“This is the comic I’ve wanted to write all my life–a comic about everything: action, philosophy, paranoia, sex, magic, biography, travel, drugs, religion, UFOs… you can make your own list. And when it reaches its conclusion, somewhere down the line, I promise to reveal who runs the world, why our lives are the way they are and exactly what happens to us when we die.”
–Grant Morrison
At a certain point as you read though the seven volumes of The Invisibles, Grant Morrison’s psychedelic magnum opus, you have a realization as to just how deeply, deeply knotted the book gets.
Somewhere between the tantric sex, the esoteric black magic, the deep-cover agent in so deep they ended up going deep-cover against their own side, and the anti-government anarchist paranoia, it hits you: this is a story told by an unreliable narrator, about characters who themselves are unreliably narrating their own lives to each other.
This has everything to do with the metaverse that Morrison creates within the comic. King Mob, the bald-headed nominative leader of his cell of Invisibles, describes the universe that the Invisibles inhabit as the three-dimensional intersection of two higher-dimension universes, one full of the purest evil, the other a shining utopian paradise. Their interplay creates the muddled state of the Invisibles universe, and the evil universe is in a constant struggle to exert its control over it, for reasons even King Mob is unclear on, but it’s implied that there will be an apocalypse of some fashion, as well as “eternal slavery” for the actual three-dimensional universe of the Invisibles.
That’s just one explanation, and admittedly only one of the slightly more lucid ones, of the cosmology of the Invisibles. Other important pieces involve a “three-dimensional slice” of a higher-dimensional being, which both created the universe from itself and is trapped within it, and appears as a big silver blob of… something, the truth of the existence of every god from every pantheon you care to name, the secret English alphabet consisting of 47 letters, which is used to give names to things that do not exist within the classical 26 letter one, and in fact cannot be experienced without the knowledge of the supra-alphabet, and so on and so forth.
Animal Man, breaking out of the frame
Two of the characters, King Mob and the time-traveling witch Ragged Robin, visit the “intersection” of their universe and the utopian one, a place known as the Invisible College, and King Mob pulls a stunt reminiscent of Morrison’s work on the superb — and infinitely less esoteric – Animal Man: He steps out of the frames of the comic book itself and manipulates them from the margins. Robin, of course, can’t follow what King Mob’s doing, of course, and the appearance of it to her is completely unimaginable to our own experience.
It’s really mind-expanding reading, honestly. It doesn’t hurt that every collection involves at least one major gun-battle with the forces of eternal oppression, as well as a refusal to shy away from the sexual lives of the Invisibles themselves — or self-censor their bodies as they engage in said acts. Ragged Robin appears topless a number of times — and, just so you don’t go running down to the store to pick a volume up for some mid-afternoon thrills, so does a 90-something woman. (She then proceeds to have sex with an astral projection of a 30-something man from 60 years in the future, because she told him that that was what she recalled happening in the past. Closed time loops are funny like that.)
But back to the unreliable narrators. The nature of the reality that the Invisibles inhabit is one which is deeply informed by the actual form of the story being told through them — that is, a fiction using words. The world of the Invisibles is entirely made of words; it doesn’t take more than a well-placed word to being something into being. That’s how the magic works, after all.
It’s implied at one point that one of the reasons that the world appears the way it does is because the words used to describe it wouldn’t allow it to appear any other way. The general populace of the Invisibles universe is enslaved, in a sense, to the words they’ve been taught since before they can remember; that “this is how the world is” blinds them to how the world actually might be, or how it might become.
The other side of the coin is the root of the textual undermining of the book’s cosmology — that is, actions within the Invisibles universe are treated just as importantly, if not more so, than words themselves. This stems from a cursory borrowing from Zen Buddhist thought that characters occasionally make reference to. The idea of constant, incessant change is the backbone of each cell of the Invisibles, and the be-ing of that change, which cannot be described in words alone, as the antidote to the words which infest the culture the Invisibles are struggling against.
It’s much like how comic books themselves work; comic books are a constant battle between the descriptive powers of the written word and the visual impact of the illustration on the page. Scott McCloud wrote an entire book on this theory of competition within the comic form. Only by acting outside of the language of words can someone be liberated from their effects, and only by words can someone be saved from the constant primacy and immediacy of actions, which do not allow for contemplation.
It’s really a great big sticky mess, and the book revels in the straddling of boundaries, of that need to incessantly change everything about oneself. One member of the group is Lord Fanny, a transvestite from South America who passes as female but has no interest in having the actual sex-change operation performed. She’s a witch, and the culturally-transgressive nature of her body is integral to the boundary-breaking of the witchery she performs. (She also has a lot of sex, but that’s mostly off-page. Even this comic — or its publisher! — has its limits.)
So the entire book is one enormous meditation on the nature of fictional realities. One one level, anyway. On another, it’s a meditation on our own reality’s inherent instability, intellectually, as it relates to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (the idea that our thoughts are shaped by our language, since we can only “think” about things that we have the terms for). On another, it’s a cool story about how everything’s a conspiracy, and how only by shooting a bunch of people and blowing things up can things be brought to justice. On another, it’s an essential window into the paranoia and ennui of the counter-culture of the ’90s, and how that came across in fiction.
And yet, it’s not really any of those things. The Invisibles is the sort of book which feeds off of what you come into it with, which is strange for a book that appears to have such strong opinions about, well, everything. But that it talks about everything is part of the reason it’s so fluid. The vast proliferation of theories, explanations, and Truths within the text allow for the reader to build their own version of events around them, carefully selecting the parts that support their theory and ignoring the bits that don’t.
The ultimate postmodern comic book, then. It’s metatextual, self-aware, form- and genre- conscious, and forces the reader to choose between various interpretations of events. It’s a classic for a reason.
“In Katmandu, much to my shock and surprise, I experienced [...] a full-on, Tibetan, Sci-Fi Vision of All SpaceTimeMind As A Single Complexifying Iteration Which Is The Larval Form Of A 5th Dimensional Adult Entity.”
–Grant Morrison
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