One lost soul writing to another.
The Invisibles is a strange little exploration into the delirious mind of a dark philosopher-king, writer, restless soul, wanderer, information addict who is looking for the meaning of life in all the wrong places.
It is a peek into the mind of a wealthy aristocrat – Grant Morrison – who doesn’t really need to make a living and therefore writes what he wants, spilling his imagination on pages drawn by a myriad of some of the best comic artists working in the 90s. (That itself makes the comic worthwhile collecting.)
It spanned a whole continum of time-space and incorporates every influence on the Roman catholic Scottish national – who loves the Sex Pistols, the Beatles, James Bond, hates corporate America, idolize its pop culture trash nevertheless and even absorbs comics influences of the Moore and Gaiman, and half-baked conspiracy theories to Asian religion such as Hinduism and Buddhism which touched Morrison when he backpacked India, Nepal and elsewhere and did cheap drugs.
It’s a psychedelic comic that also pretends to be literate smart, citing influences of new age philosophers like terence mckenna and horror writer Lovecraft, while trying to make sense of the exploding amount of trashy information available on the internet, especially pornography and other underground cults. It’s a language breakdown pretend poetry sort of comic mess.
At the heart of it, it’s really a story of Grant Morrison going mad and trying to sound clever about it. Morrison is trying to find TRUE MEANING in life but ends up being a rabbit going deeper and deeper into a hole that does not tunnel out into light. He gets lost in darkness, masturbation, philosophy and contradicts himself many times on what he thinks IS IT, as anyone stumbling in the dark will do.
Many strings of Morrison’s oddball knit of a story has been copied by others – most famoulsy by Wachowski Brothers in the hit movie – THE MATRIX. Sadly, Morrison himself, is to blame for coming up with so many interesting ideas and philosophies and then too lazy to make a ‘real’ story to explore it further.
Obviously loaded up on drugs when he wrote this fantastic tale, Morrison could not put more coherence and find light at the end of the tunnel he put himself through, including plenty of bablefish about Jesus and lots of cursing and sex just for sensationalizing the adudience … he left others to discover the smarter story that can be told for a mainstream audience, and as a result, stole from him.
I don’t know if it has any value as a story but as a peek into the mind of a writer, THE INVISIBLES (60 issues three volumes in all and first published 1994-2000) is fairly interesting for its unrestrained telling style, honest confessions and drug induced hyper-colorful imagination and mind-bending images.
The most wonderful thing about The INVISIBLES is that it could only be done as a comic. And that’s what makes it a groundbreaking and landmark piece of literature for our times, up there with seminal works such as Alan Moore’s WATCHMEN, Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN, which anyone clever enough will know can never be truly translated into any other medium. The fact that it’s not ranked anywere and rarely reviewed by critics during its initial run as a comic means that few could comprehend it… it’s still too heady for the masses.
But… if you think you are a fairly sophisticated reader with some smarts and cannot stand the thousandth retelling of Batman or Superman … Pick up the INVISIBLES. Read it. Read every issue of THE INVISIBLES, let it wash over you and then read it again to understand it … or not.
Morrison doesn’t care… obviously.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
WHAT and WHO ARE THE INVISIBLES?
click >here< for an introduction.
No Comments Yet
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
