Comics newbie requests a description of The Invisibles!

Probably doesn't help...

A couple of years ago I was wearing my homemade Invisibles T-shirt (design: the apple the blind chessplayer is holding) and ran into somebody else wearing an Invisibles T-shirt she'd made herself (design: "My Tits Spell Anarchy" from the self-detourning issue). We instantly became friends.

What were the other comics your friend showed you?

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Bunch of 'em, actually.

I disagree - there's a very nice balance of self indulgent weirdness and old-fashioned story telling in the early days. It's the last couple of volumes where things go tits up.

I kinda agree with you if you're including KISSING MISTER QUIMPER. The arc which consisted of King Mob and Ragged Robin going to Philadelphia and come to the conclusion that Mason's vaguely sinister is, whilst quite engaging, pretty ridiculous and goes absolutely nowhere - a complete folly, if I may say so. It's especially embarrassing compared to the issues that follow - the Black Science sequel and "All Tomorrow's Parties" (!!!) - which I'd say rank as some of the best in the series.

I loved it then but I would be just a little bit afraid to re-read it now (having read almost all of GM's other stuff, for one thing).

I gave up after the first issue, because it was rubbish.

CHUCK - And the art is better! Weston rox hard!

'tale of one bad rat' is a very good comic, i say.

As we all exist at every moment in history simultaneously, I'd like to take back my previous slaggings of The Invisibles on ILC. Thanks for the (indirect) recommendation, Douglas -- I finally got around to reading the whole thing this weekend, and I fuckin' loved it. In fact, I can't wait to read it all over again. (Although, NB, I might take a break before I do that.)

So glad you liked it!

One of us. One of us...

I think my main problem with the series was King Mob -- he's such an instantly dateable 1990s ultraviolence/anti-establishment caricature -- but he really grew on me as a character this time round. (When it first came out, I gave up the series about halfway through Volume 1, so this is the first time I've read beyond that -- it really does get a <i>lot</i> better.)

I have to say, though, I enjoyed the series more as a "simple" reader -- the incredible intricacy of the plotting, the wonderful ideas and art, and (especially) the many excellent jokes -- and unraveling the philosophy of the series took a backseat for me. But that's an aspect I hope to dip into more conscientiously on future readthroughs.

(conscientiously = consciously, duh)

I recently reread all of The Invisibles, and there's one particular question that's kinda bugging me: is there some deeper signifigance to Edith's miscarriage? When she first tells the story in issue 6 of volume 3, I thought it was just anecdote to illustrate Edith's character. But then we actually get to see the scene of the miscarriage in the very final issue, when King Mob is traveling through time. That made me think there must be something else to that scene beyond character trivia. In the final issue, when we see Edith right after her miscarriage, we can also see Dane boiling the rubber glove to prepare for The Hand of Glory in the background of the same panel. I know those two appearing in the same panel is an effect of KM's displacement in time, but it still made me think that boiling a glove is also a way to make it sterile, and hence there might be some connection between the miscarriage and what Dane is doing. Also, the only other significant reference to pregnancy in The Invisibles is towards the end of volume 2, when Ragged Robin mentions that she's pregnant (presumably with KM's baby?), and the she's gonna name the baby Quimper. Is there some connection between Quimper and/or RR's pregnancny and Edith's miscarriage?

Quimper of course is horribly malformed, but when we see his "real" form (or at least the form he had before being mutilated) in volume 2, in the scene where the men with animal masks torture him, doesn't he look kind of like a grown-up foetus? Could that mean that Quimper is actually Edith's miscarried baby? (Yeah, I know Lord Fanny says Quimper is some sort of a forest spirit, but I don't think anything in The Invisibles has only one simple explanation.)

Also, King Mob has sex with Edith in 1924, and Edith has his miscarriage in 1933, so biologically it is impossible for the baby to be KM's. Except that KM visited 1924 in a ghost form, and who knows what the effects of having a sex with a ghost are? Maybe it took 9 years for a ghost foetus to gestate, and the miscarried baby is actually KM's? Which would tie all this speculation neatly together: Quimper is both the miscarried baby of KM and Edith and the future baby of KM and Ragged Robin. (And, if both RR and Edith have become part of the Harlequinade, it's actually the same baby.)

No idea Tuomas, but interesting theories and I would be interested to hear what others think. I always got the impression that Quimper was an alien, but I don't think GM explicitly stated that anywhere, just maybe something I assumed from his resemblance to the Schwa icon that was prevalent at the time.

Yeah, when I first read volume 2, I thought Quimper was an alien too, but Lord Fanny says he's a nature spirit of some sort, and later on it was implied Robin is pregnant with Quimper, so that would kinda rule out the alien theory. Also, the actual aliens we see when Dale is abducted aren't really aliens either, rather than some sort of manifestation of the Barbelith. I think Morrison just put the alien imagery in the comic because it was popular at the time, and The Invisibles is clearly infatuated with pop culture, but there aren't any proper aliens in the whole series, are there? Even the Roswell UFO turns out to be something quite else.

The Invisibles was, partly, Morrison's attempt to make sense of what he'd believed to be an alien encounter he'd had sometime previous.

But didn't he also say somewhere that he went to Nepal (or wherever it was he was supposedly abducted) with the specific intent of getting abducted by aliens? So I'm not sure how seriously you're supposed to take the whole story. Anyway, even if you do take it seriously, there aren't any proper aliens in the story, so maybe The Invisibles is an attempt to deal with the information he got during the abduction, because it certainly isn't a story about aliens per se.

I was reading through the Barbelith annotations of those specific issues, and someone had written this there:

Quimper is Robin and King Mob's baby, which parallels Grant Morrison's story about Quimper being an abortion his girlfriend had.

Can anyone confirm if Morrison has indeed said that Quimper is supposed to be his girlfriend's aborted baby? Because that would certainly support my theory above.

I should re-read this. Can't remember anything about vol 3, except some nice Bond art.

The vol 3 tpb is worth seeking out as some of the art that wasn't really decipherable has been redone by Cameron Stewart, if memory serves correctly.

I think there were only around 4 pages re-drawn iirc.

The Barbelith stuff really reminded me of Philip K Dick's Valis and his related novels about alien contact - where although it is presented as an alien intelligence, reading between the lines you can see it as a metaphor for the author undergoing some sort of consciousness change, either through drugs, mental breakdown or something else.

There are only 3 redrawn pages, in the second to last issue. I don't think the original art is that bad, but the the artist (Ashley Wood) misunderstood Morrison's script, where people are described as 4-dimensional "time maggots". This is supposed to mean that from a 4-dimensional point of view you can see every position a person takes in time, so they look like endless rows of the same person, i.e. "maggots". But instead of that, Wood drew Dane transforming into an actual maggot! So Morrison got Stewart to redraw those pages, as they are rather important in explaining his idea of a 4-dimensional spacetime. Those three pages are also supposed to show that the Outer Church and the Invisible College are part of the same continuum, and I think Stewart's art better conveys that too.

Speaking of changed pages, for some reason the Counting to None TPB is completely missing this page, which appeared in the original comic book. I have no idea why it was omitted.

I own one of those Cameron Stewart-redrawn pages. I'd tell you which page, but I don't have my INVISIBLES trades handy. There's a castle, Dane going 4D, some giant fleas and Mob's bald girlfriend the ontological terrorist going all ontological terror on panel. Does that help?

Yeah, that's the second one of the three redrawn pages.

Own them as in the originals? Lucky guy.

Looks like this.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxwellm/3442574276/"; title="Invisibles_253.jpg by maxwellm, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3410/3442574276_efcae25e8c.jpg"; width="335" height="500" alt="Invisibles_253.jpg" /></a>

That's the only one I got. But it's enough.

Oh bugger. What'd I do wrong this time?

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You'd think that answer would be helpful...

ILX uses BBCode tags, not HTML. Click "Show Formatting Help" below the post window.

In the meantime,

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3410/3442574276_efcae25e8c.jpg

Thanks.

The castle in panel 4 is almost completely obscured by a dialogue balloon, by the by. Granted, there's a lot of information being tossed at the reader here, but the original art is ever so much nicer than the lettered.

After having reread The Invisibles several times, I feel there's only one big thing in it that I've never really got: who/what is the blind chess player dude supposed to be? In the Arcadia arc he gives Mary Shelley an apple, does that mean he's supposed to be Satan? Or is he the Gnostic Demiurge, trapped inside the world he created? (Of course, some Gnostics thought Satan and the Demiurge were one and the same.) In some Gnostic texts the Demiurge is called Samael, which means "the Blind God", so this would definitely fit the chessman.

On the other hand, the chess player apparently sees beyond dichotomous concepts such as matter/spirit or Archons/Invisibles, which would mean he exists on a higher plane than the Demiurge... In the Arcadia arc we see him sitting on the side of the chessboard and playing both black and white, which is one of the first hints that the central conflict in The Invisibles isn't as Manichean as we thought. Later on we see him both inside the Invisible College and working with the Outer Church, and, in the page above, he actually shows Dane that the two are part of the same continuum. I guess it's possible that he's actually the God/Hypercontext, but IMO that would be kinda too obvious. In Black Science 2 he says to Dane; "I'm not the God of your fathers." Is that a quote from somewhere? Does it mean he's not a god at all, or that he is a god, but not the kind Dane would've heard about?

Of course, this being a Grant Morrison book, the blind chess guy could actually be yet another author avatar, which would explain why he seems to know everything that's going on in the story. But Morrison avatars tend to be Morrison lookalikes, and the chess player doesn't really fit that description. Plus The Invisibles already has one Morrison avatar.

Hmm, the Barbelith Wiki mentions that the line "I'm not the God of your fathers" appears in The Invisibles before the chessman says it, in the vision of Christ Dane has during vol. 1. To quote the Wiki:

The Christ-figure also says "I am not the god of your fathers" -- which also fits with the various Gnostic ideas being tossed around here, since Gnostic Christians saw the God of Israel/JHVH/Ialdaboth as an evil usurper.

Based on my limited knowledge of Gnosticism, I'd say this implies that the chessman is not the Demiurge/Samael. Ialdaboth is just another name for the Demiurge, who the Gnostics believed had created the material world and trapped the essence of the true God inside it. This myth, of course, is reminiscent of what happens to the "magic mirror" God in The Invisibles when the first atom bomb goes off, and the porn movie actress also tells a similar story to Mr. Six & co, though I think she uses the names of Zoroastrian Gods. So is the blind chessman an incarnation of the magic mirror God kept inside the Dulce base, i.e. an aspect of the true God who the Outer Church has trapped inside the material world? But when he hangs out with Colonel Friday and Quimper in the Dulce base, they're awfully polite to him, almost as if he's their boss or something.

It's also worth noting that "Archons" are what Gnostics called the servants (demons/evil angels) of the Demiurge. But if the chessman is not him, that would mean that we never see Demiurge himself in The Invisibles, only his servants.

Even if there are lots of Gnostic references in The Invisibles, I think Morrison's relationship with Gnosticism is kinda ambiguous though. AFAIK, the Gnostics believed the material world was an corrupt place, which had trapped the true divine essence in us to flesh and matter... So they were kinda anti-materialist and anti-body, and wanted to escape the physical world. However, this doesn't seem vibe with what Morrison is saying in The Invisibles, since bodily pleasures such as dancing and sex are shown in a positive light, and Lord Fanny's whole philosophy is that he transforms the "filth" of the body into magic. I guess you could say the way everyone merges with the Hypercontext by the end of the series is kinda similar to a Gnostic enlightenment, but I never understood it as a mere spiritual enlightenment where your spirit leaves your body behind. I thought the Hypercontext was a sort of a place where everything is more solid, more sensuous, more real than in the "real" world. Kinda like relationship between the infant universe Qwewq (i.e. our universe) and the DC universe in Morrison's mainstream DC comics.

No one here has any theories on the chessman?

nah

It's a clear reference to a heterosexual affair Alison Bechdel and Howard Cruse had while they were coincidentally on holiday in the same place.

Hey, I just mentioned a funny detail that was pretty easy to spot if you read both Morrison's and Milligan's introductions to each others' books. It's not like I concoct elaborate sexual fantasies involving the two as a daily habit. (And even if I would, so what?)

Hey, I just mentioned a funny zing that was pretty easy to spot if you read both Morrison and Milligan threads on this board. It's not like I concoct elaborate sexual fantasies involving the two as a daily habit. (And even if I would, so what?)

Tuomas, have you ever looked at the Barbelith board or the old Invisibles guides part of the site, if they're still there?

Yeah, I have. But the Invisibles annotations over at Barbelith don't have much in the way of trying to come up with a proper explanation for the chessman, except for some random thoughts like the one I linked above. It seems many people at Barbelith think he is the Devil, but frankly I don't see much proof for that theory except for the apple thing.

"the one I quoted above"

this has always bugged me too Tuomas - I just assumed I was missing something.

Nice to hear I'm not the only one. Of course Invisibles is supposed to be an open-ended comic with no one definite resolution, but for most of the big things in the book it at least provides us with loads of information to help interpret them. In fact, you could say that one of the defining features of The Invisibles is that everything is overdetermined; Morrison deliberately overloads it with material for multitudes of alternative interpretations. But then you have this one seemingly important and powerful character who's just a total mystery, except for a couple of obscure hints.

yeah I basically gave up on any definitive explanation of the chessplayer and more or less assumed he was a God-figure.

I guess him being (the true) "God" is the most reasonable explanation, though it still feels a bit weak and un-Morrisonian to me. Also, there's stuff like that scene in the "Black Science 2" arc where we see things through his eyes, and find out that he's not really blind but can see the energy flows (or something like that) within people. That scene made it look more like he's a physical being with some weird superpowers than a god.

it does seem sloppy/too convenient for Morrison but I don't think any decent explanation is proferred otherwise.

um Gnosticism usually came in two forms as far as I've always understood it--Ascetic and Libertine...it's exactly like it sounds: the ascetics deny the body; the libertines indulge it.

Gonna read along with that final issue in realtime tomorrow as the world dissolves around us and turns into a period.

I was a bit disappointed Morrison didn't release any new Invisibles-related material this year to coincide with us entering the supercontext.

If you utter "Blind Chessman" in front of the mirror a 100 times, Laurence Gardner comes to haunt your dreams. Maybe he's Dr. Manhattan?