| Product: |
The Invisibles |
| Date: |
20/05/03 (688 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Excellent comic, very strange, expects a lot, from its readership
Disadvantages: It is a comic, though, so no one will ever, read the goddamn thing
The Invisibles is a very long and complicated comic book story. It's published by DC, one of the two big mainstream comic publishers in America, under their Vertigo imprint (which offers comics for mature readers). It was originally serialised in (usually) monthly instalments from 1994 to 2000, 59 issues appearing in total over three volumes. It has since been collected in seven large paperback editions. It was written by Grant Morrison, a Glaswegian writer who started out on British sci-fi comics before moving to DC (most of the best British comics writers followed the same career path). The artwork was handled by a variety of different people during the series' run.
It's impossible to give a brief description of the plot. Basically, the universe we inhabit is being fought over by the agents of order and chaos, order being evil, and chaos good. The Invisibles, our heroes, are a group of anarchist terrorists who fight the forces or order wherever they can. The comic focuses on one group of Invisibles as they fight the good fight. Led by charismatic and violent magician, King Mob, who is bald with lots of facial piercings and a fetishistic dress sense, the group also includes a Mexican transvestite witch, a girl from the future and an African American martial arts expert. At the beginning of the series they recruit a foul-mouthed Liverpudlian juvenile delinquent called Dane, who may be the future Buddha (Dane's the best character, being resolutely annoying and unsympathetic for at least the first half of the series).
During the run of the series we see these characters, and their varied supporting cast, fight, shag and generally act weird in a sequence of increasingly peculiar situations. Taking in bizarre speculative science fiction, Eastern mysticism, time travel, the end of the world, hardcore postmodernism and the music of The Kinks, it's a notoriously complicated narrative that tends to divide its readers. You either comple
tely buy into its strangeness or dismiss it as pretentious, drug-fuelled rubbish. I think it's tremendous, personally, and really don't find it as confusing as some people claim to.
The early parts of the story are a bit wobbly - the influence of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, a pretentious but hugely popular series that set the tone for most mainstream adult comics during the 90s, is very obvious. Characters quote Shakespeare at each other, Byron and Shelley make a pointless cameo, and everything points towards the idea that you can't be a sexy, time-travelling anarchist unless you have an English degree. Fortunately this ploy was so unpopular with comic book audiences that The Invisibles was almost cancelled due to low sales. Consequently things had to be livened up a bit. The rest of volume one featured more fights. Volume two, set in the US, really upped the nudity and violence levels, and is the most straightforward (and entertaining) of the three volumes. Volume three marked a return to the rather convoluted style of volume one, but it didn't matter in terms of sales by then, as the series was nearly finished.
I'm not going to try and describe individual facets of the storyline(s), that would take forever. All you really need to know is that if you persevere with the difficult aspects of the story, what you end up with is a surprisingly satisfying reading experience, and one that's always fun. It would be a complete lie to claim that it's all easy going - if you believe that comics can't aspire to anything more complicated than your average Spider-Man or Asterix story then this probably isn't for you. And it is pitched at comic book readers to a certain extent - Morrison throws in plenty of references to his own life and work. King Mob looks a lot like the real-life Grant Morrison, for instance, and he often uses his own drug experiences and strange religious beliefs (Morrison is a practising magician). The sto
ry works fine for people who don't know any of this, but certain plot developments are a bit more interesting if, say, you know that such-and-such a character is a variation on a character from a previous Grant Morrison comic. Basically, you don't have to be a comics geek to enjoy this, but if you are you'll perhaps enjoy it slightly more. (I guess Morrison was trying to set himself up as a comic book James Joyce when he wrote it, which is fine - I like my disposable pop culture artefacts to have delusions of grandeur. The Invisibles obviously isn't as good as Ulysses, but it doesn't take nearly as long to read.)
In spite of being published in the US, it's a very British comic. References to TV shows like The Prisoner, Jason King and Dr Who abound. My favourite moment in the whole series is when a character who strongly resembles Regan from The Sweeney is burnt alive in a large Wicker Man - Morrison certainly picks references that I wholeheartedly endorse. In addition to that there's a very British feel to the whole thing - it's set in Britain for the most part, the sense of humour on display is very British, and the American characters tend not to be quite as interesting as the English ones.
It's not perfect, of course, no comic book series that runs for more than 50 issues ever is. Perhaps the main problem is that, not having one artist throughout, its look is often wildly inconsistent. Occasionally an artist stayed with the comic for long enough to really leave an imprint on it (Jill Thompson in volume one was very good, as were Phil Jiminez and Chris Weston in volume two). As soon as one artist left, their replacement would, naturally enough, use their own style rather than trying to be replicate what had gone before. (In the later issues of volume three there was some shockingly bad art, that rendered some of the most important parts of the story absolutely indecipherable - these pages have been redrawn for
the collected edition.)
Another problem is that it already looks and feels rather dated. Aesthetically it owes a lot to the image-obsessed Britpop era. While it's a clever enough comic to fully exploit a lot of the inherent ironies of trying to make serious points by using trivial methods, it still seems like a bit of a throwback to less enlightened times. (Some of the earlier issues contain editorials in which Morrison enthuses about the likes of Oasis and Kula Shaker - I hope he's suitably embarrassed about that now.) Also the idea that people being transvestites, or wearing bondage clothes, should somehow shock me is kind of cringeworthy. Surely there are ways to try to make characters seem alternative and edgy without going for such predictable Daily Mail shock tactics (although the story does play on these weaknesses itself, so that's probably the whole point).
When The Matrix was released, Morrison complained that it had stolen its ideas from The Invisibles. I think that's a fair point (The Wachowski Brothers are big comic fans, so it's not as unlikely as you might think). One of the reasons I think The Matrix is rubbish is because it's Invisibles-lite. But, that said, it has to be noted that a lot of the ideas in The Invisibles aren't exactly new - its great strength is that it gathers together a lot of cool ideas and deploys them in a way that no one else had before.
There are hundreds of other things I could say about this comic - it's incredibly complex, and seems to demand 10000 word dissertations. But I'm going to leave it at that. I realise that the chances of anyone who reads this review actually going out and buying it are very remote (to get the whole series would set you back almost £90 anyway). But I highly recommend it - it's funny, outrageous, weird and occasionally rather poignant. It's a good example of what the comic book medium has to offer, and the fact that it will never
reach the kind of audience it deserves is a terrible shame.
(I just noticed - these advantages and disadvantages boxes are perfect for writing haikus in. Five syllables, then seven syllables, then five again - that's right isn't it?)
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