Let's Talk About The Invisibles

Hi, I’m David Harth, and everyone is going to regret this. Possibly even me. I can’t be sure. I’ve spent years thinking about doing something like this for this book, and I just have so much to say.

Let’s talk about The Invisibles.

The Invisibles is Grant Morrison’s magnum opus. It deals with a lot of stuff that he was into during the 90s and beyond. It’s the comic that gave him his reputation for being a drugged-out shaman of the new world. It’s beauty and chaos and darkness and pain and love and everything in between. It’s insane at places in the best possible way. You’ll never read anything like it, and after you read it once, you’ll read it multiple times trying to understand the whole thing.

For my money, if someone asked me what the 90s were like, I would give them this comic. It captures the zeitgeist of the time so well. I’ll explain-

The 90s were the last time that I can remember when there were so much hope and so much despair at the same time. Like, we looked at the future with rose-colored glasses and could never foresee the down curve that was coming. We were on our way to utopia. However, we also knew that just behind all of that was this terrible yawning darkness, this secret world of government conspiracies and corporate power that was controlling everything. That utopia we thought we were heading towards was being built for us while we were trying to develop our own.

We had no idea what was coming in the millennium.

The Invisibles captures those feelings to a tee. There’s sex, drugs, dancing, music, violence, aliens, magic, holographic universes, fetish clubs, government conspiracies, monsters, time travel. There are freedom fighters who lose sight of what they are fighting and why and agents of terrible order whose entire existence has been pain because of what they know and what they work toward.

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here.

The Invisibles is the story of a cell of freedom fighters fighting against the entrenched power systems of the world, which are in league with dark beings from another universe. The team highlighted in the book consists of King Mob, Ragged Robin, Lord Fanny, Boy, and the newest member, Jack Frost. These are all codenames they have chosen for themselves. Oh, and Jack Frost is the newest reincarnation of the Buddha and is extremely powerful. He’s the POV character of the first storyline, but as the book goes on, it focuses on the other characters, giving us the origins of each of them. Later in the book, the team is joined by other members of the Invisibles from around the globe, including Jolly Roger, Mr. Six, billionaire Mason Lang, Jim Crow, Helga, Takashi Satoh, Paddy Crowley, George Harper, and Jack Flint.

Yeah, that’s a lot of names to throw at you without context, but you know, that’s how the cookie crumbles. It’s like asking who have been Avengers or Justice Leaguers, or X-Men. If you don’t know who every character is already, you’re going to be lost regardless.

Much like in his Doom Patrol run, Morrison does some great character work with the main cast (although, if I’m being completely honest, some of the ancillary characters don’t get as much polishing, and I’m still confused about what’s going on with some of them, like all of the Division X guys who aren’t Mr. Six, Paddy Crowley, George Harper, and Jack Flint). Jack Frost starts out as a stereotypical British hooligan in training, and while a lot about his attitude doesn’t change, he grows as a person in ways that he would never have if he hadn’t been discovered by the Invisibles, which is both good and bad. King Mob is basically Morrison himself in the book as a supercool killer (more about this later) who, as the series progresses, begins to question his if all the killing is worth it. Lord Fanny is one of my favorite characters in anything ever. She’s a trans woman, ex-prostitute bruja, and she’s just delightful. Every scene she’s in is great in so many ways. Ragged Robin is a telepath whose mysterious background plays into the whole thing later. Boy is an ex-New York City cop… or so it seems. She’s also probably the least fleshed out of the main characters.

On the other side, you have the Outer Church. This is where things get complicated, but I’ll explain the cosmology of the whole thing before I go on- in the universe of The Invisibles, there are three universes. One is the Outer Church, and it is a place of ruthless order and casual atrocity. It is diseased and impure. Another is the universe where The Invisible College resides, and that place is the opposite of the Outer Church. The two universe touch and meld together, and that melding forms “our” universe. The Outer Church is run by Archons, demonic beings who exist to torment and control. An unaltered human in their presence dies of multiple cancers quickly. They have their human servants, some of whom they alter and others who just want power and will serve them because they see no other alternative, such as the main villain of much of the comic, Sir Miles. Every bad thing you can think of is on their side. They control the governments. They have all the power. Or so they think.

Now, there’s much more to the whole thing than a simple battle between good and evil, and as the book goes on, things get way more complex. If I’m being honest, I’m still not a hundred percent on everything that is going on in the comic. That sense of mystery, though, is easily one of the best parts of the book and why it’s so rewarding to re-read it and discover new things. This is probably the comic that got Morrison the reputation for his series’ being so complex to the point of turning people off. The Invisibles is one of the most complex narratives I’ve ever read and even though it highlights an ontological battle between the forces of happy anarchy and monstrous order with things like magic, time travel, demons, spirits, gods, and everything in between, it feels very real to me and always has. Life is complex. There are no simple answers, and frequently, there are no answers at all. Good and evil can just be different ides of the exact same coin.

One of the key themes of the book is an old concept that was going around at the time called millennialism. It basically posited that the coming new millennium would change everything, that humanity would become something new. That said, it never really said what change would take place, and that’s where this book comes in. In it, there are two options- servitude or freedom. Or so it seems. The book also goes with the whole Mayan calendar thing about when the world will end, meaning that whoever wins eventually loses when everything ends. There are so many layers to the whole thing.

For example, King Mob. King Mob is both a character in the book and a magical construct for Morrison. He’s a fiction suit that Morrison put on to interact with the comic world. He made King Mob into everything he wanted to be- fashionable, witty, the coolest guy in the room, and it worked out very well. He would get girls like the ones King Mob would get, but there would also be a drawback to this- at one point, King Mob gets captured and tortured, and some of the damage happened to Morrison. Now, I wasn’t there. No one was but him and whoever else he knew at the time, but as someone who has always believed in the supernatural, I can believe it. When you play, you have to pay. That’s a rule in the mundane world as much as it is in the magic one. Morrison also said that Lord Fanny was his feminine side, and he got the idea for her because, in some of the rituals he would perform, he would crossdress. I always felt this magical side of things gave the book an extra dimension, adding to the realism of it.

Lord Fanny is one of my favorite comic characters ever. In the 90s, it was rare to see a trans character played in a positive light. Now, there are some things about her that people would find problematic today, basically the fact that she was a sex worker and that’s sort of a stereotype for trans women. However, there was a story reason behind the whole thing- as part of her initiation as a bruja, she pledged herself to the Aztec goddess of filth, Tlazoleotl. Her working as a prostitute was part of this. Beyond that, though, she is a strong character who never really needs much help. She’s not played as some kind of pathetic stereotype but as one of the most powerful members of the group. She may have been born a male biologically, but she is a woman through and through. She also gets some of the best lines in the book and is laugh out loud funny. Terrible things have happened to her, but she doesn’t let that destroy her zest for life. She fights the good fight no matter what. She is an amazing dancer, a skill that comes into play eventually in the book. The artists also have a lot of respect for her, as well. It would be easy to draw her as more male looking, but she’s frequently the most beautiful character on the page, especially when Phil Jimenez draws her. I met him once. I should have paid him to sketch her for me. He did tell me how Grant Morrison originally wanted to kill Jean Grey in New X-Men #150 after he signed it for me. I’ll fill you in on that when I write about New X-Men.

Speaking of the art, Morrison works with a lot of great artists in the book. There’s Phil Jimenez (he’s my favorite one of the bunch), Jill Thompson (she does the first two volumes of the book, including the origin of Fanny story and it’s sensational), Chris Weston (who Morrison would later work with on The Filth, which is sort of the opposite of this book), a very young and raw Ivan Reis for one issue, Philip Bond, Steve Yeowell, Sean Phillips, Mark Buckingham, and Frank Quitely (who does the last issue). There’s more, but these are the ones who do the best work, in my opinion. Now, yes, that’s a lot of artists, but they each bring something unique and powerful to the table. There are some rough spots, but for the most part, the art is great. 90s Vertigo books were hit and miss in this regard. Books like The Sandman got the best artists (Jill Thompson worked on both books) because they were the big sellers. Morrison at this time was a name, but he wasn’t megastar Grant Morrison yet. In fact, the book almost got canceled early in the run. Morrison had a mystic sigil printed in the letters page of the book and asked readers to.. Ahem… masturbate while touching it (I am not making this up), in an attempt to activate the sigil with all the combined pleasure of the readers and keep the book going.

You can believe it worked or not, but the book didn’t get canceled. Make of that what you will.

Let’s talk about King Mob some more. He’s the character who went through the most change in the run of the book, and his story is sort of integral to the whole thing. When the book starts, King Mob is an ultra-smooth, ultra-cool, badass killing machine. He kills without mercy because he feels that he’s validated in what he’s doing- he’s working to save the world from evil, and if some grunts get caught in the crossfire, well, they were serving the wrong side and besides, they were trying to kill him or his friends anyway. As the book goes on, he becomes disillusioned with the killing. Part of him realizes that these people aren’t all bad. They’re just people looking for a paycheck, people with families. This drives him to abandon the team for a time before coming back with a new outlook on violence. This change plays into the change that goes through the book as it goes on- things stop being so cut and dry. Good and evil aren’t monoliths that you have to choose. Sometimes, people are put into bad situations, and they have to do what they need to do to survive.

Readers get a glimpse of this before King Mob does in one of the best issues of the book, #12 (Vol. 1, although it can be found in 2nd trade paperback, Apockalipstik), “Best Man Fall.” It follows the life of one of the soldiers. Mob kills in the first issue when he rescues Jack Frost. We, as readers, get to see his life, the things that happened to him, and how it all shaped him. He was abused as a child, and he abuses his wife later in life in turn. He becomes a soldier in the Falklands War and is injured. His story is quite sad, and while he isn’t a good man by any means, he’s not a monster. Did he deserve to get shot in the face? That’s up to the reader, but this issue was one of the first that I read that gave a voice and a face to one of the faceless hordes, and it informs the choice King Mob will later make in the series.

The book keeps growing more and more complex as it goes on. For example, there’s the Harlequinade. They’re three Harlequins dressed in bondage gear that seems to be on the Invisibles’ side. They go so far as to have Fanny and Jack Frost (who I will talk about soon, bear with me) dance for them to get an artifact called the Hand of Fate. Then, in the last volume of the book, we see them from the other side, as they also work with the Outer Church in another guise. Good and evil. Same coin, different sides. There’s a character called the Blind Chessman (well, he’s never named in the book, but he’s literally a blind guy playing chess). He’s introduced into the book in the first six or seven issues, where he meets up with Ragged Robin, and they play a game of chess. He never tried to hurt her or capture her, they just talk and play chess. He reappears in the book later, this time working with Colonel Friday, the American representative of the Outer Church, and Mister Quimper, a deformed spirit creature corrupted by the Outer Church (with links to Lord Fanny) and seems to be in a position of power over them. However, he holds no malice towards the heroes, not really. Again, he plays chess with one of them, Jack Frost. Who he is and what he represents is up to the reader, although he gives a clue saying he was left out of the Bible at the Council of Nicea. His place in the book is strange and seems to buck against the readers of view of the good guys and bad guys. He commands the bad guys, but he doesn’t really do anything evil himself, not really. He’s not one of the Archons, and he takes no pleasure in the horrors that some of the other villains do.

Layers and layers.

So, Jack Frost. Jack Frost’s name before he becomes Invisible is Dane McGowan, and he’s a typical Liverpudlian kid who likes profanity, women, and crime. He’s basically the main character of the first story arc, the touchstone character, the guy who gets introduced to everything so readers can understand it all. He’s the reincarnation of the Buddha, Jesus, whatever messianic figure you want to believe in and has immense power. As the series goes on, he changes from a street tough to something more, an enlightened being with the foulest mouth. He’s given the secrets of everything and acts on it. When asked what side he’s on by the Blind Chessman, he answers, “I’m on the side with butter on it.” His role in the narrative is greater than just being a good guy in the fight against the Outer Church.

Then there’s John-A-Dreams, and I still have no idea what his whole thing became, other than he was the leader of the Invisibles cell we follow throughout the book who disappeared and then showed up with the Outer Church. Still, there’s this sense that it’s way more complicated than a forced defection.

The Invisibles is one of the best comics of the 90s and one of Morrison’s best works. It’s extremely opaque at a lot of points, but that makes it no less amazing. In fact, it’s that sense that there is more to everything that’s going on the page that makes reading it so addictive. For a long time, I would re-read it and re-read it, learning more or getting confused by it. That’s the kind of book it is. It’s rewarding. It’s full of great characters and action, insane plots, and all kinds of other good stuff. Give it a try.

So, that’s it for this week’s installment. These aren’t exactly coming out weekly, and I’m sorry for that. It’s not completely my fault. Except when it is. Anyway, come back next time, when I talk about New X-Men.