Evil is just misrecognized good, usually misrecognized by itself. Early in the series, Morrison reveals that what looked like a “war” in the first few chapters, a cliched fight between rebels and empire, is in fact a “rescue mission.” Images of medicine and midwifery abound: our heroes aim not to kill but to cure and to convert the enemy, to turn the enemy into a friend. On this date, humanity is due to ascend into what Morrison calls “the Supercontext,” or a matured experience of spacetime as an integrated simultaneous totality to which terms like good and evil will not apply. The 1500+ pages of the series narrate how Dane’s becoming an Invisible coincides with the mounting crises leading first to the millennium and then to 2012. This quartet tries to recruit a Liverpudlian teenaged delinquent named Dane MacGowan, who may be a new Buddha. Morrison’s series begins when The Invisibles need to add a new fifth agent to their cell, which consists of the glamorously violent Englishman, King Mob the fragile psychic waif, Ragged Robin the former New York City cop, Boy and a trans magician from Brazil, Lord Fanny. The newly enriched Morrison traveled the globe, experimented with drugs, received the secrets of the universe from aliens in Kathmandu in 1994, and began a new creator-owned series for DC Comics’s adult Vertigo imprint about a cell of anarchist terrorists called The Invisibles who war against evil insectoid Archons bent on controlling the world. Morrison wrote a metafictional treatment of Animal Man and an avant-garde superhero saga in Doom Patrol and, most consequentially on the material plane, also wrote the delirious Batman graphic novel, Arkham Asylum, which, coinciding with Burton’s Batman movie of 1989, became a bestseller. So what is The Invisibles? Why should you read it?įirst, its author: Grant Morrison, a Glaswegian working-class magician, punk, and failed pop star, became one of the most notable writers of American comics during the late-1980s British Invasion. But rereading it over the last month, I was surprised to find that its time has come round at last. I assumed, because it was so timely, almost reading at moments like a journal Morrison was keeping about 1990s cultural trends, that it could not possibly hold up. I had not read The Invisibles all the way through since about 2001 or 2002. Certainly those of you who have been reading some of the other things I write about here: not only Alan Moore, but also Herman Melville, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison (no relation).
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