The blank badge and everything that surrounds it: an Invisibles reread

About Barbelith: Morrison has admitted that some parts of Doom Patrol bled into this series, with Ragged Robin being an alternate version of Crazy Jane... So with that in mind, Barbelith also seems to be a variation of the similar shape Rebis sees in Doom Patrol when they have their final enlightenment. But what that is supposed to tell us about the connections between the two series, I have no idea.

Or actually I do have sort of a universal theory of how every one of Morrison major DC works are connected to each other, dunno if I've shared it here?

morrison was explicitly trying to make the dc universe literally a self-aware magickal entity in his superhero run iirc but i'd be interested to hear your theory for sure

i still haven't started my invisibles re-read but my current theory is that morrison's chaos magick 'every reader must have a wank to save the series' ritual did indeed save the series but unfortunately it created qanon as a side-effect

Okay, I posted this a long time ago on TVTropes.org, so I'm just gonna copy-paste it from there... I'll put it in spoiler tags, cos it has spoilers for All-Star Superman, Seven Soldiers, and DC One Million:

Almost all of Morrison's DC works are tied to each other, as well to the real world, forming a big "Morrisonverse". Here's how it goes: In All-Star Superman Superman creates the infant universe Qwewq. In JLA we see the heroes discover (a version of) Qwewq. Both in ASS and in JLA: Confidential we see that Qwewq actually contains "our" Earth, i.e. a realistic Earth with no superheroes. The final Morrison-penned issues of Doom Patrol and Animal Man take place in a realistic world with no superheroes (and they both share the same colour scheme, meaning it's the same world in both), which is presumably Qwewq, i.e. "our" world.

In Seven Soldiers we find out the ultimate fate of Qwewq (or at least one version of it). Final Crisis (which takes place in the same universe as JLA) refers to Bleed (the "sea" that separates different universes in the DC multiverse) as "ultramenstruum", and the same term is used is The Invisibles, implying that the Invisibles universe is a part of the larger DC multiverse. If we accept that Qwewq is "our" universe, this means our universe exists inside a larger universe populated by superheroes. Both Flex Mentallo and The Filth feature the "real" world to which superheroes from outside this world burst in; thus, the real world in both these comics could be (a version of) Qwewq. Lastly it also seems that DC One Million takes place in the future of All Star Superman as Solaris and Kal Kent appear and happens to be the story of how Superman ended up having to fix the sun.

Or to sum up just the Invisibles connection: in Final Crisis Morrison calls the Bleed (the space between alternate universes created by Warren Ellis) "ultramenstruum", which is the same term Invisibles uses about the weird floating mirror substance we see several times, which would imply the Invisibles universe is one of the alternate universes in the DC multiverse.

Whoop's I messed up the spoiler tags there...

The first few issues still give me "CBBC 5.05pm drama, but with much more swearing and violence" vibes. There was talk of a BBC Scotland adaptation, if I remember right?

The series ultimately (and fairly explicitly) lands on option b. Forces of control inhabit each end of the spectrum.

i still haven't started my invisibles re-read but my current theory is that morrison's chaos magick 'every reader must have a wank to save the series' ritual did indeed save the series but unfortunately it created qanon as a side-effect

― you are like a scampicane, there's calm in your fries (bizarro gazzara), Monday, September 21, 2020 8:09 AM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Plus the thing where we never escaped/must constantly relive 2012

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4__NWrfejTg&t=194

The first few issues still give me "CBBC 5.05pm drama, but with much more swearing and violence" vibes.

There's more than a passing similarity (specifically, the focus on am underground "magipunk" world hidden beneath real London) between the first storyline and Gaiman's Neverwhere, which was a BBC drama first. Maybe the BBC commissioned Gaiman to do something similar to Invisibles, but more feasible for TV?

Otm, Dane going back to Liverpool and Boy leaving are both fairly explicitly about this in their separate ways. I don’t think that Fanny’s recruitment (while she’s recovering from assault and bleeding) is portrayed neutrally either. John-a-Dreams recruiting her at her lowest point has always sat uneasily

The problem here is that Mister Six is supposed to have been enlightened beyond the Invisibles/Archons dichotomy, yet he seems to be a part of the plan for Dane, or at least does nothing to stop it? This is one of the reasons why I feel Morrison changed his mind about the Invisibles and their moral justification at some point.

There's more than a passing similarity (specifically, the focus on an underground "magipunk" world hidden beneath real London) between the first storyline and Gaiman's Neverwhere, which was a BBC drama first. Maybe the BBC commissioned Gaiman to do something similar to Invisibles, but more feasible for TV?

Sorry, I didn't notice Nhex already mentioned this connection upthread.

Plus the thing where we never escaped/must constantly relive 2012

well, yeah

promethea also goes full 2012 apocalypse at the end iirc, it was def in the air for comics' two magick uncles

Didn't they both get the 2012 date from the Mayan calendar entering a new cycle in that year? IIRC that was explicitly referenced in the Invisibles?

yeah, the mayan calendar ended on 21/12/2012, as did our reality

sorry to break it to you like this but we've been living in hell ever since

Mods please ban Tuomas

?

I will be posting my thoughts on the first two issues of The Invisibles early this week!

Can’t wait to catch up on the thread and see what people are saying about those first two issues of The Invisibles

I’m going to *not* do a dump of some random thoughts from here on our and, delving into both the guides published for the series and my own thoughts, avoid plot summary as well. But for today..

#1/#2 of the first series of The Invisibles

The Invisibles starts off with a bang. Well, multiple acts of violence. There’s the feeling that, given the need for a punchy intro issue Grant Morrison front-loaded the confrontation into the beginning,

This gets dialed back, and put into retrospect (to great effect) later. But the ideas are unsubtle at the start. Morrison’s strength is in his cultivation of ideas. Interviewed, he’s claimed that he has a story he’s returned to, all the way from cheap licensed properties he wrote at the beginning of his career. Alluded to in this thread, he reiterates and builds. There are a lot of pieces in the beginning here, that seem like one-offs, that he returns to later in the series. The best reader of Grant Morrison is Grant Morrison, and it’s not as much a Chekhov’s gun situation as it is an intentional building on prior work.

The Dead Beetles title is literal and figurative. I feel that Lennon-as-godhead is part of a thought cloud of ideas riffing on the title. The scarab pushing the orb comes first: The scarab being the titular beetle, the introduction of Dane as Liverpudlian follows as a character origin. It takes Morrison until the next issue to give Dane a voice of reason friend on the street who’s from Glasgow — author insert? King Mob/GM fusion isn’t evident yet. Morrison loves conceptual zeitgeist/rock figures as embodiments of orgone energy or cosmic fulcrum. Lennon is.. the dead be(e/a)tle!

When I first read the series, I was irritated by Dane at this point. He’s the kid with completely justifiable impulses to lash out, with a sympathetic teacher he can’t hear, and a judge who says all the right things within a system he’ll never listen to — with reason — because it’s never done shit for him. Ironically, the first words of the Harmony House administrator, who we then see is serving evil, are right. He’s the square peg they’ll shape into fitting in that round spot, but it’s the Invisibles who will be doing it. But with kindness (really?), as in the second issue we get to..

Tom. Tom’s much more sympathetic with every reading, (And so we return, to begin again) as the character most in tune with the world as it is. He introduces us to magic as it exists, the will to understand the world as it can be and accept that what happened was the results of your incantations. Abandoned tube stations as sanctuary, constructed totems, mold as cosmic hallucinogen. Is it really magic, or is it Dane accepting that scrapings from a dusky wall is a drug to take him beyond? It’s both, I’d say.

The magic of monarchy and ancient ritual are both accepted and ridiculed throughout the series and the faux-fox hunt, with the as-yet-unnamed introduction of Sir Miles are a bit cliche and heavy-handed as they escape a literal hunt of the homeless.

The ending with the hinted-at but unintroduced Invisibles posing as the hunters at the end is another incident of parallelism between the purported villains and our yet-to-be-introduced team. We’re the good guys, and we’re doing this as a hazing ritual! We’re not the good guys. The series will draw nuance later, but at this point the differences between the Invisibles and their not-yet-named adversaries are vague. We’re fucking with you, but.. for good!

"And so we return and begin again" was semi-nicked 20 years later for The Wicked and the Divine, which is actually the only time since then that I can (probably faultily) remember a creator doing the "I've written stuff before and I'll write stuff again but this is The Big Work"

The first time I read this, in early 2007, I had never been to London. The first time I went was a few months later, after reading this, and until after I'd moved over here a couple of years later, I had never seen homeless people with the regularity that you do in this issue.

I can't honestly remember whether I went to New York or London first but when I'd been to both I was struck by the fact that the homeless population in NY had a much larger percentage of people with (obvious) mental issues - this is no longer the case, and not because NY's gotten any better :/

The first cover is by Rian Hughes, who presumably designed the font for the creator names that continues into cover 2, which is I think the first time I saw Sean Phillips' painted work? It's fucking beautiful. Hughes will also have done the Invisibles / Streisand logo?

I remember hearing the theory that Tom was a time-shifted Dane, at the time.

"Urizen, deadly black in chains bound" is from Blake of course, and reminds me of the giants of London bit in Heaven, the last track in Alan Moore's piece about Blake.

There's no letters for the letters page yet of course (when did the practice of sending out samples early to get some kind words in?), so in the first two issues we get two-and-a-half doses of Morrison as the kid's version of a Very Exciting, Grown-Up, taking drugs and chances in Tahiti and Kathmandu and New Zealand - the half is because he got to share the On The Ledge column with J M DeMatteis (before he was using his comics as telephone boxes to stick up his guru's card in).

(I'd forgotten that he was pulling the Brett Anderson "heterosexual (with possible latent homosexual tendencies)" line here)

On the other hand:

THE INVISIBLES is what I'm going to be concentrating on for the foreseeable future, and I think I've at last found a concept wide-ranging enough to accommodate all the ideas I've had which would otherwise be spread through a succession of one-shot books and specials. Although we have a core group of characters, anyone can belong to or oppose the Invisibles, giving me the opportunity to tell stories ranging across time and genre, stories that will eventually come together and be revealed as one large-scale, shimmeringly holographic tapestry. Generally, the longer stories will feature the activities of our five principal players, while one shots will explore the lives of various ordinary and extraordinary folk drawn into a web of conspiracy that extends from the back streets of your home town to the dark blue-green planet circling Alpha Centauri and beyond, out past the horizon of the spacetime supersphere itself. 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. And when it reaches its conclusion, somewhere down the line, I promise to reveal who runs the world, why our lives are the way they are and exactly what happens to us when we die.

very very sign me up

Week 2: Vol 1, issue 3, Down and Out in Heaven and Hell, Part 2; issue 4, Down And Out In Heaven And Hell Part 3; issue 5, Arcadia, pt 1: Bloody Poetry

https://i.imgur.com/QyXzMtE.jpg

"Even your life doesn't belong to you." That's what King Mob says as the rest of the cell disappears into the dark, and it's true, isn't it? The only way to be free is to fight against the outer Church and everything, but you can't do it alone and that comes with obligations.

"Nobody's got a good word for the younger generation nowadays but all they need's the threat of death to get them going." Whether it's the past or the future, Freddie/Tom has always been funny.

I've always loved London pigeons, diseased and stupid as they are, so Tom telling Jack to leave them alone is one of my small favourite pieces of this issue. :) I used to take photos/videos of unusual or strange looking pigeons when I was in London every day, they are everywhere and nowhere at once. You see them perching on anti-bird spikes and wobbling down bus lanes obliviously. Stupid, endearing birds!

Also, I just realised that park they're in is St James's Park.

"All my teachings are on this level of consciousness and that's why you can't remember where all the time has gone." I had never thought about this line before, it always flickered past me like taxi lights in the dark. How long has passed?

"When you dream, what makes you think it's not real?" - lol, this is one of the most obvious bits ripped off by The Matrix early on.

I get such an ache rereading the scene at St Dunstan's-in-the-East, because the look in Tom's eyes as he sees himself and Edie pass by in the past kills me. Both Toms quote the same part of King Lear.

Lol when Jack says he can't be arsed by any more walking around - in this issue they've gone from St James's Park to Tower Bridge to St Dunstan's in the East to Cleopatra's Needle which is about 2 hours. More or less a straight line down the river in both directions.

Dane's awakening is always very moving to me, water-based rebirths are such a cliche but this one really got to me.

Sorry I'm late doing this today, if I don't post 4&5 today it'll be tomorrow!

The ending with the hinted-at but unintroduced Invisibles posing as the hunters at the end is another incident of parallelism between the purported villains and our yet-to-be-introduced team.

The bizarrely didn’t fix that in the trades or omnibus!

Rereading issues #3 and #4 made me feel even stronger about what I mentioned earlier in this thread: Dane is being gaslighted, almost brainwashed into accepting the Invisibles' agenda. First King Mob's cell abandons him to live on the streets for months, then when he's at his lowest point, Tom comes along to give him a new ideology that makes him feel like he has a purpose and place in the world. The most damning bit here is the Invisibles masquerading as the hunters: what other purpose does it serve than gaslighting?

This honestly feels as bad as the V's manipulation of Evey in V for Vendetta that Morrison criticises later in The Invisibles, yet Dane's conversion here is depicted as a completely positive thing. I honestly feel Morrison changed his mind about the morality of the whole thing later on.

There's a clear colouring error on the last page of issue #2, when we first see the Invisibles-disguised-as-hunters: both Boy and Fanny are coloured to be as white as Robin and King Mob.

This isn't remotely true, though? Boy is clearly darker than Fanny (which has always been the case quite apart from her fondness for makeup) who is clearly darker than Robin - if there's a colouring error then it's on King Mob.

I'm genuinely not sure if you've spotted this, but the gent he tries to sell a Big Issue to in #2 is the only non-Invisible person he talks to all issue. For good or ill, he's not been abandoned.

(he = Dane there, sorry)

Yeah, I know the Invisibles are still keeping an eye on him, but they have let him live as a homeless person for months instead of taking him in because... he needs to suffer to understand their viewpoint, or something? And on top of that they dress up as the hunters and torment him, because he needs to see how the enemy is? Even though it's not the enemy but his supposed comrades? How does that make any sense?

This isn't remotely true, though? Boy is clearly darker than Fanny (which has always been the case quite apart from her fondness for makeup) who is clearly darker than Robin - if there's a colouring error then it's on King Mob.

Coloring error might be in the reprints? There isn't a huge degree of variance in the original issue but it's there.

I am looking, at the original issue.

Sorry, I misread that.

I’m not on board with the overly broad use of “gaslighting” given Dane could only recognize King Mob out of the group and doesn’t seem to, but it’s definitely a sort of indoctrination by force.

For good or ill, he's not been abandoned.

This makes it worse! Dane has absolutely no idea who these people are, and if he did pick up on their repeated presence it’d seem like surveillance, not well-keeping

Morpheus in The Matrix was a lot more soft-handed, lol

It becomes obvious fairly quickly in the third issue that they’re play-acting as the enemy in hunter garb, but it’s still them. Theatrical reproduction of the enemy’s terror, but Dane’s still looking like shit on the streets

A microcosm of the series at large, where even the players aren’t sure if their manipulation is for a greater purpose or if it’s cruelty for the sake of cruelty

As we progress, it’ll be interesting to see how I feel about different characters this go around. I was a lot more sympathetic to Sir Miles on my last reading!

almost hissed out loud there, mh. Sorry, i still need to do 4&5, later I promise!

Dumb question: is Boy trans? Had to wonder in that panel where King Mob challenges Dane about this being a "man's" job.

There are a lot of ethical questions later in the series re: time travel, manipulation, etc. and how much agency some of the characters have and whether they are just playing out preconceived roles (with Morrison as puppet-master). Go back to that tarot reading in the first issue, then make note of any time tarot symbolism pops up :)

xp I never read the character that way.

Dumb question: is Boy trans? Had to wonder in that panel where King Mob challenges Dane about this being a "man's" job.

Btw I’ve never seen it as anything besides the Invisibles seeing Dane as a tool that needs to be strengthened, for his own sake as well as theirs. Roger knows about his abilities in v2, he’s clearly extremely powerful but he’s young and he hasn’t gone through his time in the fire like the rest of them have. Even post-initiation he nearly loses it post-Orlando and after what happened with John-a-Dreams, you can see why they need him to be what he is. Throughout the series you see him being trained by different people - Boy, El Fayed, Tom - because they know what his role should be and are keen to get him there. Whether that’s ethical is really besides the point.

xp also this was 1994 - more than one trans character would be exceptional

(also let's be honest, while Fanny is a great character, she is partly there because Grant Morrison felt he had something interesting to say about transsexuality and Brujería - he'd need another hook for a second character)

gotcha. I can't remember much about where this goes for any of these characters except maybe Dane and a lot of explosions later

"There's a war on, boy. There's a war on and we want you, we want you as a new recruit" isn't the army, though - it's from the Village People's In The Navy.

This makes it worse! Dane has absolutely no idea who these people are, and if he did pick up on their repeated presence it’d seem like surveillance, not well-keeping

Oh yeah, no, I didn't mean it was easier for Dane - this is an initiation ritual, a stripping down. "The Boy's going to have to be put through the mill, poor bastard."

And yeah, breaking up the armour means that the person inside can get out, but also that you can get in if you want, to plant whatever you want - Jesus or scientology or the army. The flat statement that Tom's planted stuff in Dane for later is intentionally unsettling.

A theme in my rereading (the first since they came out) might be "this is well-described and has only got worse" - "it's worst being a little scared of him because he makes you feel tough when there's trouble. He makes you feel hate instead of uncertainty and fear" - that's not Boris, but it might be what comes after.

"There's a war on, boy. There's a war on and we want you, we want you as a new recruit" isn't the army, though - it's from the Village People's In The Navy.

xp Boris?

As promised (for once), here's issue 2.

https://i.imgur.com/6F3l8Zy.jpg

Kickin' (Black Science Part Two)

Where were we? Oh yes, on the big shiny enamel train to getting fucked, thanks to Quimper.

We open up with Oppenheimer solemnly intoning "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds." Mason's quote is actually slightly wrong, but never mind. Wikipedia says At an assembly at Los Alamos on August 6 (the evening of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima), Oppenheimer took to the stage and clasped his hands together "like a prize-winning boxer" while the crowd cheered. He noted his regret the weapon had not been available in time to use against Nazi Germany. However, he and many of the project staff were very upset about the bombing of Nagasaki, as they did not feel the second bomb was necessary from a military point of view.

Boo fucking hoo, you made your choice, and at least you got to live with it. Mason's arm outstretched towards the sun's rays recalls the flag of Imperial Japan; this and the Oppenheimer quote are our first serious indicators that his morals are a bit...flexible.

The crew is in New Mexico; the men are off their faces on top of a mountain, the women are down below fighting and planning. (Where is Fanny? With neither camp, hmmm.)

Boy and Robin both agree they don't trust Roger.

Back on the mesa, some of the chat when they're tripping is funny the way things are funny when you're off your face:
https://i.imgur.com/87hQxK5.png

The way they descend the hill is how I go down stairs when I've been drinking. Fully validate it.
https://i.imgur.com/IVNyjo3.png

We hear more about the structure of Invisibles cells for the first time since Edith talked to KM about it in Paris way back in volume 1:
https://i.imgur.com/cjWURk0.png

Quimper and Colonel Friday are talking at the base and Quimper demonstrates his "total control" over his puppets, by means of a certain code phrase.

Robin is waiting on the roof of a house for something. She won't tell King Mob (listening to Kula Shaker ffs) and he says he won't pry. He goes and she waits. We see what's drawn her attention: a little girl getting out of a car nearby. We see then that the girl is past Robin, in this universe, and that Robin remembers every word said at this seemingly meaningless encounter. This factors into her writing the story later - she comes across like an author lingering over a favourite line.

Anyway! Turns out Robin drew Air, which makes her the leader and she's got to dress the part. In flashes we see everyone else's draws: Fanny gets Fire and Boy is Spirit. That's important.

Lol @ Fanny:
https://i.imgur.com/u1bIM0m.png

The gang breaking in - King Mob, Robin, Roger, Boy - get in without much trouble, but King Mob is distracted by a cage containing a gleaming, formless substance. At the same time we see the porcelain train gliding by.

The backup team in the hotel room - everyone else - are listening to Mason theorise about Independence Day and then a ghostly form that resembles Quimper appears in the wall and hisses "fuck you all!"

Back in the base, King Mob can't tear his eyes away, Robin and Boy are freaking, and Roger gets hijacked. Shit's fucked basically, Boy otm.
https://i.imgur.com/LR0Keug.png

I've forgotten a lot of Volume 2, I have a vague memory that it's my least favourite, but we'll how that goes.

I definitely wasn't expecting it to get off to so much of a bang - into a Secret Government Base twice in two issues!

her cell, who get shot and captured right in front of her

She mentions later that two of them get out - it might just be Bobby that's gone.

The T-shirt that Robin's wearing is basically painted on - I understand Jill Thompson was pretty pissed off about what happens with Robin's sexiness in this volume.

I think the "small dining room" line is actually nicked from Batman-the-film!

It's an interesting bit of operational security that King Mob just says "A friend" got them over to the US when we know that it's Jim Crow.

King Mob: I suppose if the Buddha grew up poor in Liverpool and swore a lot, he might be a bit like Jack.

Yeah, this reminded me of Fanny's "What are we looking for, darling? A little lump of smouldering charcoal that says 'Fuck' every five minutes?"

It's worth noting that the year-long gap papers over the business of Jack (dressed here more or less as Keith Flint) and the rest of them actually becoming friends and team-mates - he's less of a standoffish figure than at the end of Vol. 1

It'll surprise absolutely no-one that Phil Jimenez was given tapes of Grant and his mates chatting shit while on LSD to write up.

Nothing more late-90s than film-student level enthusiasm for "my theories about films" including something from Tarantino, followed by lampshade-hanging it as like something from Tarantino.

(Except maybe the line "Drag Queens and Dykes hardly ever get along")

I wanted to go along with the re-read but my damn Invisibles trades have vanished. A year later and going through I think pretty much my entire collection and they are just GONE...

Makes you think. ;000

🐦[The Queen will be taking it easy for the rest of the year. https://t.co/lOBm0inhBx🕸
— Glasgow Live (@Glasgow_Live) November 15, 2021🕸]🐦

_Lads, I'm so fucking bad at this and I can only apologise. The only thing that makes me feel less bad about it is the fact that, with the exception of Andrew F, you are too._

I'm still reading and enjoying Gyac, but haven't made the time for a reread myself, so don't have much to contribute! But keep it up...