Maybe you remember it, maybe not but everyone was joking endlessly that the world was supposed to end then and when it didn’t come to a screeching halt and we all woke up to more of less the same world we went to sleep in the night before, everyone declared checkmate on those Mayan savages. I should just let Grant explain The Invisibles so I can get to the meat of this story before you click away. Their agents range from Lovecraftian monstrosities to heads of State and military. The Outer Church are the classic Archons of gnostic philosophy with the insidious Rex Mundi leading them. The Invisibles oppose a fiendish cosmic organization called The Outer Church, hideous alien beings from beyond spacetime that enslaved the Human Race thousands of years ago without us ever having known. The eponymous Invisibles are a cell of a larger body of ontological terrorists called The Invisible College. They filled the gap with two titles: Preacher, Garth Ennis’s hyper-violent western-noir, a book desperately trying to be American and failing spectacularly to shake off how positively Scottish it is, and a book by Grant Morrison that left just about everyone reading it scratching their heads: The Invisibles. And when Gaiman closed the book on The Endless, DC was hurting to find something that would keep the label alive. Vertigo floated almost entirely on the critical success of Gaiman’s Sandman while publishing a collage of significantly less successful titles. These writers gave wings to an imprint of DC called Vertigo, a label for more mature comics with weirder ideas and darker themes. Their true breakthrough moment didn’t come, however, until the publication of a prestige-format Batman one-shot called Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, an absolutely nightmarish hardcover with art by Sandman cover artist, Dave McKean. They pitched Animal Man and followed that run up with a positively weird riff on Doom Patrol, DC’s less-than-successful version of The X-Men. Morrison’s start was a little less dramatic but no less quality. Gaiman’s pitch centered on the Golden Age detective The Sandman, shifted focus, entirely, and used the character in name only. Moore’s pitch, based on a request to use newly acquired Charlton comics characters, resulted in Watchmen, ostensibly the first comic book deconstruction of the comic book hero cycle. The result was a series of undisputed heavyweight champions. Each one was given the chance to pitch the publisher on some lower tier characters and then do whatever the hell they wanted with them. But then DC Comics took a weird chance when they doubled down on their investment in Alan Moore, who had been writing for DC since the early 80’s, and brought Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison into the mix. Americans could catch a glimpse every now and then of famous UK publications like 2000 AD and Warrior but the UK comic book industry was largely a mystery to most of us in the States. A bit of our stuff crossed the ocean, but very little of theirs made it our way. England had its own comic book heroes and magazines separate from the sphere of Marvel and DC. They were still very much considered low-culture by the broader public. PBS would broadcast 70’s Doctor Who episodes, Fawlty Towers, and All Creatures Great and Small and some IPs were strong enough to break through to broader venues like Monty Python, but comic books weren’t subject to either of these circumstances. Before this time, the Atlantic Ocean was a physical and metaphorical gap between American pop culture and British pop culture. If you’re not already in the know, then let me break it down for you.Ĭomic books in the late 1980’s experienced a wild shift in creative. The Invisibles is also the flashpoint for a lot of people’s occult studies being that it’s basically a manual of magical operation wrapped up in a tidy conspiracy theory, drugs, and sex package. My writing tends to attract fellow dorks and it’s so thickly steeped in pop cultural references that you’re likely coming from a place of awareness. If you’re reading this, then it is entirely likely that you’re at least aware, in some capacity of the The Invisibles. Word-count, be damned! Let’s talk about Grant Morrison’s arch-90’s comic book, The Invisibles. But this time I’m throwing caution to the wind and going for it. I stop after about ten thousand words and realize that I have yet to actually address the comic and just delete the entire fiasco. I have been trying to write this article for years.
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