Grant Morrison, anyone?

[Wandering Sensei: Moderator Man]

Should we bring the Morrison discussion over here now? I don't know how...

[Mark Sullivan (Vertiginous Mod)]

Vol. 3 #4 "The Invisible Kingdom Part One: Planet Stepford"

Mister Six has been in contact with the 'other things', and when he emerges, he contacts a newly shaved Helga with details of the plan. In London Sir Miles, Rossiter and Orlando and preparing the path for the Moonchild's occupation by an Archon. Miss Dwyer's replacement turns out to be John A'Dreams. King Mob is watching as the events unfold. Fanny and Jack are undertaking their own form of preparation spinning glamors all across London. In 2012, we see Dane on the street experiencing the end of the world, while Fanny, Helga and Takashi fight the Rex Mundi as Robin's timesuit is launched. As the Moonchild is led to Westminster Abbey and the Eclipse starts to occur, Sir Miles starts to act strangely...

The beginning of the end, too big for any single artist to illustrate, apparently. Steve Yeowell is back for several pages, as is Jill Thompson. Everyone else has contributed before, except for Ashley Wood. The continual shifting between artists continues through all three issues in the arc. There's no attempt to meld the styles; if anything, they seem to have been encouraged to be as individualistic as possible. It's a visual representation of the series modus operandi of always keeping the reader a bit uncertain of what's going on, always questioning prior assumptions. Sir Miles had appeared to be undone, but here he is proceeding with the coronation of the Moonchild.

Vol. 3 #3 "The Invisible Kingdom Part Two: Goodbye Rag"

King Mob has been shot, and lies in a phone box, explaining to an ex-girlfriend what happened at Westminster Abbey. The Queen and many invited VIPs had been watching the ritual transforming the Moonchild into a home for an Archon. John A Dreams and Orlando are sacrificing children and homeless people, while Sir Miles is looking increasingly unstable. He is suddenly confronted by members of Division X who have been disguised as guests. But despite having the Hand of Glory, two of them are killed by Orlando, leaving George Harper captured. When the sacrifices continue, King Mob and Lord Fanny emerge from their disguises, just as four of the Archons emerge from transdimensional space. Jolly Roger appears, but is grabbed by an Archon, and Jack Frost is captured by soldiers. Across the world Takashi, Mason and Jim Crow are preparing themselves for what is to come. Helga and Mister Six arrive outside the building. Sir Miles reveals that the Moonchild is not going to house the Archon. Young Jack is instead...

Slightly different group of illustrators this time. Rian Hughes does a page which is radically different from the rest of the series.

Vol. 3 #2 "The Invisible Kingdom Part Three: The Moment of the Blitz"

Aargh! No Barbelith summary, so here's a brief one from Wikipedia: The arc "The Invisible Kingdom"portrays the final battle between the Invisibles and the Outer Church. Sir Miles is killed, and perhaps Jolly Roger, while Jack Frost single-handedly defeats Rex Mundi. He then travels once again into the Magic Mirror and learns that the dimensions that the Outer Church and the Invisible College inhabit are one and the same. Afterwards, King Mob retires and devotes the rest of his life to nonviolence. Jack Frost and Lord Fanny are left to start their own Invisibles cell.

And yet another gang of illustrators, this time including The Pander Brothers, Mark Buckingham, Dean Ormston, and Grant himself penciling the final page. It's interesting to imagine the entire series done by some of these folks: the Dean Ormston pages call The Books of Magic to mind, unavoidably. After all the chaos this issue contains one of the most touching, human scenes in the entire series. A woman named Audrey Murray comes to visit King Mob as he is being released from the hospital. She found him bleeding to death in the phone booth, and saved his life. KM hugs her and says he hopes she inherits the earth: and so do I.

Vol. 3 #1 "Glitterdammerung!"

Years have passed since the incident at Westminster Abbey and Jack is breaking into a skyscraper to find out about a new Invisibles game. He is astonished to find out that King Mob is in charge. Jack starts to play the game. Meanwhile King Mob picks up a gun. Around him, the world is being gradually assimilated into the Supercontext, as the burgeoning larval life form that is the universe begins to wake up. He moves through the collapsed portions of time, experiencing moments of his past, which collide with him. Arriving at the laboratory where they await Ragged Robin's return, an Archon manifests in her place. A symbolic gesture later and it too is absorbed into the supercontext. And from behind it comes Robin, speaking in emotional aggregates - something larger than human. And we are left with Jack, watching as the world emerges. And he looks at us and says: OUR SENTENCE IS UP.

Back on familiar ground for the art team here: Frank Quitely (penciler) and John Stokes (inker). Boy makes an appearance after all, as King Mob speaks of seeing her in New York, where she asked about Jack. As KM moves through time, the narration talks about the Supercontext, in some of Grant's most impenetrable language. Hard to talk about the unknowable. But the final pages manage to illustrate the unknowable pretty well, especially the final one. Our sentence is up--fade to white--implied reality reboot.

[Figserello]

Vol. 3 #6 "Karmageddon Part Three: six minus six"

Helga’s trip under the influence of Key 23 and the Glossolia language is a mirror of King Mob’s trip in the very next episode.

Her vision of the microbe men behind reality working away is fun. “We’re trying to free them but they don’t understand”, they say, in the back-to-front mirror script that we have seen often before now. Mirror imagery is used again and again in this series, in one form or another. Perhaps 'Alice through the looking glass' is a template for this whole series. Terry Pratchett has written that if science could understand exactly how mirrors work, we’d know all the secrets of the universe!

We get a few very experimental frames of the action as seen from the point of view of Barbelith. The earth in red, King Mob in X-ray, Mason seeing after images, bits of seemingly unrelated conversation. As we’ve seen before it ends with "RVM re-integrated.” I wonder what that means?

“Thomasina”, which Mason believes explains life itself, refers to The Three Lives of Thomasina, a sixties movie starring Patrick McGoohan, the Prisoner himself.

At her 'last supper', Edith re-iterates something which has been coming through repeatedly in this final volume:

“Amidst all the bangs, and the drama and the high passions, it’s kindness and just ordinary goodness that stands out in the end.”

The story she uses to illustrate this is of her having a miscarriage on the steps of Harrods. This seems to be the moment just after King Mob saw her in his vision back in “bloody Hell in America” and which he lives through from another angle at the very end of this volume. Looking at this issue again, there is a similarity between the steps down to the edge of the Ganges and those in the famous department store.

There is also a possibility that it could have been King Mob’s baby that she miscarried!

Edith is a notable character for a comic series in that we see her both when she was young, beautiful and flighty and when she is old and wise and thoughtful - a sharp old bird, as you say - and we see she is still the same person. Old women or young women in stories are usually exactly that, and, in boys comics especially, are just filling an archetype, whereas Edith gets to be a complete person. She’s quite unusual.

I wonder what is the deal that Helga cuts with Sir Miles?

(BTW – By Sir Miles’ account, Frederick “Mad Tom” Seaton seems to have been the senior Conspiracy member who led Sir Miles into his initiation into the conspiracy. Poor Sir Miles seems to have been played from the start.)

Vol. 3 #5 "Karmageddon Part Four: smile"

This issue flows on from the previous one. King Mob has added the germs from the Ganges where Edith has been cremated to the potent mix of Key 23 and the 64-letter ubersprech for his trip.

Smile – the title of this issue – is also the name on the grenade that ends Issue One of Volume One.

It’s possible to get so carried away with the head-scratching and fathoming out meanings in The Invisibles that you miss the strong emotional beats. Edith meeting Mad Tom before her death and King Mob re-living his first meeting with her (but not hers with him!) is another.

Edith asks Gideon to smile for her, adding yet more meaning to the issue’s title. We already know that this was her first utterance to him, but seeing it happen here is quite powerful. It reinforces the undercurrent in these last few issues that “it’s kindness and just ordinary goodness that stands out in the end.”

Gideon is almost unrecogniseable as the phantom lover from the future that she knew 70 years before, but she knows that she will recognise him if he is smiling like they did as friends.

Add to this that she is a friend he has never met, who comes to him at his lowest ebb, to change his life.

This is sentimental life-affirming picture-poetry, cunningly disguised as a mad helter-skelter of wacky ideas.

Next up

.... Here comes the Summer

[Figserello]

After commentaries and thoughts on 55 odd issues of The Invisibles, I’m beginning to tire now, as the time-lag is starting to attest. Still, a comic series like this, with so many puzzles that we had to wait dozens of issues before the answers started to become clear, the last 4 issues are just a matter of tying up all the loose ends. There doesn’t seem to be as much to comment on at this point.

If we don’t get it by now, we’ll never get it!

Mark said: The continual shifting between artists continues through all three issues in the arc. There's no attempt to meld the styles; if anything, they seem to have been encouraged to be as individualistic as possible. It's a visual representation of the series modus operandi of always keeping the reader a bit uncertain of what's going on, always questioning prior assumptions.

Agreed. Also, with more tying up to do in this last long arc than new puzzles to create, Morrison is having a final go at discombobulating his readership.

Vol. 3 #4 "The Invisible Kingdom Part One: Planet Stepford"

A character, possibly Helga, says in this final volume, that we are all Stepford Wives now, all Midwich Cuckoos. Both these fictional groups were the subjects of horror movies recoiling at the idea of everyone becoming clones of each other. However, on the Disinfo talk linked upthread, Morrison argues that the way forward is to identify with each other more closely and to stop being so precious about our ‘identity'. Our identity should be something we can change as the situation demands. He’s subverting the horrific associations of these movies.

The constantly changing art teams on this book illustrates that idea of a shifting identity very well. I really love it. A lot of the artist’s seem to ink their own work. Except Morrison. I presume fellow Scotsman Cameron Stewart embellishes Grant’s work quite a bit, on the last page of the final issue of this arc. Otherwise I’d want to see Grant draw as well as write all his comicbooks.

In the early stages of the arc, each artist draws a specific set of characters or sub-plot, but by the end of the arc, the different artists are just drawing whatever pages they are given, overlapping in subject-matter and switching in mid-scene.

(By a coincidence, I read a Batman comic which I’ve owned for years just this weekend that is similarly drawn by a series of different artists. The Invisibles love coincidences.)

The Black Watch, the army regiment involved in the human sacrifices in Westminster Cathedral were an especially unpopular regiment in Northern Ireland for their heavy-handed methods. Still, it’s amazing that Morrison can get away with depicting them like this in his comic though. We even see Queen Lizzie later obediently placing the crown on the Moonchild’s head. This is old-school 2000AD iconoclasm.

I don’t know if its subtle, but while King Mob is philosophising over the daintily presented Chinese meal, we cut to the dirty chaotic scene in the kitchen of the restaurant. Dismembered animals, stuff being spilled or sitting around filthy. We glimpse King Mob through the doorway talking about what our world must look like from a ‘higher’ perspective. The implication seems to be that we are in the dirty disgusting kitchen down here and we can only glimpse the better world of which we are a necessary part.

I love Thompson’s very rough artwork here, by the way. It doesn’t look like her work at all.

Vol. 3 #3 "The Invisible Kingdom Part Two: Goodbye Rag"

With the title, we get the possible answer to a previous puzzle: Bye, Bye Baby Rabbits, which was about Dane’s farewell to his childhood in the House of Fun. With King Mob’s reference to Rag, Tag and Bobtail’s last tv programme in this issue, it looks likely Bye, Bye Baby Rabbits referred to the same thing. Not necessarily goodbye to King Mob, but goodbye to an early stage of development of human consciousness.

A lot of the lesser heroes, that we know little about, die in this arc – Jack Flint, Crowley and Jolly Roger. In another comic series it would be to ‘up the ante’ towards the end, but here it seems to serve another purpose. Jack Flint, especially, seems to die asserting that it is all a game, and that these are only ‘suits’ that they are wearing temporarily. Again Morrison is dramatising and making us ‘experience’ what might have only been told to us earlier – Why do we feel existential dread when a piece is moved off the game-board?

Vol. 3 #2 "The Invisible Kingdom Part Three: The Moment of the Blitz"

The cover of this issue represents a key point of Morrison’s philosophy. The true grail is in the spaces between us all, just as the shape of the mythical grail can be seen between the profiles of King Mob and Helga on the cover. Again, it's identity and the self as a blind alley in Morrison’s thinking. The sacred is in what goes on between us all.

Mister Six says of the otherworldly secret chiefs of the Invisibles order: "They are as alien as the spaces between our bloody fingers! Yes ... They're us."

Miles in his madness and obsession does everything an Invisible should do here. He kills the Moonchild, and the hateful Rossiter and moves Jack into position to receive the King-Archon. All while thinking he is working for the bad-guys.

The eclipse represents the two universes coming together. I’ve just realised that’s why Morrison adapted the ‘Ministry of Sound’ symbol into the overlapping circles symbol of the ‘Ministry of Tomorrow’ in this comic. I guess the sun and the moon in the eclipse aren’t two forces in opposition, but two halves of a complete whole. Likewise, Universe A and B need to be joined together and healed so that the ascension to the better world happens at the end of the series.

Or so it said on the internet!

Miles hangs himself in a very strange fashion. By the ankle. Perhaps your neck snaps if you don’t use a bungy rope? Notice his papers and knowledge goes flying around him when he dies. His end has a certain pathos though. He followed his own misguided path to the end. His existentialist, morbid view of the universe would see ‘the Age of Christ’ as starting with Judas’ suicide rather than the great sacrifice or the miracle of the risen Christ himself.

A woman named Audrey Murray comes to visit King Mob as he is being released from the hospital. She found him bleeding to death in the phone booth, and saved his life. KM hugs her and says he hopes she inherits the earth: and so do I.

I don’t know if I’d have got it easily without the good old internet, but Audrey Murray is of course, the wife of poor Bobby Murray, the hapless security guard that King Mob killed in Vol 1, issue 12.

That would seem to be Ragged Robin in the final Morrison-drawn page of this issue. Great slogan she has on her forehead. Every teacher’s nightmare. Jack becoming a teacher himself, working with youth as ignorant as he was, is another circle being closed.

That’s us Morrison is offering the blank Invisibles badge to at the end.

[Mark Sullivan (Vertiginous Mod)]

Yep, I'm feeling a bit of discussion fatigue myself. But one last time, at least!

It’s possible to get so carried away with the head-scratching and fathoming out meanings in The Invisibles that you miss the strong emotional beats. Edith meeting Mad Tom before her death and King Mob re-living his first meeting with her (but not hers with him!) is another.

A woman named Audrey Murray comes to visit King Mob as he is being released from the hospital. She found him bleeding to death in the phone booth, and saved his life. KM hugs her and says he hopes she inherits the earth: and so do I.

I don’t know if I’d have got it easily without the good old internet, but Audrey Murray is of course, the wife of poor Bobby Murray, the hapless security guard that King Mob killed in Vol 1, issue 12.

I agree about the emotional content in the series, and Audrey saving King Mob hit me even more strongly. I completely missed the connection with that security guard! That makes it even more breathtaking. You could make a similar point about the action scenes in the series (and I think we did earlier): there's lots of them, especially in Vol. 2, and they really carry the story along. Sometimes there's so much happening you completely forget about all the puzzles to solve!

Edith is a notable character for a comic series in that we see her both when she was young, beautiful and flighty and when she is old and wise and thoughtful - a sharp old bird, as you say - and we see she is still the same person. Old women or young women in stories are usually exactly that, and, in boys comics especially, are just filling an archetype, whereas Edith gets to be a complete person. She’s quite unusual.

Didn't want to let this observation go by without comment, because it's so true. In many ways she is the most three-dimensional character in the series, and indeed one of the most clearly drawn I've seen in any comic. This for a character that seems incidental at first.

A final observation on the entire structure of Vol. 3. As you pointed out earlier, Morrison had followed the character arcs of many of the players to their conclusion by the end of Vol. 2, so it would have been redundant to just carry on in the same manner in Vol. 3. But there are so many changes in Vol. 3--new illustrators, new characters, and a basic change in the Invisibles charter (as Wikipedia puts it, "The Invisibles also no longer consider themselves at war with the Outer Church. Instead, they are on a mission to rescue humanity before the world ends"). It is almost as if Vol. 3 is a sequel to the first two volumes, rather than a continuation. I had trouble maintaining the emotional connection that I had developed with the characters, despite the powerful emotional scenes in the volume. In that way it's a flawed conclusion for me, although I think the actual conclusion is pretty satisfying.

[Figserello]

It is almost as if Vol. 3 is a sequel to the first two volumes, rather than a continuation.

Good point. And the final issue, in turn is like a sequel to Vol 3.

Partially I think Morrison was pushing against the very edge of using an engrossing adventure comic to disseminate really contentious and marginalised ideas. That's part of the reason the original very human Invisibles are largely supplanted by the Cypher-like one-dimensional hard-men of Division X (and the intimidatingly intelligent Helga).

It's often said (by himself occasionally) that Morrison has trouble with endings. I felt satisfied at each point in the series that Morrison knew exactly where he was going with the story as a whole, his characters, and his arguments. It's a good feeling! However perhaps technically he failed to carry them all forward to the end, with some of them resolving earlier than they should.

But I don't know. I found a lot of Vol 3 refreshingly different after the first 2 volumes.

At the end of the day, The Invisibles is its own thing.

BTW - I forgot to mention when I talked about coincidences above, that while I was looking for the aforementioned Batman comic, I found the front page of a newspaper I'd kept from 12th August 1999, which showed the eclipse against a dark sky background. I probably kept it because I was amused by the name of the paper above the picture: The Irish Sun. I should file it away with my Invisibles volumes.

[Figserello]

Vol. 3 #1 "Glitterdammerung!"

Frank Quitely provides perfect art for this final chapter.

The suicide note school essay is one of the framing devices for this issue. The way the writer identifies herself as being anti-sex and anti-death and with her issues with education, she would seem to be the same girl as on the last page of the previous issue, but this is now 2012, 11 years later and she couldn’t still be at school. The letter-writer (and/or the girl we saw Jack teaching) may be Reynard who breaks into the Technoccult building with Jack at the start. It could be her suicide note insofar as she seems to be fatally wounded in the attack by the Archon on Takashi’s laboratory, which takes place a few days/weeks after the break-in. And with these deep Invisibles types, there might be no difference between dying today and dying 11 years in the future.

In any case, although King Mob seems to slip immediately from showing Jack the new Invisibles game to his appointment with the Archon on 22 December, for Jack and Reynard, a few days at least pass between these events. 22 December might be a bit late for the Christmas market, especially if your CEO thinks the world is going to end three days before Christmas.

Although the whole issue is quite upbeat, even here death is all around. Takashi, and Reynard both die in the Archon’s attack and everything comes full circle with Jack’s friend Gaz from the very first issue dying in Jack’s arms. Death is a vital component of The Invisibles, just as it is central to practically all myths and religions.

I loved the capitalist-busting idea of the shoes that make the beats while you dance, thus doing away with DJs and bands and the whole consumerist music industry. In the future we’ll all make our own music!

By 2012, the Invisibles seem to be up against the forces of consumerism/capitalism rather than evil worshipers of the dark gods. It's as if Morrison has compressed a whole saga into this one issue. Reynard mentions that the moon has Coca Cola written on it. It’s easy to miss, but in the 2nd frame of the 4th page we see the McDonalds arches projected onto the moon rather than the swirly Coke writing. Perhaps they buy timeslots. King Mob has adapted the lessons he learned fighting the occultist Archon-worshipers and here too, he’s defeating the enemy by becoming them completely. He runs Technoccult, which Jack and Reynard have set out to sabotage, and he funds the Invisibles that subvert Technoccult broadcasts.

King Mob gets to give some of the final commentary on The Invisibles as a work of art:

“It’s a thriller, it’s a romance, it’s a tragedy, it’s a porno, it’s neo-modernist kitchen-sink science-fiction that you catch, like a cold.”

And much more besides, I'd add: a magickal manual, a reading list, a history lesson, a diary, a catalogue of comicbook techniques, and on and on.

King Mob further advises: “…if you don’t get it the first time, you have to keep running it.”

As they say on the Barbelith wiki, the work literally demands re-reading.

Seeing how everything is tied up here, including the convergence of King Mob’s dream in Black Science, with Edith’s experience on the steps of Harrod’s, and King Mob’s 2012 mission to kill the Archon, it’s worth pointing out again that Morrison gets some very unjustified abuse. Okay, when we were reading Black Science, King Mob’s dream only seemed like a typically Morrisonian exercise in wilful obscurity and meaningless absurdism, but it was just a case of us not knowing enough at that stage. Morrison’s biggest crime is that he thinks across a larger canvas than the standard 22 page comic.

If I can return to a point I made earlier about it being easy to miss the big emotional beats amidst all the weird messages and impenetrable symbolism: I read this final issue late at night and then slept on it. It hadn’t made that big an impression on me. The next morning, I was on my bicycle, halfway to work, and it hit me that King Mob had waited 14 years from losing Ragged Robin and he’d prepared himself to be there to ‘save’ her from the terrifying King-Archon exactly when it’d arrive. Then he steps forward to face it and fire his gun just one more time. It’s a love story, after all, with King Mob as the Knight in Shining Armour!! That’s a simple beautiful narrative beat.

I was surprised that the Barbelith Wiki had been amended quite recently to comment that the ending of The Invisibles was similar to the white-page ending of Final Crisis. (I had thought it was closed for editing a long time ago.) In addition, it struck me (on my bicycle – it’s a good place for pondering these things) that King Mob facing the Dark God Archon with a single shot in his gun was a very similar situation to Batman using his single God-killing bullet against Darkseid in Final Crisis. Pop / Gotcha. There’s stuff to think about there…

Looking at Jack’s final speech now, and that fade out … that’s a brilliant ending.

Full!

Stop!






… However, what makes Morrison a great writer is the moment before Jack’s final monologue where he pauses to reflect on the short tragic life of his childhood friend.

"Ah, Gaz, man ..."

One of life’s losers, Gaz doesn’t seem to have had a chance from when he was too young to know any better. Great mind-blowing sci-fi adventure stories have little time for outcasts like Gaz. Yet this final issue is as much about his final moments and Jack’s love and pity for him as about all the other wild ideas the issue presents us with.

[Mark Sullivan (Vertiginous Mod)]

One of life’s losers, Gaz doesn’t seem to have had a chance from when he was too young to know any better. Great mind-blowing sci-fi adventure stories have little time for outcasts like Gaz. Yet this final issue is as much about his final moments and Jack’s love and pity for him as about all the other wild ideas the issue presents us with.

I agree with everything you said about this issue, but this is an especially good point. Another example of the emotional heart that beats behind so much of the series, despite all of the action and craziness. And it's yet another scene that was prepared well in advance, further proof that Morrison knew where he was going all along.

[Figserello]

Here's a link to a fine interview with Morrison where he discusses some of his creative processes and more interestingly, highlights the connections between his own life experiences and The Invisibles.

He states that many of the events in The Invisibles are accounts of things he really experienced and gives quite a comprehensive list of the autobiographical episodes.

The weird thing is that I did many of these things for the sole purpose of having experiences worthy of putting into stories, so, if I hadn't wanted to include Australian magic, Jeet Kune Do, or the tawdry allure of transvestite glam in The Invisibles, I might never have gone there or done that. Instead, I've been round the world three times on my own and with friends, visited a ton of countries, and had loads of mad relationships and weird experiences. This is how a hypersigil works to change the world around you. This is total surrender to the text, total immersion and deliberate self-annihilation. I'm not doing 'stories', I'm desperately writing biography to celebrate life in this world and to negotiate with depression and meaninglessness. I become possessed by characters and texts to the point where my own 'personality' is reconfigured and it's partly what gives my comics their particular, occult, and often irritatingly 'cultish' flavour, I reckon.

He also asserts that the problems a lot of people have with his work are deliberate on his part. He deliberately writes stories with gaps and mysteries in them for the reader to grapple with.

I like things to have double, triple or quadruple meanings, if possible, with multiple POVs and big spaces for the reader to vanish into and fill up with ideas of his or her own, sort of like 'Lost' on the telly, or like 'The Prisoner' or the films of David Lynch, for instance. My own personal taste doesn't run to literal work or stuff where everything's neatly explained to me and tied in a 'clever' bow. The world's a big, wild mess and I like to reflect that. As a reader, I like to join in and not just watch, if you see what I mean, so as a writer my intention has always been to create experiences which deliberately raise questions or suggest further, untold stories and don't necessarily have one easy solution or outcome. I like to leave people with something to talk about and fire their own imaginations and I'm trying to capture the real patterns of real life.

Furthermore, the "head-scratchingness" of his work is his version of realism:

In real life, conversations are peppered with weird dead ends, misunderstandings, interruptions, surrealist non sequiturs and in-jokes. In real life, you don't get neatly-controlled dramatic set-ups and resolutions. In real life, the writer isn't nearly as clever as he'd like to appear on the page. And so on. For these reasons, I like to think of myself as a hard-nosed realist writer

It's a good interview with Morrison, but then again, I find most of them are.

[Mark Sullivan (Vertiginous Mod)]

Is this the interview you linked to earlier? I remember thinking I should wait until we were done reading, because you said it had spoilers in it. That would be now!

[Figserello]

Mark Sullivan said:

Is this the interview you linked to earlier? I remember thinking I should wait until we were done reading, because you said it had spoilers in it. That would be now!

No, I just found that interview yesterday, and part of it just seemed so specific to the Invisibles that I thought I'd stick it down here. The rest of it addressed quite directly some of the problems people have with his writing.

The big thing that I linked to earlier was Morrison's Disinfo speech, which sums up a lot of what he was trying to do with the series. It's one of the links in this post.

I'm also halfway through the Maya Derren book. It's a fine book in its own right, but it does shed a bit of light on some of the series. Not just the Voudoun bits, but also where all the mirror imagery came from. I might report back when I'm finished.

[Mark Sullivan (Vertiginous Mod)]

Thanks for linking me to these interviews; quite informative. I enjoyed hearing Morrison speak--much higher pitched voice than I was expecting, but lovely to listen to--although I confess that I switched to the transcript after a few minutes, because I could read it so much faster than listening. I might go back and watch the whole speech later.

[Mark Sullivan (Vertiginous Mod)]

All in all, my least favourite arc so far, so I might as well talk about The Third Policeman, one of the greatest books in the English language, according to George, or perhaps Jack, in the Mr Six issue...

The Third Policeman is one of my own favourite books and I’d recommend it to anyone. As well as illustrating the kind of thing that goes on in it, I thought I’d detail that episode as it illustrates something Grant loves to write about. Namely the concept of what was called in one of the Planet of the Apes movies ‘Infinite Regression’, where something contains an element, which in turn contains another element and so on. In Escape from the Planet of the Apes, the idea was illustrated by a painting of a guy painting a painting of a guy painting a painting etc.

I just finished The Third Policeman. I'd call it a unique book full of original ideas, but I can't say I enjoyed it very much. All the real conventional "action" occurs in the first chapter, of course. The anonymous narrator's experiences with the policemen are meant to be nightmarish, and they are: full of dream logic, so he never quite understands what's happening, and finds himself thwarted at every turn. But the endless bizarre metaphysical discussions got tedious after awhile. And the footnotes! I nearly bailed on the book towards the end, in the chapter about water that has DeSelby footnotes occupying at least half the length. I honestly enjoyed your summary of the book more than the book itself. I'm not sorry I read it, but it's a strange one: definitely an acquired taste for me.