What Happened at the Library Today

A woman just had a seizure behind me. I'm at the library at Chicago and Ashland, and she started to convulse and almost scream. Loud, inhuman, angry noises, and her body seemed to twist as if trying to pull itself apart.

She's sleeping now, gently snoring, sprawled across a few chairs. The man who's with her - a homeless guy I've seen at the library a few times before, held her throughout. He whispered "there, there" to her as her body bucked and fought. He was concerned, but not alarmed. He ignored the stares of the other patrons, told people grabbing their phones that they didn't need an ambulance. It was just a seizure, she had them all the time. Normally she had them in the mornings, but today she was having them in the afternoon. She'd quiet down in a few minutes.

He was calm, collected. Once her shaking had subsided and she had drifted off to sleep, mind and body exhausted by contortions, he turned back to his computer and waited for her to wake.

What's scarier? The loss of control? The realization that the human body, brain included, is not under the sole jurisdiction of the conscious thing we call "I," but merely a collection of connected cells that can suddenly cascade in painful, humiliating ways?

Or that this man, who I've judged before, for having less than me, for not always being able to bathe every day, treated what must be an incredibly stressful daily occurrence with grace and dignity, while I sat here, scared, and fucking BLOGGED about it.

Issue Nineteen: Assasin

This is late - I've been depressed. Also, no detailed summary - KM tricks Sir Miles, he and Fanny break free. Ragged Robin, Jim Crow, and Boy locate them magically. Miss Dwyer turns into a monster beetle, and Fanny and KM are still trapped in the base with her.

Everybody has a secret origin, and they all suck. Bruce Wayne is a crying little boy, Clark Kent is a farmboy. King Mob was a rebellious kid in a band.

That's why you wear the costume. You can talk all you want about "protecting your loved ones," but the truth is: Nobody would be impressed by Peter Parker fighting crime in jeans and a T-shirt. When you wear the costume, you become an icon. You take on meaning, become more than human. Hilde puts on a wig and leather and becomes Lord Fanny. And Gideon Starorzewski wears a suit made of pop-culture deities and rebellion and Michael Moorcock stories and magical traditions and becomes King Mob.

And the question remains: Is King Mob a good person to be? Dude destroys SOULS. Not in a "I shall destroy your soul, verily, let us wax wroth" way, but in a "I just ripped your aura out of you, and now you are going to cease horribly" way. I mean, it's right there in the title of this issue. ASASSIN. He's not a magician, not a shaman. If he's got the mirror stuff inside of him (and we can assume he does, since it seems to go hand-in-hand with having a Barbelith/magic stone experience), he doesn't seem to be using it.

Fanny runs through lust and filth because that's how she connects to the gods she uses as an interface between "her" and "the magic" (which is also her). King Mob is way more straightforward - his idealized version of himself is a badass superspy from a convoluted conspiracy thriller, and thus he lives a life where he gets to be that. That means he shoots dudes in the head, rips off auras, tosses off cheesy one liners. James Bond as totem animal.

Jim Crow drives around in a big hearse, because Jim Crow walks with death. And we keep getting told that death is no big, because life is a transitory existence and we're all going to wake up into infinity and blah blah blah. But, you know, just because a man's "initiated" doesn't mean he's good. Sir Miles is initiated. He's wearing a costume made up of aristocracy and he does some pretty crappy things with it.

So the question stands: Is King Mob a good guy?

I mean, it's not like the "scorpion gods" are other, evil gods messing with us. We keep getting told that ALL the gods/aliens/whatever are masks being worn by Barbelith. Is "Dude what kills better than anybody" a vital component in a team whose job it is to save the world? Is King Mob a necessary, aggressive part of the defensive program? Would you read a comic book if it didn't have awesome gun fights and explosions?

Once you've seen the big circle in the sky, once you have your magic stone, is that the end of growth? You pick your totem and you get your superhero costume and then you just fill that role for the rest of your life? Because King Mob just got tortured within an inch of his life. Yeah, it was a trap, but he was crying. He was close to broken. Does he just get back up and start shooting people again?

Or has all of this just been the secret origin of something even better?

Michaels & Sullivan: Holistic Sudoku

INT. OFFICE - DAY

The walls are covered with clippings from newspapers. Some of them have headlines that read things like "Sudokuists Supreme Sizzle Snake Smugglers," and "Puzzle Patrons Pummel Petty Pursesnatchers." Others appear to be solved puzzle pages. One whole wall seems entirely devoted to a massive, thousand-cell puzzle. A man, MICHAELS, is slumped, asleep, in a chair behind a desk piled high with pens. His face is ink-stained and grizzled, and his breath stinks of whiskey. Suddenly, the door bursts open and a fast-talking palooka with a lot of moxie (SULLIVAN) walks in.

SULLIVAN
Michaels, wake up, you worthless son of a Quizzler, we gotta case!

MICHAELS (groggily)
What? Who is it... Marlene?

SULLIVAN
Damn it, man, do I LOOK like Marlene? We both know that two-bit hussy walked out on you the minute Big Will Shortz flashed his bankroll at her. Now get your booze-soused brain in gear, we GOTTA CASE!

MICHAELS
All right, all right, I'm up. What's the skinny, Sully?

SULLIVAN
No skinny this time, boss, this one's all fat. The Clogstein Diamond's been lifted. Filched, even!

MICHAELS
Where's the canoe factory, Sullivan? That's flatfoot business. There's no angle. No percentage for numbermooks like us.

SULLIVAN
Boss, the gumshoes are stumped. See, the only dirt they could dig up at the scene was a Sudo! They figure the crim left it behind, as a clue, Gorshin-style!

MICHAELS
You got my attention but you ain't got my heart, ya loveable galoot. The boys in blue aren't the sharpest tacks in the tack shop but they can solve a Sudo if someone throws it in their faces. Why's this our business?

SULLIVAN
That's just it, Michaels. They solved it easy, sure, but then... when they filled all the numbs in, it formed 9 smaller sudos... and when they solved that one, another 81. By the time anyone realized what was going on, four coppers were dead and another 20 in the doctor house. This ain't no normal Sudo-crim, boss.

MICHAELS
Sully! The numbs in the first Sudo... anything twig you oddstyle about them?

SULLIVAN
Whaddayamean, boss? Looked fresh to me.

MICHAELS
And a clock just looks like a sundial to a caveman. But to a space caveman.. Sully, I'd bet you a year's pencils that those numbers were all prime. He's back.

SULLIVAN
Who's back, boss? What are you chewing on?

MICHAELS (standing up, putting on his hat)
Get my gun and my erasers, Sully. We're on the case. The Cross-Hatcher's gonna pay for what he's done.

Issue Eighteen: Messiah

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 18

"Entropy in the U.K. Part Two: Messiah"

Synopsis
Sir Miles continues to interrogate King Mob. KM is injected with a drug called Key 17, which causes the user to be unable to distinguish between written words and the actual things they represent. Sir Miles convinces Gideon that he has cut off his fingers and destroyed his face.

Flashbacks show King Mob spending time with Aboriginal people in Australia. He declares himself "Scorpion Dreaming" and is allowed to descend into Ayer's Rock, where he sees a gigantic, fish-like spaceship, and then begins to have a "Barbelith" experience similar to Jack Frost's.

Sir Miles, unable to prove that the man he has been torturing is King Mob, is forced by his superior Miss Dwyer to drink her milk, which has been tainted by nanomachines related to the archons of the Outer Church. Using the psychic boost they give him, Sir Miles finds a memory of King Mob performing a tantric sex ritual with Lady Edith Manning, and discovers that the Invisibles learned Jack Frost is returning to Liverpool.

Boy investigates the apartment King Mob keeps in his "Kirk Morrison" persona, only to find that the police are already there. She is grabbed by a policeman, but fights him off, and is driven away by a random passerby who enjoys seeing people stand up to the cops. She arrives back at Invisibles HQ, frantic in her certainty that something has happened to KM and Lord Fanny, only to find that Ragged Robin has recruited Big Jim Crow to help them.


I'd like to show you something now. A mirror.
I was having trouble breaking this issue down, until I was hit by a sudden revelation. The whole first volume of The Invisibles is a meditation on shamanic initiation. And we get some of that, with King Mob's flashbacks. But Gideon isn't the character being initiated here: Sir Miles is.

Sir Miles is the one gaining access to a language "whose words do not describe things but are things" in the form of the drug Key 17. It's Sir Miles who has a "magic stone" forced into him in the form of Miss Dwyer's archon-changed milk. He's reliving memories of his youth, having parts of his identity stripped away, reacting with fear when touched by a higher world. And he comes out of it with power and understanding.


Of course, in regards to a lot of it, he refuses to listen. Part of the fun of the Gideon Stargrave interludes is the way they reflect and contain the world of The Invisibles in them. Gideon is being pursued by a psychically created double (shades of Sir Miles being a mirror image of King Mob) while his trusty assistant rattles off yet another variation on initiation - it's all there, if Miles and his unsavory associates had the capacity to listen. Even more so when KM, re-living his Barbelith moment, starts rambling the heavy stuff.

"Qabbalexic neurostasy.. trans-mater... ellipticryptic hymgnosis... ectogens... infoplacental halluciongenesystems." Frankland dismisses them as speaking in tongues, as if that makes them less important instead of more. None of that stuff, far as I can tell, is English, per se, but it brims with ideas. And all of them relate to a connection between language/information and birthing. Rebirth from flesh into ideas. It's the Barbelith experience, in word form, and Frankland and Miles just skip over it like an impatient reader moving over the page.


Gotta dreaming?
I don't have a lot to say about King Mob's Australian experiences - it's one more version of the initiation from another angle, with the descent into the rock mirroring Fanny's descent into the underworld and Dane's trip down into the tunnels. The idea that Ayer's Rock itself is a magic stone, one for the entire planet, is an interesting one, though. The hippy from a few episodes back (in fact, the one where half of the sex ritual we see in KM's mind takes place) talked about the planet itself becoming sentient. Maybe he was closer to the truth than we thought - we've been told the end of the world is coming, and the entire planet being initiated into magical awareness would look a lot like that.


Speaking of that ritual - it's essentially King Mob having sex with time itself, merging Edith in her 20s and Edith in her 90s, youth and death and all the years in between, sinking into and losing himself in it. If the "gods" are just us, unmoored from time, then King Mob has found a handy way to commune with them...

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.