I Really Should Read This 20: The Invisibles Book Four, by Grant Morrison and many, many artists

The Invisibles Book Four, by Grant Morrison and many, many artists 

1999!

What's it all about? I don't know. I understood many of the pieces of this, but I'm not sure it made any sense at all, except in the most vibing of ways. And that's good enough for me.

Rock!

I started reading the Invisibles last summer, starting with book one and finishing book four this week, and that seems to be a fair pace. The series came out in three parts over a number of years, but it's barely coherent as it is, so I can't imagine trying to draw it out for years and stay wrapped up in it. For that matter, I can barely imagine reading any monthly comic anymore, so it's just as well I got this in the collected edition.

Yes, that's right

What's it all about? Something about a demon being crowned king of England, and the secret group called the Invisibles who are out to prevent this reality ending event. That's what it seems to be about, but that's not particularly interesting. So it's about the Invisibles and how they navigate reality. Sometimes the book is about reality warping, and sometimes it's about embracing the subversion of normalcy. Again, I can't say what it is about.

Who are the Invisibles? Anyone. You could be one.

What's this about?

There is a plot, and it's the least satisfying part for me. What I enjoy about the Invisibles is how it embraces the fringe. I really wish I had been reading at the time. I was so into subcultures and anything weird the 90's, and I think the book would have pushed me just that much more into the weird. Morrison took every fringe concept he could get his hands on and inserted them either as a part of the narrative or as set dressing for it. Some of it I knew of at the time, but it would be very minor subculture, not well known at all.  I think those things would have been hooks to get me to use the book as a roadmap to other strange subcultures. For example, in a few places Guy Debord and the Situationists are referenced, something that was very exciting to me as a 20-something, but had pretty much no mainstream representation. In another place, he references Terrance McKenna's self-transforming machine elves of DMT, an exciting concept to psychedelic explorers, but had no place in a mainstream culture that was still just saying no to drugs. And those are but a few references, the book is littered with ideas. Does it pull them all together? Not at all! But this was before Wikipedia and the ability to look up any tossed off reference with the click of a button. Underground culture was something that took a lot of effort to cultivate and learn about. It's just a treat to see them referenced so liberally. Shelly Bond was a generous editor to the series.

Is there a difference?

If the book has a unified idea, it seems to be that much like how the universe is unified, a thousand disparate concepts of the underground share a common thread: they are variations on a theme, there is something else. This thing we see is not what it is. Then the book drops some spy shenanigans on top of that for the sake of making a comic book narrative. It's like a capsule to contain the medicine.

Subtle

I loved Lord Fanny. She is a transgender character, and she is a character. She is equal to any other character and is a lead character. This feels so transgressive now, as media is making an effort to have some trans visibility, often looking clumsy with from the obvious effort involved. 

I loved reading a book that, while having some interest in morality, had no interest in being moral regarding anyone's sexual interests, much less orientation.  Characters have sex and enjoy it as they want to.  And it's very human feeling, not over-romanticized. I love the normalization of the fringe. I don't think they should make a TV show out of this unless it's x-rated. Not XXX, just treating sex as a normal human activity.

Do what you wanna do

I loved Edith, the 99 year old Invisible on the cusp of death. She is an old woman and we see her as a sharp, forward thinking woman. I personally make an assumption with seniors that they just don't have a compelling inner life, and sometimes talk to them as if children: don't swear, mention sex, mention anything other than the weather. It's a stupid thing to do, especially as I'm on my way to becoming one myself. It's a product of being young and thinking adults just don't get anything you do, and grandparents really don't seem to. Seeing a character like Edith, and getting to know her, it's not your typical rock and roll comic fare. 

Edith is endlessly interesting because she is interested in the world

The Invisibles is not a clear comic. It's a collection of concepts mashed together. It's a hodge podge. The first run of the series had multiple artists, and that was blamed for weak sales, so the second series only had two artists in its run. Series three has three arcs, with different artists in the first two. But then the final arc has different artists from page to page. It's a lot of whiplash visually. Characters shift from highly rendered to cartoon, from garish to noir, with each page turn. 

Sean Philips inked by Jay Stephens... When I thought the book couldn't get any weirder

I'm sure it was on purpose. If the book was about mashing a thousand ideas together, then maybe that final arc was about mashing a thousand images together too. Whatever the concept, it wasn't normal. But it all fits together.

Ultimately, the book ends, and there is an epilogue issue which I found very abstract. After reading the whole of it, I want a break from this world.  But if I see an article about it, I'm bound to read it. I don't think the story makes much sense at all, but I'm interested to see if others think it made a lot of sense. Are there folks who analyzed this the way some folks analyzed Inception a decade ago? 

Ten years from now, I'm sure the whole thing will get a re-read from me. There are ideas inside I want to puzzle over.

Lord Fanny took my heart a little

What was it about? A bunch of underground agents save the world.

Reading Through 2021 55: The Originals, by Dave Gibbons

The Originals, by Dave Gibbons

originally published in 2004, Essential Edition 2018

Sometimes you don't know what you're looking for until you find it.

He did the cover up like a James Jacket

Dave Gibbons was never an artist I followed around. Of course Watchmen was an amazing work, and his art, design, and layouts were a part of that, but his art isn't flashy. Some of it was my age and what was hot when I collecting mainstream art; in 1990, I was into Art Adams and the school of artists that came out after: McFarlane, Liefeld, Silvestri. Much more style over substance. I went from that art style straight to indie comics and missed out on a lot of mature semi-mainstream stuff, ie. Vertigo.

Last year, I read all of Martha Washington for the first time and enjoyed it wholeheartedly. As an adult, I can now appreciate just how good Gibbons is at what he does. Then I saw this book I'd never heard of and gave it a try. 

It's a perfect comic.

From Gibbons' intro to the book

Up front, I have some sentimental attachment to the content. I was a huge fan of Quadrophenia in high school, so I know some of where he's drawing from. He's not drawing from that movie, but The Originals and Quadrophenia both are coming from the same British subculture. And while I wasn't a mod, in my late teens I was into the music and clothes and sometime stupidity of my subculture, to the extent that I was blinded to the outside world. I did anything to hide my bland suburban roots.  I know exactly where the characters in this book are coming from.

The type of ads that woo in young Lel

While the book has a plot, it's a simple one, and is as much of a character sketch as anything else. For some, that may be a turn off. But it's not a typical comic plot. Despite the sci-fi setting, it's pretty down to earth.

Our introduction to Lel

So what's it about? It's about Lel and his friend Bok, who want nothing more than to join the Originals, the coolest crew in their town.

Our introduction to the Originals

And they look amazing. Gibbons takes the mod aesthetic and tweaks it enough that it's his own vision. You can get why Lel wants nothing more than his own bike.

The Originals are a gang of sorts, and have rivals, bikers called the Dirt (by the Originals, I'm not sure if they call themselves that), who they will fight on a moment's notice. Both crews stupidly antagonise each other until it inevitably comes to a boil.

The Originals are not the good guys. Both sides have problems

The art makes full use of the page, and looks incredible in the oversized Essential Edition. Gibbons frames everything in black and lays white narration over that space to keep the images clear, interrupted only by text balloons. Despite both groups wearing near uniforms, you know who everyone is by their facial structures and haircuts. Sometimes he has cinematic storytelling, sometimes comic collage images, and sometimes just intimate little close ups. He also creates advertisements and newspaper clippings to flesh out the world. Gibbons is flexing his skills all over the place with this book.

An example of great comic art: many artists today would have simply cut and paste the faces from the larger pic to make panels out of them. Gibbons probably lightboxed them, then added details to them to make them more than just repeated images. He added that panic to their eyes

The whole book is done in gray scale, and giving it a timeless feeling. It feels old, but things were never like this.

It's a high school story

Gibbons has worked with Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and Mark Millar over the past decades and lots of other writers. He's also written some superhero books himself. This book is his personal thing, I can feel the love he has for everything in here. 

The only complaint, and it's a minor thing, is the pages absorb the oils from your fingers, so there are fingerprint smudges all over the book now. That's the cost of reading sometimes.

Ah yeah

This is his auteur work. It has the energy of youth, and the refinement of decades of experience. I had no idea I was looking for this, but I'm so glad I found it.

I Really Should Read This 9: Transmetropolitan Book Two, by Warren Ellis and Darrick Robertson

Transmetropolitan Book Two, by Warren Ellis and Darrick Robertson

1998, collected in 2001

Yesterday, I wrote about Abe Sapien, a book I was warned wasn't the best of the Mignola-verse, but I ended up enjoying. Today, I'm writing about Transmetropolitan, a book that seems to be pretty universally beloved, assuming 'universal' to be 40-something comic fans.

Pills!

Transmetropolitan is about the life of celebrity journalist Spider Jerusalem as he fights the City, achieving greater and greater success every time he takes society down a peg.

It was interesting, it was readable, but I wasn't blown away by it. I've been trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who mainly read mainstream superheroes, and Vertigo was their notion of "out there" comics, and yeah, this probably would have been mind-blowing. My small town comic shop flirted with indie books in the 80s after the TMNT boom, but by the 90s, it was mainly Marvel, DC, Image and Dark Horse. I don't even know they ventured much into Valiant territory. So Transmetropolitan was likely the most dangerous comic they carried the year it came out, followed by Preacher. It satirizes and attacks normalcy, so it probably read to 17-year-olds like Mad Magazine read to 9-year-olds.

Drugs and random references

I'm a 40-something art school graduate who's spent decades digging into the counter culture, and this thing read like the Cliff Notes of Hunter S Thompson, Philip K Dick, Dadaism, and a ton of other things Ellis was likely excited by at the time, rather than an incredible new and original vision of the world. When you read a book, you're not just reading a book, but it's competing with all that you've read before. Some work that wears influences on its sleeve breaks out into its own thing, but I didn't quite get there with this (I read book one a few months back, so I've read 24 issues total). Rather than see Spider as a character, he just read like a delivery method for Ellis' ideas.

On one page, Ellis spends the page setting up a dirty joke I've heard multiple times, but he changes the punchline from "goatfucker" to "chimpfucker". It's content for his comic he was churning out, and I doubt Ellis would hold it up as an example of writing he's proudest of, but it emphasizes the collage nature of the book. Transmetropolitan is not so much an idea as a bunch of ideas Ellis enjoyed and assembled. I recently read Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, and that also reads like a stew of things happening in the 90s, but with that series, I feel like it really coalesced into its own thing.

It wasn't worth it

Another thing that turned me off of the book is that Ellis is torn on what its viewpoint is, and what Spider's take on the world is. Lead character Spider is constantly hyped about getting drugged up, but society is also criticized for being drugged up and medicating their lives away. It's not so much that I want Ellis to take a position on it, but it's not consistent. Is being wasted a 'punk' action or a form of sheeple denial? In my most Dionysian points as a young man, I was similarly confused. I thought getting legally wasted (drunk) was for braindead losers, while getting illegally wasted was underground cool, even though they shared a lot of overlap. I don't really want Ellis to go into a treatise on the differences between stimulants, depressants, and hallucinogens, but compared to the use of drugs in Grant Morrison's Vertigo books, or Alan Moore's pre-Vertigo Swamp Thing, Transmetropolitan looks shabby in comparison. 

In the same vein, Spider is a self-proclaimed rotten bastard, but he spends his time sticking up the underclass, so is he? Is he about the destruction of society, or just the unfairness of the system? The character of Spider is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it too construction, switching modes as the story calls for it. Sometimes he's an evil, violent bastard, sometimes he's a sensitive hero. Maybe the notion is that he's a Robin Hood, attacking the rich to give to the poor, but he's not consistently that either. He's fluid.

What a self-proclaimed bastard! Using his influence to highlight the issues!

I get it, I really do. I have no idea how old Ellis was working on this, and honestly, I shared a lot of the same conflicting viewpoints as a young man, this frustrating rage against the world. As an adult reader though, trying to view Spider as a successful, influential writer is pretty hard, it's a bit too much to swallow.

That criticism out of the way, what can I say positive about the book? It's about stuff that a lot of other comics wouldn't be about. This is a twelve issue run about a presidential election. The main themes are that the candidates are self-serving and have no cares for what they say or their constituents beyond what gets them elected. That wasn't a new theme when it came out (this book came out a few years after "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos."), and politics has only gotten more cynical in the decades since, but it's not an overdone theme in pop culture either. On a very basic level, Transmetropolitan is tackling topics which would be too polarizing for the mainstream in most cases. At the very least, it gives the reader something to think about.

Probably the thing I like most about the series is the concept of the City, which is only named as the City. Living in Toronto for a decade, I certainly had my own love-hate relationship with the place, and the strongest part of Spider Jerusalem's character is his own push-pull with the City, wanting to experience all of it and wanting to go hide in the mountains again. I've since moved to a smallish city and lost all those conflicting feelings, but yeah, living in a metropolis can make a person crazy.

It's not trying to be subtle

I've never been crazy about Darrick Robertson's penciling. He's a workman-like artist with Mark Bagley energy. He's made a solid living doing grotesque images with this and the Boys, so I'm glad he's found a niche. He draws everything, he gives people individual faces, and has fully rendered backgrounds, so he's doing really good work on the book, better than most could. He's a good artist. I'm just not a fan of his line work, which is a matter of personal tastes.

This really reminds me of someone, but who... what president could ever be so immoral as to think the job gives them blanket immunity?

Some of the original covers were done by Geoff Darrow, and those are gorgeous. It's absolutely unfair to compare a monthly artist to someone like Darrow, who is very slow and in the top percentile of the medium. But they are gorgeous, it has to be noted.

I'm not going to read more, unless book three gets sharply marked down. I enjoyed some of this, but it doesn't have the bite it should to get me excited. I suspect this is one of those books where you just had to be there at the exact right point in your life to get the thrill from it that people still carry with them today. For me, it didn't hit, it didn't meet the hype. 

(Books I read for the first time in 2020 that met the hype:

-Swamp Thing

-The Invisibles

-Akira

-Berserk

-Doom Patrol

I'm not just trolling by saying I wasn't crazy about the book.)

I do think if it were updated and adapted, it could make a very strong TV program though.

I Really Should Read This 4: The Invisibles, book 3 by Grant Morrison and Phil Jiminez

The Invisibles, book 3 by Grant Morrison and Phil Jiminez 

late 90's

Look at that cover! Incredible, I want it black and white on a T-shirt! Of all the comics I had laying around the past year, that one got comments from people who noticed it, enough that I started leaving it face down.

I read books 1 and 2 in the summer, and enjoyed them. I'd read the first issue when it came out in the 90's, but it didn't grab me then. It's a book that requires more patience than I had at age 19.

It's a grab bag of cool stuff, especially 90's cool stuff: anarchy, conspiracy, deviancy, technology, spirituality, philosophy. This was all the stuff that was exciting about alternative culture at the time that eventually got squeezed out as companies figured out how to market and exploit the culture more effectively. The Invisibles is 90's culture distilled into an intimate epic.

Book three is the second volume of the series. This collection has one artist instead of a rotating cast, and is slightly more coherent. The first two collections have a lot of tangents. It's not quite as WTF as the first two, but it's a more enjoyable read. I found it easier to binge.

Morrison works really hard to communicate these metaphysical ideas he has, and after enough time, it made sense to me. Sample dialogue:

-"If our words are circles, theirs are bubbles."

-"The universe is a hologram created by the overlapping of two meta-universes."

I really like the attitude and the ideas of this series, and wish I'd been reading it all when it was new!