Writer: Grant Morrison
Artists: Steve Yeowell, Jill Thompson, Dennis Cramer
Colorist: Daniel Vozzo
Letterer: Clem Robins
Trade paperback
Published by DC Vertigo 1999
$19.95
Reviewed by Gregory Dickens
"And so we return and begin again."
From the first seven words, THE INVISIBLES perplexes. Immediately, you have a mystery. "We," who? Begin what again?
What am I missing here?
And THE INVISIBLES is, call it what you will: crafted, sculpted, engineered, woven, cobbled, assembled, collided, meant to make you wonder. To question. To consider.
What am I missing here?
The "here" however encompasses whatever you wish. The "here" can expand in depth and breadth: the speaker's identity, his audience, the reader, the reader's criteria in comic enjoyment, the reader's sphere of experience and ability to catch allusions ad infinitum until we get to the most universal questions of identity and place and purpose. It's up to you, dear reader, to determine where the pondering ends. I channel Lord Fanny: "How big is your navel, sailor?"
Grandiose? Rhapsodic? Absolutely. THE INVISIBLES is not a small venture nor does it contain a small theme. It's big. It has to be because it encompasses everything.
Yes. Everything.
The cover of THE INVISIBLES vol. 1, issue 1 is a hot pink grenade on a flat orange plateau. It's a Andy Warhol homage. Warhol used repeated imagery and stark color combinations to make the audience confront the packaging of commercial product, including the conventional definitions of art, and celebrated figures. He made icons glow to give the common images a new life and vibrancy. It's both a condemnation of advertising and a wallow in glamour. It's not a purely 20-century notion. Roman statues of gods and heroes weren't stark pale marble as we
see in museums; they were painted and adorned with more paint and jewels than Dame Edna. And for pure ironic perfection, the industrial bar code and mature-reader suggestion heighten the tone. Artistically abhorrent, maybe. But for this title it works as an accessory. It's additional packaging on a garish package.
So, from this initial image, Morrison and company are clearing their throats before the sermon on artifice, conflict, perspective and art. It's a grenade, after all. Violence is enclosed, but it's pink. It'll be a lovely explosion, we suppose, with shrapnel intended to imbed and alter those in the blast radius. It's an act of destruction to the physical, but the decoration invites us to encourage the potential for damage. It'll hurt to see it go off but the hypnotizing color will make the impact easier to swallow. It's a pop bomb; deconstruction with a spoon full of sugar.
So what's the gunpowder, the explosive message? Just that every conspiracy theory you've ever heard, every urban legend that stretches our perception of reality is true. Those in authority really are working from ancient, Freemason-approved schematics designs to alter the world and corral individuality. The anarchists bruising Starbucks in Seattle and British McDonald's are in the right. The sometime inhumanity of global powers belies their real nature, the Heaven's Gate cult should have hit the snooze bar before their mass suicide, and there really are subliminal advertisements in the commercials for cereal and Must-See TV meant to keep the great unwashed subservient and stupid.
THE INVISIBLES takes the Jungian gray aliens, Lovecraftian netherdemons, Kafka's suspicion of bureaucracy, Mayan sun cycles, Steranko's mod spy aesthetic, Leary's drug subculture and William Burroughs' wordplay and philosophy and suddenly that darling grenade of singular disobedience becomes a nuclear catalyst for heightened awareness.
You may find yourself asking is it supposed to be so #!%@ hard to grasp? Ontological highways? Memes? Esoteric alphabets? Isn't he limiting his potential audience by making them dig so deep and chase hundreds of tangential references? Does all this peripheral junk actually make the story better?
Kids, the "peripheral junk" is the story.
THE PLOT
The basic veneer story is this: Young Brit turk Dane McGowan is recruited by a bizarre clique fighting "dark forces who would rule this planet." The Invisibles are: King Mob, superspy; the painted Ragged Robin; Lord Fanny, the transvestite shaman; and Boy, the female ex-cop. They rescue him from being lobotomized by a demon-worshipping schoolmaster and leave him to walk the streets. Devoid of any prospect, he encounters Tom O'Bedlam, an Invisibles ancillary who reveals magic to Dane and encourages him to open his mind to possibilities beyond his bedraggled, angry life of vandalism and theft.
(A great touch solidifying Dane's mindset is that his first and last words of the first issue is "fuck." It's a perfect note for this guy and a great capper to a tight first issue.)
Dane sees evil shapes hovering over the authority base of London. He switches minds with a pigeon and sails over the city. He's exposed to a second, shadow London. He is given vague information of the Invisibles' enemy and they're agenda to wipe out creative and individual thought. On the shores of the Thames, he is forced by Tom to confront the absence of his father and the creation of his bogeyman, Jack Frost. "Washed" clean by the experience, Jack follows Tom to the top of the Canary Wharf tower and leaps off in a gesture celebrating Tom's departure from the Invisible battle and Dane's acknowledgment of trust. Surviving and finding himself alone, Dane rendezvous with the rest of the Invisibles cell and agrees to take on the role of Jack Frost.
The cell then journeys astrally through time to recruit the Marquis de Sade to orchestrate the Invisibles plan to prepare humanity in its ultimate skirmish against the Archons and their forces of Myrmidons and Cyphermen. The bad guys have also sent the pandimensional assassin Orlando to kill the Invisibles in retribution for their earlier rescue of Dane, who loses a finger to Orlando before being rescued by Fanny. Boy, Mob and The Marquis find themselves trapped in a dreamstate hybrid of the 120 DAYS OF SODOM and the Invisibles war and Robin encounters the mechanically-preserved head of John the Baptist.
Assembled again in the present, the Invisibles tend to their wounds and prepare to fend off the surrounding Archon soldiers while the Marquis, awash in a San Francisco subculture scene he practically created centuries before, prepares to divine a better future. The world is at his feet and, seemingly, at the heels of the Invisibles.
But to say THE INVISIBLES is about this plot is like saying TWIN PEAKS was about a federal investigation of a ritual homicide. THE INVISIBLES is part-primer, part-apocalyptic achtung, part-Orgone Box beseeching anyone with an ear for its techno-beat soundtrack that, to quote Curtis Mayfield, "People, get ready. There's a train a'comin'."
Underneath the cool, vibrant struggle for freedom against specters is Morrison's message of human evolution as we approach the universe's end on Dec. 20, 2012 as dictated by the Mayan calendar of death and rebirth. Both sides of the Invisibles war march toward that imperial deadline. The world will end and what happens beforehand is determined by the here and now as much as any salvos on Dec. 19, 2012.
And that's what THE INVISIBLES is about. Except it isn't.
None of it is real. The battle is sham; the bad guys are veiled props. You're in a simulation, a re-creation. It's already happened and you missed it. This is the rerun. There is no reality we discern as ours. All of it is a fabrication and what we experience as readers and what the characters slowly learn is the truth of their existence, is that THE INVISIBLES is a game.
THE GAME
The game is designed as a role-playing adventure where the players adopt a position in the battle and become educated and deprogrammed so they can be ready to advance to the next consciousness as the Mayan sixth sun dies. What we are reading is the progress of a 2012 player as he advances through the game and is slowly exposed to the real nature of existence.
Think of it this way: You're a farmer living in France in the 18th century and your country is being invaded by a tyrant sweeping across the globe. You are pressed into service, told of the machinations and patterns of the tyrant's progress, given the means and methods to fight his solders and sent into battle. Then you are suddenly plucked off the planet and allowed to orbit the world, only to see not a blue and green marble afloat in the cosmos, but a Risk gameboard. You are not French. You are not a farmer. There is no tyrant. Look at your watch; that's what time it is. But you've learned, by living the game, how to fight what the tyrant represents.
This is what throws many readers. The later issues of THE INVISIBLES makes no secret of this. As the story speeds to its climax, more characters become aware that their struggle is not against the Archons, but against their own mental obstacles to prevent their spiritual progress toward a very physical evolution. We do see the seeds planted in THE INVISIBLES: SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION.
In an initial read, it appears as a series of seemingly disconnected comments.
Dane's friends remember a night when another friend was stealing cars and taking ecstasy. "Spazzer thought he was in a video game with that brilliant buzz." An unidentified rave attendee sits with a virtual game set-up and complains "something's downloading into my brain."
Later we see a mysterious figure appearing through moments in time. When Ragged Robin approaches him, he is playing chess against himself. "When one reaches my age, one sees through the struggle. One sees it all for what it truly is. Just a game."
(We can easily surmise this chessman is the devil. He tells Robin that he has never looked his age. When he appears to Mary Shelley, he offers her an apple, like the Eden serpent. He tells Shelley of meeting her mother and defends his youthful appearance. "I am ... older than I appear, Mrs. Shelley. My features do not bear the marks of what I have seen and done. I have been lucky."
He encourages the poet Shelley's works with a caveat: "We need our utopias. But radical dreamers must never forget the price that is often paid by those who seek to change the world." This, buoyed by the other clues, suggests Milton's Lucifer revolting against God and cast into Hell.
And when Shelley says he never told her his name, he responds, 'No. I did not." Again, in the company of the above, the chessman theory is supported if we recall the line from "Sympathy for the Devil" where Jagger sings, "Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name.")
But it's the beginning of issue five where we see the full game premise. King Mob attends a puppet show of Arjuna versus Duryudana. The dalang is the puppeteer behind the mahabharta for the audience. Mob's friend explains further:
"He makes the voices and moves the puppets. He directs the gameland musicians. His job is to make us laugh and cry. Very clever man. The dalang is more than a puppeteer. His skill makes us believe that we see a war between two great armies, but there is no war. There is only the dalang."
It's too simple to suggest Morrison is the dalang, even though we have seen him interact with his comic characters in ANIMAL MAN. No mention is made throughout the rest of the series that Morrison is dabbling into these characters although King Mob can easily be seen as his avatar.
The game is an instructional ploy akin to immersive foreign language courses that drop students into an ocean of Greek or Arabic, leaving them to pick up the vocabulary to survive. But instead of speaking a particular tongue or adopting crude slang, the game players and we are directed to rethink who we are, what we can do, who establishes both and to what end can they be surmounted.
A clever panel shot sees Boy and Dane practice martial arts. Looking at their shadows on the wall, it would appear they are fighting each other with malice and vitriol. But watching their bodies, we se they are actually improving techniques and sparring, with no possibility of harming the other, for each other's benefit. It's a telling, symbolic moment.
In the past, an insane Invisible tinkers with a piano, pondering "can it be the same hand which plays both white notes and black? ... Black wars with white. Keys like chessmen." The dalang is suspected by many but never seen here.
The crux of THE INVISIBLES, then, becomes two-fold: dissect notions of prime identity and accumulate knowledge beyond the purview of your studies. Nothing is static. Nothing is esoteric. Consider, investigate, confront and establish. It's the scientific method of inquiry applied to enlightenment.
THE KNOWLEDGE
A Croxteth Posse member asks Dane when he steers a stolen car off the roads, "Where're we going, anyway?"
"Well, it's further education, isn't it?" Dane answers.
The encouragement of free thought and action resonates throughout. The headmaster of the conformity school tries to instruct Dane into binary thought. Mob rescues Dane, telling him, "Believe what you like." The second issue begins with a Hyde Park rant against microwave mind control, "You can say what you like." It's both a disclaimer for his comments and an invitation to spread one's wings. "When was the last time you had a thought that wasn't put there by them?"
Tom tries to get Dane past his apathetic, delinquent pose. "If you really want to learn, I'll take you there ... You have to want is all." But he warns Dane of the journey, "There's no going back. We've unpicked the thread of the world." Tom tells Dane of the city virus, which flows through humanity as a reproductive measure, and that we are merely vessels spread the virus even out to the stars.
William Burroughs was an advocate of what he deemed the "word virus," the notion that you can physically cut apart pages of text and reassemble the pieces into collages. The inherent message of the original text will be communicated in the jumbled assemblage. It's called the cut-up method and it exposes the strength of the word virus. Morrison's message dots the comic's dialogue. is it purposeful? Is it the virus of the theme appearing in his writing? Even Dane is caught using such encouraging language as "you can do what you want" when he dismisses Tom. Read a volume of THE INVISIBLES and see how often it appears.
THE POWER
The "will to power" wafts through THE INVISIBLES. King Mob remarks that he "wanted to grow up and find myself living in a '60s spy series. Funny how things work out isn't it?" This is strengthened in later issues when we learn Robin has concocted a great deal of the Invisibles tale by donning a "fictionsuit" and becoming a character in the comic book. Is she the dalang? Partially, if not wholly, we can assume.
Shelley buries himself in his work, ignoring his wife who mourns their dead baby. "Perhaps he thinks he can write our daughter back to life," she ponders. Tom asks Dane, "when you dream, what makes you think it's not real?"
Tom forces Dane to examine his Jack Frost bogeyman, clearing his mind of the childhood fear and exposing Frost as a mental device to protect Dane emotionally. Frost "makes you feel hate instead of uncertainty and fear" locking Dane into a continual stance of stubborn invulnerability and perpetual ignorance to maturity. Tom pounds Dane into the river, making him erase Frost and confront his locked away emotional wounds and allowing himself to grow from them. (Jack later adopts the Frost name, signifying his place in the cell as the tough pestle confronting the Invisibles' theories and forcing them to keep them honest in their efforts.)
It's a full-out baptism and exorcism, leaving Dane cleansed and free to live openly, unashamed and unbowed. Not by coincidence does this take place under an Egyptian monument bearing the scarab hieroglyph, a symbol, as we are told on page one of this collected arc, is a symbol of rebirth.
THE CYCLE
Rebirth -- the destruction of one form and ascension into another -- is the central focus of THE INVISIBLES. All events lead to this eventual metamorphosis of humanity, as individuals and a species. It is omnipresent in the comic. Those strange first words are an invitation to go through the game again, to play and play until it takes root and the player is prepared to move on. A tenant of eastern religion is the cycle of reincarnation, where a soul takes on various living forms in consecutive lives until he becomes enlightened and advances beyond this plane.
The first issue, "Dead Beatles," uses the rock band as a metaphor for rebirth and life cycles. Dane witnesses Lennon and Stu Sutcliff discuss his departure. "You're only leaving a band ... It's not the end of the world."
"Maybe we are dead, John. we could be dead and not know it."
"More like fucking alive and don't know it," Lennon responds.
Lennon is later contacted as a god of living music by King Mob. The summoning reverberates with encouraging fragments. "It is not dying. be reborn be light and come again. rise from the grave of himself ... it is not dying. the boy born again ... it is not dying." A tarot reading portends "darkness giving birth to light." A man killed by the guillotine during the French Reign of Terror comforts himself by chanting "there is no death."
Shelley comforts himself after the death of his baby girl, writing, "And the love which heals all strife, Circling like the breath of life, All things in the sweet abode, With its own mild brotherhood. They, not it, would change and soon, Every sprite beneath the moon, Would repent its empty vain. And the earth grow young again."
Click Here to read Part II
