It's time again for another Weekly Comics Hype. I'm doing these alphabetically, but skipping around a bit, and we close this year with a few words on Grant Morrison's great big, ungainly look at conspiracies, magic, multidimensional nightmares and time travel, The Invisibles.
This series really was all over the place, a demanding, challenging, often frustrating, but incredibly cool read. The Invisibles are a number of five-member cells dedicated to fighting the secret societies who control our culture. It's a series where every conspiracy theory, every notion about the Masons or JFK, is true, and where "they" are very close to global control and subjugation of individuality and thought.
The series focusses on the five members of a British-based cell, led by the "terrorist" who calls himself King Mob, a name passed down from one Invisibles cell to the next for decades, and their newest member, who is called Jack Frost and who, some suspect, might be the messiah. If he is, he's certainly got a foul mouth...
Using these members as the focus allows Morrison to shift out and around them, and tell stories from the viewpoints of other characters and how they relate to the cell. There is a remarkable amount of foreshadowing in The Invisibles, and old characters show up unexpectedly, especially when time travel is involved and old scenes are replayed from another angle.
It's an exciting series, albeit an often demanding one. Sometimes the overall plot seems vague and hard to grasp, but the individual stories within the books are so tremendously exciting that you don't mind losing sight of how they relate to the whole. Books five and six feature a recurring foe called Quimper, and his machinations are really fun to watch unfold. Watching this unfold in the monthly comic was a real nightmare, since Morrison uses cliffhangers better than anybody else in comics. This experience is sadly lost to new readers, but believe me, there were six or seven occasions during the original run of this series where I'd have gladly killed a man just to get the next issue.
These are characters you grow to care about greatly, and Morrison's use of the medium is absolutely masterful. King Mob's visit to the Invisibles of the 1920s is simply astonishing, with an ominous, inescapable ending, and an incident in volume seven, despite all the warnings that it was coming, caused me to drop the comic on the floor. It's one of the saddest and most moving moments I've ever read, and one of the finest death scenes in all of fiction.
Morrison is matched with some spectacular artists to make this tale work. There's an argument to be made that it gets a little mad towards the end as a host of artists team up for the climactic three-part story (Ashley Wood, what were you thinking?!), but Steve Yeowell, Jill Thompson, Phil Jiminez, Steve Parkhouse, Mark Buckingham and Sean Phillips, among others, provide some of the best work of their careers. The great, reclusive Rian Hughes even does a page towards the end, but it's Philip Bond who really impresses the most. His work in book seven, where the classic film The Wicker Man is referenced, is breathtaking.
The Invisibles was originally published in three "volumes" of monthly comics, one of 25 issues, one of 20 and the last containing 12. Despite strong initial sales, the complex second story arc, entitled "Arcadia," was deeply unpopular with the nascent readership, almost halving orders before it ended, and making the future of the series uncertain until the end. As this weird story is reprinted in book one of the seven collected editions, new readers might enjoy sampling "Bloody Hell in America," the low-priced fourth collection, which is considerably less convoluted, before continuing with book one.
The Invisibles is available from your local comic shop, who would enjoy your custom; new books ship each Wednesday (delayed, the week after Christmas, to Thursday), so why not stop in after work?
This series really was all over the place, a demanding, challenging, often frustrating, but incredibly cool read. The Invisibles are a number of five-member cells dedicated to fighting the secret societies who control our culture. It's a series where every conspiracy theory, every notion about the Masons or JFK, is true, and where "they" are very close to global control and subjugation of individuality and thought.
The series focusses on the five members of a British-based cell, led by the "terrorist" who calls himself King Mob, a name passed down from one Invisibles cell to the next for decades, and their newest member, who is called Jack Frost and who, some suspect, might be the messiah. If he is, he's certainly got a foul mouth...
Using these members as the focus allows Morrison to shift out and around them, and tell stories from the viewpoints of other characters and how they relate to the cell. There is a remarkable amount of foreshadowing in The Invisibles, and old characters show up unexpectedly, especially when time travel is involved and old scenes are replayed from another angle.
It's an exciting series, albeit an often demanding one. Sometimes the overall plot seems vague and hard to grasp, but the individual stories within the books are so tremendously exciting that you don't mind losing sight of how they relate to the whole. Books five and six feature a recurring foe called Quimper, and his machinations are really fun to watch unfold. Watching this unfold in the monthly comic was a real nightmare, since Morrison uses cliffhangers better than anybody else in comics. This experience is sadly lost to new readers, but believe me, there were six or seven occasions during the original run of this series where I'd have gladly killed a man just to get the next issue.
These are characters you grow to care about greatly, and Morrison's use of the medium is absolutely masterful. King Mob's visit to the Invisibles of the 1920s is simply astonishing, with an ominous, inescapable ending, and an incident in volume seven, despite all the warnings that it was coming, caused me to drop the comic on the floor. It's one of the saddest and most moving moments I've ever read, and one of the finest death scenes in all of fiction.
Morrison is matched with some spectacular artists to make this tale work. There's an argument to be made that it gets a little mad towards the end as a host of artists team up for the climactic three-part story (Ashley Wood, what were you thinking?!), but Steve Yeowell, Jill Thompson, Phil Jiminez, Steve Parkhouse, Mark Buckingham and Sean Phillips, among others, provide some of the best work of their careers. The great, reclusive Rian Hughes even does a page towards the end, but it's Philip Bond who really impresses the most. His work in book seven, where the classic film The Wicker Man is referenced, is breathtaking.
The Invisibles was originally published in three "volumes" of monthly comics, one of 25 issues, one of 20 and the last containing 12. Despite strong initial sales, the complex second story arc, entitled "Arcadia," was deeply unpopular with the nascent readership, almost halving orders before it ended, and making the future of the series uncertain until the end. As this weird story is reprinted in book one of the seven collected editions, new readers might enjoy sampling "Bloody Hell in America," the low-priced fourth collection, which is considerably less convoluted, before continuing with book one.
The Invisibles is available from your local comic shop, who would enjoy your custom; new books ship each Wednesday (delayed, the week after Christmas, to Thursday), so why not stop in after work?