Customer Reviews

Invisibles, The: Revolution VOL 01

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

First let me start by saying that I might be a little biased in this review. I started reading The Invisibles with the Second Series, so it wasn't until after a few of those issues that I went back to the First Series.

After the totality of violence and conspiracy in the story "Black Science" in the Second Series, I felt a little slowed by the pace of Say You Want a Revolution, with the focus mainly on Jack and his scholarship under Tom O'Bedlam.

The introduction was a needed aspect of the story; however, since we are essentially initiated at the same time that Jack is.

The second story arc "Acardia" was an interesting look at the workings of the The Invisibles as a whole and how each one interacts with the other. I think we could have all done without the perverse nature of the Marquis de Sade, but you slowly come under the realization that Morrison is trying to shock all the taboo out of your system, in order for you to let your barriers down and stop thinking with the mind that "they" developed for you.

Morrison is an incredibly creative and intelligent author who mixes real science and philosophy into an ultimate tale of violence, conspiracy, magic, and sex. This first book may be a little slower than the others, but the entire series quickly picks up speed and you'll soon find yourself unable to read anything else until you finish it.

I made some mistakes in my early review; the main one being that the fifth Beatle was not Peter Finch but Pete Best (Peter Finch was a popular actor in the 1960s and JFK's brother-in-law). However, I still would like to go on the record and say that this is not Grant Morrison's best work. The Invisibles: Say You Want a Revolution is just way too hip for it's own good (I feel the same way about Warren Ellis'Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street). A much better work along the same lines (and also by Grant Morrison) is Doom Patrol: Crawling from the Wreckage. In the Doom Patrol it works for the characters to be strange and weird, that's who they are. However, in the Invisibles, the characters' oddities just seem forced. Stay away from the Invisibles and get the Doom Patrol, because the Doom Patrol is what the Invisibles should have been.

I suppose I was expecting more from this book, than what I actually got. I come from the old "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you" school of thought, and when I first read the reviews for this book, I could not wait to get my own copy. However, I was disappointed. This is not the story I though I was getting. Granted, there are some good moments. The Harmony House for example, where individuality is stripped away leaving a person an open receptacle for the world around him (and any new fad that just happens to wander in). The god of chains is another, and seeing the ghosts of John Lennon and fifth Beatle Peter Finch walk down the Liverpool streets, is a standout. However, these sequences are few and far in-between. The problems come in the second half. Jack Frost, after a long initiation, finally meets the team of Invisibles. My main problem, here, is with is the Invisibles themselves. The characters are idiotic and more resembling the cast of the MTV's Real World than a subversive group of anarchists out to buck the system (and I really, really, really hate MTV's THE REAL WORLD!) Grant Morrison would have done better, if he had left the team of Invisibles a presence lurking in the shadows, than bombarding us with their "quirkiness". Had he left the Invisibles as just another truth for young Jack Frost to unravel in the unfolding brave new world before him--then this would have been a better story. As it is now, the Invisibles: Say You Want a Revolution is just a pale imitation of The Prisoner. Spend your money instead on the JLA, which is Morrison at his finest.

Reading it now, the first 8 issues of the Invisibles seem almost childish. The conspiracy is painfully upfront with little mystery. The Acadia story arc that makes up the bulk of the issues is plodding and really quite dull.

But if you look closely, in the little cracks, you can see a sort of incredible sincerity and a real desire to create something special. Jack Frost is a wonderful character, Buddha as british hooligan.

Grant Morrison was trying to mold all of his greatest influences into one bold series, but it really comes off as a mess. But it's a great mess but a mess nonetheless. Morrison's effort on this was A1 and it's very obviously a great work of love.

This is where it began, and it only gets better to get a little bit worse in the end.

It surprised me that I was drawn to this series. I should have hated it, since I'm middle-aged, middle-class, and from the middle-west. Yet, I read them all, or at least the six that I am aware of. Strange. Perhaps it is because I saw myself in "Tom-o-Bedlam" in this first volume. Perhaps it was the world-behind-the-world underpinnings, ala Phillip K. Dick (if you like the Invisibles, try the Valis trilogy.) Or maybe it was because there were so many synchronistic "hits" with my own life in issue after issue that I briefly wondered if I was slipping into schizophennia....
In any case this series was a delight. It was written with intelligence and erudition. There is just so much concentrated input on every page, both verbally and visually. As for the politics- this is also strange, for I have come to very simular conclusions. Perhaps that is adding paranoia to the schizophrenia....
There is an excellent bit of dialog when King Mob tells of how one of the other major characters read a story called "The Invisibles" and wrote herself a part in it. Yes, that is how magic happens....

I have to agree with one of the earlier reviewers that this would have been a better book if it had stopped halfway through. In the first half, we are introduced to the eerie world of the Invisibles from the perspective of the young Jack Frost protagonist, with whom we can relate (obnoxious as he might be).

But the second half of the book suffers from jarring time travel sequences, high gross-out content, arcane conversations, and a lack of sympathetic characters. The Marquis de Sade is, I think, *intended* to be such a viewpoint character, but I found him too strange and off-putting to have much sympathy for him. And the Invisibles themselves already seem to know everything.

That said, I have to conclude that it's a very ambitious and engrossing book nonetheless. The high point for me was Jack Frost's initiation to the Barbelo and whatnot, at the end of the 4th chapter. That had me really hooked, despite the fact that things got less interesting as the story went on.

I can definitely recommend this book to people who liked THE ILLUMINATUS! TRILOGY and some of the more paranoid Philip K. Dick novels; that sort of thing.

This seditious series is definitely comics' most bizarre example of anarchy from the U.K. A decidedly different sort of superhero group, as part of a millennia old secret freedom fighting cult, the Invisibles hide their very existence from the public; their only identifying mark, occasionally worn by some members, is the "blank badge" (a plain, round, white button-the slogan-bearing kind, not the shirt-closing kind). "The only rule of the organization," as explained in one issue, "is disobedience."

The series follows a particular Invisibles activist cell made up of: King Mob, a bald, tattooed and multiply body-pierced tantric magician and master assassin; Jack Frost, a teenaged, foul-mouthed, psychokinetic alien abductee; Boy, an African-American former policewoman and deadly martial artist; Ragged Robin, a mime-faced, time-displaced, clairvoyant witch; and Lord Fanny, a glamorous drag queen and Aztec shaman.

The series ran from 1994 to 2000, totaling 59 issues divided into three volumes. Fortunately, the entire series has been collected in the form of seven easily accessible trade paperbacks. Say You Want a Revolution, collects the first eight issues of volume one, which focus around the recruitment of Dane "Jack Frost" McGowan: the story begins in a reformatory where juvenile delinquents are indoctrinated into a life of mediocrity by extradimensional beings hoping to harvest their souls, and ends in revolutionary France where the team recruits the Marquis de Sade. Apocalipstick(issues 9-16 of volume one) is about Jack Frost's attempt to flee from his role as an Invisible and how Lord Fanny was indoctrinated as a shaman when still a young child. Entropy in the UK (volume 1, issues 17-25) tells the story of how Lord Fanny and King Mob escape imprisonment and torture by the agents of total Control. The next three books collect the entirety of volume two. Bloody Hell in America (issues 1-4) follows the groups invasion of a top-secret military installation in the New Mexican desert to rescue the AIDS vaccine being kept there. Counting to None (issues 5-13) deals with bad karma, time travel, and brainwashing, and Kissing Mister Quimper (issues 14-22) covers a return to New Mexico, making amends with the past, and setting the stage for the final conflict between the forces of control and freedom, which takes place in The Invisible Kingdom (this collects the entire third voulme, which ran backwards, from issue 12 to issue 1, counting down to the new millennium). Having recently reread the entire series from beginning to end, I was struck by the intricacy of the plot, and the way that events in the first volume of stories foreshadow and continually intertwine with later events.

Although presented as a mind altering, spy thriller, roller coaster ride of conspiracy theories, metaphysics, (often extremely) graphic violence and slightly less graphic sex, the thin veneer of allegory barely conceals the more commonplace tragedies beneath the surface that occur in the real world every day. The surreal scenery is simply a backdrop for the true goal of the Invisibles (both the characters and the comic book): to purge the dominant paradigm and awaken people to their own human potential (Grant Morrison actually envisioned the series as spell of liberation).

Like the protagonist of Alan Moore's graphic literary masterpiece "V for Vendetta," the Invisibles are true to their roles as 21st century Robin Hoods, redistributing the only wealth of importance in the Information Age: Knowledge is not only power, it is freedom. As people become self-aware, they become self-reliant, and soon they become unwilling to prostrate themselves before the trappings of authority. Grant Morrison is only trying to make Visible the unseen strings that subtly manipulate us all.

Time travel, anarchy, and cameos by everyone from John Lennon to John the Baptist. A safe, unnatural high.

I love this book. When I finished reading it, it seemed incomplete though. Then I learned through the diehard fanbase that it is actually part of a larger piece that has not been released in collected form. My question is, why not? This is a great start, why not release the rest?

I picked up the Invisibles when I was bored in my local comic book store and was blown away. No, not at first, not at the begining but a tid bit later when the information began to sink in. How much references and information does Grant Morrison have in his head? This book makes you think, and wonder about the modern world and the obstructed view of the world in which we live in. Anyway, it's a goddamn fine book so I recomend that you buy it and send Grant cash.