Slight Delay

Hey, Chicago got hit with a blizzard a few days ago, and I got stuck at a friend's house, not conducive to writing. Next issue will be up tonight.

Issue Seventeen: Entropy in the U.K. Part One: Dandy

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 17

"Entropy in the U.K.: Dandy"

Synopsis
Sir Miles begins his psychic interrogation of King Mob. However, instead of actual information, he can only find bizarre science-fiction stories about a dandyish super-assassin named Gideon Stargrave. King Mob claims that he is a writer (Kirk Morrison, whose books have been seen before in the series) and that these are ideas for a book he's writing. Miles eventually manages to push deeper, and discovers King Mob's younger self, a violent rebel not unlike Dane McGowan, and learns that his last name is Starorzewski. He prepares to physically torture KM to extract more information.

Sir Miles also reports to his superior, Miss Dwyer (previously seen bringing Dane McGowan to Harmony House in the first issue). However, he is horrified to learn that an archon of the Outer Church, The-King-of-all-Tears, is about to manifest himself on the earthly plane.

In flashbacks, King Mob has a conversation with his friend and mentor Elfayed, in which Elfayed tells KM his theory that humanity is consuming its environment at an advanced pace because it is preparing to metamorphose into something new.

Ragged Robin and Boy, worried over KM and Fanny's disappearance, split up - Boy to check out King Mob's apartment, Robin to "go see a rock band."

A police officer named Harper is in an armed showdown with a criminal. Harper's phone rings, distracting the criminal, and Harper kills him. He answers the call, which is from his old friend Jack Flint (seen in a strip club in a previous issue) and is told that Division X is being reactivated.


Wizard prang, old bean!
Have we ever talked about the fact that King Mob is Grant Morrison? Not in a subtle, a few details pulled from his life, sort of way. His fantasies in this issue are from wish-fulfillment comics Morrison wrote when he was younger, he's an author (who publishes under the last name Morrison, no less). As much as the Invisibles is about the transformation of its characters, it's also trying to transform us, to act like a how-to guide for enlightenment. And Morrison is leading the charge, here, with a character who is essentially himself but idealized, Invisible.

And in this issue, he lets that mask slip. One of the things I've always loved about this one is the complete, un-self-conscious way Fanny and KM slip into their cover stories - every reaction they give lines up completely with the events of the shooting, and with how a normal person would react to them. And I think, at least partially, this is coming from a real place. KM is in as bad a situation as he's ever been in, and he's tapping into real, legitimate fears to make "Kirk Morrison (also KM, of course) seem scared shitless by what's happening to him.


A bit of the old ultra-violence
And meanwhile, his mind cycles through adolescent fantasies (steeped in violent rebellion, crazy sci-fi elements, big explosions, the Gideon Stargrave bits are like a timeline of the development of the ideas that eventually matured into The Invisibles) that get closer and closer to the ways Morrison thinks today, as Sir Miles smashes against his psychic resistance. There's even a gorgeous shout-out to The Prisoner, with King Mob and Sir Miles saying some of the show's opening dialogue, along with a shot of Mob, dressed as The Prisoner, is pursued by the ominous Rover (who looks uncannily like the Invisible blank badge).

And why not? This is King Mob's origin story, but it's also the origin of this whole book. The Prisoner, with its surreality, its strange sci-fi plots, and especially its focus on self-determination and individual freedom, is as much a parent to this book as Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stories, which serve as the template for all the Gideon Stargrave stuff. There's even a shout-out to Orwell, with Sir Miles referencing Room 101 from 1984 - the worst room in the world.

And at the end, Sir Miles does break through - at least a little. He finds that young man, Polish, bushy head of hair, last name Starorzewski... But when he finds him, he's got a solid colored circle at his back, and he's holding a gun that kill ideas. Sir Miles may think he's broken KM, but he's got a lot to learn.


Casper the benign tumor
We also get another conversation with Elfayed, and once again he's talking about mummies. Last time this came up, I associated mummies with preservation, stagnation, but maybe I was wrong. He's much more inclined to think of them as prototype cocoons, as more symbols of transformation and change. (King Mob, awesomely, says the mummy reminds him of the Invisible man - he's right, in multiple senses of the word)

It's another reminder of the principle he lays down earlier, "As above, so below," (shades of the way Fanny's near-death experiences reflect her "higher" descent into the underworld, as well as Ragged Robin talking this issue about making friends with your cancer cells). The human body consumes itself as it dies as part of a transformation into something new, just as humanity is consuming the world for the same reason. Fanny manages to get a laugh out of one guard, and it's an entrance point into bringing down the whole base. Small changes reflect bigger ones.

As above, so below.

Issue Sixteen: London

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 16

"London"

(I usually don't like to re-post too much of the book in one block, but the abduction sequence in this issue is important enough to include as a whole)



Synopsis
Dane McGowan is once again living on the streets of London. He sees members of the cell looking for him, but continues to hide, and is wracked by guilt over the enemy soldier he shot.

He once again sees the words Barbelith spraypainted on a wall, and suddenly recovers much of his memories of his time with Tom O'Bedlam. Most significantly, he remembers what happened the first time he saw the word painted on the wall of the subway tunnel.

Dane is abducted by aliens, who tell him he is the chosen one, and implant a "magic stone" that will allow him to produce the magical superfluid known as magic mirror into his forehead. When Dane realizes that they are not really aliens, they remove their disguise to show their true form, telling him "the soul is not in the body, the body is inside the soul," and that they are a higher form of humanity.

Dane is woken from his reverie by the appearance of Sir Miles and the Hunt. Miles tells the boy that he has been tricked and manipulated by the Invisibles, and offers him a place of power and safety with the enemy. Dane refuses, and the Hunt attacks him. Dane channels his psychic abilities in a massive act of self-defense, destroying all of his attackers except Sir Miles. Miles attempts to psychically dominate the boy, but Dane manages to overpower him. He holds a gun to Miles's head and is about to shoot, before being stopped by a police officer.

Dane, acting off of a recovered memory from Tom, goes to a locker that has been left for him. Unlocking it with a key Tom gave him, he finds a Tesco's bag. With the supplies inside, Dane cuts his hair, changes his appearance, and begins hitchhiking north, back to Liverpool.


The Invisible man
And suddenly we're back where we started: Dane McGowan, losing himself on the streets of London. Except this time, it's not a controlled experiment. The Invisibles are all still around him, but they don't know he's there. And this time, the Hunt is real.

But most importantly, Dane McGowan is no longer the person he was. He has killed (and felt deep remorse... I can't help thinking that the juxtaposition of Dane's grief at the dead soldier and those pigeons taught him not to kick is intentional.) And he's been through enough, now, that when he sees Barbelith sprayed on the walls of the city, he can recover some of the things that happened to him the first time he saw it.


Be as strong as you can. It always hurts.
It's important to read this issue after She-man, because Fanny's story sets up a lot of parallels here. Dane briefly realizes that he is BOTH standing outside, and down in the tunnel. The paint forming the word Barbelith will always be wet, fresh. Magicians exist outside time, and this is the story of how Dane became a magician.

In the light of Fanny's experience with the Aztec gods, it becomes easier to see the aliens who abduct Dane in a similar light - metaphors for the Other, the more advanced. UFOs and conspiracy theories are the modern myth, and the consciousness communicating with Dane uses that imagery to obfuscate the frightening truth. And just like Fanny before him, Dane sees through the illusion. That's part of the test.


There's a little bit of confusion, for me, when this particular entity uses pronouns. It declares "you" "The chosen one," who has been "/(elected)/" to save the world. I think this might be the point where we break from the Hero's Journey mold we've been operating in for Dane. Because, while Dane is powerful, and he will be important, I don't believe that he's the actual, literal Messiah. It goes against everything the comic seems to be about, the idea that everyone can become Invisible, to have a character who comes in and saves the world by dint of how perfect and special he is.


It seems more likely that this is what anyone who gets to this point is told - and it's true. Once you get to this level of understanding, leading people to "/(global peace and harmony)/" (those /( are what the aliens use when they're... not lying, exactly, but using simplified language to express something we can't understand). It is part and parcel of learning magic, the way the universe works.



Try to remember.
Or, hell, maybe he was /(elected)/. The right man in the right place, chosen by a group that can see everyone in every time. Maybe Dane McGowan was the right man for the job.

Because that's Barbelith's last big revelation (for now, anyway). That all of these aliens, these mysterious circles in the sky... They're just big, cosmic versions of the Invisibles badge. The magic mirror exists outside of and reflects time, and when you look into it, what you're seeing is yourself. Your whole self. The "aliens" and the "gods" are just what we look like from the outside, reaching into the universe to help the parts of us stuck there. No gods. No monsters. Just humanity, reflected.

In the end, I've only one true teaching for you, Dane, one simple word: Disobedience
If there is something special about Dane, it's not the psychic powers. It's that complete unwillingness to join anything. That immature "Fuck you" to the idea that any group or side has his best interests at heart. He's the permanent outsider, rebelling against everything, and, when he finally taps into that rage, the results are spectacular.

I find it interesting, that when Jack Frost unleashes on the members of the Hunt, he almost seems to be attacking the page, as well. Maybe it's just a stylized way of showing carbon monoxide, but it LOOKS like Jack has thrown paint thinner onto the pages, erasing his opponents from the universe. When he has his psychic duel with Sir Miles, the same thing occurs, seeming to blot his opponent out of the page itself.
And why not? Magic is the manipulation of the rules of reality, and reality is the book.

The most interesting example, though, is when Dane goes to the locker Tom left for him. This might be a huge coincidence, but Dane opens locker 23 (a reference, I assume, to the many conspiracy theories related to that number), and directly next to him is the page number of the issue - 23. Maybe I'm crazy, but it seems like Dane is reaching into the page itself for the items Tom left for him. A secret cache, passed from one reality manipulator to another.

And what's in the bag? Scissors, a new shirt. Ways to change your appearance. Ways to become Invisible.

Issue Fifteen: Apocalipstick

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 15

"She-man Part Three: Apocalipstick"

Synopsis
In Mictlan, Hilde watches her future life beside the death god Mictlantecuhtu. He tells her that she must turn away from the world and come into his kingdom forever. He shows her the star demons, who include Orlando in their ranks, and say they will consume the world in pain and suffering soon. Hilde protests that she is not dead yet, and offers him a joke in exchange for knowledge and safe passage from his kingdom. He accepts.

Her joke (What are pink, wrinkled and stiff and make women squeal? Cot death babies) makes the bone god laugh, and he allows her into his garden. There, she learns the secrets of magic, and is shown that the gods are just masks, behind which lies the strange red circle called Barbelith.

In Rio de Janeiro, an 18-year-old Hilde is working as a prostitute. She is taken to a party where men in animal masks brutally rape and beat her, then throw her from a moving car. She returns to her home and contemplates suicide, but resolves to stay alive. Moments later, John-a-Dreams comes to her door, and asks her if she has ever heard of The Invisibles.

In present day, Lewis Brodie reports to his superior, Sir Miles (who appears to have been wounded in an altercation earlier that day with the missing Jack Frost), that he has captured a member of the Invisibles.

Lord Fanny attacks Brodie, but is unable to match him physically. She is saved by King Mob, who arrives at the apartment and begins battling Brodie. However, Brodie manages to get to his gun and shoots KM through the stomach. He then fires his gun into Fanny's face, but (due to her magical manipulations) it misfires, and she slashes him through the crotch with a shard of broken mirror.

Brodie dies after seeing a strange vision of his childhood cat. Fanny passes out. And Sir Miles and his troops arrive at the apartment, realizing that they've managed to capture King Mob.


I'm already on my knees
So the question is: How do you become Invisible?

It's not just rebelling. It's not just learning to do magic. It's not martial arts training or knowing how to shoot dudes or any of that other action hero bullshit.

Being Invisible is stripping away the self, giving up who you were. Dane McGowan gets pissed when the cell members call him Jack Frost because he doesn't want to face a truth - Dane McGowan is gone, given up willingly when he jumped off the building at Canary Wharf.

For the girl named Hilde, it came on a night when she was working the streets of Rio, during Carnivale. A room full of faceless men in animal masks (and a strange light in the corner?), raping and beating her and then throwing her out of a moving car. It was kneeling on a bathroom floor, trying to get her hands to close around enough pills to end the pain. And realizing that this was as bad as it could get.

It would never get worse. COULD never get worse. And she had survived it. Could now draw strength from it. In that moment, Hilde was gone, and Lord Fanny was born.


Don't make me laugh! It hurts too much to...
Lewis Brodie dies in this issue, and I'm still not sure how I feel about the man. At his core he's a brute and a murderer, but the edges of his character have weird twists and turns. He recognized the mirror stuff, after all (although maybe we all would, when confronted with something like that). He has an almost hero-worship-like attitude to the mythical King Mob, as though KM is some sort of archetype or rock star he's been trying to live his life toward. And then there's the stuff with his cat.

Brodie mentions the cat in all three issues - first to Sir Miles, and then when he sees the magic mirror. And Hilde, when she drinks the tea during her initiation, sees a black cat among all the aliens and mantises and weirdness. I'm worried I'm missing a reference here, to some Aztec god that Brodie unknowingly worships with his love for his dead cat. Lewis asks "Who's that WITH you?" Death, presumably. Cats have traditionally been seen as psychopomps, those who lead the souls of the dying to the land of the dead.

Or maybe it's just that we all have gods, living in our heads. The things we love, and still think about. And in exchange for keeping those ideas alive, they can give us gifts. Like taking laughter into the face of death.


Cot death babies.
Which is how Hilde survives her meeting with the bone god, of course (for now, anyway). Her patron is the goddess of filth, and she tells a joke that merges sex intimately with death, and gets a chuckle out of old Mictlantecuhtu. In such a way, she is allowed to leave death... for a time.

And death is not so bad, when confronted by the alternative that Mictlantecuhtu lays out - unceasing torment by the creatures he calls the star demons. Among their number is our old friend Orlando, who still bears a grudge for things to come. Spirits of pain that threaten to overwhelm the world, death stands as a respite from their ministrations.

Mictlantecuhtu speaks of needing payment for his services in dismissing the demon (back in the windmill). Is the payment Hilde's joke? Or is it the entire situation with Brodie? Did Fanny throw herself into danger because being brought near to death again was the death god's payment for his help? The joke she told merged sex and death - and so did getting high and bringing Brodie home. Are they reflections of the same event?


We gods are only masks
In any case, she survives, and learns the ways of magic. "That language whose words do not describe things but ARE things." We'll be seeing that idea more and more, language as the bridge between our thoughts and reality (and the way the languages we are taught constrict the thoughts and realities we can operate in)

And then, one more monstrous god, skull-faced butterfly with wolf's paws... almost a composite of the various gods Hilde has dealt with... And that is pulled away to show what all the gods really are. The truth behind every myth of ascension and magic. The hidden circle.

Barbelith.


And we learn one more thing. Magic mirror is a reflection of reality, yes. But it's also a liquid, pliable, constantly moving. And when you reach out, gently, and change it (so that a bullet, say, fails to fire)...

That's what we call magic.

Issue Fourteen: She-man Part Two: Day of Nine Dogs

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 14

"She-man Part Two: Day of Nine Dogs"

Synopsis
Hilde, the young Lord Fanny, continues her initiation on the steps of a pyramid in Mexico. She steps into the jungle and is confronted by the god Tezcatlipoca, who challenges her to pull his heart from the doors of his chest before they can close on her (with death as the price of failure) she does so, and forces him to show her the way to Mictlan, land of the dead, so that she can learn magic. She moves through higher dimensional space to get there before reaching the court of Mictlantecuhtu, lord of death, who welcomes her to his kingdom, telling her that she is dead.

Other flashbacks show Fanny as a transvestite prostitute, being degraded and eventually badly beaten by her clients.

Lord Fanny, in the bathroom of the club, quickly pulls the "magic mirror" back into her and, charmed by the Outer Church assassin Lewis Brodie, takes him home to her apartment. They fool around for a time before Brodie pulls a gun and demands she tell him everything she knows about King Mob.

King Mob asks Edith Manning to help him find Dane McGowan, and she eventually agrees. The ritual itself is not shown. On the way back to London, KM picks up a hitchhiker, who speaks at length about conspiracy theories that seem to complement the events of the book.

Taking a break from the search for Dane, Ragged Robin and Boy relax in a bar. Robin pulls a Tarot card to determine what will happen to them next. The card she pulls is Death.

Kirby, beaten in the previous issue by Brodie, is found by his friends. King Mob questions him, and, learning that Fanny is in danger, rushes out to rescue her.

In a strip club, a man named Jack Flint is told that Division X is being reopened, and that he has been reactivated.


I truly believed in Tezcatlipoca. I just didn't ever think he was real.
Speaking to the young Hilde on the steps of the pyramid, the butterfly spirit Tlazolteotl says a very curious thing.

"The mystery will open up to you and you must reach out of time, grasp its heart and make your bargain with it." And then Hilde proceeds to the trial of the god Tezcatlipoca, where she follows those instructions in typical myth fashion. There's a hint, there (one we've seen before in these pages) that much of the more mystical symbolism encountered in The Invisibles is acting as a metaphor for one, central process. Hilde views it as a test by the god of darkness before descending into the land of the dead. Jack Frost headed into the tunnels below London and smoked the blue moss, then jumped off a building and fell to somewhere... else. King Mob's hitchhiker talks about information crashing into ours from a higher reality. And even Lewis Brodie seems to recognize the magic mirror, the time stuff, from somewhere. There's something fundamental to humanity in these mysteries, and we've built framework after framework over the millenia to understand and tap into them.

For Lord Fanny, the framework comes from the patronage of Tlazolteotl, goddess of filth and lust. And so she wears her priestly uniform, subjects herself to pleasurable degradation, leaves clubs with dangerous men when she's too high to see the warning signs. (It is telling that her dangerous encounter with Tezcatlipoca, where she must bargain and risk with a god of darkness, is intercut with working as a prostitute - she has to be brought close to filth and death if she's going to learn.


It's the time stuff, isn't it?
And in exchange for all this, the butterfly whispers the secrets of the universe to her: that time is not a linear process, but a 4-dimensional construct, with all elements of itself accessible at once. That events cycle because they are all the same event, a reflection of a higher truth. Hilde is dying on pyramid steps as Fanny is horribly beaten while working as a prostitute as Lord Fanny is attacked by Brodie as Fanny is living her entire life, moving forward toward her inevitable, eventual death, and always, Hilde is descending into Mictlan, the land of the dead.

And to get there, she moves through "backstage," where people and buildings and the world are just 2D cutouts. We've been here before, when Jim Crow lifted a puddle and walked through, when Jack Frost rode his bike. Lies-to-children, mythic representations of a single true place. And just on the other side of it (through the magic mirror) is Death. Everybody gets there eventually. The trick, of course, is to get there - learn something - and then... make it back.


Speed. Madness. Flying saucers.
So that's Fanny's story this issue. Not much to say about Boy & Ragged Robin, although I find the presentation of their story in newspaper-esque strips delightful (and possibly a continuation of the Prince Valiant-esque panel detailing the history of the pyramid last issue? Looking through the third issue, I can't seem to find a parallel, so it's probably just a coincidence).

The page of King Mob and Edith, with her thoughts presented on the page from within her smoke, and none of their words in bubbles at all, makes me think of last issue, when Fanny was vomiting panels. High enough that her thoughts are merging with the comic's superstructure? Or just artistic license?


The hitchhiker KM picks up lays down some foreshadowing for the America-based Volume 2. (And I just noticed that, with King Mob's red glass sunglasses in this issue, he's essentially walking around with two Barbeliths on his face).There's nothing I can remember about the future of the series about him being anyone in the know, so it might just be an example of the collective-unconscious acting in Invisible-types (even if they aren't members of the group proper). And as King Mob points out, he really believes it. Whose to say his belief structure is any more or less accurate than Aztec gods, hm?

Issue Thirteen: She-man Part One: Venus as a Boy

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 13

"She-man Part One: Venus as a Boy"

Synopsis
Lord Fanny, subconsciously worried by the toll she knows she must pay for having summoned the Aztec death god Mictlantecuhtu to dispatch the demon Orlando, tries to distract herself by taking drugs and heading out for a night on the town. While at the club, she suddenly becomes sick, and begins to vomit the strange substance known as "magic mirror."

Lord Fanny's backstory is recounted. Born as a boy named Hilde to a family of matriarchal witches in Brazil, she is raised as a girl when her mother is unable to give birth to one naturally. When she is 11, her grandmother, a powerful witch, takes her to Mexico for her initiation. She cuts Fanny's inner thigh to "make her bleed" and trick the Aztec gods into accepting her as a witch. She is marked by her spirit guide, who appears to her as a butterfly.

King Mob meets again with Edith Manning, asking if her connections to Tom O'Bedlam give her any insight into Dane's whereabouts. She denies any knowledge, and points out to Mob that Dane's role as the "spirit" element of the group is to push the group members to the breaking point and test them.

Sir Miles assigns a killer named Brodie to investigate a member of London's gay community who has been asking after the still-missing Dane McGowan. Brodie violently interrogates a young homosexual man named Kirby, who reveals that the person in question is Lord Fanny.

As the issue ends, Brodie discovers Fanny in the bathroom of the club. And somewhere else, a phone call goes out to re-activate something called "Division X".


this thing is big
If The Invisibles is definitively "about" anything, it's about initiation - the search for enlightenment. It's the thing that binds almost all of our cast together - once upon a time, they saw something that broke them, broke the way they saw the world. And after that, they rebuilt themselves as something better, stronger.

We watched Dane McGowan go through it in the first four issues (although we're still missing a few key points of data about what, exactly, he saw). Tonight, we begin looking at Lord Fanny's initiation; parts of it, anyway.

This is the first time we see Fanny not as "herself," dressed as a man. But really, that just means we get to see her transformation. And man, but that is glorious. It makes it clear that "Lord Fanny" is a costume - or, rather, a uniform, like a priest's collar. Or the suit a superhero puts on so they can fight crime. An idealized, perfect self, a symbol of power. Mike Moran said "Kimota" - Lord Fanny puts on lipstick.


We get an origin story - boy raised as girl to pass on family's feminine magic, but we don't get into the meat of the initiation this issue. Still, we see the beginnings: drinking the hallucinogenic tea, young Hilde sees disjointed visions of familiar-looking aliens (and a cat?) and then a brief image of the red circle called Barbelith. And then she is marked by the butterfly, who reminds her that time, in magical initiation, is much more fluid than it seems.


Free bloody spirit
There are a few other things happening in this issue. We have Lord Mob meeting once again with Edith Manning. It's always interesting to see how the older members of the conspiracy have clearly stopped giving a shit about all of KM's cloak and dagger shenanigans (although there's a lurch in the stomach as we see his hyper-masculinized, Rob Liefeld-esque take on an event that last issue forces me to think of as "The murder of Bobby Murray.")

we also get a bit more explication on the elemental symbolism that runs the group, and the way the Spirit role (Dane's) works. Interesting that KM sees it in terms of "morale," of how it works within the existing structure, whereas Edith points out that it also exists to shake that structure up. Rebellion against even the concept of rebellion. (Something that Dane's brief appearance in this issue, during Brodie's description of his dream of the tiger cub, helps to emphasize - the kid is going to be powerful and dangerous... eventually.)


You're a bastard, Brodie
And that does bring us to Brodie. I'm not sure whether to read him as closeted gay or bi... The first time we see him, he's looking ambiguously, almost regretfully, at a woman he's just slept with. He's cruel, but not in a way that reads as homophobic or self-loathing. But there's also something in his violent flirtations with other men (his comment about the blow-job to Kirby in this issue comes to mind) that speaks to a release of hateful, pent-up desires. If so, he's the outer Church's perfect weapon to infiltrate the gay community. Self-loathing and the ways it can be turned on others being their stock in trade.

Or hell, maybe he's a bisexual man who likes sex where he can get it and has no issues (in that regard, anyway) at all. And that that healthy sexuality in no way changes the fact that he's a violent killer (who exists in a stark black-and-white world, the art would suggest) with unshakeable loyalty to his side. Death with a handsome face.

(I also kind of love the way Sir Miles totally ignores the content of Brodie's dream - they use dreamcatchers, but only because they recognize dreams a source of energy, not of meaning).


Now tell me the rest
So, that butterfly. It's the same one we see at the start of the issue, bursting from a cocoon. In fact, it spends the whole issue flying to Hilde. But the strange thing is that it doesn't seem to be crossing DISTANCE to reach her, or even, explicitly, time - it crosses the book itself, inserting itself in between panels and going from first page to nearly last. Taking a shortcut, as it were.

There's a moment about halfway through this issue that caught me off guard. Lord Fanny, high, terrified by what she knows is coming, vomiting magic mirror into a sink. But what it forms isn't the usual shimmery blue stuff, but an image. Specifically, a PANEL. Earlier, she felt she could almost see her thoughts, which appear as traditional comic thought bubbles (a very rare sight in The Invisibles).

Which is to say, Fanny contains within her (and is puking up) the stuff that makes up her reality - the magic mirror, which allows the reader to see all of the events of the series without regard for linear time, and even allows us to see into the characters' heads, is the comic itself.

Of course, if the comic you're holding in your hands is a mirror, then what, exactly, are you seeing when you look into it?

Issue Twelve: Best Man Fall

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 12

"Best Man Fall"

Synopsis
Bobby Murray.

A spaceman
So, you've realized that there really is more going on in the world than you ever thought. All your sci-fi nerd dreams of the way the world work are true. And so you fit yourself into those tropes, become a super-spy, chaos magician assassin. And one of the bad guys you're chasing pulls a lever, and now there's an alarm going on. That summons some faceless mooks, so you do to them what you always do to faceless mooks: Put a bullet in their brains with a pithy one-liner.

That's "The Story of King Mob, Psychic Agent Provocateur." It's a fun story - we've been reading it for eleven issues now, and we'll be reading it for a long while afterward. But let's try a different one. Just as an experiment.


So you grow up with parents who fight, and a mean older brother. And you head off to the big city, and you meet a girl. When you were a kid you saw Armstrong on the moon and watched fireworks in the sky and dreamt of floating above the earth. But dreams don't come true, and you need work, so you sign up for the army, and you learn to be a soldier but you also learn that soldiers get hurt, and you get sent home and your mom dies and you have a baby. But she has cerebral palsy and your wife got fat and you got old and you hit her and then you apologize and you wonder how this became your life. And you need money, because your daughter's condition isn't cheap. So your old army buddy hooks you up. Sure, the place is weird, and the things they're doing to those kids seem wrong. But it's the government, isn't it? And you need the money.

And then one night some bad guy pulls a lever, and now there's an alarm going on. And you get summoned, and then what always happens to faceless mooks happens to you, even though you have a face. A name.

Your name is Bobby Murray.

There are two main ideas running through this issue. One is easy: there is no such thing as a "faceless" stormtrooper. Every person King Mob kills in this series had a childhood, a family, a life. No one is just their uniform. We're all a series of events leading up to our death. There's a great panel, near the end of the issue, where we see Bobby at Harmony House, in his helmet, but with his face clearly visible. And across the page from him, faceless and strange, the helmeted King Mob.

On the next page, we move back to the day Bobby asked his wife to marry him, both of them wrapped in bliss. And is it a coincidence that her earrings look exactly like the blank badge of the Invisibles? In that moment, together, they've carved out a real joy, without being touched by the government or the corporations or the world around them. For that moment, together, they were invisible, too.

And now he's dead.


Yes. This is happening.
The other idea being played with here is time. Bobby's life is shown in an almost random order, jumping years from panel to panel, flashing forward, flashing backward.

The strangeness of it all is most pronounced in the scene with Bobby in his crib, as bubbles that no one else seem to see float around the room. Bubbles like mirrors (and again, 3D mirrors in the Invisibles reflect 4D reality - movement through time) and then the boy - it seems - speaks, saying "Edith says to call him Boody." And we're reminded he couldn't be saying that. "He's only a year old."


We'll see later that this moment is intersecting with others, that the Hand of Glory is once more at play. But the Hand is just an artifact, an illustration of what's happening all the time. As readers, we can see the entire span of Bobby Murray's life. We can jump back and forth from panel to panel, watching him age and grow younger and age again. He's a year old and thirty and fifteen and every age in between.

This isn't just an issue about "Oh, that King Mob shouldn't have shot him, he had a mum." This is a portrait of the life of a character in the story we're telling ourselves called "The Invisibles," and what it looks like from the outside. It's out of order and confusing and strangely full. And even Bobby can sense the way the past and the future are labels more than absolutes, fearing the gas mask (and the cellar that it hangs in), representing, in short order, the shovel he uses to bury his dog, his brother who dies with words of hatred, and his own death at the hands of a masked man.


I bet I could be an actor
"I did it. I opened the door and I saw the scariest thing in the world and it was just a gas mask." The issue is bookended with scenes of Bobby, as a child, playing a game where he pretends to die, and narration, from an unidentified source telling someone (the reader) that they have to remember. This is just a game.

So yeah, Bobby Murray died. But if I jump back a few pages, there he is, alive again. And if that voice is to be believed, all of this, all of this struggle and fighting is a pantomime. A game we play, of living and struggling and then falling dead. And then you get back up, and it's someone else's turn to play.