Issue Seven: Acadia Part Three: 120 Days of Sod All

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 7

"Arcadia Part Three: 120 Days of Sod All"

Synopsis
In the windmill, Orlando eats Dane's severed finger, and Dane awakens. His cries for help rouse Fanny, who attacks Orlando. Dane attempts to use King Mob's gun against Orlando but the gun fails to fire. Orlando attacks, slashing Fanny across the chest with his knife before advancing on Dane.

King Mob and Boy are lost on the "ontic highway" with the psychic projection of De Sade. Their surroundings quickly transition from the "Et Arcadia Ego" postcard into Castle Silling, the setting of De Sade's "120 Days of Sodom." The trio are forced to watch a slightly modified version of the events of the book (a vicious satire in which four powerful men kidnap several young people to an isolated castle and wantonly use them to fulfill their every perversion before killing them) before they are allowed to continue on their journey to De Sade's ultimate destination, San Francisco.

In Venice, Percy Shelley mourns the death of his daughter, wallowing in his misery. His wife, Mary reflects that it is easier for poets, because they are allowed to lose themselves in their grief, while she must continue to live.

Ragged Robin finds herself in the French village of Rennes-le-Chateau, where she meets a mysterious chess player (Mary Shelley's carriage companion from the previous issue) who informs her of the mysteries surrounding the village. She enters the chapel at the center of the mystery, only to find a group of Cyphermen there. They claim to have already found what the Invisibles sought there - the oracular head of John the Baptist.


Transvestite v. Shadowman Smackdown!
Let's start today's analysis with a look at what's going on in the "real world" (i.e., the one with the time machine windmill and the fleshless Aztec knife nut). I was trying to put together some fancruft about Dane and Fanny being the ones to wake up because they're the most magically gifted of the cell, but really, I think it's just that the story demands the team be split up, and this way makes the most sense.

King Mob and Boy go with De Sade because they're the grounded ones who are going to be able to avoid taking anything they see too seriously.

Dane's gotta be in the windmill because getting the crap cut out of him by Orlando (and totally failing to do anything about it) is all part of his Hero's Journey thing.

Robin has to deal with the "Head of John the Baptist" because... I don't know, someone had to do it. I might have more on this next issue, when we get into the meat of what the head is, but no promises.

But most of all, it had to be Lord Fanny who took on Orlando.

I'm GUESSING that Orlando's name is a reference to Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography, a semi-true, mostly metaphorical story of Woolf's female lover. In the story, Orlando is born as a man, lives a life of adventure, and then suddenly transforms into a woman. And while our Orlando takes the form of a male, he's similarly transitional - he wears the skin he chooses.

In the other corner, we have Lord Fanny. Without getting into her backstory, she's Aztec, too. A biological male who wears the appearance of a woman - a sexy, kick-ass woman, at that. Like Orlando, she didn't have her identity thrust upon her - she chose it (in a less messy fashion than Orlando's, I hasten to add).

It's her transitional strength that puts her on an even footing with Orlando here - high heels being wielded with a male's musculature, sexual characteristics that act as armor and can be thrown away when damaged - way more than Dane, trying to use King Mob's dick/gun and getting slapped around for it.

Sniffing at the skirts of mystery
Speaking of Robin, though, this is our first issue where she gets any time on her own, but I don't know that I have a lot to say about her yet. She's one of the book's big puzzles, but for now we'll just have to accept what she's presenting on the surface... even though we know that's a mask.

As for the man she meets in the churchyard at Rennes-le-Chateau, well... He's clearly the same man who rode with Mary Shelley more than a hundred years before (the man mentions that it's been 100 years or so since the priest Sauniere came to the town, placing Robin's segments at least in the 20th century, if not present day).

Last issue, I had him pegged as Death, and it's not as though the chess imagery here doesn't support that (not to mention the skull-shaped charm Robin's wearing around her waist!). His position relative to the board indicates he's playing both sides, although we never see him moving the white pieces.

If he is Death, he's as impartial as before, with his warnings about going so far after buried treasure that you pull up worthlessness instead (something I should probably keep in mind as this project continues).

Oh, and the painting he mentions Sauniere buying, "Les Bergers D'Arcadie," is, of course, the Et Arcadia Ego painting that names this arc, under a different title. Not sure of the significance, but I wonder if Morrison set this excursion in Rennes-le-Chateau specifically because the painting recurred there?


Guilty
The thing I can't stop poking at, though, is the make-up. This issue is book-ended by people in very similar make-up: white face paint, with red circles on the cheek. One of those is our very own Ragged Robin, confronted with Cyphermen and Rennes-le-Chateau and the head of John the Baptist. And the others are the...protagonists? Villains? Central characters of De Sade's "120 Days of Sodom." Is Robin's dark side being hinted at? Foreshadowing of poor Mr. Quimper?

I'm inclined to think it's the reverse, actually. Robin's make-up is her little way of pointing out the ridiculousness of her life. It's all pantomime, and she's just another clown.
The make-up worn by the Banker, the Duke, the Priest, and the Judge is a similar marker of theatricality. After all, in the same scenes where it's first shown, they're shown "getting into costume" as they put on their wigs and robes. De Sade was trafficking in the far extremes of brutality, not because it got him off (although... yeah, it got him off, and again we see that pull toward rage and darkness that sits in the man/movement, alongside the urge toward freedom) but to form an instructive lesson.



I'm not saying anything the text doesn't spell out on its own, but the events that Boy and KM and De Sade experience on the Ontic Highway (and, to jump back to our discussion of the cave and the shadows from a few days ago, ontic means "real" - we're into a "higher" level of reality here, closer to our side of the page, the stuff casting the shadows) are for our, the reader's benefit. We're the ones being addressed by the Judge after the world is ended in rage and despair. The original De Sade didn't write about "electronic tagging" or "DNA fingerprinting files." That's all for our benefit.

It can be easy to see the things that the Outer Church does and blame it on the archons - the monsters made me do it! But while they may supply the supernatural mojo, 9 times out of 10 it's us doing the actual killing and crushing and raping. Everybody on The Hunt was 100% human.

And even then, it's not them who pull the trigger. That's the last joke, that it's the prey, the blank brutalized faces, as Big Malkie might put it, who are the ones who actually end it all in our little playlet... once they've been put in front of the button, of course.



If Arcadia is about the conflict in the human spirit between idealism and cynicism, then last issue's trip through the Terror was cynicism's triumph in the "real world" - the shadow - and what we see here is the platonic ideal, the true object casting that shadow. This entire issue is tinged with failure - the events in Castle Silling, Dane's impotence against Orlando, Percy Shelley's descent into melancholy over his daughter's death, the Cyphermen discovering the head... The case that's being made to us is that humanity is flawed, un-savable, and the idealists are so lost in their ideas that they ignore the people they love and get them killed. It's a damn grim message.

Thank God this arc is four issues, not three, huh? See you tomorrow for the counter-argument, San Francisco-style!

Issue Six: Aracadia Part Two: Mysteries of the Guillotine

The Invisibles
Vol 1
Issue 6

"Arcadia Part Two: Mysteries of the Guillotine"

Synopsis
Having psychically time traveled, the cell meets up with Etienne, a member of the Invisibles, in 1793 France, during the Reign of Terror. Etienne guides them to their target, revealed to be the Marquis de Sade. He also tells them that strange, insectile creatures have been seen in Paris. King Mob identifies these as brainwashed enemy agents known as Cyphermen, sent to disrupt the mission. The group witnesses several bloody executions, as well.

De Sade, in his capacity as an administrator in the revolution, is touring disease-infested hospitals. He comes across a room where three Cyphermen are cutting a woman open. They tempt him to join them in an exploration of his flesh. He begins to give in, when King Mob appears, weilding a weapon designed to destabilize the Cyphermen's psychic projections. Having driven them off, the group tells De Sade that they are bringing a psychic impression him to the future, which his true self will join when it dies.

Sensing that the murderous shadow creature Orlando is growing near, the group attempts to return to their bodies, but finds the way blocked. King Mob suggests they focus on the image of the postcard in his pocket as a physical link back to their bodies. However, something goes wrong, and Boy, KM, and De Sade instead appear apparently INSIDE the postcard, with the others nowhere to be seen.

Meanwhile, Orlando enters the windmill, to find the five cell members still in trance. He begins his attack on them by cutting off one of Dane McGowan's fingers.

In a series of scenes that run throughout the issue, Mary Shelley is seen traveling, at her husband Percy's insistence, with their two children to join him in Venice. The hard journey is physically draining on the children. A mysterious man also travels in her carriage - he offers her an apple, mentions that he has met both of her parents, and warns her of the price of idealism and utopia.


The religion of blades
Maybe it's wishful thinking from having started this post quite late, but tonight's issue is a bit less complex than yesterday's. Not that it doesn't have its major points to make, but there are fewer and they're hit harder.

This is a story about the prices we pay when we try for Utopia, and the human reactions that keep us from achieving it. As such, we'll spend most of it in one of the idealist's great warnings: The Terror during the French Revolution.

We start with the Tricoteuses (literally, "knitting women," those who sat and watched the executions as they went on day after day). Percy Shelley might want us to believe in a higher world, but these women (and men) will always be there to remind him that what people want is blood and spectacle, human sacrifice and gods.

Orlando's presence in our story demands a parallel between his own roots in the Aztec civilization, and the bloody deaths of the revolution. In both cases, death was used as a way to beseech a higher power, to beg it for relief from life's woes. Thus we have Saint Guillotine, saint of getting back at those who had the audacity to live above us. We have Liberty, the spirit of getting even.

The past stinks
And time travel itself isn't that great. This is no idealized past we're visiting: just a stinky, filthy place where everyone is just as confused about whose side they're on as they will be in 200 years.

Not to mention that it's crawling with insectile counter-agents, brainwashed by high frequency subliminals (seemingly the opposite of the ELF that the nutjob in the park was worrying about a few issues ago). Thank God King Mob has a gun with him that he can shoot them with. Yay, guns!


De Sade
I've always found the Cyphermen's attempts to subvert De Sade interesting. I don't usually associate The Enemy in The Invisibles with temptation (although, now that think of it, a few events down the line call that into question) so much as coercion and repression. But they come close, here.

It's a reminder that De Sade is not JUST a philosopher and libertine, that his drives push him toward something it's hard not to describe as evil. He would never cut a woman open himself, I think, but when it has been done for him? When there's nothing left to do but enjoy the spoils? That calls to him.

We think of the Outer Church as a foot stamping down on deviancy and self-expression. But there is also that element of it that is embodied in The Hunt, the part that revels in saying "We are so above you that morality no longer applies." As much as De Sade's drive toward freedom pushes him to The Invisibles, his drive toward cruelty pulls him to the Church, to worship at the impure altar.

(And speaking of the Church, it really is no surprise that all of the worst elements of the revolution are contextualized as a religion, is it? Remember, kids: College good, church evil!
I'm being facetious, but, like I wrote last time, a college is challenging, often formless, while religion, as detailed in the 5-step mysteries (in the sense of a religious ritual) of the guillotine, is structured, comforting. It appeals to the part of us that wants familiarity and the ability to just follow orders without having to think.)

An apple from the teacher
And meanwhile (25 years later, 175 years ago...) we have Mary Shelley making her way across Europe, at her husband's idealistic insistence, with two sickly children (neither of whom is long for this world, I regret to inform you).

Her journey is the human cost of revolution on a personal scale. A change, made with the best intentions for the good of all, with terrible consequences for the weak and the sick. And with a mysterious traveling companion, who offers wisdom and apples.

I read him as Death, a conclusion that took me a surprising amount of time to come to. He is not hostile to the goals of the Invisibles. But he is also a reminder of the costs. He is with you, when you try to change the world, kindly, offering support, but still taking his due.


Sacrifice
Case in point - Orlando's arrival at the windmill. Dane has been sick for the entire trip, and while it's possible to interpret that as inexperience, it seems more likely that his own psychic warning systems are just kicking in much, much more strongly than the others. And as the guillotine falls in human sacrifice in Paris, so does Orlando's blade fall on Dane's fingers... And like les tricoteuses, he has no intention of stopping with one cut.

In fact, let's reverse the metaphor. Orlando's going to disassemble everyone, as he puts it, bit by bit by bit... So what does that say about the true purpose of St. Guillotine?

Issue Five: Arcadia Part One: Bloody Poetry

The Invisibles
Vol. 1
Issue 5

"Arcadia Part One: Bloody Poetry"

Synopsis
King Mob is in Indonesia, having received new orders for his cell. He watches a traditional wayang puppet show, makes a dedication to the god Ganesh, and then sets out for London via a "shortcut" that takes him through an alternate universe where the Berlin Wall has been rebuilt and the countryside is devastated by war. He spends time with a young mother and her baby, deformed by chemicals released during the fighting, before setting off for London.

Scenes also show the romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley debating on the relative merits of cynicism and idealism. Byron believes that people are driven by base urges and easily controlled, while Shelley asserts that it is the poet's duty to find a higher world and lead people to it. To illustrate his point, Byron takes Shelley to a madhouse where a member of the Invisibles (which the two poets are also revealed to be) has gone mad in the pursuit of such a "perfect world."

Dane McGowan trains in hand-to-hand combat with cell member Boy, who tells him that he was recruited because the cell had recently lost a member. When Dane points out the difficulty of deciding whose side anyone is on in the current conflict (including their own), Boy grimly agrees.

The creature called Orlando speaks to a man in a park, declaring himself to be the Aztec god Xipe Totec. He kills and flays the man, and then, wearing his skin, approaches the man's children.

That night, the cell is gathered for dinner as they wait for King Mob to return. Dane continues to ask questions about the organization, and is told that the group tends to work on its own, although they have worked with someone named "Big Jim Crow" who operates out of Haiti. King Mob arrives and reveals the group's orders: They are to travel back in time to retrieve a member of the order and return him to the present.

King Mob also shows the group a postcard he received. It is of Nicolas Poussin's painting "Et in Arcadia ego" (also discussed by Byron and Shelley), depicting a group of shepherd in an idyllic landscape dominated by a tomb that reads, in Greek, "And in Arcadia, I" as a reminder that death exists everywhere. The card is signed Xipe Totec as a taunting warning from Orlando.

The group drives to a seemingly abandoned windmill, where they begin a ritual to thrust their psychic presences backwards in time to the French Revolution, where their target awaits.


Arcadia
All right friends, initiation is over. It's time for the training wheels to come off.

The first four issues of The Invisibles are told almost entirely from the perspective of Dane McGowan, which is useful, because Dane knows as little about this world as we do. And they were about his education, which meant that he (and we) were getting things explained to us as we went along. The explanations might not always make sense, but they were there. It was a small-scale (okay, actually huge, super-important scale, but humor me) story of one person struggling toward enlightenment.

Well, all that bullshit is over. If Down and Out in Heaven and Hell was about how you prepare yourself to be an extradimensionally attuned warrior magician, Arcadia is about the breakneck, confusing, dangerous experience of actually being one. It's vast in scope, and there is no time for hand-holding. When King Mob tells you we're relocating someone on the spacetime super-sphere, or going surfing on the ontic highway, you're expected to work out what's going on for yourself (and be quick, because Orlando is still coming).

Happily, there's still a little breathing room at the start of this one, as King Mob makes his way back to London through all the myriad ways. So let's get started. (This issue jumps between a lot of different perspectives, so for the sake of clarity, I've given each its own section).


Shadows
So you're chained up in this cave, right? And there's a light behind you, shining on objects. But you can't turn your head to see any of them. All you can see is the shadow the things cast. So you convince yourself that the shadows are the objects, even as you see them blend together and take on new forms. The shadows are your reality, and they're mutable.

King Mob watches a shadow play, somewhere in Indonesia (I have no idea how he got there from last issue - presumably he's on his way back from getting orders at the Academy). And his companion tells him, speaking of the puppeteer: "His job is to make us laugh and cry. Very clever man. The dalang is more than a puppeteer. His skill makes us believe that we see a war between two great armies, but there is no war. There is only the dalang." Maybe I'm over-emphasizing this point, but it's laid out right there in the text, folks. We are not at war. We're just seeing shadows on the wall.

Percy and George
My first few times through the series, I had a lot of trouble with the scenes between Byron and Shelley; they seemed tangential, distracting from the action. But reading them now, I see that they are, essentially a mission statement. We've seen what The Invisibles aren't, the things they oppose, with our trips to Harmony House and our glimpse of The Hunt. But so far, they've only acted in destructive capacities (Killing people and explosions? Fucking brilliant, mate!).

Byron and Shelley are talking about what the Invisibles hope to create - with Shelley as the idealist, dreaming in the sky, and Byron as the cynic, trying to keep things grounded. And without these arguments, The Invisibles is just a story about rebellion, instead of revolution. If Byron is right, and the poets are going to rot in their graves without ever moving the human spirit, we might as well just burn everything down, McGowan-style.

The airy ship of dreams
But idealism is dangerous, too. When we push ourselves to dream impossible new structures for society, reality, we leave ourselves open to being crushed by the task. Our minds can wander so far afield that they can be sidetracked and never return, like the Invisible that Shelley and Byron visit at the asylum.

(Side note: I think this is the first time The Invisible College is referred to by its full name. It's worth noting that the Invisibles style themselves as a place of learning and collaboration, while the Outer Church names itself after a hierarchical, instructive structure)

And he's obsessed with shadows, too, with light and darkness. Like our friend in the cave, he's bound by chains he cannot see.

"Can it be the same hand which plays both white notes and black? My skill is gone. Black wars with white. Keys like chessman." As a dalang, the madman is failing, lost in the illusion of shadows.


"Boy." That's a stupid fucking name for a girl, anyhow.
I've always loved that line, I don't know why. It's a confused kid, getting his ass kicked by a girl, saying a dumb thing, but it's also kind of true, which, knowing the Invisibles, is probably the point.

So let's talk about Boy a bit, as she trains Dane (in a sequence that starts with more shadows fighting on the wall). In the group's current elemental symbolism, she's earth, stability. She's the Elfayed here, the one whose job it is to call bullshit when things get too weird or metaphysical. She answers questions with straight answers, and she teaches Dane that, as great as psychic powers and magic tricks are, survival means you also need yoga, and how to throw a punch. She's the argument that being Invisible isn't just castles in the sky and weirdos in fetish suits. It's normal people getting pushed around for too long and fighting back. And because of that, she's also the one most likely to become skeptical of the cause, when things become too convoluted or confused.

It can be easy to dismiss her as "the boring one," but she's also the one willing to relate to Dane on a personal, human-to-human level, talking about home (in the mystical, Narnia-like world of New York!), and the one who reminds him that part of not going crazy is keeping a sense of humor. Is it any wonder he fancies her?


Gandhi, from that film
While earth seems a good fit for the practical Boy, (and water a good one for Lord Fanny, who lives in boundary conditions and liminal spaces), I'm not surprised that King Mob, as he'll mention in a few issues, isn't really comfortable in the air, "leadership," role. It's not that he's a bad leader, as into his spy-badass role as he is. It's that he seems so much happier when he's out on his own, as a tourist.

We start with another meeting with Ganesh, and a quick reminder that, for KM, gods, whether they be pop musicians or elephants, are just concepts to be adopted and used, not concrete entities.

And then we take a strange jaunt into one of King Mob's shortcuts, into a world where World War III was a reality, where children are born with one beautiful blue eye, where the Berlin Wall is back and bigger than ever. Gideon's attitude here is interesting - at no point does he express pity for the people he meets here. He treats the baby like any baby, he is kind but he doesn't wring his hands about the horrible things that have happened. This is a King Mob I could really like, a walker in strange and distant lands who realizes that, no matter what has been done to them, people are just people.


Orlando
Meanwhile, back in London, we get our first glimpse of the ominous Orlando - in the flesh, as it were.

Orlando, as he tells his victim, is from "the place of the unfleshed." It's not just that he's inherently fleshless - he's not just a creature of shadow - but that he's "un"- fleshed. I read that as a loss of flesh, a shadow that has had the object that cast it stripped away. Information without context, and desperate to reclaim it.

And there's something so creepy about the way he opens his arms to his victims, and the way they seem to walk willingly into his embrace.


Space-time Supersphere
And now the gang's all here, and it's time for the mission: Psychic time travel to the French revolution while being stalked by an unfleshed serial killer with a knife fetish. Boo-yah!

Why a windmill? The only guesses I can offer is that it's an intersection of two circles, one rotating around the other like a prayer wheel (like a mandala). And then, once more, we're looking at the shadow wall. And just because the shadows aren't real, doesn't mean we can't use them. They're as real as the man reading the news on the telly. Feel the shadows, interact with the shadows, step into the shadows. Travel backwards along the shadows... and step back out just in time to see a Frenchman getting his head chopped off.

Next time: Mysteries of the Guillotine

Issue Four: Down and Out in Heaven and Hell Pt. 3

The Invisibles
Vol. 1
Issue 4

"Down and Out in Heaven and Hell Pt. 3"

Synopsis:
Dane McGowan remains euphoric after his previous experiences, but Tom insists that he will soon be dying. He continually reminds Dane that death is nothing to fear, and that he will soon be joining the Invisibles under the code name "Jack Frost." Dane remains ambivalent. Later that evening, Dane ecstatically burns the stolen sports car they have been driving around in, and Tom tells him that tomorrow, they jump.

Tom gives Dane more of the blue mold to smoke, and then leads him to the tower (Dane hallucinates cash and blood flowing out of a sewer pipe, and babbles to the people around him that the city is built on a lake of "blood and sweat and shit."

At the tower, Dane hesitates, saying he does not want to learn magic. But Tom takes his hand, and asks him to trust him. Together, they jump.

Dane falls for a time, and then is suddenly transported to a strange, rural landscape. He immediately sees the solid-colored circle that he saw during his previous "UFO" experience, this time much larger and closer. He flees from it, grabbing a bike he finds and riding away. He eventually comes across a ringed planetoid floating in the sky, the sight of which brings him to tears.

We then see Dane going to an address Tom gave him before the jump, which is seen to be a school. King Mob's cell is there, and they introduce themselves. Ragged Robin is a young woman wearing clown make-up. Boy is a young, tough-looking woman. Lord Fanny is a glamorous transvestite. They are all people Dane has seen during his life on the streets, and he also recognizes them as the fake Hunt that menaced him earlier.

King Mob tells Dane that Tom is dead, and asks him if he wants to join the group, saying it his last chance. Robin senses that enemy agents are about to arrive, and the cell runs. Dane follows them.

Meanwhile, a high-ranking member of the British government contacts someone named Orlando, who appears to have a grudge against King Mob, telling him where to find him and his group. Tom is seen descending into the darkness below the city. As the soldiers of the Outer Church arrive at the school, they find it deserted, except for a pinless pink grenade with the word "Smile" written on it.

Initiation
So, we're still in initiation mode here in Invisibles land - last issue, Dane McGowan cast away the person he was, but it's yet to be seen who he's going to choose to be. And it's still initiation for the readers, too. There are a lot of ideas being seeded here that are going to come up again and again in The Invisibles, so we'd better get used to them now.

Case in point: Tom, telling Dane that he can see the entire shape of his life. Not a single moment, or even a thread running through events, but a shape that comprises everything he ever did.

And that flows quickly into a discussion of the difference between "I've a sadness on me," and "I'm sad," the way that the shapes and structures of our language reinforce and dominate the ways we think.

And Dane is still afraid of death. He's still afraid of the fight, still afraid of choosing a side, because once you've chosen a side, it's possible that you chose wrong. He's still not ready.

Last time, he was trapped in Jack Frost. Today he's Dane McGowan (and that's fine, for a time). But soon, he's going to have to BE Jack Frost, the warrior/sorceror/protector. Not a thing he hides behind, but a thing he is.


Tomorrow we jump
Dane and Tom have been riding around in a beautiful little car. Where'd they get it? Where do you think? Dane's always known how to hijack the system, remember?

And then burn it to the ground. King Mob's barely in the issue, but this scene is as much about him as it is Dane. Explosions! Killing people! Brilliant! But Tom's tired. He's not sad to see one more explosion, but he's ready to go. For Dane (and Gideon) there's always another car, another explosion, another excitement. But Tom knows better. That stuff is fun, but it's not important.


A lake of blood and sweat and shit
I do not think of The Invisibles as a particularly funny series, but the quick jump between Dane saying he's all right, and him being utterly whacked out of his gourd on the blue moss and ugly truth, makes me laugh. As does Tom's line, "I'm his keeper. He wets himself."

And there's probably something to Tom telling Dane to be blue smoke, as they enter the tower. If there's no such thing as blue mold, then it's just Dane getting high on his own mind, isn't it? He's the blue smoke already. So why not embrace it?

Jump!
The view of London from the top of the tower is like a postcard, Tom says. Something you'd give to the sick or the infirm to cheer them up. But Dane's neither of those things, and it's time to give up the comforts of the world. It's time to jump.

So what does it take to be Invisible? It's more than just letting go of yourself. It's more than just seeing the machinery below the world, and the truth about cities. It's looking at the world that you know could keep you fat and happy for the rest of your life, and believing your friend when he tells you there's something much, much more. All you have to do is reject the world... and jump.


Barbelith, again
And it's okay to be scared (it's okay to cry). The end of the world, even if it is just your own world ending in death, is scary, the first time you confront it. It's scary to be born, to cross from one threshold to the next. The unknown is scary, too, when you see it looming like a stop light right in front of you, two-dimensional and solid and strange.

It's okay to run for a bit, to ride your bike and just enjoy the sensation of rushing air, until you can alter your perspective and see that it's not a circle.. it's a sphere. A beautiful planetoid. And when you fall or jump, it's what's waiting to catch you, after you've woken up from the dream that is the world.

Barbelith.

(Digression: Let's talk about the landscape where Dane finds himself after the jump. It's reminiscent of the park where he and Tom threw the Frisbee (a bright red, solid circle) at the start of the issue. And it has a scarecrow, looming in the foreground, and then being blown past. I THINK that might be a representation of the Outer Church and the archons... something designed to frighten and warn, but not truly dangerous. But I'm not sure.)


Learn to become Invisible
And once more we're back in school, and the big exciting spy plot that's been on hold while Jack Frost was being born kicks back into gear. Tom's dead, and we can miss him, but it's not sad. He's gone somewhere else, is all. Woken up. Been born.

And some of this has been a game, of course. Allies dressed as enemies, playing various parts and keeping an eye on our boy. But don't fool yourself: The Hunt is very real, and Orlando is coming. Just because death is no terrible thing doesn't mean the other side won't hurt you and hurt you and hurt you before it's over. And no acknowledgment of false dualities is going to stop Orlando when he's playing with you with his knife.

And Dane's still asking what's real, but I don't think he means it anymore. He already knew: there is no blue moss. There's just you, and the things you can see and do when you believe you can. And when you realize that, when you accept it, that's when you know the truth: you've always known the magic. You've always been Invisible.

And Tom O'Bedlam walks down into the tunnels to see the spires and meet the Harlequin again, and the myrmidons kick down the door of an empty school house, and it's time for another big, fun explosion.

Smile!

Invisibles: Volume One, Issue Three: Down and Out in Heaven and Hell Pt. 2

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 3

"Down and Out in Heaven and Hell, Pt. 2"


Synopsis
Dane refuses to run when confronted by members of The Hunt. Instead, he throws himself at them - and is soundly beaten. However, the hunters back away, saying they only wanted the boy to know that they could kill him whenever they wanted. Dane finds Tom O'Bedlam unharmed, and while giving him back his coat, finds a mysterious blank white badge, presumably left behind by the hunters.

Walking in the park with Tom, Dane expresses dismay at how long he's been living on the streets - several seasons seem to have gone past. He says he needs money, and somewhere to live, but is unable to answer when Tom asks him why. Dane is chastised by Tom for kicking at some pigeons, as Tom claims they are "Invisible" animals. He then strikes Dane on the back of the head, putting him into a trance, and seeming to replace his eyes with a pigeon's.

Seeing from the pigeon's perspective, Dane sees monstrous black birds hovering around St. Paul's Cathedral, and Tom narrates the secrets of cities to him, claiming they are a virus that has infected humanity, forcing humans to build and propagate them, but they have magic that can be claimed by those they make deals with. He tells Dane that he has been subconsciously teaching him for months, just like this, which is why Dane does not remember much of the passage of time.

Sitting in a playground near a church, Tom asks Dane questions about Harmony House, and then begins to reveal to him the two sides at war in the conflict. They are interrupted by a young man and woman strolling through the playground. The woman mentions the Harlequin, and says that a man named Billy Chang has asked them to prepare "The Hand of Glory." The young man, identified as Freddie, expresses fear and the worry that he is haunted. Tom seems to recognize the couple.

Tom again questions Dane about Jack Frost, and Dane reveals that it is just something his mother used to say about Jack Frost coming for him when he was bad, after his father left. Tom continues to push him, and eventually begins physically attacking the boy, chiding him for hiding behind armor and being "just another robot." He eventually throws Dane into the river, holding him down. When Dane emerges, he calls for his lost father to return, and Tom forces him to look at the blank badge, calling it a mirror. Staring at the badge, Dane passes out or goes into a trance.

When he awakens, he claims to feel new, refreshed. He is unafraid to express emotions, and seems happy. Tom tells him that, now that they have experienced life, it is time to experience death. They're going to throw themselves off of the Canary Wharf skyscraper.

Dane
So we have to ask ourselves, after his months on the street, after Harmony House and Luan-don and the blue moss, who is our plucky young hero? Have we reached maturity yet? Is maturity somewhere we want to be?

Well, he's brave enough, throwing himself (ineffectually, of course) at the members of "The Hunt" instead of following orders and running. But while the reward for that bravery is the blank badge, he still doesn't know what it means.

He's still operating in all the grooves that the world has carved for him. He's still obsessed with progressing his life toward something he's been told to want, still reacting defensively to questions about himself, still unable to accept the reality of the life he's living. Still the student, asking his endless questions and defending himself with his cheap bravado. Still kicking at pigeons.


The Secret Lives of Cities
There's something horrific about Dane's face with the pigeon's eyes staring out. It smacks of Harmony House, perspectives being forced on others, and the experience isn't pleasant. But where the agents of the Outer Church were forcing a singular perspective on the boys in their care, Tom is expanding Dane's. He's seeing with Invisible eyes, now, the monstrous beasts that hover over the places of the world's power. And he's learning, as promised, the secrets of cities.

They're viruses, to hear Tom tell it, and they're interfering with what he describes as a birthing process. They want us blasting ourselves into space with rockets, so that we'll carry the cities with us. But that's not the true birth, the one this entire series is building toward. No, that's the one where "We have to leave our bodies and our cities behind us and go into space, just like the little fishes had to leave the sea was all they knew."

Or is it that we'll "Leave as insects. When our bodies are no longer needed, we will send out our spirits as a swarm of golden beetles, carrying the sun of pure understanding out of the abyss to our new home among the stars"? Elfayed may have dismissed this as "cleverness" back on Vol. 1., Issue 1, Page 1, but don't expect the idea to go away on his account.


An angler in the lake of darkness
If it seems like the young couple, talking of mysterious things, comes out of nowhere in this issue, that's because it does. Or rather, it comes from exactly where we already were. It's just a matter of when. As we'll see, much further down the line, time starts to bend and contort when the Hand of Glory gets involved, and, as before, there's not much difference between being haunted by ghosts, and things seen out of time.

Ha, and I just noticed while pulling panels for this, Dane asking whether the enemy is "The Devil or something" shares exact space with the young woman telling Freddie they've got Pan and Dionysus on their side. Same guy, different names, different perspectives.

Choosing Sides
I'm not sure how much Tom knows about the true sides of the coming conflict he tells Dane about, and I'm not sure how much he cares. When he describes the magic of the cities as neither good nor evil, just something to be picked up and used as a tool, he's close to the root of it.

But we're also back into US and THEM territory, the rhetoric of division that Volume One lives in. And who can blame him? It's an easier sell, that there's an enemy and an ally, two strictly delineated sides. The Good Invisibles and the Evil Enemy.


Jack Frost
Man, there's shades of Dead Beatles all over this one, now that I look for it. The heiroglyphics we see just before Dane's baptism feature, among other things, our old friend Khepra, sign of transformation and rebirth. Meanwhile, Dane STILL refuses to grasp what "real" means in his situation. Speaking of his imaginary punisher/protector Jack Frost (he of seelisches land, you may remember), he says "It's just in my head. It's not like he's real. It doesn't bother me." But what could bother you more than something living in your head?

Dane's being haunted, and the thing that's haunting him is himself. His toughness, his fear. So that's what Tom's drawing out, with his little BumFights, River Thames Edition. Throwing in Dane's face that even his most extreme rebellions are just part of the system, that after all of this, his desire to just find a place to live is a form of cowardice, of looking away from truth.

And Tom blows that self-inflicted prison to pieces (Your sentence is up). It's a baptism in the traditional sense, washing away "sin" but also depriving him of air until he has to push past it, blowing through the armor and into the pains and fears and past that until there is nothing left but the badge in his hand.

And when you look at the badge (it's a mirror), and see absolutely nothing staring back, that's not nihilism, that's getting ahead of the game. That's your self getting out of the way. Clear of all the chains that were forcing your perspective into the ways the world wanted you to grow. There's nothing in the mirror.

You're Invisible.

Jack Frost was a prison Dane McGowan made out of himself, with the help of the world. Now he's just Dane. And it's okay to cry, and laugh. It was just the prison telling you to be ashamed of those things that live at the very core of you.


Now, let's throw ourselves off a building, shall we?

Short Fiction of no consequence

It is not easy to be an outcast in the Dead Empire. Imagine a machine as complex as the world, constructed of a million cogs of brass and light and flesh. Imagine yourself as one of those cogs. Imagine trying to escape, as the teeth of other gears hold you in place. Imagine me.

When I was sixteen years old, my mother received an Imperial order. This was a rare occurrence in our small, ill-regarded slum. Of course, the Emperor sees all, so there's no reason he wouldn't have just as much a plan or purpose for the beggars and servants of my home than for high-born lords and ladies, but it never seemed to work out that way. Indeed, we had only the one Tube winding down from the upper levels of the city, bringing us the occasional summon or command or edict from the Imperial Bureaucracy. Our neighbor had received one a few years earlier, ordering him to change his name from Jessup to Michael, which he promptly obeyed. The next year, a friend of his addressed him by the old name, violating the order. He was not seen again.

So you can see, I think, that my mother was in no position to argue when the Tubeman came to our little shack and handed her one of those famous crimson envelopes. She reached to open it, but the Tubeman walked past her, and handed it to me. My mother (name: Maria Hent, Imperial Designate 604432Q, servant) made a sound in protest, but quieted at the Tubeman's warning look. He was not a cruel man, by any means, and had lived in our village his entire life (save the time he spent at the Imperial Academy), but he was still a member of the Bureaucracy, and he was law- and honor-bound to place the letter in the proper hand. My hand.

Unlike many of my young friends, I was an avid and able reader, and so it was very little trouble to decipher the black ink, placed with a firm and even hand, on the red envelope. "Alistair Hent, Imperial Designate 700000X. Open immediately." And so I did.

"Dear Alistair," (the letter read)

"I have waited, I think you can agree, a fair amount of time before sending this letter. Sixteen years is more time than many get, and sixteen more that I was, at first, inclined to allow you, given the severity of your crimes. Please know that I wish you no ill-will, re: your scheduled execution, and I hope that the feeling can be considered mutual.

That being said, I have no choice but to present you with, charge you, and convict you of the following treasonous acts, to be committed at undisclosed later dates:

The destruction of the Tube station at the Imperial district Quez17" - this being the slum where I had spent the previous, significantly less eventful, twelve years of life - "via jury-rigging of the letter redirection systems, destroying several vital Imperial orders in the process,

Evasion of an Imperially appointed Tubeman in the execution of his sacred duty,

The stealing of said Tubeman's Imperial vestments, and the impersonation of him thereof,

Various and sundry offenses against the Empire, to be detailed at future as they become relevant to the case at hand, and, most pressingly,

The destruction of the Dead Empire through the unlicensed and unauthorized use of the controlled substance known as 'Free Will'.

Those official charges are written in the most painfully dry of language, aren't they, my boy? In any case, I'm afraid it's all true, and the sentence, as you've probably gathered, is death. And so, my Imperial order is this: Hand this letter to the Tubeman, and let him lead you to the prison, where we can get this messy business over once and for all.

Cheers!

The Dead Emperor.

PS: No sneaky lying to the poor man and running off, eh? Be good."

There are many benefits to living in a society ruled by a man several years dead. There's no danger of him acting out of self-interest, no chance of him using his power to woo women or steal funds or what have you. You might think it would leave his orders horribly out of date, but that's easily fixed by only picking emperors imbued with the gift of prophecy, and only letting them issue orders for the period after their deaths. I had not, until now, known that the Dead Emperor was quite so whimsical in his writing style, of course. And I had never imagined that I might someday be named the enemy of a being who controlled armies, cities, and, it had always seemed, the threads of fate itself.

The Tubeman was looking at me, curiously. In a day or two, he would receive an order confirming the letter I had gotten, to ensure that I had not attempted to defy the Imperial order.

Unless, of course.... And the idea would never have come into my mind, you understand, would never have even dared to suggest itself to me... That I could lie. Disobey the order. Wait a few hours, and sabotage the Tube. I'd have to be clever to do it (I was clever), and I'd need a disguise (like his clothes) to escape afterward...

But it could be done. Would be done, even, if the crimes I had been charged with were accurate (and they always were). Had the Emperor expected me to simply give up my life? Did he think his subjects so servile? Or was this what he had expected or wanted, all along? It does not pay, I have found over the years, to second-guess the mind of a man who can see the future. But I held to the one truth I have desperately gripped these many years... I wanted to live.

I smiled at the Tubeman. "It says I'm to be given a tour of the tube station, m'lord. Right now."

He frowned at this, reached for the letter, but I held it back. Imperial orders are for ONLY the addressee, and not even the Bureaucracy is allowed to look at them. Shrugging, he turned away, gesturing me to follow. I took a moment to kiss my mother goodbye (not that she knew), and then followed along, already looking for weaknesses in the system.

Issue Two: Down and Out in Heaven and Hell, Pt. 1

The Invisibles

Volume One, Issue Two

"Down and Out in Heaven and Hell Pt. 1"

Synopsis
Dane McGowan, after being left on the streets of London by King Mob, quickly becomes a homeless beggar. After throwing a trash can through a store window in a fit of rage, he falls in with Tom O'Bedlam, a seemingly insane man who possesses certain magical powers - including the ability to render people invisible.

While being shown how to survive by Tom, Dane encounters The Hunt - a group of aristocrats who hunt and kill young people on the streets of London for sport. Avoiding them, Tom leads Dane into the undercity below London, where they smoke an apparently hallucinogenic blue mold that grows there. Dane sees the word "Barbelith" scrawled on a wall, and then has a mysterious experience that shares certain characteristics with an alien abduction.

Upon awakening from this trance, he finds himself and Tom in an alternate London, where zeppelins float over the city and unfamiliar fashions and statuary abound. While here, Tom appears to blank out all the lights of London, allowing Dane to see the stars. After this, Dane acknowledges that he would like to become Invisible.

Immediately after this, Dane reappears in the normal London, to see members of The Hunt bearing down on him with knives.

ELF, Elf, and elf
So, for reasons of time and clarity, I'm dropping the page-by-page thing I did for the first issue. It was a crutch, really - no need to organize thoughts when you can just lump them in by page.

That being said, let's start today with the first page of this issue, the first part of Dane McGowan's true descent into the world of the Invisibles, "Down and Out in Heaven and Hell."

And we start with a nutter talking in the park about the evil radiation is frying our brains and controlling our minds. It's all perfectly laughable stuff, of course... if maybe a little less so, knowing what we know about the sort of things that were happening to the human mind in Harmony House.

Specifically, he's worried about Extremely Low Frequencies, or ELFs. I might be diving too deep here, but I can't help but feel that there's a double meaning to that. Like I mentioned last time, Elves, fairies, the Fair Folk are all tied into the upper levels of reality in The Invisibles, higher-order consciousnesses unable to relate to their own. And there are also machine elves, common fixtures during hallucinations from certain drugs, described as "jewelled self-dribbling basketballs" that construct reality. More on reality altering/creating spheres or circles in a bit.

Down and out
So here we have young rebel Dane McGowan, brilliantly non-conforming by... dropping out of society. Going homeless, begging for food, getting sick, dying. Full of rage at the things he wants, can't have, and is disgusted at the world for producing. He's been effectively neutered, not by any malevolent force, but by the structure of society. If he wasn't being targeted for initiation into a glorious magical battle with the forces of evil, he'd be done for. Rebellion called off due to indifference and an unremarked death. Or maybe he'd get really unlucky, and get the attention of The Hunt.


The Hunt
Maybe I'm just a cynical bastard, but I find something blackly comic in the sequence that introduces us to The Hunt. There's just something about seeing those jolly good English lords and ladies - and their kids - all kitted out in their fox hunting regalia, sounding their horns - in the middle of downtown London. Of course, the conclusion isn't so funny, as they cut a young woman to shreds, just because they can, just because they're better than her.

The Wild Hunt, like the Fair Folk, is one of those old ideas that's always cropping up in stories. It's the prey/predator relationship at its most brutal: you run, we kill. Power abusing weakness, because that's what power's for. No wonder Tom's afraid of the dark magic of it, as the powerful men of the world exercise their privilege on the weak (as she beats her fists against a giant steel door marked "Private").

"Mad Tom is come to view the world again"
Confession: I've never read King Lear. Curse me for a Philistine if you like, but it's true. So until tonight, I'd missed the vast majority of the references built into the character Tom O' Bedlam when I read The Invisibles.

So, for the Philistines: In Lear, Tom O' Bedlam (which was old British slang for a madman - Bedlam being Bethlehem Hospital for the mad) is the guise adopted by Edgar, son of Gloucester, after his bastard brother Edmund frames him for the attempted murder of their father. Which is to say, he's a guise of madness into which a good and honest man retreats from the evils of the world. Later, he guides his blinded father to safety.

If you're following along on your Hero's Journey Bingo cards, Tom's introduction will let you cover up the "Mentor" spots (those of you who already filled in "Call to Adventure," "Rejection of the Call," "Supernatural Aid," and "Crossing of the Threshold" after our trip to Harmony House are obviously playing to win). And Tom's a good fit for that role in Dane's case, because here is a man who conforms to nothing. Completely absent from society, yet hale and hearty. And at the same time, completely divorced from and uninterested in the war the Invisibles are waging. He's the ultimate non-joiner.

Luan-Dun
So down we go with our mentor, into the city below the city. There's something about the places under cities that draws the imagination. Passing through that underworld on rigidly laid-out subway tracks, it's hard not to imagine the other tunnels, the ones we're not allowed into. The consequence of hundreds of years of human civilization all built on the same land, sinking into the earth.

Dane's pissed that someone's been here before, but isn't that the point? This isn't just caves in the mountains, this is humanity's place... for a while. Halfway, at least, until it intersects with a deeper/higher world. We'll be back here some day, to see those spires. Because what is it to be Invisible, if not to transcend and make meaningless the borders of humanity?


Barbelith
And then some aliens show up.

So, a few years before writing The Invisibles, Grant Morrison made a name for himself by taking a character called Animal Man and making him interesting. Animal Man - Buddy Baker to his friends - was a guy who was given powers by aliens that let him use the abilities of animals in his vicinity. That's it.

Morrison used this goofy character, with his goofy premise, to explore the relationship between fictional characters and reality. And he started with that origin, the one about the aliens. Early in his run, Buddy's origin gets rewritten - if memory serves, it was badly out of date due to the unchanging nature of comic book time, meaning Buddy had been Animal Man-ing around for twenty or thirty years, despite still being a young man. But the interesting part was that it was the aliens themselves who seemed to be doing the re-writing, acting, essentially, as editors to the story. They just look like aliens, because that's the shape that things from a higher reality (ours, in this case) look like when they dip into the fictional world to mess around with things.

So when Dane McGowan puffs on the blue mold, he sees, among other things, aliens. He also sees a solid circle of changing color. And his perception fragments into smaller and smaller boxes, but all of them hang under the banner of one word - Barbelith.

Go then, there are other worlds than these
And so we find ourselves in an alternate London, where statues of William Blake's Urizen (god of rationality and confining order) dominate the water, but which, as Tom O'Bedlam will remind you, are exactly as real as the London we've been reading about already. And it's here where Dane finally acknowledges that, yes, magic and knowledge and the stars in London are worth joining something. That being Invisible, unseen, outside of perception, is something he wants.

Of course, wanting to become Invisible and becoming Invisible aren't the same thing...

(That's actually almost exactly wrong. But you are going to have to show you want it. Cue the Hunt!)