's speech is actually only glossolalia, speaking in tongues -- or more succinctly, utter gibberish -- and that its secret lies in that anyone who's willing to hear orders and commands is free to interpret the babble differently, obeying the imagined commands to the letter. As she reveals her finding to the agents of the other side, they become subdued and she is allowed to leave the scene.
Cut to modern times where the Marquis is having the time of his life at a modern S/M club alongside King Mob. Marquis de Sade decides to stay in the modern-day present and to also become an agent of the Invisibles. Meanwhile, Jack Frost and Lord Fanny, still fighting Orlando, defeat him through Lord Fanny's mystical powers, and are finally rejoined by the other members of the group. There is a resolve at the end, but a continuation to the story is also very strongly indicated.
3.3. Some Allusions and Literary References Explained
Right off in the very beginning, we get references to ancient Egyptian mythology, the anarchist movement in Russia, the Beatles (the first episode is named Dead Beatles, both a reference to the band but also to the recurring beetle motif that haunts King Mob), psychedelic drugs, ceremonial magic, buddhist meditation and Tarot. This barrage of imagery hardly withers towards the next issues: aliens, Situationism, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, ley lines, cities as viral organisms bent on taking over and consuming the world, Downing Street 10, Hindu mythology and Indian puppet theatre, martial arts and yoga, Aztec mythology, French revolution, Marquis de Sade, modern techno clubs -- all of this and more comes loose.
Let us take a closer look at some of the lovingly rendered homages. Here we have the opening page of the Arcadia storyline, from the fifth issue of the original series:
We see the English Romantic poets Byron (dark-haired) and Shelley discussing the very theme at hand in The Invisibles: whether people command their own destiny or not, and what could be done about the matter. These characters are revisited from time to time throughout the storyline, yet they do not have anything directly to do with the adventures of the Invisibles. This inclusion of figures unconnected with the actual story is very much a postmodern trait: one could have not found narrative such as this in older, modern comics.
Let us look on another reference in more detail, namely when King Mob summons the spirit of John Lennon earlier on in the book:
Not only has Dane already encountered the ghosts (or manifestations) of John Lennon and Stu Sutcliffe, the so-called "fifth Beatle", we also get this wonderfully ironic suggestion that Lennon did indeed become some kind of deity after his legendary demise (King Mob says later: "I figured he's got all the attributes of a god now, so I used traditional ceremonial magic methods and summoned him for advice").
The encounter at the riverside in Liverpool with the two members of the famous band is a clever allusion, like the reference to Byron and Shelley. While the two literary figures represent the classic arts, the Beatles is markedly modern pop art. All the time Morrison cares little about where lends his material from, as long as it has somehow represented ground-breaking ideas or new visions to the world. Shelley and Byron, as well as Stu and John, represent a kind of Invisible agents in their own time, although they might not be overtly aware of their significance.