![]() He hits all the parts of his life which mattered to him, and the storytelling takes great pains to sew together all those elements into an authentic and true life, even as that life is cut short.įor all the exploration of that linear/non-linear sequential arrangement of Bobby’s memories, what’s as interesting is how clearly defined each of those memories are by themselves. He thinks to being a child, being an adult, being a dad, being scared, being happy. He lives, he dies, and as he dies he remembers elements of his life in scattered – but carefully arranged, and actually fairly linear – form. ![]() He ultimately signs up to become an armed guard, at which point he runs into one of the comic’s actual protagonists and is promptly shot through the face without much ceremony. It tells the story of a working class man called Bobby, who goes from a dreaming, nervous child to a war-scarred veteran of the Falklands, and then into a miserable domestic abuser and washout. The issue itself is one of those celebrated ones – it made our Top 100 Comics List, in fact – and it achieved that acclaim largely through it’s perceived non-linear storytelling. Even a writer as carefully manic as Morrison can’t be about dadaism and meditation all the time, and it’s with a comic like The Invisibles #12 that you see some of their working class roots grow out into narrative. And although it doesn’t come up particularly often in their comics works – particularly in something as ambitious as The Invisibles, which often feels like a life statement from a writer published ahead of time – that background does sometimes drag itself back up into the work. For all the drugs, surrealism, or chaos magic which are frequently invoked along with their name, Grant Morrison is a normal person who grew up in Scotland, has a family, and lives (to the best of my knowledge!) a normal life. As Morrison, who took them on when he wrote the giant story strand mashup series Final Crisis, puts it: "These long-running universes have a weight, and a reality, that is greater than mine.Every so often, Grant Morrison reminds you they’re human. But it also presents amazing narrative challenges. There are drawbacks: practically no one ever properly dies, which does lessen the sense of risk. The Fantastic Four alone probably has that licked by now. ![]() In the 19th century, a penny-dreadful series called The Mysteries of London ran to 4.5m words over 12 years. ![]() In terms of longevity and complex continuity (all those monthly stories have to dovetail), there's nothing I can think of in the whole history of narrative comparable to the universes of Marvel and DC. Why not inhabit their worlds rather than flee from them in embarrassment?Īs well as that link to primal storytelling, superhero comics have a heritage of their own. As the best writers in the genre recognise, these myths have real force. The Iliad is a superhero story, as are Beo-wulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Morrison approaches it from the other end: "He wanted to bring us into super-world." As one interviewee in Talking With Gods points out, Moore was interested in placing superheroes in the real world – giving them sexual neuroses, bad breath and anxiety disorders. Morrison, although he shares Moore's occult interests, is much more into the biff-pow-bang. But, rather than being sombre or preachy, it's rollicking good fun.Įver since mainstream comics "grew up", with Alan "Watchmen" Moore as instigator, the way they tended to show their maturity was by ditching ass-kicking in favour of ideas. Its themes are: order v chaos (the Invisibles are fighting the Archons of the Outer Church, a race of inter-dimensional beetles with obsessive-compulsive disorder), time and timelessness, occult magic, and psychedelic or hallucinatory experience. No summary can do justice to how mind-bending and bizarre – and yet compellingly in earnest – this comic is. But Morrison's masterwork remains The Invisibles, a series about a cell of existential resistance fighters – including a transsexual shaman, a grumpy Scouser, a telepath from the future and their bald-headed leader King Mob, who is the dead spit of Morrison himself. His Doom Patrol featured a gang of supervillains called The Brotherhood of Dada, a sentient piece of roadway called Danny the Street and a painting that ate Paris. They are exhilaratingly strange, and kind of puckish. At their best, Morrison's comics are crammed with ideas.
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