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!)

Issue One: Dead Beatles

One rule before I start: I'm trying to stay away from the extremely good annotations on Barbelith.com, for the simple reason that, if I started cribbing from them, I don't think I could stop (and it would call the whole point of this exercise into question).

At the same time, I want to reiterate that I am in no way an authority on Morrison or his work. Where this approaches insight, I'm certain I've pulled it from people who are. This is just my attempt, in my words, to try to understand why I love this book.


The Invisibles
Vol. 1
Issue 1
"Dead Beatles"

Synopsis: Young Liverpudlian Dane McGowan is in a state of rebellion against his teachers, his school, and his life. He's also seeing things - ghosts of the past, spirits of... something else. He eventually attempts to burn down his school, brutally attacking a teacher who earlier tried to reach out to him in the process. He is sentenced to serve time at a brutal reform school.

Meanwhile, the anarchist/terrorist/hero King Mob consults friends and associates for portents about his attempts to recruit Dane into his organization, The Invisibles, going so far as to commune with the spirit of John Lennon for insight.

The reform school is run by a Mr. Gelt, who wears black, eye-concealing glasses, and is obsessed with instilling conformity in his charges. Dane's friend, Gaz, is taken by Gelt, and is shortly after revealed to have been brainwashed. Gelt is shown to be agent of the shadowy extradimensional entities known as the Outer Church. Their representative, the King-in-Chains, demands Dane be brought to him, so that the Invisibles cannot get him.

The night he is brought to the school, Dane sneaks from his room and discovers that the school is castrating the boys sent there as part of the brainwashing program. Gelt attempts to subdue him, but before he can, he is attacked by King Mob, now decked out in his crazy battle helmet. KM kills several security guards (along with Gelt himself) and then burns the school to the ground. He drives Dane to London and then, when the boy declares he doesn't want to join The Invisibles, suddenly disappears, leaving Dane in the city... alone.


P1.

And right out the gate, we're playing with time, hinting that all of this has happened before and will happen again. "And so we return and begin again."

The speaker is Elfayed. He's an interesting guy - an old friend of our main man King Mob - the bald guy in the chair - and a key member of the larger Invisibles organization, but he'll only intersect with our main cast a few times. His attitude here - that the mystical is all well and good, but that common sense is just as, if even more, important, is going to be an important one to hold on to as things get stranger and stranger from here on out.

As to what he's saying, Khepri/Khepra is the sacred beetle god who pushes the sun across the sky in Egyptian mythology, like a dung beetle pushes his ball of crap. He's a symbol of transformation, unsurprisingly, of growth and change. New life growing out of manure. Filthy, but necessary. Which is presumably why Elfayed finds the idea of mummifying a scarab so amusing - unnatural, desperate preservation of something symbolizing change and rebirth.

p2.

Meet Dane McGowan. Reader surrogate. Rebel. Potential Buddha. Protagonist - although that designation will get slippier and slippier the further into this we get.

But really, all you need to know about him right now is this page, triumphant, one fist in the air, a molotov in the other, shouting FUCK at the world.

p3-4

And burning books. Burning down a whole library, in fact. Dane's not just striking out blindly, here, and not just at something he knew would burn. He's attacking received knowledge, all the facts and data that's being shoved into his head daily by a school he's too smart for.

Or he just wanted to see something burn, I don't know. But the graffiti says it all: King Mob's been here before. Nothing new.

p5

More apocalyptic, fiery imagery from our hero. Burning away the world. Well, that's the only way a new one can grow, right?

Dane feels like he's seen that graffiti before? Almost like a story you read a long time ago and just picked back up for the first time.

p6

Our introduction to Ms. Edith Manning, seen here near the end of her days. Edith's long life runs all around and through the history of our story (as she hints with her comments about knowing King Mob in 1924). Some of the first people we see in this story are the people it's already chewed up and ruined in some way or another - Edith here, and the Tom KM asks her to contact, especially.

This is also our first good look at King Mob, aka Gideon. Charming, manipulative, morbidly funny, driven and willing to sacrifice. Shamanistic James Bond. Loving his own, badass image.

But back to Edith. The Invisibles is, among other things, a time travel story. And Edith is one of our great time travellers. Not in the exciting, clocks-spinning-in-the-wrong-direction, calendar-pages-flipping-off-walls sense. Edith took the slow route, 95 years of it, from birth to now. Is it any wonder she's tired? Is it any wonder she doesn't want to be involved any more?

And note the reference to John-A-Dreams. What exactly happened to him, and where he is now, is going to be something we'll be revisiting more than once here.

p7-8.

Back to school! Big Malkie wants to talk about how revolutions get killed, strangled, turned into new authorities, but Dane just wants to leave a mark on the world.

Malkie is the kind face of authority for this issue (we'll be meeting the less kind faces later on). He's the carrot, encouraging intelligence, nurturing young minds, curtailing violent rebellion. He's also incredibly condescending, telling Dane not to become "another blank, brutalized face, drinking beer in front of the telly." But he's clearly out of touch, and he's doomed to fail - if those kind of appeals to his better nature and intellectual vanity appealed to Dane, he wouldn't really be Dane.

p9

Speaking of blank, brutalized faces, Mrs. McGowan gives a pretty good example here, doesn't she? She's almost a caricature of a bad mother, kicking the kid out on the street so she can have a date. In a lot of ways, Dane's whole life is caricature - the young rebel who doesn't know what he's trying to rebel against. In his mother's mirror, they're both twisted, ugly, mindless things.
This would be a stock story... except King Mob's shadow looms here, too.


p10 - 12

As Shakespeare would put it, "Enter ghost." And what ghost could haunt Liverpool more appropriately than John Lennon? Not the later, established Lennon, the instigator, the assassin's target. The young man seen here, chatting with Stu Sutcliffe, is on the verge of becoming John Lennon. In fact, what Dane's seeing (and really, it's less a haunting and more seeing time out of order - if those are even different things) is the moment before the revolution. One of these two men is about to fundamentally alter the way people think... but for now, he's just shooting the shit with his friend.

p13

Another haunting, of a more sinister type. Jack Frost, speaking German, laughing mirthlessly. It translates as something like "good earthly method" and "strong owner". The dead at 22 and 40 are Sutcliffe and Lennon.

"The Reverse of the Moon." We'll keep coming back to this. What's hidden behind the moon? It's always been there, and we've only ever seen half of it. What's been hidden from us for all that time? If I'm translating this right, it's the inner world, the emotional world. Seelisches land.

But Dane's not ready to play yet.

It's probably worth pointing out that Jack looks a bit like an elf or fairy here. The Fair Folk, inexplicable by human standards, cold and distant - at least from our point of view.

p14-15

So what do you do when you're seeing ghosts and being menaced by something that looks like a demon? Lash out!

Dane's still just a kid. He wants to get laid, he wants to drink, and he wants to show that he's smarter than everyone around him. So why not steal a car? Why not disconnect a system from the world, pull out it's protectors/antibodies/car alarms, and then start it back up - this time in your control?

p 16

And then take it joy-riding. His mates wish they could score some Ecstasy so they could strip the reality out of the situation - make it feel like a video game. Pretty sure Dane is already doing just fine on that score, though, as he weaves through the lines and the rules of traffic.

p17

"We can do anything we want with it. They should just be glad we didn't wreck it." Why shouldn't he? He took control of the system. It's his.

And here we are, back at school. Dane can't seem to get away from this place, can he? He's an ambitious young man, and he can see the channels the world wants to push him into. Time to fight back.

p18-19

And here's a couple of pages for those who were worried this wasn't going to get suitably weird.
Although it won't be clear for a few pages, King Mob is summoning John Lennon - not the physical spirit or man, but the idea of him, the pop god, to grant him a little insight. What that translates as is some psychedelic imagery, and something that reads like The Hero's Journey as built from Beatles' lyrics.

KM invokes Ganesh here, the remover of obstacles, the god of beginnings. So it's as much Morrison calling out to him at the start of this project as it is King Mob asking for help as he begins his ritual.

It's the last part of the second page that interests me (besides the wonderfully trippy artwork, anyway). At this level, we're moving back and forth between narration and god-speech, between the voice in King Mob's head and the Voice in his head, but I think this is where the prophecy proper starts, because it flows from "let me take you down" (after visiting an oracle?) through the grave (he is not dying) into rebirth, into an apple - knowledge/temptation. That's a concise way of describing what Dane's got ahead of him.

p20-21

I'm honestly not sure about the sincerity of Malkie's entreaties here. He's pleading for rationality, civility, but he's also begging Dane to stay within the system. By claiming to understand his frustration, he's drawing a box around him, ensuring him that what he's feeling is normal, natural.

But (and here I am dipping into spoiler territory) Malkie's not just Malkie, is he? He's an Invisible, presumably sent to keep an eye on Dane. So is he really trying to reach out to the boy, take a non-violent tack to his recruitment? Or is the kind-hearted teacher a goad, prodding the kid toward the violent escape of the Invisibles?

p22

The judge here labels Dane's acts as "far beyond the limits of what might be regarded as legitimate youthful rebellion against authority." Well, no shit, yerhonner. Wasn't that the point? It's normal for bad boys to talk back to the teacher and nick a car and maybe even start a fire. That's within the lines. But beating the shit out of a teacher and trying to blow up the school? That's where Dane McGowan wants to be.

The judge is a lovely piece of authoritarian snobbery. An aristocrat through and through, and in The Invisibles "aristocrat" might as well be "bad guy." There's also the first hint here that the the government, the system is a full part of this conflict - they may not know EXACTLY what's happening at Harmony House, but they like the results they're getting, clearly.

p23

Not much to say here, except to note that this is certainly not the last time we'll be seeing Miss Dwyer, and that this is a world where not seeing people's eyes - not seeing how they perceive the world, that is - is usually a bad, bad sign.

p24

Loath as we may be to admit it, Mr. Gelt has a point here. It's Dane's individuality that makes him attack the world. If we were all as desperate to fight conformity as he is, we'd be a world on fire, constantly kicking at the people around us.

Of course, Mr. Gelt, with his eyeless face and his creepily meaningful name, may be going a tad far. He thinks there's a war going on, between good and evil, order and chaos. So that's how our bad guys think, in violent, stark dualities. Presumably our heroes won't think like them.

p25

"It's not the government, it's your country. Anyway, I'd be fighting for money." That Gaz doesn't realize those three things are all just one thing is the difference between him and Dane.

And man, do I love those cards the boys are playing with. YES NO YES NO YES NO. Good/Bad, Order/Chaos. With us/Against us. US/THEM. I wonder what the rules are. I'm guessing there's not a lot of room for critical decision making.

p26-27

As Ragged Robin (hi, Robin!) so kindly informs us, the Moon is another initiation symbol. It's also the internal landscape, emotional battles, magical thinking. Seelisches land.

God, is there anything better than King Mob's costume? There's a line in Morrison's The Filth about how the secret interdimensional super-garbagemen who work for The Hand dress the way they do (crazily-colored fetish outfits) because it tickles people's Freudian issues and makes them ignore them. Can't help thinking that's what KM is doing too. I mean, why dress like that, except that it weirds out his enemies and makes him feel powerful?

Robin also namechecks the other members of the cell, Boy and Lord Fanny. More on them, of course, later.

And that last line is King Mob in a nutshell. It might actually be The Invisible in a nutshell, too.

"You know, when I was a kid, I wanted to grow up and find myself living in a '60s spy series. Funny how things turn out."

p28

Virtual reality? Yep! Although I'm not sure Gelt is referring to the chaps in the goggles so much as he is to everyone in the world. Although those goggles are plugged right into the eye. Around here, when you control how people perceive, you control the people.

p29

And here we meet our first archon, The King-in-Chains. The archons do their job wonderfully, because their job is to look scary and reflect your own hates and fears back into your head (after all, he said snarkily, they do style themselves as a church). And again, it talks in absolutes - because what is sin if not absolute?

And of course, the face is a giant vertical slit full of light, in a story about young boys being brainwashed by cutting off their dicks. So it's got subtlety going for it, too.

p30-31

Well, they certainly fixed Gaz, didn't they? (Tee-hee, "fixed," I'm so clever.) And now he's talking in the simplest of dualities, too.

p32-33

Oh, so that's why he's named Gelt!

Okay, I'm being silly, but the book started it, with the room full of balls-in-jars. But (and maybe this is a male thing), it's got that visceral horror to it, too. I almost feel like my Freudian issues are being poked, so that I won't look too closely.

And honestly, I'm not exactly sure what's in those jars. Testes, certainly, but testes don't scream when you drop them. I didn't notice that, somehow, the first few times I read this - looking away with a cringe, I guess - but there's something horrifying about how the scream wraps itself around Dane.

Gelt's talking about mummifying living things here, shades of our conversation with Elfayed back on page one. Taking a living thing and preserving it, draining it of life, rendering it immobile and safe.

p34-35

So it's a good thing King Mob is here! Bam! Pow! Feed on this, fat boy!

Dropping one-liners, dressed like a weirdo, shooting dudes in the dick! Take that, irony! This is a crazy action spy story, so it's a good thing these faceless goons are here so that our hero can blow them away! And the last thing they'll see is his eyeless face staring down at him, and the last thing they'll hear is his witty one-liner. After all, they picked their side. It's us against them, right?

Hmm.

p36-37

So, Dane McGowan kicks the crap out of his teacher and tries to burn down his school. So he gets sent to Harmony House, where Our Hero, King Mob shoots the headmaster in the head with another witty line, then burns down the school, then writes his name on it.

Harmony House needed to burn, of course. But there's a hint there that we're just seeing a boy's angry rebellion writ large. Turned toward justice, maybe. But still immature.

Maybe I'm tipping my hand - and the comic's - but King Mob is a trick being played on you. This super-competent, super-violent badass dude... who's killing people. Murdering. Declaring people as "Us" or "Them" just as clearly as the Outer Church does. "He's not Gaz anymore - forget him." We've been conditioned to accept this, because that's how spy stories work.

But "The Young Rebel Who Burnt The World" is just a story Dane's telling himself. And "The Headmaster Who Got Rid of Sin and Made Everyone Act Right" was a story Gelt told himself. So who's to say "The Invisibles, A Spy Story Starring King Mob" isn't just another story he's telling himself? When people control how you perceive, they control you.

p38

Gelt has been turned, of course, into a beetle. Rebirth, resurrection, continuing cycles.

And then Dane steps on him, without even noticing or thinking about it. Cycle's getting broken, folks.

p39-40

But even when he's been rescued by a mysterious action hero in an awesome hat, Dane McGowan's not much of a joiner. The counter-culture is just the part of the culture where the party in opposition lives, right? They're still a party. And frankly, if he was willing to join, he wouldn't be ready, for exactly that reason. Because the Invisibles aren't just the counter-culture - a safe outlet for frustrations, Big Malkie style - the Invisibles are a revolution.

Hell, the poor kid hasn't even been to the Underworld yet.

Next time: Down and Out in Heaven and Hell.

New Series: The Invisibles

So, I've decided, in the interest of writing something every day, this blog needs a project. Something to keep me coming back every single day, and which will be interesting to me, if no one else. So, I've decided that, every day for the next 59 days, I'm going to be discussing, reviewing, and analyzing one issue of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles.

For those who don't know, The Invisibles is a comic series, published by Vertigo from 1994 until 1999. Morrison started on it after finishing his run on Doom Patrol (a team of crippled people, led by a crippled man, fighting crippled villains - Morrison didn't invent that premise, he just realized how weird it was), and it still probably stands as his magnum opus. Morrison is best known these days for playing in other people's sandbox - New X-Men, All-Star Superman, Final Crisis, Batman - finding new, weird, inventive spins on existing characters. The Invisibles is its own universe, and that means that it's a place where Grant can get really, really weird.

On the surface, The Invisibles is the story of good vs. evil, about finding enlightenment. At times, it mimics the structure of Campbell's Hero's Journey and magical initiation. Up on the surface, it's pulp - kick-ass bald men with guns and fetish masks shooting horrifying monsters that want to cut off your dick and rape your brain.

That's just the suit it's wearing, though, the mold it's been poured into. Quoting GM in the column at the back of the first issue:

"- a comic about everything: action, philosophy, paranoia, sex, magic, biography, travel, drugs, religion, UFOs... you can make your own list."

Disclaimer: I'm not a professional reviewer. I'm not even a particularly GOOD reviewer. But I love this book, and I wanted to examine why. These posts may be inaccurate, stupid, completely wrong. But here goes. Down the rabbithole.

...And so we return and begin again.