Sorry for the delay. I was rereading The Invisibles. Now I’m rerereading it. As mentioned before, these posts are going to be my musings on the series at this point in my life, rather than a “deep” reading full of ne’er-before-seen insight. If it’s annotations you want, check out Barbelith’s The Bomb or the Disinformation Guide.
This post is entirely spoiler-free; later posts will be mostly so. Some parts of this overview may be misleading, others will be outright lies. If you want the unvarnished truth then go read the books. So:
There is an eternal war between the forces of Order and Chaos that has been going on for time immemorial. On the side traditionally thought of as “good,” less traditionally as Chaos, are The Invisibles – a loosely-knit group of ontological terrorist cells dedicated to overthrowing Status Quo, freeing mankind from the mental shackles of modern society, and shooting the ever-living hell out of any ultraterrestrial beings who make the mistake of invading our physical plane. Or at least those who work for said ultraterrestrials.
And in this corner, we have the nasty beasties of the Outer Church, servants of absolute Order, total control, and the enslavement of all mankind for all eternity, forever. For argument’s sake, we’ll call them the “bad guys.”
Also also: every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard is true; all moments in time are simultaneous; there is a red, circular satellite called BARBELiTH orbiting the dark side of the moon and sometimes it beams messages into our brains; and the world is going to end on December 22, 2012, 8:00 A.M. GMT, as the walls between self and not-self break down and all of humanity is born into the higher state of unified consciousness that, because we have to call it something, we’ll call the Supercontext.
Get ready!
There are a lot of Invisibles, but our five core characters are:
- Jack Frost, a.k.a Dane McGowan, teenaged Liverpudlian hooligan, possibly the reincarnation of the Buddha, certainly a powerful sorcerer, maybe the most powerful. Doesn’t really give two shits, though. The newest recruit.
- King Mob, de facto leader of this Invisibles cell. Wears leather, shoots guns, behaves like life is an action movie and he’s the star.
- Ragged Robin, a clown-faced red-head, Has some psychic powers. Has some other powers.
- Lord Fanny, a powerful Brazilian shaman and a fabulous dancer. Also, a transvestite.
- Boy, who is a girl.
Okay, enough background.
Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weigh of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous little cabinet? Little bokren things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are.
- Tom O’Bedlam, to Dane McGowan
Our story begins with Jack and his initiation into the secret world of the Invisibles. I’ve always associated strongly with Jack; we were born in the same year (1980) and, as Invisibles was set in the “present” of the book’s publication, that means Jack was always my age. During the 90s, that is; reading this series in non-real time, I can’t help but notice how young he is. Not to mention a righteous wanker. What once seemed like youthful rebellion now just comes across like being an asshole. As Tom tells him, “you think you’re an outlaw but you just do what they want you to do”; his rebellion is trapped within the superstructure of how a young, violent rebel is expected to behave. At this point in his development, Jack isn’t actually rebelling, he just thinks he’s rebelling. Mostly, he just wants to break things.
I felt a lot more sympathy for the character of Tom O’Bedlam, the older, homeless sorcerer who oversees Jack’s initiation. My first few times through the series, I felt more like Jack: “Hurry up, old man! What’s all this prattling about the nature of things? When are we going to get to the good stuff?” Now, I find him to be one of the series wisest, most sympathetic characters – in great part because he’s willing to put up with Jack’s undercooked nonsense. Tom’s ramblings about reality aren’t just for Jack, they’re for the reader: Don’t let the world distract you from what’s important. Look with your heart, not with your eyes. You are a person and you can accomplish anything - so why settle for anything less?
Tom may be mad, but he’s sane where it counts. Like the best Fools, he can say what he does because he knows he won’t be believed. The irony, as always, is that he speaks nothing but the truth.
Jack soon passes through the first stage of his initiation, puts the bulk of his attitude problem (if not his foul mouth) behind him, and meets up with the rest of the cell. Then they go to a windmill in the middle of the English countryside and sit in a circle for five issues. Okay, not really, they’re actually travelling back in time to France’s Reign of Terror to bring a psychic projection of the Marquis de Sade back to the future where he can architect a new world order based on Absolute Freedom. And to hang out with Byron and the Shelleys, because, you’ve already gone to all the trouble of travelling back to 1794, so why not?
Thus begins the series’ infamous “Arcadia” arc that nearly got the series cancelled . Truth be told, it’s difficult stuff. There’s not much action; the main characters, in the present day, are literally in an immobile trance as they project back in time. There’s a lot of talking and philosophizing. On the other hand, it’s at least interestingly difficult and thematically coherent. Furthermore, like most second arcs in Morrison’s long-form comics, it provides a secret road map to the entire series to come.
My enjoyment was helped a lot by my own expanded pool of knowledge, this time around – I knew more about the French revolution, about the historical significance and symbolic import of the guillotine, and about the Marquis de Sade and 120 Days of Sodom – thanks, Keith. I was also more willing to approach each arc of The Invisibles on its own merits – does it accomplish what it’s trying to accomplish? I mean, there’s plenty of ultradimensional warfare and time-travelling hypernarratives in the issues to come. This arc – a philosophical treatise on human freedom, the subjectivity of prisons, and the false security of either-or, us-them Manichean dichotomies – succeeds mightily. Compare the Marquis’ freedom, even imprisoned, to the self-imposed incarceration of the libertines, or the stark difference between what Robin and the Ciphermen hear during glossolalia. There’s also the dalang, a most skillful puppeteer, and the Blind Chessman, playing both sides for want of a suitable opponent.
I used to think the Blind Chessman was Satan, given his penchant for apples and affiliation with the Outer Church, but this time around I considered him as the Gnostic Christ. He claims he is “not the god of your Fathers,” and that his stories were made heresy by the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. The idea of the Gnostic Christ – a spiritual Christ dwelling within a human host, rather than a Christ divine both in flesh and spirit – resonates strongly with the series’ recurring image of a person or creature from a higher state of existence becoming “trapped” in a lower. So, I’m going with that.
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