The Invisibles: The Invisible Kingdom

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Invisibles: The Invisible Kingdom (volume six) (DC, 2000).



This book remains a massive disappointment to me. About two-thirds of it are absolutely blinding, some of Grant Morrison's very best work. And then we reach the climax and it is a complete mess. Most of the time, Morrison handles his finales incredibly well. This is one of those rare instances where he fumbles at about the two.

This last book of The Invisibles is the longest, reprinting the series' final twelve issues. It's set a year after the events of volume six, and starts with the three operatives of Division X, last seen in book three, finally making a break in their investigation of Sir Miles and the royal conspiracy. However, what these super-agents don't know is that Mr. Six is in league with the opposing, Invisibles conspiracy. Things spiral crazily out of control as King Mob, Jack Frost and Lord Fanny return to England and one member of Division X - the one who bases his persona on John Thaw's character from The Sweeney - is kidnapped and wakes up in a burning wicker man...

Actually, that this incident is set almost two and a half years after the last Division X episode just drives home what an amazing, parallel, series we missed while the focus was on the main characters. If Grant Morrison and Philip Bond, who illustrated these four episodes, would reteam for a good twenty issue run with Division X, I would buy the hell out of that series. Forget the conspiracy and the metanarrative, I just want to see these guys busting heads and having weird adventures.

So the first third of the book, drawn by Bond, is amazing, and the middle third, drawn by Sean Phillips and centered on 99 year-old Edith Manning, is transcendent. The installment where Edith, having come to India to die, spends her final hours with King Mob, is one of the most brilliant things that Morrison has ever written. Reading it again brought new tears. It's absolutely heart-hammering work, and the tiny flashes from ten years previous, with a younger, twentysomething King Mob looking for some kind of meaning, looking at the river with The Smiths on his walkman, about to have his life upended by an eighty-nine year-old lady who met his future self in the 1920s, suggest just how wild and amazing Doctor Who could be in Morrison's hands. (You think time is wibbly-wobbly when Moffat writes it?)

And then things fall apart.

A big part of the problem is Morrison's decision to let a freaking pile of artists jam on the climactic issues, resulting in a schizophrenic mess, and key, critical moments undermined by huge shifts in style. The absolute worst moment comes when King Mob phones the old girlfriend that we met briefly in book five. She gradually realizes that he's been very badly injured as, going into shock, he starts reliving a childhood memory of the last episode of a kiddie puppet show. Steve Yeowell draws the sequence, and does it brilliantly. I'm a huge fan of Yeowell's, and this might be one of the best things he's ever done. But then it's completely ruined by giving the climactic page of the sequence to Rian Hughes. Normally, I'm a big fan of Hughes, but this splash page is so jarring a shift in style that it doesn't look like it belongs in the same comic at all. It looks like an ad for British Telecom.

This keeps happening, with key moments either interrupted by a change in artist, or assigned to artists who make a complete hash out of things. Characters change their appearance every few pages, even in the middle of scenes. Yeowell and John Ridgway are the only participants in these pages who seem like they have a handle on even how to stage some of the action. There are others who don't look like they should have been let near a mainstream adventure comic at all, let alone one as challenging as this. There's a parallel universe where I'm filthy, stinking rich, and in that reality, I've commissioned Yeowell to redraw everybody else's bungled work and make it look consistent and good. (Parallel-me has also hired Cameron Stewart to redraw all the godawful art of Morrison's JLA, and hired Tony Harris to do the same to Morrison's run on Batman. Don't you wish we could have those comics?)

But while the art jam is a big problem, the script really is a bigger one. On the textual level, the villains' plans have completely stopped making sense - it all seems to be built around coronating a squishy tentacle monster as the new King of England, for some reason - and the Invisibles are going to stop it by doing something, and Sir Miles has been disavowed but suddenly he's back at the reins of things. Divorced from the subtext, it's just a rotten piece of drama, with confused motivations, and once a reader puts the fractured narrative into a linear sequence to understand it, it still doesn't resonate because it's incomprehensible sludge with too many characters.

But the subtext, the suggestion that there's much more to this work of fiction than we can see, completely overwhelms what's going on, and that's why The Invisibles fails right at the end. It's been previously hinted that the events of books one through six were the events that Ragged Robin wrote in a book, and then, rather than traveling back in time to experience as we were told, she actually entered her own fiction and interacted with her characters. By the end, we've added another layer of metatext and pseudoscience, that even Robin's participation was just part of a larger game, that basically people ten or twelve years in the future who read New Scientist every month have built a video game called The Invisibles which features a character who thinks that she wrote The Invisibles, who participates in the events described in her fiction, and, through the use of fiction suits (which people used to just call "writing yourself into your story," and sneered at), other... people... do... too?

The narrative is lost in this. Fiction, even complicated fiction, is most effective when the reader can enjoy the narrative at one level without being sledgehammered by the complex ideas of the other levels. The big climax here is one where both the structure and the meaning are intentionally obscured by the subtext, by the fractured style of storytelling, and by the poor mix of artists, who mishandle the material. It is a massive disappointment as well as a breathtaking experiment, and honestly, while having the whole thing drawn by Yeowell would improve things, as long as we're fantasizing, I think I'd still rather see a Philip Bond-drawn Division X series than bother. Recommended, but only because the first two-thirds are completely amazing, and readers can stop reading when the Sean Phillips artwork wraps up and have a fine experience.

The Invisibles: Apocalipstick

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Invisibles: Apocalipstick (Volume Two) (Vertigo, 1995)



Oh, my. Is this ever more like it. Rereading the first collected edition of Grant Morrison's nineties series The Invisibles had been an exercise in frustration, with the writer assuring us that wonderful things were in store for us, but that we had to wait patiently while he set up a very complicated board game with way too many pieces first. I still think that he just plain did that badly, but after the spectacular mess that was "Arcadia," things improve greatly - exponentially - with the stories in this volume.

Having said that, DC's collected editions department, which seems to routinely manage twenty-nine belching mistakes for every moment of greatness, didn't win themselves any awards for the way that they collected The Invisibles. The first episode reprinted here ties up the loose ends and resolves the cliffhanger ending to the first book, and really should have been included there. Illustrated by Jill Thompson, it finally lets us watch the members of the team in their mystical, ass-kicking glory and it's a pleasure to read. Had it been included in Volume One, it would have ended things on a high note and left readers demanding more, rather than scratching their heads wondering what all that French Revolution time travel nonsense was.

Next, we've got the first moments of pure genius in the series, with three stand-alone episodes. These are illustrated by Chris Weston, Steve Parkhouse and John Ridgway, and flesh out the universe that we're seeing.

In any other book. Weston's and Ridgway's episodes would be duking it out for supremacy, but Parkhouse's is the runaway winner. It's called "Best Man Fall" and it's one of the best single issue comics ever printed. Period. Telling you why would ruin it. It's a tough guy lout's story, and it's completely captivating watching him try and hold a difficult life together, and if you're like me when I first read it - I was living in UGA's Family Housing at the time and for some reason, I felt like getting off the bus home and enjoying the sun and read this episode under a tree in the Myers quad - then it will be right at the point towards the end where it's revealed why you're following this character that you'll even start to wonder what his connection to the overall narrative is. It's so damn amazing that I clearly remember where I was when I read a funnybook almost fifteen years ago.

That, I think, would be the only real downside to starting The Invisibles with this book over the first. The payoff-PUNCH-payoff-PUNCH-payoff-PUNCH ending to "Best Man Fall" loses one punch if you haven't read the first book. So there's your tradeoff: if you start with the second book, you'll be more patient and understanding of why you might have to struggle through the first, but if you start with the first, then you get one extra punch from "Best Man Fall."

So anyway, Thompson returns to art duties as Morrison returns the story to the lead characters, focusing on the magical transvestite Lord Fanny and the international ass-kicker King Mob (Gideon) as the protagonists all try to track down their errant new member. Dane, the not-likeable-at-all audience identification figure, is mostly absent from this book, having told these terrorists to leave him alone at the end of the first.

This three-part chunk is really entertaining, and Thompson's art is much better suited to it than her previous work on the series. Despite the powerhouse story, the first episode reprinted here is a notable art stumble, with a bullets-n-fast cars pace that leaves her looking out of place. Thompson's much better able to capture Lord Fanny's present in a drag club and past in rural Mexico, and she pulls this off right at the point that Morrison's theories of time travel start to make sense.

In The Invisibles, and here's where it gets tricky, past and future are much closer to any point in the present than just about any other fictional construction (or world). Just as Lord Fanny is flashing back (for the reader's benefit?) and, shockingly and just for one panel, forward (for her's?), there's a grand page with King Mob consulting his eighty-something friend, Edith, about finding Dane and she makes a curious comment about she and Gideon having been intimate once when she was 26, long before he could have been born. I've said before, and I'll keep saying, that Morrison uses both flashbacks and foreshadowing better than anybody else in comics. Under him, they're two sides of the same coin, and he knows exactly where to place it, every time. When Morrison reached the payoffs - there are two, unforgettable - of this comment, I was literally in tears. It's that damn good.

The other thing Morrison does better than anybody else is cliffhangers. Part two of this story ends with Lord Fanny on her knees in one hell of a mess, and I think, when it was originally published, that the next thirty days were just about the longest in my life.

The book ends with Lord Fanny's and King Mob's stories unresolved, and Paul Johnson on art chores for a curiously low-key episode. This one finds Dane learning more about his powers and purpose just as the series' principal baddie, an ass of a toff called Sir Miles, catches up with him. At this stage, from the snatches we've seen in other episodes, Sir Miles is a real cardboard villain, and one of the series' few misfires. A scene in Ridgway's episode that sees him and his fellows unconcerned about a servant's death doesn't come across as monstrous or sinister, but unbelievable and comic. There's better in store for this character, but at this point, Dane becomes more interesting and sympathetic at the expense of Sir Miles. Also notable here, Johnson uses a really neat art trick to show off the manifestation of Dane's powers as we learn why the Invisibles want him to be called Jack Frost.

Overall... maybe I was wrong last time and readers really should suffer and struggle through book one first, but I think that it's almost what-side-of-the-bed-is-this close as to how I feel now that I've read both. I absolutely think that anyone who likes comics should read The Invisibles. Toss a coin and pick up either the first or the second book. Watching it unfold in either direction is an absolute joy. With, you know, occasional rough bits.

Doctor Who: A Cold Day in Hell!

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Doctor Who: A Cold Day in Hell! (Panini, 2009)



We've reached the point in these collections of the Doctor Who strip where I originally stopped buying the magazine, so I was pretty interested in checking this book out. I'm kind of hazy as to why I quit reading, but I sort of recall that the price went up and they dropped eight pages back in 1987. I'm also pretty sure that I enjoyed Sylvester McCoy's Doctor more than anybody else that I knew at the time, but my enthusiasm had still ebbed after a couple of years of fandom. I also seem to recall one issue's cover with McCoy and Richard Briers making stupid faces at each other, and lit so they looked like a couple of ugly jack o'lanterns and deciding my money would be better spent on Siouxsie and the Banshees records.

Inside, the comic was going through some radical changes. In the seven pages of commentary in this collection, John Freeman interviews the comic's editor, Richard Starkings, who confirmed that the magazine was going through some belt-tightening at the time, and that artist John Ridgway, who had drawn the strip since the first Colin Baker episode, was passed over in favor of a rotating series of writers and artists.

The intent was apparently to follow the TV series' lead, as of course each serial had its own screenwriter and director. However, this simply doesn't work as well with an ongoing comic. Particularly in collected form, the inconsistent tone provided by having a new team for each story really jars.

As for the individual stories, some fail spectacularly, but some are pretty good. Freeman's two-part "Planet of the Dead" is a really fun romp, and I like the way the Doctor really seems completely lost, yet still in character, but it's undermined by Lee Sullivan's artwork. In time, Sullivan would grow into a favorite on Judge Dredd, but this early work is really rough and his storytelling is confusing, and the story's aliens, a shapeshifting bunch called the Gwanzulum, are just about the dumbest looking monsters in a series known for dumb-looking monsters. It ends up feeling like a rough draft for what should have been a memorable anniversary runaround, just a disappointment.

A lot of the book is like this, with novice artists just starting their comic career undermining a good story or two. Admittedly, neither Kev Hopgood nor Dougie Braithwaite were ever among my favorites when they started on 2000 AD a few years later, but their work here is just terrible. So is "Culture Shock!," a one-parter written by Grant Morrison and utterly ruined by a teenage Bryan Hitch, who would of course go on to far better things in the future, but who barely understands page composition here. It works the other way around in one case, though: veteran Alan Grant turns in a completely awful script called "Invaders from Gantac!" about an alien invasion of Earth totally at odds with anything else Doctor Who has ever presented, but somehow artists Martin Griffiths and Cam Smith make it look readable.

Elsewhere, among the 21 episodes in the collection, are two crossovers with other Marvel UK titles, putting this Doctor in the same continuity as Death's Head and the Sleeze Brothers. Apparently, these really aggravated readers when they originally appeared. Having never read Death's Head or the Sleeze Brothers myself, all I can say is that I am in no rush to go back and read any other Marvel UK series that I might have missed. These are just awful.

The best stories here are the first four episodes by Simon Furman and John Ridgway, before he moved on, a one-off by Furman and the wonderful John Higgins, and a creepy, clever two-parter by Dan Abnett and the returning Ridgway. Everything really meshes with these episodes, and I almost get a sense for what a regular team might have accomplished. While I honestly liked the artwork in this book by Griffiths and Higgins, the collection in some alternate universe where Ridgway got to draw the whole thing would certainly be a superior prospect. Recommended for fans only.

(Oh, one final bugbear about this book: while I realize that exchange rates often make it difficult to price things in advance, if you're out there, Panini, I really didn't appreciate ordering a book solicited in Diamond for $24.99 only to have it arrive costing $31.95. Seriously, are you going to do this with the supposedly $24.99 [see here] edition of "The Widow's Curse" when it shows up in November?)

The Big Book of the '70s

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of The Big Book of the '70s (DC / Paradox, 2000).



I used to love picking up these Big Books that DC used to publish in the late nineties. As with so many of their subsidiary and imprint publishers, however, they really flooded the market with the darn things, releasing close to two dozen over a period of about two years. That was a bit more than even fans like me could handle.

Each of the Big Books gives you close to 200 pages of comics, with several dozen artists tackling a story in around 2-5 pages each. This time out, you've got work from Bookshelf favorites like Sergio Aragonés, Roger Langridge and John Ridgway, among many others, illustrating tales of excess and bizarre behavior from the groovy decade. Everything from The Brady Bunch to the Son of Sam to the Symbionese Liberation Army is profiled within.

Seventies pop culture was often garish and ugly, but it sounded better than it looked, if you take my meaning. Maybe it was my own adolescent curiosity around the time of the 1980 election that made me want to make some kind of sense about the world around me, but I've always found the crazy news and culture of the period fascinating stuff, and enjoyed this Big Book thoroughly. I shouldn't have put off this collection for as long as I did!

Now to find a new copy of The Big Book of Conspiracies. I loaned mine out a couple of years back and don't remember to whom. Bah!

Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files vol. 12

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files vol. 12 (Rebellion, 2009).



Readers of this blog are certainly aware of Rebellion's wonderful series of Judge Dredd Complete Case Files, which are reprinting every episode that appeared in the weekly. With the twelfth collection, released in February, the publishers have chosen to follow the strip's lead and reprint the color episodes, which began in 1988, as they originally appeared. This does mean that the books have to be a little smaller than previously - what had been 400-page collections are now 320-page volumes on better paper - but given the choice of seeing Will Simpson's beautiful painted art or Chris Weston's earliest professional pages reproduced as muddy grayscale, Rebellion has certainly made the right choice.

Writers John Wagner and Alan Grant elected to end their successful partnership following the epic "Oz," which was reprinted in the eleventh Case File. This collection contains a final handful of their co-written stories, but from there it is mostly Wagner flying solo. Grant contributes some fine one-offs, including one that sets up a later Anderson: Psi Division storyline, along with the expected pop culture parodies. Wagner has the bulk of the action, including some wonderful, moving stories which focus on the citizens caught up in the Mega-City madness. The installments concerning the mutating Eleanor Groth, painted by Simpson, and some John Ridgway-illustrated episodes set in a nursing home where a resident suspects the staff of euthanasia, are truly fantastic. Here, again, is a book that belongs on every comic-lovers' bookshelf.

(Excerpted from Thrillpowered Thursday.)

Doctor Who: Voyager and some Andrew Clements novels

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



This book's flawed to an aggravating degree, because while the plots are pretty solid, the stories are entertaining and John Ridgway's art is fabulous, at no point does the main character appear anything like the Sixth Doctor. There's a good reason, or excuse, for this: because the producer of the Doctor Who TV series wanted all the ancillary merchandising to reflect Colin Baker's Doctor from the moment he first appeared onscreen towards the end of the 1984 season, the first chunk of episodes in this book were written before his character had been seen. And then he was seen in a story shown across two weeks which depicted him as delusional after his stressful regeneration, so all the rest of the episodes (twenty in all) were written with only a vague idea how he should be portrayed. So Colin's Doctor - the loudmouthed, egotistical perfect children's hero, railing at maximum volume - isn't present here at all. They're still good enough stories, and a long arc of episodes dealing with an ancient, insane Time Lord criminal who's trying to escape the attentions of an Eternal called Voyager, are periodically brilliant, but the uneven characterization and the insanely high price tag - $32 for 170 BW pages - make this a recommendation only for collectors.



I've been remiss in telling my fellow parents about Andrew Clements. I've been very fortunate to have children who enjoy reciprocating the reading they've uncovered on their own with me, and about two years ago, when I mentioned that the plot of Frindle, in which a schoolkid demonstrates the foolish, arbitrary nature of words by coming up with a new name for what we call a "pen," sounded like a neat idea, the Hipster Son asked if I wanted to read his copy. Since then, he's checked out or bought five other Clements novels and passed them to me when finished.

There's a degree of repetition in Clements' basic plots - an elementary schoolkid finds some reason to question the status quo - but there's an incredible variety in where the stories lead from there, making these perfect reads for later elementary and early middle-school students. Sometimes the young heroes earn major victories, but sometimes, as in The Last Holiday Concert, their victory doesn't change an inevitable, downbeat reality. In others, like The Janitor's Boy, there's little to change beyond the understanding that sometimes even parents can have their souls crushed by inevitability.

The best of the Clements novels I've read is the one I just finished, The Landry News, in which a girl starts an underground newspaper and finds a surprising ally in the teacher against whom she spoke out in an editorial. Alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, it's a great story told exceptionally well. If you've got kids, or if your friends do, I can't recommend Clements highly enough. Your kids will eat these stories up, and if you've got a spare hour, you'll read right along with them.

(Originally posted February 10, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)