Travis Hedge Coke
4.08
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
Character Design
by Travis Hedge Coke
No one can look upon you and know for sure.
What does it take to make a person and how much do we make up ourselves?
Five suns. Movement. Water. Rain. Wind. And, Earth. Five spotlights on a set. Five spirits fit in you, me, paper people, ink drawings.
Phil Jimenez has discussed developing idiosyncratic body language for the primary cast of The Invisibles citing an absence of consistent visualized bearing until he came onboard as a long-term penciler.
The difference between Jill Thompson’s visualization of Jack Frost or Boy prior to the first issues of the comic, penciled by
Making Up Ourselves
Most of us, most of the time, when we retell a tale, we tell an angle. We make pitches even when we do not mean to.
The Invisibles has no canon versions. The Invisibles may have many canonicities. The comic we read has agendas, angles. The book Miles Delacourt writes is written and published with angles, for reasons. The reason the Edith Manning Memoirs may or might not exist is the reason there is a collection called, the Edith Manning Memoirs.
In 2012, Mason Lang will control an empire of military power, but is that 2012 before or after he dies? What is control of a military-industrial complex?
What is a kind of control.
Every telling of The Invisibles is a telling, a version. Ever retell is a reversion. Revisioning. Fissioning and bastardizing old tells.
Making Up Ourselves
Everybody has tells. Any old cardsharp will tell you.
Our making time and space from panels and art is part pathology, part nature.
I like to break down time in comics by gekiga time and cinematic time, but these are readerly, these are audience-perception concepts of temporality. These may be shared by characters, but it is no prerequisite.
There is no concrete or inarguable sense of time or even spatiality betwixt one panel and another, one page or issue and the next or that released one year later in the original serialization.
If a seconds or days can come between panels, and between one panel and another, whole decades can be retracted, what is time in this comic?
Making Up For Ourselves
Hawk-eyed princes can be wondrous bold, but sixfold seamstresses stitch these silk shirts.
When you ride the reins tangle and the horses stop, so what happens to carriage and you, the driver?
p = mv
“Batman! What is your reason for not prostrating?” The devil with the bat-horse is perplexed.
“[Flying saucers] are in reality the space bodies of certain aggregates of consciousness… the can penetrate both the third and fourth dimensions simultaneously or can, if they wish, confine themselves to either one of these,” as Mr Orion is purported to have said on behalf of the Ashtar Intergalactic Command in our history, never mentioned explicitly in The Invisibles. Orion claimed these UFOs were interlacing two realities, which is a work expressed all through The Invisibles.
Mr Orion and the Ashtar are Nazis who seeded our on terrestrial naziism. So some say. Some say an Ashtray agent, Vrillon, worked in television broadcasting during the 1970s.
Like the spirits discussed in the 19th Century nonfiction book, The Invisibles, the Ashtar or those who claim messages from them, may make up some things for purposes of miscommunication, misinformation, mischief.
The water in the wadi does good, but any of us can say anything.
Making Up For Ourselves
The Invisibles are always living in the Supercontext – the dissolving of individuated ego into endless celebration – even before or after they have entered or rejoined. The Supercontext is rejoined. Initiation never ends.
Supertext as audience participation and authoring can frustrate some audiences, as it would upset some of us if experienced in the real life we prefer to not think of as authored or as narrative. The matrices of referents, the bathhouses and bathyspheres of ideation and tradition which, if subtext is embedded in, float around a text.
Downy ones and knowing coves.
Bohm and the process of abstraction.
Trying to claim everyone with green eyes is green-eyed from jealousy.
Assemblage defines our views on causality, on justice and universalism. Social formations are assemblages, but what is a distinct, singular, social element?
Making Up
UHF
VLF
ELF
Supertext was what The Invisibles sends to other Invisibles. So, subtext. So, text. Sew downy ones and knowing coves.
“Beating on a vet like a völva.” Loki.
Sometimes we and the comic move too fast for whom?
Making Up
Some things in The Invisibles have been redrawn or dressed with new paste up.
A sky of stars may become another sky, other stars. A kachina might appear.
The authors of Anarchy for the Masses disliked the pages as drawn by the Pander Brothers and by Ashley Wood. (I like them a lot.) The authors of that book, which includes annotations, commentary, and timelines about the comic, feel sequences drawn by these artists fail to communicate important information and may fail, also, aesthetically.
The time worm passage drawn by Wood is redrawn for all collections and does not represent the dissension of a human being across time as a kind of fleshy contiguous worm, however it does present at affecting visualization of the insect otherness anxiety of seeing ourselves outside a moment, in a continuity of time passing and passed.
I think the Panders’ sequence is perhaps the best of King Mob’s fight scenes. Exciting and brutal, singing like rotoscope animation in a Liquid Television clip.
Up
Every falling sun is somewhere rising. Sun and moon are the rising sun, but so is any priestess or Quimper. Or, quimper.
The English gematria of Crowley is a gag, but all gags can fail to come off. The exercise of back and forth letters from your name is just as likely to rip meaning up into useful fetters for you. Infinite space equals eighty-three. Too, so, eighty-three.
Or, quimper.
When we can see the pencil art beneath the inks, outside the comic, even though the comic only prints those ink lines, we can reintegrate the pencil work. When we do not have those pencils to interpolate, we can intuit them if we have descriptions.
With this externalized familiarity, we can see more of The Invisibles than is reproduced. We can see some that no one sees unless they got in our head.
Up
Over cermet henhouses, hereunto over schemes, here comes the sun. Man whole scandal.
Who has green eyes? (Edie.) Green eyes of jealousy?
“Now comes the final age announced in the Cumaean Sibyl’s chant”
The Virgin
Chaste Lucina
Saturn
Boy just born
“Thine own Apollo is now King.”
– parts of the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil
*******
Nothing in There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles) is guaranteed factually correct, in part or in toto, nor aroused or recommended as ethically or metaphysically sound, and the same is true of the following recommendations we hope will nonetheless be illuminating to you, our most discriminating audience.
How to Read a Dress. 2021. Lydia Edwards.
A?A?. 1907. Aleister Crowley.
This Boy. 2002. Amy Burt.
Blind. 1994. McG.
